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Are Nazis or neo-Nazis a problem in the United States, or is it just fear mongering?
I have trouble pointing out exactly what they're actually achieving, but also it does seem like they've been a lot louder recently. Is that only because the fear mongers are giving them more attention, or is it because they are more brazen and have higher numbers?
Are they only a problem if they actually get some sort of power, or cause some sort of harm? Or are they a problem for simply expressing that they want to cause harm? Is that what they're even expressing?
I think they effectively don't exist. There aren't literally zero, but they're smaller and less significant than alien abduction believers, flat earthers, moon landing deniers, and any other ultra-fringe ideologies.
The actual Nazi party was very much a creature of 1920s Germany. Their full ideology and goals are pretty much about that time and situation. Pretty much nobody pays much attention to all the details of it now.
There are some fools who like to fly Nazi flags and basically LARP as them. You can look around at their channels. They never seem to manage to gather more than 3-5 people in any place at once. They don't seem to have much interest in actual Nazi ideology, they more seem to just want to wave the symbols around because it really pisses off liberals. They don't really seem to do much except post stickers around their towns and drop banners on highway overpasses once in a while.
The paths to actual political power in the US are pretty clear and well-known. Participate in local party politics, volunteer for stuff, work hard, try to climb the ladder, buddy up with other up-and-comers who are further ahead, etc. It's by no means easy to make it past the entry-level, but it's all pretty clear and mostly above-board. Nobody who flies Nazi symbols is making it past the front door of any actual political organization. Even if the ideas and behavior weren't rejected entirely, the people who do it are mostly trying to declare that they're "too good" for actual politics and have no interest in or ability to work within any particular system, which mostly involves a lot of compromise and sucking up to people before anyone will even listen to any wild out-there ideas you might have.
Of course, revolutionary politics tries to bypass that sort of thing. But very rarely with any success. To have even a chance of success, you have to be a lot bigger and a lot more organized, and you need to have a crisis of faith in the current institutions. Okay, we might be in shouting distance of a crisis of faith, but nobody outside the mainstream political parties is organized anywhere near well enough to have the slightest hint of a chance of taking advantage of that, certainly not any Nazi flag-fliers.
I think they do exist and have a measurable influence, but that influence is about as small as possible while not being non-existent. I would agree that alien abduction believers are more influential.
https://twitter.com/RichardBSpencer?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Richard Spencer does have 70k followers on Twitter, and while he does seem smart enough to avoid putting any blatant "Blacks are dumb beasts and Jews want to control us" on his actual Twitter, his podcast is a bit less veiled and does get at believing blacks are worse than whites.
My opinion is that people panicking about Nazis being on the verge of taking over are fools. But that it is a good policy to do stuff like ban open Nazis from social media platforms, because spreading that rhetoric isn't good.
This may be the stated reason, but the real reason is simply that most people do not want to have to scroll past swastikas on their way to NBA updates, radio station contest announcements, cat pictures, memes, and personal life updates, and consider this significantly worse than advertisements.
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I don't think Richard Spencer is very significant. Yes, he has 70k-ish followers. But I don't think that alone means much - some may be fake, some may be hate-reading, or just wondering what he's going to say next. If you flip through his most recent dozen or so tweets, engagement is pretty low - replies and retweets mostly in the single digits and likes in the low double digits.
I agree that panicking about them taking over anything is foolish. I disagree that banning them is good policy. Fundamentally, actual Nazism is stupid and annoying. Why ban them unless you think their arguments are extremely persuasive? They're not. Banning them just gives them a persecution complex and makes people think they are cool and dangerous - their ideas must be really great, or they wouldn't bother silencing them! Wanna rebel from the system? Wave a Nazi flag, it's what the system really hates! Instead, give them all the rope they need to show everyone exactly how stupid and annoying they are. That's what we do here, and it works. We have some posters writing Nazi-adjacent ideas. You can read the threads, it's pretty clear that they aren't convincing anyone that their ideas are good. The only thing I would ban or block somehow is aggressive abuse of random users.
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