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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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They're clearly selecting members to go out and protest based on fitness, though? All of the 'PF are feds' arguments just seem like a cross between conspiracy and cope (not parent specifically though)

I just never see anything approaching that level of organisation in other groups. There's someone with the job of going and reviewing members to make sure they're in the right physical shape to protest. There's someone ensuring they have matching outfits. There's someone procuring matching riot shields. When the protest is done they all leave together at the same time at the same subway station, with a police escort the whole way.

This is just completely foreign to any experience of politics I've had. Even mainstream parties attract a ton of crazies. Niche groups are overflowing with them. Things are haphazardly thrown together, individual members go and get arrested for absurd nonsense acts. But these guys have money and structure.

I just don't buy that it's genuine. It's a law enforcement trap to suck in the nazi-curious and catch them before they do anything violent.

I just never see anything approaching that level of organisation in other groups

If you take a dozen or so samples from most distributions, you'll find a few outliers. The modern far-right has a strong emphasis on physical appearance and masculinity and aesthetics. It makes sense that some of them would come together to form a group. That, notably, is not true about mainstream democrats or republicans. If you have a hundred thousand people in the US who watch webms of nazi rallies approvingly (which there are! Hitler is becoming very popular online), you can probably scrap together a few thousand of them who'll want to imitate it, a few hundred of which will be fit.