- Why We Need to Oppose these Groups
To say that these people are neo-Nazis is not sensational hyperbole. They openly talk about genocide, about the need to sterilize black people, and the need to “ethnically cleanse” the US. They say that queer and trans people, those in racially mixed relationships, and anyone to the Left of themselves needs to be put into “re-education camps.”
The liberals in the mainstream press think that we can “laugh at them” and they will go away. But each month, another mosque is burned, another shooting or far-Right murder takes place, and waves of Alt-Right vandalism and terror keep on happening.
To stop the growth of a new fascist movement, we have to physically oppose it. We have to out-organize it and we have to counter it with everything we have.
People didn’t laugh the KKK out of existence. They fought back, they armed themselves, and they stood their ground. The question is, what will we do?
Answer: I don't know. Yet.
The Alt-Right isn't the Klan. The Klan was civil war veterans, then people whose parents and grandparents were civil war veterans and who had been taught the lost cause in school, and then people trying to revive it to oppose the civil rights movement. They got big because they were preaching to the choir. The Alt-Right is a few people who are really into European far right movements and a lot who feel daring cosplaying nazis and making racist jokes. They're Boyd Rice and Michael Moynihan except with /pol/ and twitter they can convince themselves they have an actual movement instead of just trolling. They don't have a choir to preach to, they just have idiot hangers-on who will move on when they stop looking cool and start looking pathetic. Hell, they've already managed to alienate the militia nuts. They can be laughed out of existence.
I agree with all of this, but you're coming from a position of knowledge. A 20-year-old kid drove into a crowd because he came from a position of ignorance and hate. Have you seen this? If the default position is "I don't need to worry about my kid because he's just going to rallies supporting Trump" and the kid's default position is "I'm going to help ignite a race war by committing terrorism against a crowd with my 2010 Dodge" and if these chucklefucks can somehow convince normal, thinking people that a fuckin' "OK" hand sign is now somehow neo-nazi signaling then absolutely - let's have their numbers known, let's have their impotence mocked but for me, we crossed a threshold yesterday where laughing them out of existence is no longer enough. They're multiplying. “The shields seen do not denote membership, nor does the white shirt. The shields were freely handed out to anyone in attendance. “All our members are safe and accounted for, with no arrests or charges,” the group added. And yeah - what the fuck else are they gonna say? But the organized/organizing movement can be tiny and still attract crazy fucking fringe willing to drag their AR-15s across four state lines to save the sex slaves from the non-existent basement of Comet Ping Pong. The mutherfucker is holding the logo upside down and he still drove through a crowd of protesters twice.“The driver of the vehicle that hit counter protesters today was, in no way, a member of Vanguard America. All our members had been safely evacuated by the time of the incident,” the group posted on Twitter.
Dude. I don't mean to distract you or bfv from your conversation, because you both have damn good points. BUT! That picture is on the front page of The Guardian right now and I couldn't help but fucking laugh my ass off at them. Fucking pasty white, wanna be yuppies with bad facial hair, button up shirts, khaki pants, and loafers. Look at those shit shields. What is that? Cardboard and tinfoil? I see better stuff from highschool kids at renaissance faires. And what's that guy wearing? A bicycle helmet and swimming goggles? What a bunch of sorry ass, fucking losers. No wonder they're trying so hard to buy into tough talk. They're compensating. Edit: And I hope to God they find a way to straighten up. Deep down, every last one of them knows better.
Antifa is a bunch of spoiled, privileged rich and upper middle class idiots LARPing as Communist revolutionaries. The Alt-Right is a bunch of spoiled, privileged, rich and upper middle class idiots LARPing as Fascists. How do you fight these people? Laugh at them. Mock them. Ridicule them. Encourage them to peacefully come out and protest so people can point and laugh at them. And when/if they get violent throw the whole weight of the legal system at them and fuck them into the earth.
the people who I know in Antifa are low income ex-veterans who are sick of seeing their country go to shit. But what do I know.
Interesting. This shows that we live in very different worlds, and one of the reasons I like Hubski is that I get reminded that not everyone lives in Dumbfuckistan. The angry Vets out here tend to go "alt-Right" and would be at the march with the torches. Even though I empathize with the anger, if you fly the NAZI flag fuck you. You don't get to be a proud American and wave the flag of a government that killed US soldiers. (cough Confederate flag cough) The Antifa people out here are mostly college kids with huge student loans and humanities degrees. My proposal is as follows: Get your antifa vets and my "alt-Right" vets and sit them in a room and get them talking. And while I am playing the part of a Pollyanna I'd also like clear skies for the eclipse and a winning lotto ticket. And my point stands. Laugh at them. The guys at the march, claiming genetic superiority, all looked like less evolved mouth breeders who listen to modern pop country music.
What drives me crazy with that picture is the fasces logo is turned three different ways on the three shields. Can't they be consistent? Also, the fasces looks more like a rolling pin with an axe on the end than a bundle of rods.
That's because one of them bought a riot shield and put his logo on it, then handed out kryloned plywood circles to two dudes who wandered by so unfamiliar with what they were looking at that they couldn't hold the damn things right side up. this was racistpalooza and the joiners didn't even recognize the iconography enough to hold it the right way.
I agree with all of this, but you're coming from a position of safety. Gotta admit - I've spent the past half hour staring at this. You can be pasty. You can be a wanna-be. You can have bad facial hair, shit shields, cardboard and tinfoil, bicycle helmets and swimming goggles but if you can be incited to drive a car through a crowd, you're a jihadi. In no way do I think these chucklefucks should be taken seriously. Their ability to convince impressionable young men to take them seriously, however, has gotten my spidey senses tingling.
Mmmm, no. That's inaccurate. Timothy McVeigh happened because of Waco. Here he is, selling bumper stickers on the ridge overlooking the compound. Waco happened because of Ruby Ridge. That's when David Koresh changed the name of the place from "Mount Carmel Center" (the name it had had since the '50s) to Ranch Apocalypse. Ruby Ridge happened because of The Order and Robert Jay Matthews, who fired a thousand rounds at law enforcement and burned to death when the FBI cooked him out. Yes, wingnut terrorists have been with us long before Richard Spencer got a stupid haircut. But Nazis have a long fuckin' memory and they'll take inspiration anywhere they can find it. The Turner Diaries were written in '78 and they were still inspiring crazies in '95. Shit kinda petered out after that - at least the Montana Freemen and the Bundies didn't give that much of a shit about Nazi ideals - but a little fresh blood goes a long way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-us-challenges-perceptions-of-top-terror-threat.html fast forward http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-extremists-program-exclusiv-idUSKBN15G5VOOn several occasions since President Obama took office, efforts by government agencies to conduct research on right-wing extremism have run into resistance from Republicans, who suspected an attempt to smear conservatives.
A 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security, which warned that an ailing economy and the election of the first black president might prompt a violent reaction from white supremacists, was withdrawn in the face of conservative criticism. Its main author, Daryl Johnson, later accused the department of “gutting” its staffing for such research.
D00d I can beat that. “I call it the madman theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I've reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he is angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ — and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.” never mind that it didn't fucking workNixon’s former chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman wrote in his book The Ends of Power that Nixon had explicitly outlined a version of the strategy the previous summer:
Document and expose leaders and members of these organizations. Tell their employers, tell their friends, family and neighbours. Stop their income, take down their websites and communication channels. Infiltrate, sow discord, steal their weapons. Rob them. The list goes on.The question is, what will we do?
Yup. Just read a post on /r/relationships how the girlfriend found out her boyfriend is a racist after 2 years of dating because she saw him in the pictures of this protest. She had no idea. They're probably mostly closeted racists, and telling their moms would go a long way. You can't go to the rally, because you're grounded mister!
It's working! I've seen that at least one neo-Nazi-fuckwad lost his job, and another got pretty well scolded on national television. Social media and the ubiquity of recording devices a la smartphones is allowing us to police ourselves as a society. I have some potential concerns about that, but it seems to be overwhelmingly a net positive thing for the time being.
Stop feeding the trolls, for one. The greatest response to the rally in Charlottesville would've been nothing. I would've loved to see no one show, no one stop, everyone just go about their day. These guys are angsty 14-year-olds that never grew up. They want to shock people, they want a reaction. They want to prove how much braver they are then the rest of us. They're like Bizarro Hippies -- they want to fight the Establishment, Man, especially now that it's starting to realize that maybe black people aren't so terrible after all. It's harder now to pretend that their views are in any way legitimate, and so they're lashing out like they usually do.What will we do?
I'm not sure we can completely do absolutely nothing about this. In the past, Neo-nazis used to have their own little corner or were completely hidden in the dark. Nowadays it's seems like the Internet has given them a bigger voice and better access to contact one another. If a rally happened in Charlottesville twenty years ago, who would know about it? People in the local community and from the surroundings. But is a person from California or Alaska or Montana going to come out to this event? It may take those people a while to find out about where a rally of this nature to take place and they may be too late for it. But today, you can learn about such things in less than twenty minutes if you know where to go and you can definitely plan in advance when you hear about these things for the first time on Facebook or Twitter. Also if nobody counter-protested at these rallies, wouldn't more nazis come out? If the protests were safe and there was no consequence wouldn't that enable more people to join up. I think the possibility of violence at some of these things deters some people from coming out. There are probably white nationalists out there that would want to come out and rally but can't because they're scared they would be outed to their job about their beliefs or injured or killed. How can this be fixed though? Well that's a tough question to solve. I think this is more than just wanting a reaction anymore. It's a thing that's growing. The Westboro baptist church, remember them? Why aren't they a problem in today's America? Well they never really grew. They just mostly stuck to being Fred Phelps's family members even when they got internet attention. Everyone in America knows about them but no one is looking to join them. The Alt-Right/White Nationalists want to grow though, they want more and more members. They want the rich businessmen who want the old ways, the college kid who feels like he's falling behind, the poor factory worker who has nowhere to go, the gunmen who feel like the government is going to take away their guns at anymore, the suburban fratboy, the mother who is afraid her children will pick up bad things from minorities and so much more.
I'm not sure that's wholly right. I think your description is perhaps overstating their current power. Just look at what the KKK and the related groups were getting up to in the '40s, '50s, and '60s. They were better organized and a lot more violent, even without modern technology. Membership is definitely on the uptick thanks in large part to Trump. But there's not automatically a correlation between membership and violence, or membership and influence. More to the point, though, this increase doesn't necessarily mean that I'm wrong. One of the things that seriously hurt the Klan back in the '80s was lawsuits over their use of violence. That becomes a lot harder if they're themselves the victims; this also is an easy way to engender sympathy or at least muddy the waters. Their recruitment at this point feeds on ignorance and being ostracized, so I'm not sure how shunning them is really going to help.
Not my idea, cause I've heard it propose elsewhere before, but know what would be an awesome counter protest, especially if people know an event is gonna happen months in advance? A family friendly culture fair, held somewhere else in the city/county. People can celebrate with food and art, lectures, performances, local businesses, schools, and religious communities could get involved. There could be networking opportunities and educational opportunities. People could still make a statement in their own way, but it'd be much safer and I think more productive.Stop feeding the trolls, for one.
Maybe that would work, although to me the best idea is still to do nothing.
In this case, if you're a white person, silence IS tantamount to tacit approval. I'm sorry, and folks can be upset with me all they want, but if you look at the events that happened this weekend and can't even make it to your facebook to post a "Wow, that's fucked up" status, then you've got to question yourself. I'm not saying you need to suddenly become political, but as white people we've got to denounce these people. What happens any time there's a Muslim terror incident? We look at our local mosques and expect them to come out in opposition. And they do, partially out of self-preservation and partly because they too are disgusted by the actions of a minority. Well, it's our turn to do the same, to the same kinds of people. These people do not represent us, and we need to make it crystal clear, because we expect the same out of everyone else any other time.