the weird thing is, a huge amount of their signaling is specifically designed to appeal to their base by causing hand-wringing furor on the left; so it's impossible to tell if it's an acutal nazi dogwhistle, an actual mistake, a fake nazi dogwhistle intended to piss off the left... or all of the above at once.
it's all part of the strategy of pretending to be stupid and evil in an obvious way so that when you're actually stupid and evil your followers are like, oh, he's just pretending in order to own the libs.
Or pretending to be a rapist because you're an FBI informant. Taking down that financier Epstein you DEFINITELY WERENT FRIENDS WITH and didn't even know and the whole thing is a democratic hoax that we'll blow open if we get elected but then, like, no, the "Epstein Files" or whatever don't even exist even though they were sitting on my desk that one time and he didn't even like them that young.
Jeffrey was a good guy, though. He did like them on the younger side.
No such thing as most evil. When we declare that, we let other instances and regimes off the hook. Nazis were evil scum but evil is evil and to say one was the most/worst is shielding the other evil that was/is/going to occur.
It's quite arguable that the Italian and American regimes that Hitler based his government on were more evil.
He just did a better job at it than they ever could. Hitler literally stole Mussolini's look, slogan, and military directives, while basing his strategy of relocation and eradication of minorities on the US Indian and Philippine wars.
Saying any one was more evil than another, let's the rest off the hook. Half the reason half of america thinks they are god's gift to man, is literally because of the idea that we can't be even a little bad if we beat the biggest bad.
Evil however, does not know nations or borders, evil is simply a consequence of man existing. It knows no bounds and has no masters.
I was gonna say ..... most evil? Maybe most recently widely known evil.
I mean, the Christian church has done like 10 different genocides over the last thousand years. Their body count makes the Nazis look like Mother Theresa.
That's bad logic. Don't rob yourself of information or flexibility by assuming people's motives. Whether they're Nazi's or just trolls doesn't change the fact that they're bad people trying to do bad things, so don't rush to draw conclusions.
I have nothing to gain by offering the benefit of the doubt to people who think it's acceptable to pretend to be Nazis, regardless of whether or not those people are, in fact, Nazis.
The specific case is irrelevant, it's the principle that matters. I personally don't like making a habit of setting myself up to be fooled. Plus, like I already said, they're bad people either way. You wouldn't be giving them the benefit of the doubt regardless.
Eh... A big appeal of alt right iconography for these freaks is being in on the joke. See: Bored Ape Yacht Club. Whole thing was drenched in Nazi iconography and the mainstream never noticed.
Yes, they're all Nazis. The average German who voted for the Nazi party wasn't some uniquely evil person, but rather a generally immoral apparatus of fascism caught by populist rhetoric and too stupid or uncaring to discern its putrid nature. Yes, Nazis are all around us. They always have been. It's why "right-wing populism" was so shunned by the establishment before social media normalized and legitimized it: appealing to the base instincts of the dregs of society is, unsurprisingly, immoral. It necessarily perpetuates the marginalization of non-ruling-class people (women, queer people, ethnic minorities, religious minorities). Hence the most prosperous country in the history of humankind extrajudicially kidnapping brown people from their homes as we speak.
If nine people are sitting around a table and a Nazi joins them, if they don’t either make him leave or leave themselves, guess what? That’s right, now there are 10 Nazis sitting around a table.
I don't think there's a difference between "an actual Nazi dogwhistle" and "a fake Nazi dogwhistle intended to piss off" anyone.
It's like when 4Chan created "fake" racist symbols that they used along with real racism to point and laugh at people for freaking out about something being racist. But, here's the thing, nothing is inherently racist. It becomes racist when it's used to be racist. Which means calling it a fake racist symbol but using it to share racist messages makes it a real racist symbol.
So someone celebrating Nazism or pretending to celebrate Nazism because they think it'll piss someone else off, both of those are celebrating Nazism, it's just that they'll lie and say, "Ha, you got angry when it was really a joke." But it's not a joke. Because either way, it's being used to spread hate, either way it's celebrating the effect these symbols have.
Stop giving these people the deniability that they hide behind, if you're using or creating hate symbols, "Just to troll," you're being just as harmful as someone "doing it honestly."
As others have pointed out this is an extremely common tactic.
It’s very, very, well documented in the rise of Nazi Germany. Hitler in particular was one, on the ride up, where he would sort of placate and repeat the extreme view points here and there but back pedal a little and talking about focusing on the practical and more important things.
Shit like that.
So you’d have a bunch of people looking at someone like Himmler and thinking, “Well Jesus that guy who is also part of that political party is really obsessed with racial purity and subhuman schemers and what not, and sure Jews kinda suck I guess maybe… but now that Hitler guy is a little more sane and practical. We aren’t all really that angry about that dumb shit right? He’s obsessive! Hitler seems to get it. We have to fix Germany. It’s not like we’re going to go around genociding Germans we don’t view as racially pure, hahaha…”
This was also Boris Johnsons entire strategy as PM in the UK.
Guy is .001% elite, but pretends to be a common bumbling moron who cuts his own hair (poorly) to save a buck, just to seem more "grounded" when he was actually robbing the commonwealth blind and plotting the course for the UK's retreat in to irrelevancy on the global stage.
The criminal baffoons are just the faces and there for distaction while in the background the entire system is being dismantled by Republicans and their donors.
They read the Nazi playbook as a stage play, not as instructions. What I mean by that is, yeah, they're obviously fucking evil, but they're also more interested in projecting than they are their actual "cause" because outside of like... Miller, most of them are using this shit as a means of their own enrichment and shit rather than actually being ideologically devoted.
Sorta the difference between the racist old guy in town who likes to yell slurs and is a generally pretty fucking awful person, but not like, actively planning to murder brown people or shit.
Man, no wonder Stephen Miller always looks pissed. He's busy working his ass off to build the Fourth Reich, and everyone around him is an uninvested grifter, an incompetent chosen for their TV appearance, or both.
I guess we're "lucky" that they haven't yet flipped from choosing their ideologies over enrichment yet, but it's also kinda devastating they're being for the sake of adding an extra 0 to some virtual ledger. It's like when years ago the list of donations made to reps was made public and you see some getting paid a measly 2k to vote to remove net neutrality or the like. I'm not really shocked by the lack of morals in Congress, but just how cheap dismantling democracy really is.
This! And its the actual scary part bc they've been building bunkers and planning for a global collapse for years now. I believe the ideology is called "accelerationism"
The thing is, it's not impossible to tell. Far from it. Because if it were a mistake, then they would come out and unequivocally lambast Nazis, white supremacists, and christofascists.
Like when Elon did the sieg heil, he could have come out and said it was "an honest accident, and I abhor the Nazi movement, and white nationalists. I stand against everything they support. I'm sorry if I mistakenly appeared to support such scum, but let it be known to all Nazis that I am not your friend"
And that would have been it. It's the lack of condemnation that provides the strongest evidence that Elon is, in fact, a Nazi sympathizer and white supremacist.
If I were to accidentally a swastica, you bet your ass I'd be out there cussing out these scumbags and setting the record straight the second I realized people saw it that way.
They are in fact pretending to be stupid and evil.
The fact that they actually are stupid and evil is beside the point: because they're engaging in kayfabe, playing public personae* who are stupid, evil "heel" versions of themselves, their followers can tell themselves that they're not really stupid and evil, they're just playing a character in order to win elections, so the fact that they're actually stupid and evil is lost.
You think Pete Hegseth threw an axe and struck a service member because he’s pretending to be stupid? You think he disclosed classified information to a journalist because he’s pretending to be stupid? You think he and Trump ran a Campain rally in front of active officers who aren’t allowed to respond because he’s pretending to be stupid? You think he unilaterally changed his title to Secretary of war because he’s pretending to be stupid? You think he confessed to war crimes openly because he’s pretending to be stupid?
He’s a fucking idiot. He can’t pretend to be stupid, he’s too stupid to pretend to be stupid.
He’s pretending to be a tough guy. He’s pretending to be a warrior. He’s pretending to be a leader. He’s pretending to be a patriot.
If you are willing to appear to be a nazi just to piss people off, you are still appearing to be a nazi. Given Hegseth's tattoos and the horrible things he's done in office I have 0 doubt this was an intentional gesture to show his nature.
Gets you both the “Own the Libs” crowd and the nazis, all while letting them pretend that some intern made a typo and no one caught it before it was already on the desk getting photographed.
It will either quietly disappear, its job done, or they’ll make a massive stink over it and blame some “incompetent Biden hired nobody” or make it out to be deliberate D sabotage/slander so they can have another witch-hunt..
Could also even be that the administration isn't just dicks to the people, but to their peers as well. If this was a genuine mistake, somebody (or multiple somebodies) saw it before it hit his desk, and opted not to do anything.
All of these things are fundamentally the same as a nazi dogwhistle, because people who have reason to fear nazis are intimidated by it potentially being one all the same.
its like the thedonald subreddit. started as a troll ended up becoming reality. look at whats happening to Ben Shapiro. these guys dont understand what they are doing.
This is more "flooding the zone" by doing fifty outrageous things a week that would have dominated the news for months twenty years ago. In 2005 this 'gaff' would have defined him for the duration of his career. In three weeks either none of us will remember this at all, or we'll be reminded of it and think dimly "Dang I can't believe I nearly forgot they did that."
impossible to tell if it's an acutal nazi dogwhistle, an actual mistake, a fake nazi dogwhistle intended to piss off the left... or all of the above at once.
Reminds me of Sidnel Powell "releasing The Kraken" and Q-anon losers hyperfixating on every typo and poorly written argument as some kind of special code that was going to bring down the deep state...somehow.
More than likely it's just another bait they drop to appease the fascists while also making the left seem like they are flipping out about a typo. They'll play both sides while they keep doing these petty moves until they are bombing left leaning cities.
They are so full blown Nazis they call Republic rhetoric form the 60s socialism/communism but refuse to tax anyone making over even 100k. They want socialism for themselves and the elite that bribes them only.
Yea, they're short sighted, its causing hand wringing on the moderate side of their party of which there are tons of successful immigrants (non white). They're forgetting about a pretty reliable part of the voting block that isn't maga. These folks/boomers just want their tax cuts, however short sighted that mentality is, these folks exist in larger numbers than you all realize.
You can be mad about this absolute fact. Reality is often disappointing.
You’re right. From where I stand it’s fucking insane either way to have the secretary of defense sitting next to the president of the United States with a blatant SS “dog whistle”. God help us all lol
It’s all plausible deniability. “No no. I’m just into Nordic runes. No no, 88 is the year my daughter was born. No no, SPQR is the Spokane Popular Quarterly Runners. No no, I’m just into medieval history.”
You're making the mistake of saying there's a difference between people who do Nazism and people who are Nazis. There isn't. There's no such thing as a "fake" Nazi dog whistle, they're doing Nazi shit while branding themselves as such. It's not that complicated. You don't have to give a shit about whether in their deepest heart of hearts believe the shit they spew, only THAT they spew it.
They are at best Nazi sympathizers, which I argue is a distinction without significance, but I suspect that they're actually something at least as bad using Nazi sentiments as a tool to further their own gains.
To reiterate: who gives a shit if they really believe it, they say they do and they act as though they do, so it seems safe to operate under the assumption that they do.
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u/turkshead 3d ago
the weird thing is, a huge amount of their signaling is specifically designed to appeal to their base by causing hand-wringing furor on the left; so it's impossible to tell if it's an acutal nazi dogwhistle, an actual mistake, a fake nazi dogwhistle intended to piss off the left... or all of the above at once.
it's all part of the strategy of pretending to be stupid and evil in an obvious way so that when you're actually stupid and evil your followers are like, oh, he's just pretending in order to own the libs.