No Stupid Questions

It’s always been there. Trump just told them it’s ok to be nazi in public? He’ll protect them. Because he is a damn nazi.

Yeah, nobody told the "Genocide Joe" "From The River To The Sea" folks this when they were marching throwing up Nazis salutes and waiving around Hamas and Hezbollah banners, for months, every night on the News, of an Election year. Young Democrats didn't vote, and we lost the whole world.

Or weren't those the blatant displays of antisemitic Nazism that you were talking about? I get confused.

The fact that the salute is so offensive, they did it so blatantly, and their denial was so disingenuous is the point. It's a demonstration of power. They can do a Nazi salute and their opponents can't punish them. They can deny that they did a Nazi salute and their opponents can't control the narrative. If they did something more subtle, then people might think that they weren't facing any consequences because their opponents were giving them the benefit of the doubt. With the Nazi salute there is no doubt. The only explanation for why they aren't facing any consequences is that their opponents are powerless.

Nazis didn't come around all of a sudden, either. People have always, on the whole, been horrible. What changes is what is culturally acceptable to talk about.

Lots of discussion points here, but let me address two or three in particular:

blatant Nazism hurts their legitimacy in the eyes of the public

Nope. No, it really doesn't. Trump was never a legitimate contender from his opponents' perspective (due to dirty foreign money) and his true believers would stand buy him as he ate a live baby on TV.

Take a look at some approval polls that show he still has significant support from Americans. (Likewise with Musk, likewise with DOGE.)

Second point: It doesn't matter. He doesn't NEED legitimacy or approval any more. He's in power, Musk is at his right hand, and the two of them are acting with complete impunity. Seriously, they should both be hauled off in chains and tried for treason, not to mention hate crimes and hundreds of less-sexy crimes. But they're not, and so it just doesn't fucking matter.

Thirdly, where did it come from? We're discovering now that the Christian hard-right has been carefully staging this for HALF A CENTURY! Since not long after Roe v. Wade, they have been laying the groundwork for what Project 2025 is carrying out right now: A ruthless coup backed by religious extremists and foreign opponents. The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973. PNAC was founded in 1997. And there are more.

Fundamentally, Trump's first term was to see how much they could get away with. When they lost the 2020 election, the Nazis spent four years purging the party of unfaithful (i.e. people with either thoughts or morals, or maybe even both), then won last year, and were finally able to remove their veil: The government no longer needs the will of the people to execute their extremist plans.

In the 1930’s the robber Barron legacy wall street families got together and hatched a plot. A fascist coup attempt to overthrow FDR and install a fascist wall street /Military industry controlled regime that was modeled after hitler’s Germany. Wall street mostly unanimously supported the third reich. They funneled money to him, as well as equipment, put him in the cover of tine magazine as 1938 person of the year and held a rally for him at Madison square garden. The usa didn't want anything to do with the great war till it became evident that Germany was likely to lose so they allowed pearl harbor to happen to give the US carte Blanche via public support to enter the global theater then we pillaged their military secrets and gave asylum to many war criminals we deemed useful like werner von braun and many others (project paperclip) But anyway Prescott bush was one of these new money wall street people who spearheaded this coup attempt. They propositioned one of the most highly decorated generals in us history- smedly butler, author of the short autobiographical/ social critique war is a racket, to head this coup and take the white house by storm with several thousand military veterans. Butler played along until the last minute when he blew the whistle and testified to congress and the house un-American activities committee/ HUAC who deemed his testimony credible but were very likely paid off and did nothing to hold those responsible accountable. Now fast forward 90 or so years to today and the main architect of this coup’s son and grandson were both sitting presidents (one was cia director and very likely involved in the JFK assassination and was in Dallas on November 22, 1963) and all branches if the us government are now obviously controlled by the intersection of wall street and industrial military power whom also simultaneously control the press and use it to disseminate propaganda that the general public are easily swayed by in major part due to nixon and Reagan cutting education standards at the recommendation of their mutual advisor roger a freeman who said an educated proletariat was a major threat to their movement. Those two administrations were some of the most damaging to the American proletariat and did so much to dismantle the progress that the civil rights and labor rights movement did in conjunction with the new deal policies of fdr that allowed the middle class yo thrive for 3 decades until hyper inflation reared its ugly head and gave way to the modern age of austerity in America our government and their mouthpiece puppets are lying about. They intentionally devalued the us dollar while adequately adjusting corporate executive pay to compensate for this reduction in value to eradicate the workers and civil rights progress of the 40’s 50’s and 60’s and sent a majority of us manufacturing jobs to the third world to cut labor costs by 90-95%+

For the first 172 years of the us dollar as a standardized currency the price of gold only fluctuated 95% from $18 to $35 when FDR temporarily suspended the gold standard made it illegal for the rich to hoard gold and bought up the majority of the supply then revalued it from $19 to $35 an ounce so he could double the money supply and repair the damage done by the great depression. But since nixon permanently ended the gold standard in 1971 the price of gold has increased 8400% from $35 to $2900 today. This is directly in tandem with the increase in the national debt from $400 billion in 1971 to 36 trillion and change today or toughly 9200% meanwhile wall street uses the IMF/ world bank inflation figures to lie to us about the extent that the working class has been looted right before our eyes. the inflation statistics they parrot are based on consumer price index which is an inadequate and inaccurate measure of inflation since it does not account for the devaluation of a currency due to the increase in circulating currency supply which the price of gold does by design. So that means the minimum wage in the US has lost between 84-93% of its value in 54 years which in 1968-71 earned the equivalent value of 95 ounces of gold a year which would be $130/hr or $270,000 annually at a 40 hour a week salary of $1.60/hr even in 1950 75¢/hr was 60/hr today or 125,000 and in 1956 it was $1/hr or $82/hr/$168,000 today. This is why one adult working a full time job at any time from 1945-1975 could supply a family of four with enough left to save for their two kids college, their retirement (if they weren't part of the 50% of workers with a pension) own 2 or 3 used cars or one new car(which cost under $1000 at the time) and go on a modest family vacation once a year, today it would take both parents working 80 hours a week with overtime (which the current fascist regime wants to eradicate) at a base pay of$30 an hour to come close to the same quality of life. The American working class were turned to wage slaves and most were so poorly educated they didn't have the intellectual capacity to understand this reality. Today 2/3 of workers live paycheck to paycheck with insufficient savings to cover a $500-1000 emergency expense. Most millennials and gen z will never own a home and have to work till they are too sick to do so or worse while hoping that social security, medicaid and food stamps are not destroyed/ defunded and or privatized so we can survive the end of our lives. This is the sad reality of america and anyone disagreeing with my assessment is choosing to believe the words of career liars who commit fraud regularly and with impunity and have fleeced the American people countless times while our tax dollars have gone to their tax breaks and bailouts so they can enjoy lifestyles of opulent luxury at our expense. Its time to MaGGA- make guillotines great again.

They've been doing Zeig Heils for years.

I wish I could find the documentary, about a woman who dated some alt right weirdo and he started taking her to like Turning Point USA meetings and other groups meetings and she describes how the first time she did Zeig Heils, and they just did this shit like it was normal. She describes going to a book burning, thinking it was a joke, and then it was like an actual book burning.

It's all nudge nudge wink wink. They're doing Nazi salute because they are Nazis.

Edit: Believe the documentary is called "White Right: Meeting the Enemy." Available here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ0rhh5mbnA

When the Hail Hydra comes out a little too early so they call it a speech impediment.

It came from LIBERALS who demanded that we protect the free speech of Nazis while they were building their death camps.

There have always been Nazis in America, even during WW2. Listen to Rachel Maddow's podcast "ultra" to hear about how close they came to a takeover of the US way back then. They never went away, they just went low profile for a while.

we're in the end stages of a campaign by assholes to overthrow our deomocracy.

It's been getting waged for decades. they've been doing this shit for years, behind closed doors and they now feel comfortable with being nazis in public.

an important historical note is that the Nazis drew a lot of their ideology and argumentation from the American eugenics movement, which has been a major undercurrent in America since the early 1900s and never went away

MAGA has always been run by nazis; the blatancy came from winning the last election.

First up, they are not Nazis

Second, the left has been calling the right Nazis for decades. Heck, Bob Dole called George Bush a Nazi, and we all know that wasn't accurate. https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-08-10/bob-dole-george-bush-and-historys-most-brutal-presidential-campaign-attacks

It only seems recent because you're young and not aware of the history of the term.

Just a lack of Nazi hunters.

Fascism shouldn't be thought of as a static "thing" or an object of ideology. Peoples beliefs come from their environment. We are so individualized as a society that often we as progressives take "personal responsibility" too far, we buy the premise implicitly without realizing there are flaws with thinking in this way. Every logical system has flaws and contradictions, its proven mathematically though I think some systems are more rigorous and based on evidence.

GWF Hegel's philosophy of Right was written in 1820, and influenced political thought ever since. Liberalism was still in it's revolutionary phase and theories about it were still fairly new, the Wealth of Nations was written just 50 years before, and Karl Marx was like two when it was released, although it would serve as the basis for much of his work analyzing the hidden relationships of Capital, and ethical political philosophy on the whole.

The book is the closest I think someone can honestly get to an actual "horseshoe theory" because not only did it influence the left but it also influenced the far right. Hegel, using the works of other great liberal philosophers such as Locke and Kant, who Hegel was always working to surpass, applied his dialectical philosophical methods to the writings of liberalism.

What he discovered was a natural tendency toward what we would calll fascism. Like he prefigured fascism by 100 years. He wasn't a fascist, there was no such thing. He was just exploring the ideas of this revolutionary philosophy, one that purported to liberate the mind, body and spirit, and discovered the oppressive seeds which might grow into something quite different.

This isn't to call liberals fascists, I'm a communist and 20th century communism had a lot of problems, to put it mildly. I would say confidently that progressive liberals are not crypto fash, in fact the term "progressive" is a typically left-Hegelian ideal, in that it describes human progress and development as the subject of history. Instead it challenges the idea of the liberatory nature of private property, a key component of liberal thought. Of course this is all depending how you look at it, right-Hegelians see this same formulation as proof of the inevitability of their ideas and justification for their actions.

You're getting a lot of different opinions about this stuff so I'm trying to make sort of a different point about philosophy, history and action. Other reading for a deep dive on fascism is the essay Ur Fascism by Umberto Eco (great empirical analysis, but the least scientific IMO), Trotsky's pamphlet Fascism: What it is and How to Fight It, and HA Roy's Fasism, Its Philosophy, Professions and Practice.

In a way, fascism has always been there below the surface, informally shifting the sands of history until it was formalized in the early 20th century. I don't think you can have a society based on private property without some elements of fascism somewhere. Mostly "western democracies" will outsource their extreme cruelty to other countries where it doesn't affect their citizens.

But in summary, Fascism is the realization of the contradictions inherent in liberal ideology, its liberalism turned inside-out, with all its appearances of justice and freedom cut away, leaving only the logic of expansion and domination that most liberal democracies do their best to hide. This is how fascists are able to hide in our society, their individual beliefs are not completely unpalatable to centrists and conservatives who have also started to dispense with justice and freedom in the interest of national greatness. Its what makes their beliefs so malleable, and its also why liberals have such a hard time defining it. But fascism isn't an individual's beliefs, if it was it would be just regular bog-standard chauvinism. Fascism is a mass movement which will use charismatic leaders amenable to their politics to rally the masses.

In our society, the middle classes are the "battery" for fascism. Middle classes are constantly under attack under capitalism and the individuals often feel this and become paranoid (doomsday prepping, etc.,) and this paranoia and real social pressure to produce or be wiped out, the fear from the constant threat of precarity and uncertainty fits hand in glove with the aims and means of fascists.

Someone that bought his place at the white house did it and didn't get shot by a flamethrower, so all the Nazis hiding literally just below the surface feel ok to talk a little louder now.

Honestly, with sufficient evidence it should be legal to kill them in public and receive any inheritance from their wills. I don't typically enjoy personally hunting people down typically, but these aren't people.

One comment blatantly in favor of it Goodies any human rights in my opinion. It's the only way. They may say it too (vermin, poisoning the blood, etc) but they've only ever been right about themselves.

I would give a pedo human rights before them. And that's saying something.

They're just rabid animals, and I defy anyone to give a reason they deserve a single second of life at all, for any reason, in any context. Maybe with the one exception of using them to find gatherings of others. But that's it.

Suddenly? Where have you been the last 20 years?

he's trolling leftists on twitter who use the term nazi to refer to racists in general

So, you lose an election and suddenly democracy is fascism, and the choice others made by voting now doesn't count, and voters are literally Nazis because you are an electoral minority now?

Is that what you guys are going with now?

Sheesh