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So I got into an Elon argument. I said that he's autistic and made an unusual hand gesture to convey the idea he said at the time, which is "my heart goes out to you". I failed to mention Occam's Razor, which is the most obvious to me, and in this case it goes "but wtf would he even gain out of doing a dogwhistle here?" Hitler worshippers aren't worth many votes, even if they did like lip service... I guess you could argue he did it for Moloch and engagement, which seems to be why Trump says all the outrageous things he says.
But I digress. In the incredulous argumentation by the other parties that Elon was obviously a neo-Nazi and this wasn't accidental at all, I was linked five articles that they themselves got from someone else, so for all I know, these are making the rounds in a ton of spaces. I was not satisfied with any of them, but we'll go through 'em, mmkay.
I. Business Insider: Musk Faces Consequences for Calling Antisemitic Tweet 'Actual Truth'.
This was paywalled for me at the time of the actual argument, so I said as such and moved on. Reading it now, I suppose I'm glad it was, since it's more difficult to defend to a normie lib than the others were. If it's paywalled for you, it's about Musk's affirmative reply to this tweet. It's been written about before here, but I think progressives like to apply identity politics to many different groups, but do not appreciate when it's applied to white people.
However, I don't think I agree with its framing, taking such a wide swathe of Jewish groups and then saying that those same Jewish groups are appealing for help from, I dunno, the Muslims? I certainly wouldn't have agreed with it on social media, because it's a Bad Look. I'm not here to say Elon Musk is innocent or anything, in fact, I think he's dumb as hell, at least politically. I just don't think he's a Nazi, neo or otherwise. Certainly some neo-Nazis I know would be happy if he was.
Anyway, I don't think applying group status to white people is a Nazi thing to do, nor is it a Nazi thing to admit that Muslim communities have problems with anti-semitism, nor is it a Nazi thing to say that Jewish groups tend to slam white people because it's safe to do so and because half the time, they don't even mean white people.
II. Futurism: Elon Musk Deletes Nazi Apologist Tweet After Near-Universal Backlash.
Okay, he shared a Tucker Carlson interview. Who gives a shit?
Okay, but he interviewed a Nazi apologist. Okay. I've done that too. I was sent a podcast called Stone Choir telling me about how the Holocaust was faked, and I linked it elsewhere and shared clips of it to mock it. Damn, that's crazy! I've shared Holocaust denial podcasts. Who gives a shit?
Okay, but he called it very interesting and worth watching. Well, in Liberalism World, it is not a requirement to dismiss everything someone says just because they're part of a group that is disliked. Certainly, it is not only neo-Nazis who like dunking on Churchill. Slaughterhouse Five bordered on outright saying Winston Churchill was wrong to bomb Dresden, and it even used the inflated statistic of current-but-not-at-the-time Holocaust denier David Irving. I've also seen numerous articles on Lew Rockwell slamming the guy, though frankly, they're anti-establishment to the point of insanity, and certainly not above conspiracies themselves. But Tucker Carlson wouldn't have done the interview if it wasn't going to be interesting to anyone who wasn't a neo-Nazi.
Furthermore, Elon Musk probably didn't even know he was a neo-Nazi when he shared that podcast and said he liked it. How do I know? Because he deleted it. Why would he delete it if he already knew all the facts when he made the post? Occam's Razor, again! Please! But I don't really know for sure, I guess. Whatever, man.
III. International Business Times: Europeans Rebuke Elon Musk's Proposal For 'MEGA: Make Europe Great Again': 'Stay Away From Europe'.
I actually didn't even see a need to defend this one. He said Make Europe Great Again? Okay? Who gives a shit?
At the time, it felt like the baffling extension of the sentiment on /r/europe lately of "Elon, stop interfering in our elections, we're going to ban X if you don't." To which I call them vile hypocrites! Certainly no one cared if Biden or Harris or whatever establishment liberal institution endorsed whatever establishment liberal institution in Europe. Why is Elon any different? Leave Elon Alone!
Now, I see it was supposed to be a point that he's imperialistic or something, and the article compares saying MEGA to some rhetoric Viktor Orban used once. This is kind of a Trump situation for me, in that I don't really take him seriously. Who the hell would want Europe? Besides, MAGA has been memed to death at this point. And Elon likes memes.
IV. truthout: Elon Musk to Host X Event Promoting Neo-Nazi AfD Party Ahead of German Elections.
I feel like it's worth mentioning at this point that some of these links are pretty questionable and are only being talked about because they're with the right people. This sounds like a left wing tabloid? Have any of you heard of this site? Who the hell uses it? Anyway...
That sounds pretty bad! At least, it does to me. But I know from reading here and elsewhere that the AfD only made the headway that it did because it is basically the only party that doesn't support immigration and that people trust to stop the immigration, and possibly even "Auslander raus!" them. And to me, since that's the only thing I really know that the AfD supports, Elon Musk may have endorsed them based off of that alone. Or he may have wanted to signal boosted them since he saw other right wingers signal boosting them, and didn't look at their signal boost critically at all.
Whatever the case, I haven't actually heard him say what he likes about them, other than say that they're the last hope of Europe -- which they very well could be, if you take immigration as a serious issue (which people do, or the AfD wouldn't be where it is now). Frankly, I don't think Musk actually probably agrees with all their stances, because if they're actually far right, then they probably disagreed with his H1B stance pretty vehemently. You don't get a whole lot of white supremacists or xenophobes or Jew haters say that we need to import more engineers because Americans aren't good enough.
V. NBC News: Before Trump, neo-Nazis pushed false claims about Haitians as part of hate campaign.
You actually have this article to thank for this long wall of text. There was just too much to rage about and talk about with just this article to leave this post unwritten.
Whoa! You mean to tell me that far right wingers were the originators behind the hateful Haitian rumor that Trump mentioned during the debate? Are Trump and other right wingers like Elon and Right Wing Twitter really sanewashing the hateful screeds of skinheads on Gab and Telegram that aren't even visible to normal people?
Oh, they didn't. Actually these are just some crazy assholes online who probably just fed into a preexisting narrative. Good God, man, I thought we were onto something interesting.
This is actually fucking incredible coming from NBC News. Tying Trump's talking about this to this random far right group that talked about the same thing is one of the most tenuous connections I've seen in a news article. It's a very "Trump drank water, so did Nazis" news article. This may even have gotten modded on The Motte. "Ah," says NBC News Commenter Amadan, "it appears you're trying to tie the actions of a reprehensible group to some mostly unrelated group in order to make statements about the mostly unrelated group. Stop it! You're better than this! Drop the knife! Drop the knife!"
At the time, someone pulled this quote from the article, only copy pasting the bolded part:
I didn't even know who that was referring to, but I could tell that it was a horrible quotation. Why are "making sure" and "are all repatriated" in quotes, but "Haitian immigrants" is not? Because "Haitian immigrants" not being in quotes tells me that that was substituted into the original, and I really don't trust these journalists to make determinations on what the original author was saying. Maybe they could have linked the original email? It gets my hackles up, because the original could have been talking about asylum seekers in general, which is very much not a neo-Nazi thing to say. But it turns out I didn't even need to make sense of it, because Elon Musk is probably like me and has never even heard of Blood Tribe.
To cap it all off, making racist, baseless remarks about foreigners is far from being exclusive to Nazis. Dude, take any country on the fuckin' planet. That's how widespread it is. It goes higher than the ADL ever knew. Nazis have gone global.
I really thought NBC News was onto something here, but they blew it. But it's okay, because I'm better than NBC News. Where they failed to make the point, I will try to make the point that I wanted them to make non-frivolously.
I liked the Inverse Florida article about Hamas loving tumblr people for making the very excellent point that a lot of center left rhetoric is just sanewashed from insane left wing people. I am somewhat afraid that the center right may be similar, and their rhetoric is just sanewashed from insane right wing people. But I don't have any evidence. So I guess I'm actually not that much better than NBC News. Then again, at least I'm asking the question instead of just suggesting it.
Do you think that that NBC News article was closer than I give it credit for? And do any of you think that Trump or Elon take cues from people farther right than them? If so, why?
Dunno about any of this but do you think it's possible he was trolling and did a nazi salute deliberately despite not being a nazi? That is what I'm inclined to believe. I doubt he has any feelings about Jews at all tbh – I think he really cares, however, about the reactions of his nearer-at-hand political enemies, and so would be primarily motivated by creating a reaction from them.
I think this is exactly what occurred. Musk has really stepped up his troll game as of late and appears to look for every opportunity to edgelord.
What is interesting to me is that he also seems to be slowly chipping away at his plausible deniability in this domain. He has liked/retweeted some antisemetic tweets over the last several months and it has come out that he is a paid subscriber to a South African white nationalist who has advocated that things were better during apartheid.
I think all of this will end poorly for him and wonder if some of this behavior is due to his well known, extratherapeutic use of ketamine and suspected bipolar disorder.
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I just saw this tweet he made, and yeah, you're right. I actually seriously regret defending him if he's going to turn around after my unwarranted good will for him and use the language of people that I hate, acknowledging that it was intentional. Absolutely disgusting.
I still don't think he's a neo-nazi, for reasons already said. But I hate this shit. He must hate the left so much that he would purposely use rhetoric that pisses them off. Quickest I've ever been wrong, and I hate it when I'm wrong and /r/politics is right.
I don’t understand how a tweet mocking the accusations as ridiculous is proof that the accusations are true?
It's not proof that the accusations are true. It's proof that even if it was accidental at the time, there is not even an attempt to say it was accidental. The mockery is embracing the move. He's not a secret nazi, but I despise the obvious trolling going on here.
I definitely don’t agree - why validate such bizarre slander with a genuine reply?
I’m steadfast in the belief that no one actually holds the opinion that Elon did a nazi salute. I’m confident that everyone who has watched the video is well aware that he was gesturing “my heart goes out to you”.
The continued accusation that “no, it was in fact a nazi salute” is just a performance; it’s said only to try to anger you opponents and motivate your base, and not to try to accord with reality.
To me, that sounds like trolling. So you know, if you’re being trolled you have two responses: “lol” or troll back.
Sadly, I am pretty confident that they do actually believe it. I started this thread after an argument I had with my left leaning friends, and they were incredulous I didn't see it for what they thought it was. "I'm not sure what else you need to see at this point," was something said a couple times.
I can't say I don't understand your perspective. But when you are continually insincere, it makes it difficult to tell which actions were actually supposed to be sincere or not. There was a conversation in one of the non-culture-war threads about his Path of Exile 2 claims, and I think it was @cjet79 was holding the possibility that he was trolling people on purpose in that circumstance as well. In that case, I was pretty confident he wasn't trolling. After the last few days, I still think he wasn't trolling in the case of Path of Exile 2 since he deleted some of the tweets that he made at Asmongold on the subject, and trolls don't tend to do that, but I'm no longer as confident. How am I supposed to stick up for someone that purposely complicates my sticking up for him?
I also share something with the left, in that I really no longer like Hitler-staff-name puns or anything making light of that stuff. My dad is a genuine neo-Nazi in most any respect you can think of, and he loves jokes like that.
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Is there a single person more fucked in the world, as an individual, than Musk if the MAGA movement does just die with Trump?
Credible total commitment is an interesting angle, isn't it? He's now the one man Trump knows can never stab him in the back, because he'd be stabbing himself.
This would give Trump a pretty compelling reason not to stab Elon in the back. The counter argument would be "Lol" said the Scorpion "LMAO"
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Don't you? If not, give it a few years, they will come for something you care about. (probably)
They already have, and while I do like to sneer, I probably wouldn't view this forum if I thought that that was a productive thing to do. I also don't really like making jokes that extremists enjoy.
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This is the only explanation that makes any sense and I still can't figure out why? To what point? Who is getting trolled? Is Musk actually stupid or a genius? It just doesn't compile for me.
Think about the incentive structure. What does Musk have to gain from capitulation here? The end of a media cycle about something none of his supporters or normal people care about freeing them up to dive into the controversial executive orders more? Every drop of ink spilt on this is a win so why not juice it? Especially in a way his supporters will get some enjoyment out of. I don't think the salute was deliberate but the response seems to perfectly follow what I'd expect someone in his position to do.
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Trump is famous for drinking Diet Coke, the Nazi's had no Coke, evil Nazi scientists invented Fanta that the Deutsches Volk may continue to enjoy refreshing soft drinks, and the former Coke bottlers would have something to bottle.
Any evidence that Trump enjoys Fanta?
Man, Fanta is a nazi drink? I never knew. I'd say "I guess I need to start drinking that sugar water shit now", but no way, not even to own the libs.
Yes, don't drink the sugar water shit; just like Hitler didn't drink it.
From descriptions of the formula I've read online it sounds like it would have been better for you but worse tasting than the current year formula.
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Is there a Diet Fanta?
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Not only is Elon Musk not a Nazi, but nobody is Nazis. It was a mid century German nationalist movement. It has no connections to the right in America 80+ years later, and there is no reason that anyone would seek to emulate them at this point. They are just the losing side of a conflict in a long list of losing sides in history.
Even if you are “racist” and support “authoritarian” ideas, so were, idk, probably most governments in history. What is the connection to mid century Germans? “The left” obviously wants to call people Nazis to score political points, but it makes no longer makes any sense even from a far right perspective.
There are a small number of people who call themselves Nazis, worship Hitler(sometimes literally), think the Jews are behind everything, the Holocaust didn’t happen, and Nazis were the good guys. It’s fair to call them Nazis even if it isn’t literally accurate.
Even then, it's kind of a strange label. When people do that now, it's basically a historical LARP. The real Nazis weren't larping, they saw themselves as a very modern and revolutionary movement that would lead to the future.
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The irony here is that the Nazi's themselves were a larp of another historical group. Perhaps it might help clear up the confusion if we started referring to the latter group as Neo-Neo-Romans instead.
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Naziphobia is a major problem, and it really is an irrational fear of Nazis. Not because Nazis aren't rather deplorable, but because it involves seeing Nazis all around, secret Nazis, hidden Nazis, they're everywhere doing their Nazi things. The Nazis communicate with each other using cryptic signs and gestures, so one must be hyperaware and alert at all times for any word or gesture or action that looks or sounds like something a Nazi might do while plausibly denying they're a Nazi. They will not identify as Nazis, and they will deny they are Nazis. In fact, they may claim to hate Nazis, but you can't let them get away with it. You must call the Nazis out, run screaming from the Nazis, band together and then punch the Nazis.
There is nothing particularly unprecedented about this Naziphobia--it has obvious parallels--but it has been getting stronger and stronger my whole life, and it's essentially endorsed as a sensible concern by the mainstream left.
So far as I can tell, the actual MAGA right does not like Nazis. They still consider the Nazis the bad guys of WW2. However, Nazis are not seen as quite so uniquely evil. Communists are at least as evil, and besides many still recognize Satan as the worst evil. MAGA have little interest in emulating Nazis, and they have even less desire to communicate cryptically using Nazi symbolism except as an occasional joke. The idea that they would do such a thing is kind of offensive but mostly just bemusing. It's like accusing them of secretly owning slaves or something.
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Btw, I can’t read that tweet in Europe:
“This Post from @breakingbaht has been withheld in Germany, France, Ireland based on local law(s). Learn more”
What does it say?
This tweet, in response to a Charles Weber post calling people saying "Hitler was right" cowards and arguing they should say it to Jews' faces.
Which, actually, it's a bit of a non-sequitur/deflection. Who mentioned anything about minorities? Jew Man just doesn't like Hitler was right jokes, redpilling him about how he ruins white relations is not appropriate. You gotta pick your battles when Motteposting about identity group relations at large like this.
Dude, your laws are crazy. I am sorry you have to live with that.
For some reason, I am reminded of the porn bans that redditors like to argue against. They say that it's not feasible to ban porn for under 18s. I would have expected their high ideological rigor to similarly oppose these dumbass speech banning laws that can be bypassed with a simple archive.is link. I suppose some of them do, but it needs to be more. Maybe they just don't know the extent of it in Europe.
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https://archive.is/mqnhB
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In a dark irony, the Nazis did end up bringing in millions of more-or-less (but usually more) forced labourers to produce machinery (including rockets!) for them, despite being ultranationalists. If you squint at it, it's a bit like Elon bringing in engineers from all around the world to work super hardcore at his companies.
But the real difference is ideological. The guest workers in Germany were a temporary pragmatic measure to replace the German soldiers deploying to the front in industry and agriculture. They were never going to get permanent residence in Germany. The German state was for Germans only. And Germany was going to get larger so there could be more Germans. The state exists to enlarge, unite and strengthen the people.
Elon's public meltdown about H1Bs and race puts him on the other side entirely, he wants the American state/ideological enterprise to do well regardless of what happens to Americans. Anyone can be an American. The people are here to enrich and empower the state, get humanity to Mars...
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Someone once said that the great question of modernity is, “how do I get management to take my side?” I’m not sure that’s entirely correct, but it’s an interesting framing.
Right now major subreddits like /r/nfl, /r/nba, and countless others, which as recently as this morning had front pages covered with Twitter links, have all decided to ban links to X/Twitter.
Making this little stunt go viral was incredibly effective at getting management to take one’s side. Whether or not anyone was convinced of Elon’s Naziism as a result of his gesture, the fact that it was being discussed made it socially acceptable to bring up that Elon is a Nazi and demand something be done about it.
Those posts are all heavily astroturfed—in many active subreddits, these are literally the top posts of all time. There were obviously a ton of bots.
Of course, reddit being reddit, they'd lean that way anyway, but there was plainly an organized campaign to do this at once across many subreddits, with bots involved.
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The cost is that those subreddits are largely composed of Twitter links and screenshots. Unless the whole ecosystem can coordinate a move to BlueSky they'll be left with little to offer their users. On the other hand coordinating a move to BlueSky is already clearly an item on the establishment agenda so Elon has effectively scored a big own goal here by providing such an exploitable rallying point to them on a silver platter.
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I was contemplating last night how miserable it must be to believe what you read on reddit. Because the leftist echo chamber sentiment is nearly always wrong. And I'm not talking about vague philosophical political issues. I'm talking about actionable, make your life better or worse issues.
For example, say you were on /r/investing circa 2016 going into 2017. If you believed the leftist dominating the narrative, you would have panic sold your portfolio and missed out on profound returns over the next 4 years. The same narrative is spinning up again now that Trump has retaken the office, and "all the economist" are predicting market destruction again, although not to the same degree I saw in 2016. I think partially because /r/investing is an almost entirely dead board. All the same, at this point if you fall for it again you have no one but yourself to blame, but that's reddit for you.
Then there is /r/rebubble. If you believed them circa 2020 going into 2021, and refused to buy a house at low interest rates because "bubble", you may have missed your chance to own a home for 10 years or more! Sometimes you get people who did put off buying a home and find themselves priced out, the goalpost of a down payment racing away from them, their capacity to save getting eaten alive by inflation. They come bemoaning that they ever listened to /r/rebubble, and the reaction is usually "LOL, you didn't have to listen to us". Which is true. But neither side ever re-examines anything about themselves. The guy who put off buying a home falls for the next leftist panic issue, the guy who was wrong about the real estate bubble keeps spreading retarded predictions about everything. It's like he's competing to be the next Krugman.
/r/Bitcoin has been a fascinating case study in Gell-Mann Amnesia. They absolutely know the leftist consensus on bitcoin is a gross misrepresentation or outright lie. And yet they buy into the leftist consensus that Trump will be terrible for bitcoin. For reasons I still can't figure out, every thread about Ross Ulbricht being pardoned was locked, and right up until it happened people were gloating about how much of a liar Trump is for not pardoning him, and that anybody who believed Trump was a fool. I hope people aren't foolishly panic selling bitcoin because orange man bad, and that's generally against the hodl ethos of the board. But there is a strain of that there.
I could go on and on and on. It must be miserable to believe in the world according to reddit. If you acted according to reddit, you'll be poor, sick and miserable your entire life, scared off from making any single decision that could materially better your life because of TDS.
It’s not just echo chambers. Honestly these people generally don’t understand the concepts they’re discussing, nor do they understand the concept that there are seasons of life and that some things have to happen by a certain time if you wanted them to happen. Housing is often a thing you want to have before thirty because once you have kids it gets a lot harder to get a lump sum for a down payment.
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R/frugal is mostly not cool money saving tips, it’s ways to make your life worse out of paranoia. Many such cases.
I'm most shocked at how there is no escaping The Narrative on reddit anymore. Leave /r/games for /r/pcgaming and a few years later it's just as bad. Weird political PC Gamer articles that shoehorn in Trump. And every time reality starts poking through, like with nobody wanting to play the extended trans polemic that was Dragon Age: Veilguard, you effectively can't bring up how gross it is to have a game dedicate a mandatory1 side character's entire storyline to lecturing you about gender. So "bad writing" becomes the coded acceptable phrase and all the threads get locked. All the dedicated dissident places have been banned, or so neutered out of fear of being banned they are dead.
Maybe I should just go back to 4chan, or get another protonmail account just to sign up for kiwifarms. My days of expressing my honest opinion here are clearly numbered. I'm against the rules.
1: Mandatory in the sense that if you want the best ending, as most compulsive RPG players do, you are obligated to recruit that character and finish all their side quest.
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It seems to only be on reddit though? I think now that Trump is in office and all the Jan 6 "insurrectionists" are being released we can finally put to rest the idea that reddit has much influence on society or any real insight into what's happening in the world. This move will actually cut them off further from normal people and just reinforce their echo chamber. The site is going from the internet's front page to the internet's asylum.
Even had the ADL themselves come out and say it wasn't a nazi salute. That's the management that has actual power. This is just janny tantrums over losing the election.
Agreed. Reddit is increasingly siloed and useless, and even the "put reddit after a google search to get good results" is quickly becoming supplanted by AI. I quit after we moved offsite, and I don't have any interest in using it now.
I still read (but don't post to) some Reddit communities. But the more they do stuff like this, the more they drive me away. /r/lego of all places chased me off because they were bringing politics into my happy free time activities. It's so frustrating - can't have fun any more, everything has to get infected by activists trying to drag their politics into it.
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That's something that bothers me -- it's pretty much apolitical to submit this framing that he's a Nazi/fascist/whatever and ask if X links can be banned, but to actually discuss the framing is political, so the framing wins by default. It's something we've seen quite a few times by now, but I don't know what the answer is.
The answer was Musk buying Twitter and the US re-electing Trump. That is, it's a conflict that cannot be resolved by reason and compromise, only by one side defeating the other.
That is a solution, but it seems like a pretty bad situation if that's what the solution always is. Is the marketplace of ideas dead? Liberalism dead? Conflicts can only be resolved by vibes based voting against your enemies? I really hope you're wrong. There's so many vibes and so much noise in each election, and it's pretty much a tossup which side wins in the end. "Normal", reasonable people may be the loser in 2028, through no fault of their own.
You didn't notice the jackbooted stormtroopers stomping all over said marketplace? Everyone from Reddit powerjannies to the US Government itself?
Again, did you not notice the former liberals decrying "freeze peach", and suppressing confederate flags, politically incorrect children's books, and the like?
This isn't 2009, when Racefail marked the end of the recession of Political Correctness. It isn't even 2014, when this stuff really started ramping up and some high profile events like Gamergate demonstrated it was winning. It's 2024. The battle lines have been apparent for a long time.
Yeah. I get it. Rhetoric getting increasingly underhanded, and rationalism tried and found impossible/useless, leading to everyone going to their secluded corners of the internet.
But if the marketplace of ideas is truly an antiquated concept, it's only a matter of time until its corpse starts to obviously reek. I don't think that going mad with political war every 4 years and winning half the time is sustainable. I don't know that it's going to lead to literal civil war, but there doesn't seem to be some mechanism for it getting better.
Are you familiar with the essay Tolerance is not a moral precept? If not, I would highly recommend it.
I would argue that this reek is what you are observing around you at this moment.
No, it is not. The present arrangement cannot last. The highest-probability positive outcome is a collapse of centralized power leading to durable federalism. A soft separation, if you will, where Red States and Blue States get to do things their own way in their own areas without being able to impose their preferences on the other. In many ways, this is pretty clearly how things have been drifting for some time, with sanctuary states and state "legalization" of marijuana; Red Tribe is starting to dip their toes into similar efforts in nullifying federal firearms laws, and is likely to continue doing so with increasing success. As polarization increases and the tensions ratchet up, actually enforcing the law becomes increasingly impractical, and cooperating with the other side's enforcements becomes increasingly unacceptable. The path of least resistance is to just let people go their own way.
The highest-probability negative outcome, as you hint, is civil war.
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I'm having a hard time latching on to this post. Can you give a brief topics for conversation that don't involve reading 5 articles? What's the elevator pitch here?
I'll start.
@gilmore606 posted something which I'll paraphrase like this:
That's a pretty good take I think.
Daily reminder that it is never 5d chess.
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I'm sorry. I got carried away and forgot a thesis, and I even knew it was going to be disjointed, too.
My topic for conversation is that Elon Musk is not a neo-Nazi, it's a frivolous comparison, evidence for him being a neo-Nazi is weak, and even further, there is no unified thesis for accusations of neo-Nazi anymore. Does anyone seriously think Elon Musk hates Jews and thinks they're ruining the country or that they faked the Holocaust? If not, then what makes him a neo-Nazi, other than these articles you're wildly gesturing at?
Oh, he's clearly not a Nazi. Only morons think that.
There's a plausible case that he did the Nazi salute to troll people (either for the strategic reasons that I outlined, or for the lulz). More likely, he was just sperging.
In any case, what we're witnessing is the death of Nazi as an insult in real time. This is shit that happened 80 years ago. You know who wants to kill the Jews today? It's not right wingers. It's Muslims and their enablers on the progressive left.
Maybe Elon is playing 4D chess and sees how this conversation plays out. My guess is that he doesn't and he just "does stuff" because it's always worked out in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poway_synagogue_shooting
It's correct to say anti-semitism is not exclusively a right-wing problem, but right-wing anti-semitism in the US is very real and very definitely capable of violence.
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I agree that in a raw sense the greatest threat to Jewish lives is Palestinians (and the opposite is also true, of course), but I find it ironic to claim that right-wing antisemitism is dead by posting here, of all places.
This is a bad argument. We tolerate a diversity of viewpoints, even one or two anti-Jewish people. Freedom of speech is a good thing.
But the overall attitude of the motte is certainly not anti-Jewish. Who is anti-Jewish? How about the progressive left, known for chanting "kill the Jews" on elite college campuses.
In any case, how sure are you that our very own SS poster is not a Muslim herself?
This is a total non-sequitur.
My point is simple, and really quite humble. I am not saying that the motte is broadly anti-Jewish; I'm saying that the motte has right-wing antisemitic posters, which indicate that right-wing antisemitism is a real thing that some people in the world believe, that it therefore still exists.
While there are certainly antisemites on the left, like the chanters you mention, most progressives -- even most progressives who are critical of Israel were horrified when such things went down. To say those chanters represent the progressive left is to paint with far too broad a brush, or in other words to make general claims about general groups, not specific claims about specific groups.
Is it really so hard to acknowledge that, despite growing antisemitism on the left, right-wing antisemitism is not dead? There are lots of ways you could argue against my point -- saying that right-wing antisemitism has no power, that it's rejected by a larger sum of the right than left-wing antisemitism is by the left, that left-wing antisemites are more acutely dangerous. You say I made a bad argument, but you're not even making an argument at all: just repeating what you already said in a firmer tone, and acting offended that I pointed out that right-wing antisemitism exists, as evidenced by local posters who are right wing antisemites.
What I think has happened is this: you made a massive overgeneralization, treating all your opponents as one bloc and imputing to them the dreaded term of "anti-Jewish," while denying that anyone remotely on your side of the political spectrum holds similar views. You were treating antisemitism like a moral cancer, that pollutes anyone in the blast radius, even uninvolved but similar parties. In a certain ironic sense you were saying that it poisons the well. "Some left wingers are antisemites, therefore antisemitism is left wing." You should know that the left does the same thing with racism, and are every bit as wrong.
Because you were thinking in terms of overgeneralizations and boo lights, when I suggested the motte provides counterevidence, you became defensive, acting as though I had made a similar general claim: "no, we're not anti-Jewish, we tolerate viewpoints, we're not the heretics, it's them." But I wasn't saying what you thought I was saying. I'm not treating antisemitism as a moral pollutant, just as a factual description of certain views, both left and right -- some of which are present here, indicating that they still exist in the world.
The idea that SS is Muslim is... pretty bizarre, and rather reminds me of Hylinka saying right wing identitarians are simply the same thing as left wing ones, all evidence to the contrary.
We don't have to be opposed here, and I'm not trying to start a fight. I just think you made a shady argument and wanted to point out the counterevidence.
I'm not disputing your point that there are anti-semites on the right, but I wanted to respond to this:
Assuming you're talking about actual progressives, not normie liberals, didn't they broadly respond to the "let's kill the jews" marches by reminding us we needed to pay attention to the "context" of such slogans?
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The fact that there are anti semitic right winger doesn’t change the fact that institutionally the LW has an antisemitism problem the RW doesn’t.
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It’s starting to seem like antisemitism is becoming a small but vocal minority on both the left and the right, to the point where neither side can really throw stones at the other for it. A few years ago you could maybe argue that on the left it was just anti-Israel sentiment and not actually antisemistism, but I think that argument has evaporated in the last couple of years.
I don’t actually know anyone on the far left, but it seems like basically every right winger who deviates from the party line becomes an antisemite eventually- and usually, this is purely political antisemitism. If they were absolute dictators they probably wouldn’t repress Jews that much in practice even as they gave some antisemitic speeches.
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It’s not the same. You can be a mainstream elected Democrat and be an antisemite. That’s not true for Republicans.
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