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Well, Steve Bannon just threw a Roman salute at CPAC.
I know some people may have reservations in claiming that Elon didn’t mean to do what people thought he did, and many will scream until their hearts give out that he did it emphatically due to some inherent impulse to troll. Bannon doing this (a month no less) after Elon’s own stunt not only means that this was probably in response to that, but also Bannon didn’t even do the same winding motion which was the cover; no, ‘my heart goes out to you’, or, ‘I am reaching out to you’, or any superficial justification, just an unbridled arm stretched out for the purposes of salutation. Accompanying this a proclamation that Trump is a great man of history, no less, someone whose coming is augured only twice in the history of a country, with Bannon proclaiming that only Trump is worthy to be the Republican Party (and therefore President) even in 2028.
The Rubicon seemingly is continually crossed ever-so-slightly, or at least, it is being approached for the purposes of eventually making it to the other side. This comes after the news of the Napoleon quotation posted on the date of Mark Antony offering Ceasar the title of King, and the White House social comms posting Trump as King. Obviously, the former is enigmatic as a function, and the latter humorous. It’s just an interesting start to a new regime seemingly radicalized by its previously downtrodden nature; defeated, the bloodied and uncowed rejects are now reveling in their victory beyond even the limits of their persecutors’ sense of regality.
It’s funny seeing Richard Spencer being a decade early to the seeming new tradition of Trump orbiters, and only if he had bid his time he would potentially have been capable of releasing his true feelings had they not been mellowed in time. Nick Fuentes, on the other hand, is late: stating his sensing of some ulterior goal behind this style of communication being only discomforting. This is basically like the twilight zone at this point in that, although these points don’t seemingly add up to one singular great attractor at the end of whatever this Presidency even is, it’s entailing something completely different.
Ave Trump, Emperor of the Americans.
Forget reading their moldbug, some of these guys need to learn a lesson from Cartman: "don't talk out loud about it until you have most of them on the trains heading to the camps"
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I do agree that the intention is there. Right now is not testing the water, just approaching it. It's not boiling the frog, just touching the knob. Trump and his most ardent supporters are starting to stretch the Overton window to also include "crossing the Rubicon". From an objective centrist perspective, it's all just talk. But like IGI-111 notes that "TROLLING ALONE MOVES THE WHEELS OF HISTORY", well, "trolling" is really just a different form of "talking". I am concerned, but not alarmed. Alarmed is when Congress and the Supreme Court (and the People) start keeling and rollover and really do let Trump run for a third term. Even then, I'm not sure what I can do as an aspiring immigrant. I suppose cross my fingers. Maybe now's a good time to get into religion or alcohol.
But what possibilities are they trying to approach, or to stretch the Overton window to include? Invading Canada/Mexico? Genociding the Jews? And if so, why would they try and reference Nazi imagery, which is probably the aesthetic repulsive to most people in the US? None of it makes any sense.
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We need to have a discussion some day about what was the actual bad thing about the Nazis.
Was it the Hugo boss uniforms?
The music?
The German language?
Swastikas maybe?
Is nationalism itself bad?
I’ve always understood that the bad thing the Nazis did was load 6 million people or so onto train cars and drive them to industrialized killing factories. The bad part was hunting down people they didn’t like and killing them. It was all the torture and death and so forth.
edit: guys I'm being a little hyperbolic here. Of course the atrocities of the Nazis went substantially beyond just the holocaust. I'm saying that it wasn't the uniforms, or the colors red black and white, it was the violence. When people call Elon Musk, for instance, a Nazi, it comes across as stupid.
I keep seeing people get called “Nazi” for like…waving at a crowd? Which is very clearly what Steve Bannon, an explicit Zionist, is doing here.
I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of him taking. I like Steve Bannon quite a bit. He is definitely not a “Nazi” in any meaningful way that aligns with anything the Nazis did which was historically significant. Bannon is a pro workers rights, anti big government, anti CCP, Christian Nationalist. The first speech he gave after prison was about how the justice system is racist against black people and we need to fix that. During the summer of Floyd he was taking about George Floyd as a victim of globalism, and while he obviously condemned the riots, he was sympathetic to that exact same things the rioters were upset about.
When Ukraine was invaded, he gave a long monologue about how Zelensky was being brave and defending his people, and how the US was leading him down the primrose path towards the place he is now.
He literally went to prison for his principles.
Bannon is one of the good guys. Hard to put into any of the buckets commonly talked about around here. He was definitely not giving any sort of Nazi salute here.
People don't get mad at Nazi salutes because they think the salute itself is bad. Likewise the swastika isn't arcane magic that can cause harm, and Hugo Boss is just a fashion brand. Most left wingers have few issues with the modern German state and it's language. Nobody is confused about this.
Context matters. When you're a politician (or other political public figure) giving a speech , making an unironic Nazi salute communicates a message. And that message is typically "I support the ideals of the Nazi Party".
If you don't want to send that message don't make a Nazi salute. Not even accidentally. You should know what it represents.
Essentially nobody is confused about if the Nazis are bad. I'll grant that there's arguments to made about exactly how bad they where, or how also bad the Allies were, but that doesn't change the fact that you shouldn't use Nazi symbolism if you don't want to be accused of being a Nazi.
You can't "not make a Nazi salute accidentally". First of all, by definition, an accident isn't done deliberately. Second, it's easy for a motivated leftist to find Nazi salutes everywhere; it's impossible to not do something that with the appropriate camera angle and out of context still image can be called a Nazi salute.
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None of this contradicts the idea that he intentionally made a Nazi salute to draw attention to himself.
It's like saying "this person can't be a commie because their parents are rich" as they're waving a hammer and sickle flag on video.
Yes it is kindof like that. To take it further it would be a bit like saying: "you can't be a communist if you explicitly argue against communist ideology and start a podcast and spend 3+ hours per day arguing about why communist ideology is bad."
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It is their preference for out-group-misery over in-group flourishing.
For all their faults, previous govts have never taken this much joy in hurting their outgroup. Bannon doesn't care about the flourishing of white people. He cares that America doesn't facilitate the flourishing of non-whites (non-natives?). Elon clearly cares about empowering his lackeys and winning, more than facilitating a good life for Americans at large.
I agree that Bannon isn't a Nazi. But, I have yet to hear him recommend policies that would facilitate positive change.
He can point out problems all day. No solutions. No appeal to positive change. No optimism. Just finger pointing and loud gestures.
That's Nazi mentality. Germany can't flourish until the jews are genocided. What fiscal policy will enable a pure-Aryan Germany to flourish ? Who cares. We need to get the jews out first. We'll figure out the big solutions later. Ofc, this mentality horse-shoes quite hard. Bernie, AOC, Stalin & Mao have similar traits, with different outgroups. (with varying degrees of severity)
Centrists look incompetent because nothing happens. But, gridlock can be feature too. Decision by committee means that no one group gets a raw-deal. In a functioning nation like the US (richest country), the govts job is to preserve processes, not uproot them. Drastic actions make more sense in completely broken systems like Ecuador, Argentina or places with no systems like newly independent Singapore.
Now America isn't perfect. Many of its systems are broken and deserve to be disrupted. Healthcare billing is broken. Border enforcement is broken. Accountability for military spending is missing entirely. The zoning and urban planning setups are broken. I have yet to see Elon do anything towards disrupting [1] any of these truly broken American systems. Leads to me suspect that disruptions are chosen with the goal of hurting enemies rather than fixing systems.
[1] I have heard whispers of LVT. That would be a welcome change. I have yet to see anything substantial on it. Until then, my point stands.
Quasi-Keynsian war economy with Konzern characteristics. The Nazis absolutely had plans for all sorts of things beyond just getting rid of the jews - not necessarily good plans, but they were there, largely in advance of taking power. The communist party also had lots of plans. Its quite typical of totalitarianism really. Very few political movements ever had as little plan as Trump I, which is precisely why he didnt do a whole lot. This idea that that makes it extra dangerous seems to be entirely a just so story.
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To the people who lived through the evils of Nazism, there was no doubt that the worst thing the Nazis did was start the most destructive war in human history (and thereby lead their own country to defeat, conquest, ruin, and misery). "Aggression is the supreme international crime." That is the words of the Nuremberg prosecutors relegating the Holocaust to Hitler's second-worst crime - and this was not controversial at the time, and should not have been given the destructiveness of the rest of WW2. The only country for which a majority of the dead were Holocausted Jews was Czecholslovakia. And it isn't clear why the Holocaust doesn't itself count as an incident of the aggressive war - after all only about 200,000 Holocaust victims were from Germany.
Intelligent people who compare Putin to Hitler are doing it because he is engaged in the violent pursuit of lebensraum, not because he persecutes gypsies and homosexuals.
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The bad thing about the Nazis was that they started WWII. Everything they did before the start of WWII was within the envelope of typical right-wing authoritarian governments. Most people would cite the Holocaust as the bad thing about the Nazis, and yeah, it was bad, but the over-emphasis of it ironically plays right into the Nazi Propaganda that WWII was a war launched against Germany for the benefit of the Jews.
"Who started WWII" is more ambiguous than that. WWII started with England and France's declaration of war on Germany. Germany had a reasonable casus belli on Poland, and England was pressuring Poland not to negotiate with Germany. Even more important are the many peace proposals Germany offered England, which entailed Germany fully pulling out of France, and Churchill not only rejected them but even hid them from the public. Ultimately Churchill and the United States would set the only war aim as Unconditional Surrender, which is what ultimately led to the mass murder and destruction.
Furthermore the tall tale of Germans tricking millions of Jews into walking into gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms is a fantasy meant to justify this one-sided WWII narrative. Incidentally, Grok 3 is the first LLM I've seen explicitly take the Revisionist side of a core argument regarding that narrative, even going so far as to criticize the Narrative's sole reliance on witness testimony over any other form of evidence. Also first that has accurately summarized the mainstream position on an issue, accurately summarized the Revisionist position on an issue, and explicitly concurred with the Revisionists that the "official claim is not plausible under scrutiny." The days of that narrative are numbered, and other WWII Revisionism is going to come along with the collapse of that narrative.
Germany's war on Poland provides no justification for England and France to ally with the Soviet Union in a catastrophic war aim of unconditional surrender on Germany.
On that note, normalize the Roman Salute. It's just a cool pose. It evokes emotions in people and that makes it powerful.
This is the second time you've made this comment. I know you're not a complete fucking mongoloid, but obviously you think the rest of us are. So tell me again: how did the Soviet Union end up allying with the UK? Did Germany, say, do anything to the USSR that made them break their alliance?
Less antagonism, please.
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You are pretending like their hands were tied, when they could have remained neutral or even allied with Germany against the Soviet Union. Hitler pleaded for either of those two options, offering to pull out of France for peace with Britain. But Britain wanted to restrain Germany from becoming the greatest European power, so they allied with the Soviet Union and destroyed Europe to make it happen.
And then after they destroyed Germany they were desperate to make them the front line against the Soviet Union.
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Leaving aside for a second the more odious points of this comment, this is preposterous. Britain had no justification for attempting to stop Germany attempting to make itself the pre-eminent power in Europe by conquest? Almost as if it was the guiding principle of the British to prevent such a state of affairs emerging for centuries prior. This was precisely the argument Napoleon tried to give at various - Britain had no need to meddle in continental affairs rather than attending to its overseas possessions and trading activities and had ruined itself for the sake of a conflict it had no interest in. It was preposterous then and equally so in 1939. And indeed the conduct of Hitler and the and the Nazi government before and during the war proved that they could never be tolerated as a major element of the European order.
This is the Revisionist position. And no I do not think it had a justification to do so with the threat of the Soviet Union and the human and cultural cost of destroying Old Europe in a war of unconditional surrender. And ultimately Britain lost its own Empire. But yes Britain did start WWII in order to prevent Germany from becoming the pre-eminent power in Europe. That's the real reason WWII started and Britain allied with the Soviet Union to make it happen. It wasn't over Danzig, all of Poland was conquered by Britain's ally at the end of the day.
The Treaty of Versailles was an attempt to make sure Germany never become the pre-eminent power in Europe. But it was unenforceable. So they waged war ostensibly over Danzig, but then retconned it ultimately to be about the Holocaust narrative to try to post-hoc justify the war and solely blame Germany for the utter destruction and death.
Very funny that Britain makes the claim Germany wanted to "make itself the pre-eminent power in Europe by conquest" over Danzig. Germany offered to fully evacuate from Western Europe for peace and England said no.
But yes, the real reason for the war was Britain didn't want Germany to become the largest power in Europe. No that is not at all a justification for their alliance with the Soviet Union, the demand for unconditional surrender, and mass death and destruction of Europe to realize that objective. Germany is today arguably the largest power on the European Continent anyway. No it was not justified.
As @johnfabian said, you must think we're complete fucking mongoloids if you expect us to buy that.
Contemporary articles have Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden both drawing parallels to Napoleon and the 30 years war in thier opposition to appeasement, and you can find speechs from Churchill about the German/Nazi Menace going back the early 30s. There's also the 390 years of observable foriegn policy between the end of the English Civil War and the start of World War Two.
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The narrative in the US really focusses on that to the exclusion of everything else. I'd say the bad thing they did was to take a peaceful and democratic if troubled country, force a totalitarian (in the textbook sense of the state meddling in every aspect of life to align it to its purpose) reorganisation at breakneck speed, oppress and kill all internal opposition, promulgate an ideology that is fundamentally anti-humanist (in that it assigns most humans zero to negative value based on innate attributes), and finally start a massively destructive war of conquest and annihilation against almost all of its neighbours.
The comparison of anyone in Trump's orbit to that is of course massive, ridiculous exaggeration, but I don't think the assertion that Trump's second term has echoes of it is so far-fetched. The two main goals the administration is currently pursuing are firstly the "anti-woke" thrust, which they understand as a mandate for sweeping top-down action to purge parts of society of enemy elements that until then were more organically entrenched than directly installed from above, and secondly "America first", which surely is nothing other than a call to assign lower value to non-Americans than whatever value they are currently assigned.
From what I understand, Bannon is still bannished from the inner circles of the administration, and critical of it in a way that could be glossed as "Fifty Trumps". I think 50 Trumps, in the sense of cranking the above thrusts up fiftyfold, could in fact start looking somewhat like one Hitler.
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Right? At this point, who gives a shit? The extremely online portion of the left is now openly antisemitic (not a view I personally share but that's irrelevant), so what exactly is the detestable portion of "national socialism" in the current political context? Is it just "white people advocating for themselves BAD" all the way down? I'm struggling to come up with a coherent reason for people to be mad about this under the current political meta, assuming he even meant to reference nazis (highly debatable based on the video).
When has Bannon advocated for white people?
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Don't be obtuse - unless you aren't being, in which case this betrays a spectacular lack of imagination. In the first place, outside some extremely niche corners of the internet antisemitism it still entirely unacceptable in mainstream society or left-wing politics. Even the more vociferous critics of Israel who may stray, in some people's view, into antisemitism would still openly condemn the latter (and indeed might even riposte with their own accusation that conflating Israel with Jews is antisemitic). In any case, even if one entirely discounts that there's still plenty left to find 'detestable' - what most of the comparison are gesturing towards is authoritarian government. That is, though for now institutional guardrails are up to the task of preventing such circumstances from arising, Trump wants total deference from all levels of culture and media, and thinks that liberal democracy is a scam which keeps power out of the hands of the Real People of the Nation (even if his conception is not racial in the same way), for whom he speaks and therefore any result which is not a victory for him is necessarily illegitimate.
This means nothing though. Plenty of racists will openly condemn racism, because it's obviously the smart thing to do. Defending someone or yourself against charges of antisemitism by saying they/you condemn anti-semitism is particularly weak, now there's the convenient label of "Anti-Zionist" to hide behind. I think even Hamas are claiming they're not anti-semitic these days.
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Surely when the online left calls people Nazis they mean "white supremacist" and not "anti-Semitic" (not that the hypocrisy of the statement isn't absurd)
And of course "white supremacist" has also lost all meaning. Do you want to enforce laws? Do you want kids to learn to read? Those are literally white supremacist beliefs, according to the online left.
We don't have to care. We need to simply ignore these people and route around them.
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I see calls from the Right to sufficiently ostracize Bannon for this, and I wonder if that's the wrong tactic. Instead of defending his right to free expression (which in this context begins to sound like a defense of his ideas) or act like the sky is falling the way the left does, can't we just mock Bannon? Take the power out of it. His gesture wasn't funny or deep, he's pathetic, etc. (I'm trying to provide an example of mockery, but without breaking the rules and actually getting into it.)
The left tried the "Act like the sky is falling every time someone does something Nazi-ish" tactic for a while and that didn't help anything. I vaguely remember a time when people would just roll their eyes or add layers of sarcasm. Something like the way /r/TumblrinAction mocked otherkin. That is how seriously I take Bannon, as if he had just proclaimed he was an otherkin on stage. If he wants to stop pretending to be an otherkin and start eating at a human table any time soon, then he's welcome back on the Right. (Now to make actual Right influencers act this way.)
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TROLLING ALONE MOVES THE WHEELS OF HISTORY
You know maybe it would be a fair outcome of constantly calling everyone Nazis for years that the gesture of the French Revolutionaries becomes socially acceptable again because it's funny to own the libs.
Next stop, Charlie's mustache.
The priestly class cannot openly condemn identity politics or mass murder because to do so might reflect poorly on thier agenda and allies.
Thus they are reduced to attacking aesthetics.
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Ugh. Nazi salute is with hand raised up front and steady. Not a sideways wave.
Its particularly easy to make that move if you're on an elevated platform and wave or otherwise gesture in a way that is directed at some particular person or part of the audience.
If you're waving towards someone on the same height plane as you, the arm will naturally be at a 90 degree angle so its visible to them.
If they're lower than you, then you'd be rotating the arm and palm downward towards them so, again, its more visible to the intended target. That puts you more in the "no no" range, especially if you have the arm fully extended.
All kinds of tricks to avoid it looking like a salute. Don't fully extend the arm, or use only a couple fingers (or the classic 'finger guns.' Although is that too violent?), or hell, use both arms. Most of those make you look more goofy, but that's a tradeoff. But man, isolating one gesture from a speech as evidence is not a great tactic.
And finally, if you ask me, the factor that makes the Roman Salute 'bad' is the part where you usually yell "SEIG HEIL" or "HEIL HITLER" while doing it. At least, that's the part that removes all ambiguity.
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It has to be from the municipality of Nuziders, Austria. Otherwise it's just a sparkling Roman Salute.
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Let it never be said Bannon wasn't above cribbing from those he loathes, to piss off those he also loathes, to stay relevant in a media cycle.
For a guy who tries so hard to be a political kingmaker, though, he seems pretty far on the outs of the Trump Administration, despite his attempts to be let back in.
Bannon’s podcast has an incredibly powerful audience. It’s basically a political activism organizing meeting every day.
Maybe not a “king maker”, but he’s a big deal. Much more than just a talking head.
Sure. Bannon is a 'big deal.' But it's also clear he's not as big a deal as he wants to be, wishes he could be, or compares himself to.
Bannon is fundamentally trying to reverse one of his worst mistakes of his political career, which was his break with Donald Trump after being chief strategist the first time. Trump has his peculiarities, and it's not uncommon for him to welcome in former foes, but one of his apparent dividing lines is post-separation loyalty. He can respect a parting of ways, but if the person then wants to write a tell-all / slam piece, that's an act of betrayal in a way that simply parting isn't. Bannon did the slam piece tell-all, thinking Trump was done without him. Bannon went from being 'the man behind the curtain' to outside the wire, and has spent a good part of the last few years trying to get back into Trump's good graces to the position he once had.
The envy dynamic is emblematic of his recent-ish feuding with Musk. Musk has the power that Bannon wishes he was, even though has never been the sort of 'big deal' that Bannon has spent a lifetime trying to cultivate. Musk has agenda-setting power, can come in and shut down entire government agencies in weeks, and has an influence that Bannon lacked even when he was on the 'inside.' In the first major inter-right dispute of the administration, Trump pretty clearly sided with Musk over the Bannon-esque faction.
None of this means Bannon has nothing. Bannon even has power that Musk does not. Musk is very much an ideological outsider in the right circles.
But when it comes to setting government policy- and especially Trump administration policy- that's nowhere near enough. Bannon is out, when he really wants to be back in, and he's trying so hard he's being a try-hard in echoing his foil's own recent fake-scandal.
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This is from 1 month ago:
“Bannon calls Musk 'evil' and 'racist' as MAGA civil war boils over”
Bannon hates Musk. In a wider sense, it’s a conflict between two large groups on the ‘new right’.
A largely Christian, largely evangelical, largely middle aged, largely middle-American wing, descended from ‘classic’ Fox, Breitbart, OANN, Newsmax. Pro-Israel, pro-troops, sometimes isolationist, not-necessarily pro-NATO, shades of Buchanan at times minus the historical conspiracies, but also within the mainstream of US conservative opinion. This is where Bannon and his ‘permanent coalition’ of 60% of whites, 40% of Hispanics, 20% of blacks is. Opposed to mass immigration, but especially including H1B immigration. Especially distrustful of big tech. Want to preserve existing US demographics and may stereotype but have no overt or intellectual racial animus towards black Americans.
_
Tech right, ultra online, ambivalent toward H1Bs, pro in Elon’s case, disproportionately non-white, Silicon Valley, e/acc, government waste, very pro free speech, largely parrot’s Musk’s views but also associated closely with Thiel and some other VCs. Like /pol/ often performatively racist, especially toward black people, but actually quite diverse themselves. Blue tribe, lives in big cities, probably works in tech, DOGE staffer, likely not religious except in a possibly tradcath or orthodox aesthetic-only sense, redscarepod listener or subreddit user, new right press involvement in some cases. HBD believer, read Moldbug and Land in 2010 (if they’re older, read their views rephrased in online infographics in 2017 if they’re younger).
_
In addition to these you have combinations of more esoteric racists, third-worldists like Fuentes, extreme antisemites, ultra culture war obsessives still cataloguing video game wokery like it’s 2015, people who primarily have contempt for women and the wider Tate-sphere, zoomer Muslims who’ve adopted a hybrid of Islamist and western dissident right ideologies, Russophiles and nazbols like Hinkle, BAP’s gay bodybuilders and so on, and overt feds like Carlson, but they’re relatively less relevant to this current dispute.
Does JD Vance occupying a liminal space between the two groups explain the lefty hate boner for him?
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Odd that someone in the first group would have such a hate-on for white South Africans.
Musk is African-American, so their hatred of him is stereotypical even ignoring the fact he's wildly successful.
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Why? They're not Americans.
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Not really. They're often driven by an inferiority complex with regards to richer, more educated, more sophisticated whites, usually expressed in hostility to blue-state whites and Europeans, but easily transmissible to white South Africans, who are not part of the "heartland" ingroup. Even for the explicitly "white nationalist" among them, you only really count as white if you pretend to be religious, like NASCAR, didn't go to college, etc.
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'Overt fed'?
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Just to nitpick: he never actually gave the Roman salute, at least not publicly. The one time he was accused of doing so, he was actually raising his glass of whiskey.
Right, what Spencer famously did after Trump’s first win was to shout “hail victory” ie the literal translation of “sieg heil”.
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If anything that looks less like a roman salute than Elon's gesture
It's to Roman salute what a solar cross, a kolovrat or a meander are to a swastika. Sufficient plausible deniability, but they know you know they know why you put something with rotational symmetry and right angles on your banner.
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The woke left and woke right are both desperate to make fetch happen.
despite how online I am, I somehow didn't know what "make fetch happen" means
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/make_fetch_happen
The only good thing to come out of that film.
The get in loser were ... meme also originates with the same speaker taking the main character shopping.
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IDK, some of those Joe Biden "get in, loser" memes were pretty funny.
Okay, there was that. But apart from some good memes, what has Mean Girls ever done for us?
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Booooo, you whore.
Go shave your back.
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Ahem.
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