Holy shit, the Atlantic are finally acknowledging there’s a problem, rather than just sanity-washing fascists and claiming that nazis have no traction.
It became a problem partially because of the media being controlled by fascists. The atlantic is one of the worst.
Holy shit, the Atlantic are finally acknowledging there’s a problem
The Atlantic only sees a problem when a guy they don’t like is in charge. Their editorial staff will forget all about the GOP’s Nazi Problem the minute Jeb Bush is running the RNC again.
Hot take: it’s always been a problem, but people had enough fear of social reprisal to keep that stuff to themselves.
The media was a huge part of it, especially the Atlantic. They went off my list pretty early on for headlines and stories that covered for this administration. One article doesn’t absolve them, they’re POS.
Worth remembering that the Republican Party isn’t the root cause. Our oligarchs corrupting our democracy is what’s broken it. And a huge part of that is our media - not only propaganda outlets like Fox, but the control by the oligarchs of almost all media is the reason Republicans always get a pass and Democrats get minimized.
“how did the gop become this” they’re barely admitting shit, it’s always been.
Author interview
Wow Atlantic…really hot take. Did you finally realize what we all knew years ago?
For the author, pretty much. He’s been spending his time on BlueSky arguing that what we are seeing isn’t really fascism.
Yeah this is a reheated take that should have been posted in 2015.
And nearly a decade late even then.
Anyone who didn’t see this with the rise of the “tea party” just wasn’t paying attention or was ignorant. Maybe not about us heading toward fascism (especially so quickly), but there was an increase in nazi bullshit even then - but with the rise of the sheer public racism that RUSHED out of the closet… we knew we were fucked.
Bingo.
Mainstream media was asleep at the wheel as the fascist threat solidified.
Either that, or they were willfully obfuscating what was a clear-as-day motion towards fascism.
Google: trump fascism before:2016-01-01
Why you should stop calling Donald Trump a fascist. December 4, 2015
Donald Trump Isn’t a Fascist; He’s a Media-Savvy Know-Nothing. December 28, 2015
Whose Fascism Is This, Anyway? Dec. 15, 2015
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/16/opinion/whose-fascism-is-this-anyway.html
Is Donald Trump leading a proto-fascist movement? August 28, 2015
https://theweek.com/articles/574097/donald-trump-leading-protofascist-movement
Trump May Be a Loudmouthed Demagogue, but Is He a Fascist? Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric has his opponents likening him to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Such comparisons may be misplaced.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/09/trump-may-be-a-loudmouthed-demagogue-but-is-he-a-fascist/
Is Donald Trump a Fascist?
No. They HAD a nazi problem when they decided to let in the first nazi.
Now they are a nazi party.
Trump proved that the “moderate” right would tolerate the inclusion of actual Nazis, white supremacists, and other fringe right-wing groups (along with previously unaffiliated weird counter-culture groups like antivaxxers, conspiracy theorists, flat earthers, etc) as long as meant they won elections and got their supreme court picks.
The “moderate” objection to extremists was always nothing more than a fear that it would cost them elections, it was never really an ideological or moral position.
It’s a big tent, and they let the Nazis in. So now it’s a Nazi bar, and kicking them out would now be a Problem.
No, WE have a Republican and Nazi problem and they’re the same problem.
LOL, “how”? “[B]ecome”?
Has The Atlantic met the Republican Party?
The author of the piece is a former Republican. They actually flipped sides on the hate thing a few decades ago, but it took a while to get to the point where open Nazism instead of dog whistling was ok
But that’s the core of the republican party. It’s always been for hateful bigots
Well, the Nazis borrowed a lot of slogans and ideas from the KKK, who was folded into the GOP during their southern strategy push to grab up the racist/religious vote.
How?
That’s like asking how Trump got in the Epstein files over a million times. It was a coordinated effort by both of them, that lead to a long and comfortable relationship with the slimmest margins of plausible deniability.
I’m still waiting to see if the Nazis jail and execute the Republicans eventually, or if it will be the other way round.
I’m pretty sure the problem is that they don’t have a problem with Nazis.
Any discussion of the open acceptance of Nazis into the GOP that doesn’t mention gamergate is, at best, incomplete.
The fact that a central part of <gestures vaguely at everything> was some guy making up stories about his ex cheating on him is fucking wild.
GOP was accepting Nazis way before gamergate happened.
Sure. Not trying to say otherwise, but they were at least largely quiet about it, they used euphemisms.
It’s the whole “you can’t say n* n* n*” speech from Lee Atwater.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*r, n*r, n*r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nr, nr.”
Once open bigotry was more broadly accepted (or at least it was clear that any pushback was stifled) they opened up. And gamergate was central to exposing that, and showing the GOP that there was an appetite for open fascism.
Not to mention people like Bannon explicitly came into prominence through the gamergate movement
I agree with you and the lineage is obvious when looking at how Steve Bannon pushed GamerGate at Breitbart and then went straight on to become Trump’s campaign manager.
And Bannon’s name missing from that article is one of the article’s major flaws, considering how much Bannon shaped the MAGA movement as a whole.
So what is this gamergate thing then? I know the gaming communities can be toxic to say the least. That they were a lot of the alt right that propelled the president to his first election win, only possible though because the democrats threw the election with the most unlikable candidate they could find to repudiate their base and embrace monied interests they are supposed to be the ones to oppose.
Back in the day (90’s-early 2000’s) it was hard to see how the right would ever really appeal to the younger generation (people were less politically engaged in general). There was no "alt-"right, just the traditionalists and Christian fundamentalists screaming about how Dungeons and Dragons is Satanic and shit like that. Those guys were incredibly lame, and very out of line with the sentiment of young people at that time, which was generally a kind of “free speech absolutism,” brought on by being the first generation with access to the internet. Shock images/videos were common and being able to handle that sort of thing was a point of pride. Pretenses of respect and decorum were stripped away in favor of the raw and unfiltered.
Gamergate was the moment when this energy really began directing itself against left/liberal/minority figures, and took on a more explicitly political character. Because sometimes those people would critique video games and commit the cardinal sin of caring about things, while also sometimes disparaging things that people liked. Certain women became targets of hate in certain communities, and it wasn’t long before rumors started circulating that a female game developer (who was frequent target of hate) got favorable reviews because she was sleeping with the reviewers. Thus the famous line, “It’s not about misogyny, it’s about ethics in games journalism.”
As liberals and leftists were not really on board with all the harassment campaigns and violent threats, and they faced more and more criticism from that direction, and they eventually formed into (or at least formed a key component of) this “alt-right” movement that rejected the pearl-clutching and feigned piety of the traditionalist right, while still hating minorities and progressives and all that.
Apropos of nothing, apparently there’s an email in the Epstein files referencing a conversation between Epstein and Moot (Admin of 4chan) implying he convinced him to create the pol board (where a lot of both the culture and organization behind gamergate originated)
If you don’t know about gamergate, I almost don’t want to spoil that.
This is one of the better summaries of gamergate and how it shaped the “alt right” movement, imo.
living and growing up for twenty five years of living in the rural midwest, I could have easily told you how this happened and how radio and cable news spread this problem.
The Republican party has been embracing the death cult vibe long before Trump. It’s the natural location for Nazis to coalesce.
You don’t cater to evangelical zionists without the death cult ingredient. In many ways the US portion of this goes back to Jerry Falwell and the UK portion goes back even further.
As the reactionaries like to state they were part of the Democrat party before the Civil Rights Act. This issue goes beyond party lines and is about the truth of this country to those who aren’t privileged to be born wealthy, male, and white.
🔫🧑🚀”always has been”
Many Nazi ideas are a direct port of racist ideology from the USA. It’s pretty easy to argue the Nazis picked it up from us. The Republican party is a haven for Nazis, not because Nazism is a new phenomenon in the USA, but because it’s made in the USA.
America First - White supremacy garbage slogan adopted by the KKK back in 1920.
America is for Americans - Identical Nazi slogan “Germany is for Germans”
One homeland, one people, one heritage - A variation of a Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” which is listed as a central Nazi phrase at the Holocaust Museum.
We will have our home again - ICE recruitment effort. Used by far right ethno-nationalist Völkisch movement.
Numerous speeches referring to vermin, poisoning blood of our country, etc which are all Nazi/White nationalist dog whistles.
