The title’s a bit disingenuous, I know: this didn’t come out of nowhere. White supremacism is as American as Manifest Destiny and has been heavily intertwined with Nazism from its inception. That overlap with the Republican party, and their gradual slip into the extreme far-right, is evident.
But Seig Heils? Even the most dense among them must know that blatant Nazism hurts their legitimacy in the eyes of the public, even among MAGATs (as is evident right now if you peek at their echo chamber on Reddit). Surely they would have a much easier time pushing their rhetoric and establishing their agenda by keeping a purposeful distance from that sort of indefensible imagery and symbolism. How do they expect to keep cohesion in the military when you imply to the soldiers that they are Nazis now, seig heils and all.
Why Nazis?
Any theories as to where this is coming from? Follow the ketamine-fueled leader? A directive for operative Krasnov, from Putin himself, to implode the country? True Nazi beliefs among the Heritage Foundation, Proud Boys, etc? I just don’t understand how they thought this would fly. I don’t understand anything anymore lol.
“suddenly”
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.
Yep, we have demonstrated that it’s ok by not doing anything. So now they’re all proud to show the world who they are. And until they start getting their shit rocked, that’s going to continue.
Normalize punching Nazis
I knew this was coming after 9/11/2001. That was my first brush with how absolutely vile, ignorant, and racist most US citizens could be.
I used to always say eventually they would bring the tools of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars home and use against their own citizens and god damn it, it sucks to be right.
*god damn it, it sucks to be right.*
I’m starting to feel the same way. When I was a teenager (more than 20 years ago) I wrote a short science fiction story. Being awesome with titles I simply named it “USA is the new nazi”.
Well, fuck.
Funny you mention 9/11, because with the 2024 election, osama bin laden can finally rest, because his task is complete.
Godamnit! At that time, we were visiting family stateside. It was like the window let in a chill, like a rug pulled out from under you, it was tangible that something in the very fabric of the USA had changed.
I remember telling my grandpa, who fled soviet Bulgaria in WWII, that if this goes on, they can make anyone their enemy. 9/11 turned the hate siphon on full blast, and I was certain they would turn on their own.
So happy he didn’t live to see what the Republicans became.
Just a lack of Nazi hunters.
Where is Wonder Woman when you need her?
Turns out she’s a Nazi too. :(
I was referencing the Wonder Woman of the 70’s TV series (Lynda Carter) who was always fighting against nazis.
Yeah that Linda Carter formed me. No actual woman has come even close to the expectations she set. <sigh>
We need Lieutenant Aldo Raine back on duty (Brad Pitt in Inglorious Basterds)
What you’re seeing is the end of Truth.
Especially in the face of AI generated photos, we’re dealing with a future where the youth can easily be misled about what actually happened in the past, or even in the current moment.
Reality is perception, and they are busy managing reality to deny any perception of Nazi behavior.
It’s why Musk especially lies so fluidly and easily in the face of hard evidence.
It’s all perception management, and as long as they keep talking and keep repeating the same lies, a significant number of people will believe them.
Musk still claims it wasn’t a Nazi salute, and a significant number of people believe him. It’s kind of like Trump’s statement that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th avenue and not lose any support. It’s all attack, never back down, never admit fault.
So how do we combat a DDOS on truth.
Clearly the previous orders of “truth” were not perfect either, and it’s discontent at the elite and coverups which Musk and Trump and other neofacist populists have manipulated to fuel their attacks on the establishment’s regime of truth. Ironically they are replacing something bad with something far worse.
How can leftists take the discontent with the current elite’s regime of truth and use it for the better ie. recruitment?
Regime of Truth Definition
Regimes of truth is a term coined by philosopher Michel Foucault, referring to a discourse that holds certain things to be “truths”. Foucault sought to explore how knowledge and truth were produced by power structures of society.[
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
Hitle was a Mussolini fanboy. He got his ideas from Italy.
given the situation, An International History of Fascism, is overdue.
It wasn’t sudden, this shit’s been muddying the waters for a decade and the precursors were seeping in for another decade or more before that.
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.
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.
This person has paid attention.
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.
Opposition to Israeli genocide was not a problem. Consistently blaming Israeli genocide on the Democrats was an astounding self-own actively encouraged by both Israel and US fascists and it does put at least some of the blame on the dereliction of duty of the US left.
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.
Makes me think of my younger days hanging out on 4chan, thinking I was having ironic, satirical laughs with my fellow anons until eventually realizing most of them actually believed what they were saying
Yeah, old 4chan was definitely something. You had some of the absolute funniest shitposting imaginable, right next to some shit that no amount of eye bleach and showers could cleanse you of. Like, it was fun every once in a while for shits and giggles, but it started messing with your psyche after even an hour. The casual racism alone was in no way ironic. And So. Much. CP; to the point where most of the images aren’t even worth a glance because there’s a good chance it’s underage revenge porn. I genuinely don’t know how that site is still up.
Nowadays it’s pretty damn tame, at least compared to how it used to be. And the wicked thing is, there are people who legit live on there, as in it’s damn near all they do with their lives, both then and now. I’ll go peek in every few months for a nostalgia trip, but I’m out after 10 min on average, it’s still toxic as hell.
It’s still pretty bad, but they recruited jannies recently and it seems to have a small effect.
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Cognitive dissonance is a lot of it.
Maybe don’t actually realize they are Nazis. I like to talk to these types and describe the events of the Boston Massacre (kid got shot after throwing snowballs and possibly rocks at the police, then a riot broke out and some rioters got shot) the Boston Tea Party (government raised taxes in an obvious money grab, so a bunch of protesters broke into a warehouse and destroyed a bunch of private property). Get them to take the side of the British, then tell them which events I’m talking about. They know from school, hopefully, at least as to those two events, how they felt about them when they learned about them, and you can see the dissonance contorting their faces.
Others are Nazi sympathizers. I knew a dude who felt that the coolest thing he owned was a Nazi dagger from WW2. It was his “everyday carry” knife. Only visible as a Nazi knife if you looked at the hilt. He thought the Holocaust was a ln exaggeration and that the Nazis had a lot of good ideas that would translate well to today’s problems; he thought Jews controlled the media, that blacks and browns were taking jobs from better qualified white people (hated “DEI”). He was delusional, living in a world that wasnt real. Brainwashed. Maybe not his fault, but he’s responsible for his behaviors. If an alt right style cleansing or war breaks out, he’ll be the first non-open Nazi to get excited to kill minorities.
Then there are actual Nazis. Two types. Dumb, racist poor people who feel comforted by Nazi rhetoric. And intelligent, wealthy people, who want to steal all wealth from minorities and send them to ghettos (or worse), so their companies and investments have no competition and their personal wealth may go unhindered. These are people who want to use racism to bring about oligarchy and a new age of imperialism, and they recognize the oath of least resistance is a friendly dictator, brought to power based on Nazi rhetoric. This is Musk and Bannon. The people who now feel emboldened to do Nazi salute in public, as a homage to the group above, who might get caught up doing them in private.
My hot take, anyway.
There are people who proud themselves in kicking puppies and more would come forward if they felt it’s acceptable.
It’s mainly a mix of economic frusturation and a divide and conquer strategy by the rich in order to have the masses blame immigrants and people of other races/religions/genders/sexual orientations/etc. for all of their problems instead of blaming the elite class and capitalism. The lie of meritocracy being real also plays a big role here (“temporarilly embarrassed billionaires”).
There is another angle, though, and that’s sexual frusturation. When a teenage male has issues getting laid and they look online for some kind of support, they find people like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson who tells them that men who “get laid” are “alphas” or whatever and that women should be treated as subhuman or as slaves. These incels have likely never actually attempted to make friends with any women outside of a sexual or romantic context, because if they did, they would learn that women are the same as them, even when it comes to their struggles (even pertaining to dating/sexual frusturations).
I think the latter reason (specifically Gamergate) sparked the fire that made the first truely possible on a scale that we haven’t seen in our lifetimes.
There is also the additional piece of info that the majority of people won’t take action against what is happening in politics until it personally affects them, which is a very unfortunate reality.
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Sorry to be pedantic, but it’s “Sieg Heil”.
Sieg means Victory, so it means “Hail victory”.
Thank you.
Reminds me of the Rule of Goats:
If you fuck a goat ironically, you’re still fucking a goat. Same goes with ironic Hitler salutes.
Reminds me of McGregor the Goat Fucker.
Nobody called him McGregor the bridge builder, despite a long and successful career as a bridge engineer. But he fucked one goat…
Curious to hear more about this documentary
Me too, I’d love to watch it again, but I can’t remember where I saw it.
The girl may have been a blogger or journalist at the start of it. It had something to do with Charlottesville. If anyone has any luck finding it, please ping me.
I asked duck.ai and it seems to have identified it:
The documentary you are referring to is likely "White Right: Meeting the Enemy." In this film, the director, Deeyah Khan, explores the world of white supremacists and far-right extremists. One of the key narratives in the documentary involves a young woman who becomes romantically involved with a member of the alt-right. Throughout the film, she witnesses disturbing behaviors, including Nazi salutes and book burnings, which challenge her perceptions and beliefs.
The documentary aims to provide insight into the motivations and ideologies of those involved in the alt-right movement while also highlighting the personal struggles of individuals who find themselves entangled in these extremist circles. It emphasizes the importance of dialogue and understanding in addressing the issues of hate and extremism.
Plenty of answers here but I don’t think anyone has answered this part:
Surely they would have a much easier time pushing their rhetoric and establishing their agenda by keeping a purposeful distance from that sort of indefensible imagery and symbolism.
So here’s my take …
Musk did the sig heil as a fuck you to everyone that doesn’t like him. That’s it.
They just won the election by basically lying, ignoring, and playing for time. They can literally do whatever the fuck they like for the next n years with impunity.
Imagine if Harris had won and in her victory speech said something like “Don’t worry Don, I’ll make sure they give you diapers in jail.” It would’ve been a low blow but we would’ve loved her for it because it’s poking fun at the conservatives for no other reason than to stir them up.
I think there’s another, longer conversation to be had about why racism (and by extension nazism) resonates with voters in 2025, but I’m too weary for that I think.
It came from LIBERALS who demanded that we protect the free speech of Nazis while they were building their death camps.
Underrated perspective. Absolutely a big part of the problem.
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.
Hydra knows how to lay low…
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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.
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Bruh. Whether or not they are Nazi’s isn’t the crux of the issue. The fact that they are invoking Nazi symbolism and behaviours at all is the issue, and any self-respecting American should take issue with the invocation of something Americans claim they helped destroy (to be clear, fascism and Nazism in WW2).
Second, the left has been calling the right Nazis for decades.
No comment about the word “feminazi”?
Literary Nazis get mention
I really have to agree with the other replies on this one. While technically no one is a nazi but the og nazis there is nazi fanboys and between musks tweets and his salute its not at all like this person is worse than hitler or this person is a nazi because they are authoritarian you might have had in the past.
It only seems recent because you’re young and not aware of the history of the term.
Did you miss that moment when Elon Musk did two Nazi salutes, in public, at the inauguration, and no one did anything about it?
This isn’t a “they’re calling everyone Nazis” moment. The Nazis are calling themselves Nazis and making it a public-facing symbol of the power they’ve gained.
Call it white nationalist, MAGA, or whatever. Giving it a different label does not change what it is, and that’s especially true when they start raising their arms Hitler-style on national television.
Honestly, no. I’ve spent too much of my limited time on this planet checking what lefties claim are Nazis. Not a single Nazi sighting has been real. I’ve stopped checking, it’s a waste of time.
Let me guess, he waved awkwardly, and now y’all are going to swear up and down it was a Nazi salute when the video shows otherwise?
Y’all shouldn’t cry wolf. Eventually there might actually be a wolf, and no one will believe you.
Three of them in government have done it now. Elon did it a few weeks ago, it was widely condemned, and then two other losers (Steve Bannon and another figure who’s name I don’t know) did it at CPAC in the White House just the other day. You’re being disingenuous by refusing to look into it — claiming its leftist rhetoric before youve even looked for yourself — but nonetheless engaging in discourse with us about it. Why won’t you at least go look? Then we will have something we can talk about
Well, fortunately, it doesn’t matter if anyone believes it or not. It’s gonna fuck up everything and everyone, whatever their status, beliefs, bank account, achievements, or whatever else people claw to for their identity is.
So close your eyes and ears, pack out the mirror, and start jerking it to your intellectual superiority. Show yourself how smart you are. Cum on your mirror’s face and lick it up, for your seed is pure wisdom. Until you have no other choice but to stop because Trump and his rabid dogs says so, that is. :)
You can gaslight yourself all you want, but you can’t gaslight me. My eyes actually work.
