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
Because they are nazis.
Republicans were not always Nazis. The article tries to look at how the change happened
They kinda always have been. Did everyone just forget about the Ku Klux Klan? What about the 1920s Eugenics movement? Operation Paperclip? First NATO Secretary was an ex-Nazi.
Western society is fucking teeming with fascists and nazis pretending to be polite waiting for their chance. Leftists have been talking about this for decades and just got told “not everyone you disagree with is a fascist”…
The motherfucking business plot. A literal fascist plot to overthrow FDR. Implicating the Bush family. It’s been 100 years of creeping Republican fascism at least.
Republicans were not always Nazis
They kinda always have been. Did everyone just forget about the Ku Klux Klan? What about the 1920s Eugenics movement?
Before the Southern Strategy(c.1960s), klansmen, etc… were more likely to be Democrats than Republicans.
The people have always existed (by various names). I think this is more an inspection of the party itself’s shift
I doubt they’re referring to the party affiliation, and instead to the ideology of the voters and politicians.
The orgs/brands/teams they’ve historically supported are irrelevant when their current support is dependent on present and future fascism.
Sure - if their point was “fascists have always been fascists” then I agree; who wouldn’t? But that’s not what the article or discussion was about.
During the KKK era, the Democrats were the ones in favor of hate, while the Republicans were not. The parties radically flipped after the passage of the Civil Rights act as a direct result of Nixon making a decision to support the hate to win elections, though the full flip took decades to play out. We’re hitting the end of that now.
This, but also it was more complicated as well: There were conservative and liberal contingencies in both parties, but after the big flip, conservatives went with or stay with Republicans, and progressives gravitated towards Democrats.
I’m 50, and I grew up after the flip, so it’s weird to think about how it must have been before. I think that’s the only reason things worked out as well as they did after WWII. Somehow we managed to push back against the racists and make some progress (Civil Rights Act, etc.) and even kinda pushed them into the racism closet for a while there. But boy howdy they exploded back out when the Tea Party took off and Obama was elected. But by that point, the Republians had already been working on attacking our democracy for a couple of decades.
The Southern Strategy was one big waterfall moment; another was when the Republicans partnered with evangelicals. I think the first big moment when partisanship really started to show its ugly head was the attack on Clinton and the attempt to impeach. Not that he didn’t abuse his office for blowjobs, but that really was not impeachable - and they didn’t get him for that, they got him on what was really a technicality. But after that, it feels like the gloves came off and partisanship was the primary tool of the Republicans.
Not that he didn’t abuse his office for blowjobs
This makes it sound like he was getting blow jobs from political favors.
He had an affair with one intern.
Technically… the nazis have always been us. Hitler took huge inspiration from US politics and policies, so to see it come full circle… the call is coming from inside the house!
We spent all our industrial effort and millions of lives to defeat ourselves. Hooray us for stopping our evil ways. Eventually. In many respects.
We’ve managed some progress. As much racism is a huge issue and on the increase, overall minorities today are a bit better off. Lynchings are a bit less common; sundown cities far fewer in number. Haven’t seen segregated water fountains or anything like that in a bit. Although there’s certainly still redlining and plenty of inequality…
Women have done even better - as recently as 1974 being unable to open a bank account without husband’s signature. While there’s still plenty of inequality there as well, that situation has improved even more.
I certainly don’t want to minimize the successes, it’s just that the increases in bigotry that we’ve seen in many areas just feels worse because it felt like we were making progress, only to realize that it is truly a slog and struggle.
Quite so. And yet come election time we will hear, with the greatest fervor, how everything about our government should be changed instantly and successfully and that is why we must all refuse to vote or to throw away that vote on a candidate with no chance of winning.
Yes and no.
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?
we need more stating the obvious honestly because for some its not so obvious. the rebulicans want to pretend everything is all normal and hunky dory.
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.
They also have a pedophile problem, too.
Oh right, that.
It’s sad that you can say that with seriousness, right?
Oh the whole thing’s a fuckin travesty.
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.
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
Because fascism is the far right and all fascism acts the same. It isn’t difficult.
Technically they always had a Nazi problem they are just enjoying the fruits of their labor at the moment.
I can’t imagine American Nazis were voting for the Dems.
The GOP doesn’t have a Nazi problem, it’s what they’ve always been. It isn’t a problem for them, it’s the ideal. It’s everyone else who has a GOP problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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) convincing him to allow/create the pol board (where a lot of both the culture and organization behind gamergate originated)
