• I’ll be getting off work at around 5:30 or so on Saturday morning, so getting up in time to meet my patriotic neighbors by 1 p.m. won’t be easy, but it’s still a lot easier than what the future will look like if millions of us don’t get together to protest on behalf of our country, our Constitution, and our neighbors. Nobody promised us that resisting fascism was going to be convenient.
So I may be tired tomorrow afternoon, but I will be present and I will be vocal.
Many of your better neighbors will also be gathering tomorrow to speak up for one another and for those who cannot speak up for themselves safely. You may want to join them.
The neighbors who show up may not be people you agree with 100% on all of the things you or they care about. But they agree with you 110% on the fact that knee-bending, boot-licking weasels cannot be allowed to rewrite all or our laws and morals and force us all to join them in their Caesar-worship and white supremacist crusade.
No Thrones. No Crowns. No Kings.
• Politico — the epitome of centrist, mainstream, horse-race-nihilism political journalism — dropped a bomb this week with a very un-Politico article taking sides against explicit Nazism while barely ever doing the usual Politico thing of disregarding the substance of that explicit Nazism to focus exclusively on how savvy, disinterested white journalists predict it will “play out” as a “win” or a “loss” with voters. The tone of the piece and its presentation is very much more — accurately and appropriately — “Holy s–t. these people are straight-up Nazis!”
“‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat” by Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo examines the transcripts of Telegram chats among leaders of Young Republican groups and finds them filled with cheerful, giggling antisemitism, racism, and Nazism of the sort that Klansmen would be afraid or ashamed of putting into writing.
It’s very, very bad.
An important thing to understand about the Young Republicans is that this is not a youth group. “Young” here means under 40. The chat here is among Young Republicans who range in age from their mid-20s to their late 30s. These are not children or “college kids.” They are staffers and legislative aides and local party officials.
And they “love Hitler” and think that non-white people have no rights that any white person needs to honor, that the votes of non-white people should not count. That Jews and Black people and Latinos do not belong in America, and that women only belong here to never say No to white men.
There’s an unhelpful mirror-version of the nothing-matters “savvy” of most Politico reporting that responds to an article like this by bragging about how unsurprising it is for Us Savvy Politics Knowers. This is not surprising to you? You’re so smart and well-informed that you’re no longer shocked by such open advocacy of Nazi ideology? Congratulations. You get a cookie. Enjoy your cookie while you help these Nazis by diminishing the potential impact of this story by sneering at everyone less informed and less enlightened that your wonderful amazing self who might otherwise have been shocked and surprised by it and thus motivated to oppose the Republican Party that has embraced these Nazis and been embraced by them.
Yes, for millions of Americans this is not new news. Millions of women and non-white people already knew that Young Republicans — and Middle-aged Republicans and Old Republicans — often openly embrace explicit racism and Nazi ideology online because these people have been doing this in their mentions ever since the dawn of social media. Any Black person on Twitter and any woman who ever said “Me Too” or suggested that misogyny is real has had exactly this kind of explicitly Nazi language in their replies.
Heck, I’m a straight white Christian male with a C-tier blog and I’ve had to deal with sieg-heiling actual Nazis in my inbox. And for years my less-online friends have struggled to accept that could possibly be true. Years ago I got to meet a few other theology bloggers in real life and they asked me why I never mention my wife or children by name. When I told them it was because I didn’t want the Nazis to learn their names they scolded me. “You can’t just call everyone who disagrees with you a Nazi.” They couldn’t quite seem to grasp that the people I was referring to as Nazis were actual Nazis — people who called themselves Nazis, unashamedly and threateningly.
When I struggled to explain that to them, they emphasized that “Well, not all Republicans are Nazis.” Of course not. But in 21st-century America, all Nazis are Republicans.
Maybe it’s no surprise to you that so many leaders of the group that the Republican Party touts as the source of its future leadership are openly fond of Nazi slogans, enthusiastic Dred Scott-style racism, and Reichskirche-style “Christianity.” But to millions more of your neighbors, friends, and family this is news. To them it is surprising and shocking and — to use the accurate word that these same neighbors, friends, and family were trained to avoid thinking about — deplorable.
It may even be shocking enough to challenge or change the way they respond to demagoguery about “the border” or “illegal immigration” or “non-citizens” or “DEI” or “minorities seeking special treatment” (as a way to dismiss minorities seeking anything closer to equal treatment).
Let them be shocked.
And then help them to see that this racism and Nazi garbage is not just “edgy, transgressive” hyperbole, but the bedrock of the actual policies that are, right now, being violently enforced all across America.
Let them be shocked by this story and let that shock teach them to also be shocked by this story and by this story and by this story and by this story and by this story and by this story and by this one. We need them to be shocked because we need them — we need as many of them as we can get if we’re going to put a stop to stories like those.
It’s not only the chat transcripts of Young Republicans that gleefully cheer for racism and Nazism. It’s also the explicit policy and agenda of the party that currently controls all three branches of the federal government.
Every step that party takes is an expression of their desire to reduce “the people” to “the citizens,” and then to reduce “citizens” to “only the right kind of citizens,” and then to reduce that further to “only the unquestioningly loyal and obedient right kind of citizens.” Some of our neighbors don’t know this yet, but as more of them realize it, we should encourage them, not condemn them for not having done so sooner.
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