Verified pro-Nazi X accounts flourish under Elon Musk

Post Reply New Topic

It's basically: "If I can't say what I want, when I want, on whatever platform I want, with total impunity, then I'm being silenced/oppressed/persecuted".

Given that you have had an Israeli flag as your avatar ever since Israel started its murderous assault on Gaza, I think I can dismiss your criticisms of Elon Musk for being supposedly "pro-violence" just as easily as I can dismiss every other criticism I've seen you make of a milquetoast conservative for their supposed "racism" or "religious fanaticism".

Twitter / X is a private company, so Elon Musk can do what he wants with it.

Isn't "private companies can do what they want" the standard response liberals come out with whenever someone complains about social media censorship?

Yes it is. So I can use the same argument in this case.

It's surreal seeing liberals tearing their hair out because some social media platform has become about 10% less restrictive than it was before.

A lot of the supposed "pro-Nazi" account on X are just people who point to alleged Jewish over-representation in this or that area of life and wonder out loud if it's good for the rest of us or not.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of fanatical Zionist accounts on X openly calling for Israel's onslaught on Gaza to be even more fierce than it already is, and you won't see NBC complaining about that.

I roll my eyes at liberals who respond to private censorship that they like by appealing to private property, yet when it is conservatives saying things they don't like, suddenly private property is less important than who is right or wrong. Liberals gotta unlearn this Anglo tendency to act like property rights trump morality. People shouldn't face consequences because they said something a site owner doesn't like. They should face consequences for saying openly awful things that only damage society. Its like when little Billy builds a fort and makes it so everyone has to follow all his rules and demands respect whether those rules are good or bad--even if people go there only to take advantage of those rules to do damaging things they can't as easily get away with elsewhere.

"Jews have a disproportionate amount of influence" is one of the oldest, most blatant anti-Semitic talking points. "Wondering out loud if it's good" for non-Jews that Jews have so much influence is anti-Semitic. It is not innocently posing a question from a place of curiosity, humility, and respect. It is an anti-Semitic foot-in-the-door tactic.

This talking point is also one I love to point to to show that there is no acceptable level of socio-economic success for non-white, non-Christians. Forgive the generalized examples:
Mexican-Americans living in poverty? "They shouldn't have come here if all they offer is poverty!"
Asian-Americans get college degrees and enter the middle class? "See? It's not that hard to succeed as a minority! Stop complaining about racism!"
Jewish Americans support each other, build wealth within the capitalist system, value education, and become professionals who make meaningful contributions to society? "Awfully suspicious that those Jews have so much success! They're going to hijack the system to benefit themselves! If the system was really working, then constitution-loving protestants would be the ones with all that success and influence!"

Christian capitalist conservatives firmly believe the capitalist system is fair (or at least more fair than any alternative), and that their religious and political values are the result of their being hard-working and moral. Therefore, if they do not succeed in that system as much as someone else who does not share those values, it is treated as a result of cheating. Hence why conservative politicians tell their base they have been "left behind by the system", yet when liberals also struggle, they just need to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps".

Maybe if conservative red states stopped blaming the Dems, immigrants, coastal elites, and Jews for their problems, they would be able to focus more on improving their own situation.

The never ending overuse of Nazi comparisons is offensive to me. Unless the account is calling for the extermination of a group of people based on how they were born, their religion, or has a bunch of Nazi symbols it is not a pro Nazi account.

But as ronona79 said the idea that Jews have disproportionate influence has a long history of use by people who are prejudiced against Jews and have used the idea to harm Jews. Antisemitism is very different the most prejudices. Most bigotry is based on the notion that “they” are inferior.
Modern antisemitism is based on the idea that Jews who are 0.2 percent of the worlds population have such superior skills that they control the 99.8 percent of the rest of the world.

At this point no matter what the intent anybody who goes there is not going to look good to anybody who not antisemitic.

Musk is 'free' to do what he wants. And allow Neo Nazis to use his site as a sounding board.

And we have free speech to gripe about it. And the free speech to stigmatize anyone using his site as being a Neo Nazi. And to stigmatize Musk himself as such.

I feel like if someone is advocating for a totalitarian state where mass extermination of their political opponents and/or other scapegoated groups is both likely and possible, they don't need to advocate specifically for mass exterminations before they're identified as Nazi-like. The mere fact that they want to provide the state with the means to do so is enough to worry deeply about what goals they hold but aren't admitting to yet.

Last edited by funeralxempire on 17 May 2024, 6:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Jews occupy a strange place in conventional racism. They are seen as inferior, yet, unlike most minorities and despite their small numbers, they enjoy visibly greater success than those who see them as inferior. There are two main ways anti-Semites rationalize this. 1) They are cheating in some way 2) The system is flawed/favors them.

If Jews have been more "successful", it is for reasons that anti-Semites are uncomfortable with seeing.
They are often close-knit. They look out for each other. They more readily set aside selfish interests for the good of the community. Yet the Gentile is encouraged by leaders to compete against his neighbor. Such communalism among Gentiles in a whole country would undermine the threat of poverty which empowered and enriched kings and cardinals. Such communalism across many gentile nations would mean the people would not as easily be pitted against foreigners by their leaders.
Jews enjoy success in valued professions, because they value education. They value debate, self-consciousness, literacy, and reason. Gentiles are often kept in hateful ignorance by their leaders. Dog-eat-dog, man-eat-man, nation-eat-nation. Education is limited and even scorned. How many of us have met Christians who think secular education is the work of the Devil? I can't think of a single Jew I've met who thinks the same. The thought of an educated and compassionate populace terrifies Gentile tyrants.

They would also need to acknowledge the absurdity of Gentiles deciding usury was awful, but they didn't want to not have usury and banks, so Jews became the bankers--until Gentiles decided usury wasn't that bad, but by then Gentiles hated Jews for owning so many banks

Calling for the extermination of innate groups is a Nazi thing, but political opponent groups are not. We have the word "authoritarian" to describe them. My problem with the overuse of Nazi comparisons is that it waters down both how bad Nazis were and are and those being compared to them.

Related, although linguistically correct I don't like the term "Neo-Nazi". I don't like any caveat around the term Nazi.

I think this is what every leftist should be reminded. Then again, leftists will call any of their opponents with such language for sure and even I may have a fair share of such (self-aware). I do however agree that people should be reminded on what the word Nazi actually means and the context of the Nazis themselves not in a sense to glorify the Nazis but to keep them as the ultimate human evil while refraining from calling any authoritarian body a "fascist" or a "Nazi" unless said body proceeds to assault a certain ethnic or religious group of people just like the Nazis did (e.g Israel's assault on Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Serbian aggression on Yugoslav nations in the 1990s, etc.).

Calling for the extermination of political opponent groups is very much an authoritarian Nazi thing. The Nazis had as much electoral success as they did by appealing to hatred of not just Jews, but also communists and members of trade unions. Moderate Germans in the 30s might not hate Jews, but they almost certainly hated communists.
Hell, the invasion of Russia by Germany was sold to the German public as a necessary step to destroying communism. Nazism and nationalism in general are all about demonizing political opponents who are not nationalist enough.

The Nazis did not exactly lead with the extermination bit...that didn't occur till after they had taken full control of the government. And they weren't entirely open about it with the public, so a lot of germans weren't aware of exactly what was going on in the concentration camps.

Nazi Germany participated in the olympics and no one had much of a problem with them at that point. The U.S only got involved in WW2 because of the Pearl Harbor attack. But yeah the nazis didn't have a revolution to instate Nazism they just wormed their way into political power till it was too late to stop them. The MAGA/Christian Nationalist movement is certainly similar to the Nazis in that way. Though the hope is that they will be stopped before it's too late.

And the truth is, prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, a great many of Americans were sympathetic to Nazism with all its racism and talk about getting rid of those inferior types, and Fascism in general.

Yes. Even Hitler wasnt "as bad as Hitler" until nine years after he took power in 1933. It wasnt until 1942 that Hitler actually sat down with the board of directors and planned the logistics of the Holocaust.

On the other hand folks do go into hyperbole.

A certain member of WP active years ago posted the words "people like Adolf Hitler and Oprah Winfrey". This guy was a middle aged college professor whom you would think would not be given hystrionics. Adolf and Oprah in the same breath?

But I guess he considered Oprah to be ...every bit as scary as Der Fuhrer!

One of the issues with Nazis comparisons is that different people tend to be familiar with different aspects of the regime, party and it's ideology and this leads to different segments seeing different things as Nazi-like.

But at the same time, some of the more relevant comparisons (and lessons to be learned) come from the rise of the NSDAP into dictatorship and how to recognize that process. It's not one that solely focuses on how evil they became though, it's one that requires one to consider how they controlled their image to gain support in different spheres and to be alert for those trends before it's too late.

The modern day analogs of the NSDAP should never be given the chance to commit that scale of evil, but the downside to that means the comparison will always seem watered down so long as they're successfully nipped in the bud rather than allowed to flourish to the point they have the ability to engage in WWII style atrocities.

As for neo-Nazi, I'm not sure how else we should describe groups that are clearly based on Nazi ideology and who embrace Nazi imagery but share no direct ties to the NSDAP regime. Not only is it linguistically correct, anything else would seem like a needless refusal to acknowledge them for what they are.