[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

But at the same time, let's not write all of those people off as irredeemable neo-nazis. There aren't that many neo-nazis. The south isn't some bastion of the KKK where everyone goes home after work and dons a white sheet while lighting up a torch. Someone made this comparison pretty aptly yesterday by posting this protest next to the Atlanta edition of the women's march.

If you think about it like a sort of venn graph, there's a big circle of "right wing", and a smaller circle within that that are anti-immigration, and a smaller circle within that that think racial differences are important in determining what type of person someone is, and a smaller circle within that think certain races are in some way more or less capable than others, and a smaller circle within that who think Hitler had some good ideas, and a smaller circle within that who are wiling to undertake violence in support of their perceived racial superiority.

I think you've missed the point entirely. There weren't 10 million nazi's in Germany in 1929.

There is a political party that has routinely fomented racial opposition within the country for going on 50 years. There are 2, maybe 3 generations of American voters who have been primed to accept the idea that disenfranchising minorities is an ethical and sound political policy.

You posted that comment from stormfront about how Trump not saying nazis is a win for them. He's legitimized that there are equal and opposing sides in a race war. If there has been one consistent narrative from the Trump Administration's first 6 months it has been a complete lack of interest in addressing anti-antisemitism and racism. Unapologetic neo-nazi's work in the white house.

You've completely lost the forest for the trees in your attempts to educate us all on nuance. The GOP does not get the benefit of the doubt anymore, and neither does the Trump administration.

You can play the wide brush painting game if you'd like but I can tell you within academic circles among historians there is serious, serious consternation about how to most appropriately compare Weimar Germany and contemporary US politics to the public and the role of historians to make those comparisons publicly.

The problem isn't that there may only be a couple hundred thousand 'true' Nazis in America, the problem is there is a mainstream political apparatus courting, developing and multiplying their message and voters. A group of nazi's just organized a torch burning rally

According to the ADL, anti-semetic violence, intimidation and vandalism was up 86% in the first quarter of this year, after rising nearly 40% in 2016.

In July 2017, the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society invited members of the press to a private conference to discuss a sensitive pair of items from the organization’s collection: a pair of robes that might have originally belonged to founding members of the local Ku Klux Klan, established near Thomas Jefferson’s tomb in 1921.

The robes, which the society said were donated in 1993, drew attention when local activists and scholars started asking about them. “It’s probably some old respectable family name which adorns a current Charlottesville building, street or park,” speculated one of the scholars who’d requested more detail on the robes, according to Charlottesville’s Daily Progress. But Steven Meeks, the society’s president, declined to reveal who donated the artifacts. “I will tell you this much,” Meeks said to the newspaper, “neither one of them was a prominent person in the Charlottesville community.”

The tussle over revealing the identities of long-ago Klansmen in Charlottesville, the potential shame to their living relatives or descendants, feels itself like an artifact of history at this moment, when people unadorned by masks or hoods are marching for white supremacy openly on the city’s streets and lawns. It hearkens back to a time when the likes of the Klan achieved terror partially through a uniform that often obscured the face of its wearer. “Anonymity wasn’t quite the point,” as Alison Kinney pointed out in The New Republic. And indeed, in many places, for much of the Klan's history, members marched openly. “While the hoods could assure their wearers’ personal anonymity, their force came from declaring membership in a safe, privileged identity that was anything but secret.” But where open racism was less acceptable, the hood offered a useful disguise. We could be anywhere, the uniform warned. We could be your neighbors.

But the images we saw in Charlottesville today and yesterday convey an entirely different sort of threat. They draw their menace not from what is there—mostly, young white men in polos and T-shirts goofily brandishing tiki torches—but from what isn’t: the masks, the hoods, the secrecy that could at least imply a sort of shame. We used to whisper these thoughts, the new white supremacists suggest. But now we can say them out loud. The “Unite the Right” rally wasn’t intended to be a Klan rally at all. It was a pride march.

The shameless return of white supremacy into America’s public spaces seems to be happening by degrees, and quickly. It wasn’t until most journalists left the conference of the innocuously named “National Policy Institute” in November that my colleague Daniel Lombroso captured Richard Spencer leading the attendees in open Nazi salutes. Spencer’s intention—to make normal that gesture and all the sentiments that underpin it—is no more secret than the identities of his tiki torch-wielding bannermen. "I don't see myself as a marginal figure who's going to be hated by society,” Spencer said to Daniel. “I see myself as a mainstream figure.”

For the moment, you can still spot the subtle boundaries that will have shifted if Spencer and his fellow-travelers succeed. One appeared, for example, in Graeme Wood’s June 2017 Atlantic story on Spencer, when one of his associates requested anonymity: “I have a ‘normie’ [conventional] job,” the young man said, “and I don’t want to get punished for this.” How soon until that young man no longer fears the consequences of his ideas?

The town, considered a community of the Jim Crow South back in the early 1900s, was the last in America to desegregate schools following the Supreme Court’s ruling on Brown v. Board of Education, which allowed black children to attend historically white-only schools. Despite ordering desegregation with “all deliberate speed,” in 1955, Virginia strongly resisted the ruling. Some schools even shut down in Charlottesville before finally allowing integration in 1958.

In 2015, Charlottesville was under fire for racist behavior following the violent arrest of Martese Johnson, a third-year student at the University. Johnson, a black man, was confronted by three white police officers who, after asking for identification, assumed he was holding a fake I.D.. and beat him before throwing him in cuffs. A video of the altercation went viral, sparking a nationally trending hashtag #JusticeForMartese on Twitter and bringing attention to the aggressive force law enforcement enacted on blacks in the community.

Virginia overall also has longstanding ties to the Ku Klux Klan. In a study released in 2015, researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University discovered there had been more than 2,000 KKK klaverns established in the U.S. between 1915 and 1940, 132 of which had been spread across the state of Virginia.

To take into account underlying racial animus, McVeigh et al controlled for the counties' levels of support for George Wallace, who made an explicitly segregationist third-party presidential bid in 1968. They also controlled for the level of support for Goldwater; his run galvanized Southern support for Republicans before the 1964-66 growth in Klan chapters and so is another factor that needs to be taken into account. Finally, the study controlled for changes in counties' racial makeup (counties whose black populations grew presumably saw less growth in Republican support), their level of economic prosperity and education (since Republican support is positively correlated with income and education), and whether the county had an NAACP chapter (which could have provoked the KKK to launch a branch in response).

They conclude that having a Klan chapter present was associated with a 2 percent bigger increase in Republican support from 1960 to 1972, a 3.7 percent bigger increase from 1960 to 1980, a 4.9 percent bigger increase from 1960 to 1992, and a 3.4 percent bigger increase from 1960 to 2000.How could this have worked?

https://www.vox.com/2014/12/10/73724...lan-republican

Here's the abstract:

Radical social movements can exacerbate tensions in local settings while drawing attention to how movement goals align with political party agendas. Short-term movement influence on voting outcomes can endure when orientations toward the movement disrupt social ties, embedding individuals within new discussion networks that reinforce new partisan loyalties. To demonstrate this dynamic, we employ longitudinal data to show that increases in Republican voting, across several different time intervals, were most pronounced in southern counties where the Ku Klux Klan had been active in the 1960s. In an individual-level analysis of voting intent, we show that decades after the Klan declined, racial attitudes map onto party voting among southern voters, but only in counties where the Klan had been active.

We KNOW that normalizing political attitudes happens this way. The President just normalized it on a national level.