Laura Jedeed (Misanthrophile)

Without minimizing the extremely grave danger these chuds pose, there's a difference between these guys and neonazi paramilitary groups like Atomwaffen or The Base Less and less every day, mind you

I hear echoes of fash enabling neoliberal media in your reply. But, ok, I'll give you benefit of the doubt: What distinction do you draw between what we see in PB/ PP/ 3p/ and AW/TB?

What you hear is someone whose spent the last 2.5 years studying the different flavors of the American far right. This deserves a more extensive answer than I can type whole driving to Salem, I'll respond at length soon If it helps I think the PBs are probably the graver threat

Ok so before I launch into this: different does not mean better The big difference between say, Proud Boys and Atomwaffen, is that Atomwaffen is overtly white supremacist. No non-white people allowed. As in, expulsion (at best) of non-whites from America as explicit policy

We both know plenty of Proud Boys believe all of that shit. But they don't say it out loud. They accept non-white members. They talk about civic nationalism, not ethnonationalism These are dog whistles but the fact they use dog whistles at all is important. Plausible deniability

There are members and supporters of the Proud Boys who aren't neonazis. They're chuds and awful but don't believe in ethnonationalism--yet It's a pipeline in that direction, but a lot of them are at the beginning

So when we call Proud Boys neonazis you're gonna get low-level Proud Boys who can honestly say, hey, I'm not a neonazi. Then they say, you just think everyone is Nazis. Which, look, we're deep in semantics but it's a powerful rhetorical device for them

Language [propaganda] of the group, in this case PB/PP/3p does not preclude their engagement in neonazi paramilitary action. Their barely clever language only provides a thin veil for their neonazi action. By calling them what they are known by action to be - we lift that veil.