After watching ContraPoints’ amazing video on how to spot a Fascist, and spending more time in general on YouTube in the past year or so, I’ve become dismayed at how many crypto Nazis, or more often just flat-out Nazis, are parading around certain parts of ye olde interwebs as though they own the place.
And I know I shouldn’t let the Nazis get me down. Haters gonna hate. And Nazis are kind of famous for taking hate to its absolute zenith.
But still, it bothers me that in videos like the one below, so many of the comments are skewed, bigoted pieces of trash, full of lies about race and IQ that some folks with not so much IQ of their own might believe have some basis in fact.
This video specifically has Noam Chomsky commenting on some racist headlines from a New York Times that had just come out at the time the video was taken, in 1994. The article he’s being asked about mentions race and IQ, so it’s specifically rife for response by racists. Just read some of these comments and see what I mean.
I’d like to believe that what Chomsky says about the headline should apply to the commenters themselves:
“These things are such transparent ideological weapons that you shouldn’t even bother arguing about them.”
But sadly, I can’t. I can’t help feeling that his vantage point from two decades ago is no longer the right one, since the Alt-Right has moved pseudo-scientific racism from being a distraction away from real things and has made it The Thing.
We’re no longer merely fighting against systemic racism (though that’s still the most chronic and harmful of racism’s manifestations). We’re fighting against racist ideology itself, against the very idea that people are equal. Back in the 90s, you could at least look around and think we’d won the war on open bigotry, on the fact that using racial epithets and language about racial superiority were not cool to say out loud.
But, clearly, open bigotry is alive and well:
Bear in mind, the above comments are not on Stormfront. Nor are they some kind of twisted joke from the bowels of a nihilistic 4chan post. These are on a mainstream, normal, oddly busy YouTube page.
I’d really like to see all of us on the Left spend a little more time going into places like YouTube, where we aren’t merely responding to our social media friends, and making sure these Alt-Righters know that they don’t own these public arenas. That doesn’t mean we should go insult normal people or make centrists think we’re shrill, loud arguers. But it does mean we shouldn’t let the megaphone go to literal Nazis on the right, who by their very volume, and all those thumbs ups they give to fellow Nazis, might make folks in the middle think they have the authority that these skewed numbers suggest. We should counteract the hate by going and putting our positive, truthful versions of events forward.
Then again, is this the wrong approach? Will jumping into chat rooms be counterproductive, and should I be reaching an olive branch of hope to some of these guys, who may some day leave this world of hate if only they can know that the “SJW” left is not out to get them or take away their freedoms?
Well, I promise to start being nicer tomorrow.
Here’s what I left in the comments. I think it’s vicious, but fair. And I think I’m speaking in the kind of arrogant, 13-year-old boy language that online Nazis understand, using phrases like “cuck” and “incel” and all the gloriously sad language that is the backbone of both the Men’s Rights movements (more on that topic later) and the Alt-Right.
Oh, before I show you what I wrote, the below is the thread of a thread I jumped in on:
Whaddaya think? Did I hand them a new asshole to replace the one blown off in Hitler’s bunker?
Oh, here’s my actual main comment:
So many Nazis here, there’s too much hypocrisy to even start contradicting! But far from being triggered, I’m actually turned on! See, I’m a polyamorous, pansexual proud SJW living in a majority Hispanic neighborhood in Los Angeles, not some enclave in the suburbs writing from my mom’s basement. I’m of Irish descent, which means I qualify as both a mongrel race and some kind of Celtic Aryan fantasy, but I reject both labels. And as far as being a “cuck,” I don’t believe in possessing people. So yeah, I’m un-cuckable. You should try it: I’ve had sex with multiple women at the same time, as well as men. I get, and give, more cock that you little Goebbels-grovelers will ever even be able to imagine, much less handle. But I’ll tell you what–come down to Los Angeles where the real racial commingling happens, and I’ll give you a free ride on my freedom stick. A little bit of my alt-salt (or as I like to call it, goy joy) in your butt bunker is probably just the thing you need to help you chill out about all the Hitler love and start admitting that your focusing on race and genetics has been a philosophical dead end. But then again, if you incels aren’t man enough to put my money where your mouth is, you can crawl back into your moms’ basements and leave the thinking to the real men, women, and whatever fucking genders we want to self-identify as. Because we’re the future. Pepe-in-chief notwithstanding, your types belong to a philosophy that died out when the fucking ACTUAL cultural Marxists bombed you back to the stone age in 1945.
Okay, so yeah, that was pretty immature. I’m kind of ashamed about bragging about my sexual history to a bunch of Nazis (and now to you… er, sorry). And perhaps using gay sex as a rhetorical threat is become a little too easy (and sleazy) for me.
But you know what? It shut them the fuck up.
They eventually retaliated, but you could tell they were going through the motions. They were on the defensive. They felt ashamed. You could tell by their tone that they suddenly realized with horror that Nazism was just not as cool as being a secular humanist polyamorous queerboy. There were whole realms they’d never be able to conquer, both metaphorically and in the literal Reich sense of “conquer.” And I’m hoping that some random kid coming into the chat room will see all this, and that his or her take-way will be the most important anti-fascist propaganda of all: “Nazis don’t get laid.”
So who’s with me? C’mon, gang! Let’s start by going here and giving the Nazis that old Allied response!
Or … did I just get trolled? Was this counterproductive? Am I wasting my time?
It felt right. But I know you don’t win wars by feeling “right.”