"That's Lazy Thinking!"

 

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari) 

 

One of the biggest banes of my existence is when I see and hear fellow "liberals and progressives" who think they have the moral authority to challenge people like me and chastise us for calling out Nazis. They bleat, "That's lazy thinking!" and "You can't call out people who disagree with you and call them Nazis" and, of course, the inevitable, "Godwin's law."

     Ladies and germs, I give you the Young Republicans of America, the heirs apparent to Adolph Hitler.

     Just two days ago, Politico published a bombshell article, which wasn't really a bombshell to those of us who know exactly what we're dealing with, that revealed some of the worst moments of 2100 pages of Telegram chats going back to January this year between young Republicans.

     It gave the rest of us a panoramic bird's eye view of how these assholes speak to each other when they think no one's listening in. It reads like a Pandora's Box of human depravity, if we must insist on calling them fellow humans, the DSM-V come to vivid, horrifying life.

     This toxic treasure trove of intellectual sewage had everything a white, male Republican could hope for- Racism, misogyny, homophobia and unabashed Nazism and white supremacy. People freely used the N word in various iterations, leaning on tired old racist tropes involving watermelon and chicken. "1488" popped up frequently. And, naturally, considering this crowd, many references to gas chambers.

     These weren't just anonymous cranks living in their parents' basements.  One works in the DOJ under Harmeet Dhillon, Trump's top "civil rights" attorney. William Hendrix, the former vice chair of the Kansas Young Republicans, the one who used the N word, was fired yesterday from his position. Not only that, the Kansas Young Republicans no longer exist.

     The Kansas GOP, always eager to protect their brand, even though their brand and that of the entire GOP is indistinguishable from the Telegram chat transcripts, moved swiftly (but only after the Politico article came out). Kris Kobach, Kansas' AG, disavowed them. 

 

Gas the Messenger 

 

 

Ty Masterson, Kansas Senate president and a Republican gubernatorial candidate, has also disavowed them, hastily claiming neither Hendrix nor Alex Dwyer (circled) worked for his campaign, although he proudly posed with them for this picture during his campaign announcement ceremony. Of course, Masterson also added that Politico went “shopping around a photo, with deceitful intentions, in efforts to disparage” him. Yeah, how dare Politico Photoshop his head onto the body of another Republican Kansas gubernatorial candidate and his name on the signage! Have you no decency, sir, at last?!

     The hits just keep coming. Bobby Walker, the former vice chair of the New York Young Republicans said that "rape is epic" and Peter Giunta, the former chair of the same organization pronounced, "everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber." It was the upcoming vote on whether he should be elected as the head of the national federation of young Republicans. He added, "Im (sic) going to create some of the greatest physiological torture methods known to man. We only want true believers."

     As a New Yorker can expect, both of these moral and mental palsies are from Staten Island, the borough where McCarthyism crawled to die. Again, these things weren't said by anonymous cranks but by Young Republican leadership, such as it was. So the larger GOP doesn't get to act all shocked when their younger analogues are caught with their Nazi uniform pants down around their jackboots.

     And on social media, right wing outrage was also swift- They're blaming Politico for exposing their next generation using their own words against them. On Twitter, especially, right wing "influencers" that inexplicably have followings in the hundreds of thousands if not millions are calling the Politico article a hit piece, with others trying to use the "both sides arguments."

     They're, of course, strenuously trying to draw a parallel between their little Nazis and Jay Jones, the Virginia AG nominee for his own violent text messages. Yeah, Jay Jones fantasized about shooting then-Republican Speaker of the House of Delegates Todd Gilbert. Yeah, his texts were despicable. There's no arguing that point.

     But you know what Jones didn't do? He didn't fantasize about raping women or wax nostalgic about gas ovens. And he certainly didn't make racist remarks about his fellow Black people. In fact, disgusting as they are Jones' comments remind people of the firebrands the Democratic Party needs, firebrands it always sorely lacks.

Make It Make Sense

It'll forever be a mystery of where the appeal comes from in allying oneself with the worst that humanity, perhaps, had ever vomited on the planet. Well, as this pundit said a couple of years ago, conservatives have this strange, push and pull relationship with Nazism and those who were the original Nazis. They desperately try to open up some daylight between them and their own latter-day ideology but they can never seem to pull it off.

     It's a classic case of loving the sin while hating the sinner although they also tend to tweak out when even iconic characters such as Indiana Jones began punching Nazis over four decades ago. One right winger even whined recently that Indiana Jones always made the Nazis "look bad". Excuse me, when were the Nazis the good guys? Today Indiana Jones, tomorrow Schindler's List? "Oskar Schindler destroyed his profitable company just to free a few Jews? Heresy!"

     Why not ally themselves with the Maoist Communist Party or Stalin's? Well, the Commies were the bad guys, you see, although their objection to Communism and Socialism seems to be economic, although Communism is a political and not an economic ideology, and we can't have income redistribution, now can we?

     No, the Nazis hold a special place in their hearts because they reserved for themselves the right to hunt down and execute their enemies (even though it started with the Night of Long Knives that decapitated the SA's leadership in the summer of 1934). They admire the Nazis because they had the will to commit the worst atrocities in modern human history and to do so without remorse.

     The irony is the original Nazis, their ideological forefathers, would've laughed at these incel losers and would have rightly called them useful idiots if they'd been around 80-90 years ago. And I very much doubt, for all their nostalgic talk of gas ovens and showers if they would've even been able to stand the stench of the huge piles of rotting corpses that greeted the Allied powers when they liberated the death camps.

     Essentially, the little boys and girls taking part in these Telegram chats used the Nazis as historical penile implants to fantasize about doing to their self-perceived enemies what the actual Nazis did to theirs. It gives them a vicarious thrill to recount from a second or third hand perspective the war crimes that had been committed by them. And it seems to be totally lost on them that in the final days of WW II, much of the German high command died in a bunker, surrounded by ruins.

     No, "liberals".  Calling out Nazis when they act and talk like Nazis is not lazy thinking. Eliminating one's enemies rather than debating them and denigrating those who call out those who embrace that ideology is lazy thinking.