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Comment by legostormtroopr | Hacker News Reader

I'm so glad a billionaire is sticking up for human rights activists who mace old men and women, beat people with bike locks, vandalise businesses and destroy migrant businesses.

There is absolutely no defense for Nazis in society, and fortunately noone does defend their ideals. But antifa are equally indefensible but there are scores in the media who defend them - the Berkely riots and the Inauguration riots were hardly condemned by any on the left.

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Antifa will be equally indefensible after they gas 8 million people.

It's an excuse to get over the rights guilt about the ideas they helped foster. If they convince themselves the left is as bad then they can't really be that wrong.

Antifa's name and flag come from 1930s Germany, a group called Antifaschistische Aktion, a communist paramilitary organization patterned on the Bolsheviks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifaschistische_Aktion

So they are affiliated with groups that killed millions, just as neo-nazis are ideologically related to the original version.

Can't we just agree that both sides share a lame-ass hateful ideology? They are both acting terrible.

Antifa beats up old people, destroys property for no goddamn reason, and hurt people with bats and bike locks. The Neo-nazis say racist shit that is largely false and they antagonize a lot of people. They both sound idiotic and act like a group of fools, can't we just say they both suck and move on to actual policy questions....

Regardless of the merits or flaws of either identity, it is a fallacy of false equivalence to claim they are of equal threat to the public safety. Antifa are a rowdy thuggish reactionary youth subculture that only shows up to rallies, neo-Nazis are a real danger that have been tracked by law enforcement officials for decades.

Even those who actually lived and helped kill those 8 million people in WWII had war crime trials. If any one of the evil white dudes was a war criminal from Nazi Germany, besides being pretty old, and we'd already have arrested them. Godwin's Century has begun.

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