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Comment by Schiendelman | Hacker News Reader

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We (all sane people) want less nazism.

Branding everything as nazism does not help.

It is not a good thing if people go around thinking that their friendly republican neighbor or grandmother/grandfather is a nazi. It might lead some (who doesn't know better) to think nazism isn't that bad.

Besides, Nazism is a particular brand of evil and you fight them better if you learn the correct terminology, so it is a win-win (unless ones goal is to make the divide in American politics even wider by branding those at the other sites as the ugliest of all men.)

Also I haven't seen a single swastika or other NSDAP related flag on any republican event. Do you mean the confederate flag or something?

I do not mean the confederate flag: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/08/12/flags-and-oth...

OK, now we are talking.

And we've also just proven my point together as well: so many people have been calling ordinary people nazis that when someone actually bring nazi symbols and colours to the convention I refuse to believe it. (And yes, I will check more sources before I claim this happened.)

Edit: read and reread the link. I couldn't find anything to connect the Republican party and all those flags? I specifically searched for "convention", "party" and "stage" based on your comments but I saw nothing relevant.

Now English is not my first language but are you sure you gave me the correct link, and if so, can you point me to the smoking gun?

There isn't a smoking gun. That's not how dog whistles work. But the supporters who agree with this stuff feel heard and emboldened.

And there are lots of other data points to go with it. The singer of the national anthem on that stage, for instance, disagrees that Disney no longer sells "Song of the South", an explicitly racist film from their archives.

These things all work together to paint a clear picture.

Stop it.

There was no fucking nazi symbol on the stage at cpac.

If you want to take a tiny group of extremists that are not accepted by a group and pretend they represent a group, we can do that the other way also.

> The Nazi symbol in the stage of their event?

...and Gmail, Facebook and Chrome logos are masonic symbols.

You've somehow managed to delegitimize Wikipedia with those stupid claims, congratulations.

The Charlottesville protestors used that symbol explicitly (see link). CPAC hasn't come out with a denial that their stage was that shape intentionally. If it wasn't, they would have.

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/08/12/flags-and-oth...

> CPAC hasn't come out with a denial that their stage was that shape intentionally. If it wasn't, they would have.

We are quickly approaching "have you stopped beating your wife" at this point.

I don't think it would change anything if they came out and said it wasn't intentional.

Some friends of me got viciously attacked last year over some perceived fraud. They responded by publishing their books sinve they had nothing to hide.

What happened? Story just changed: "They are so crooked they managed to hide it from both the police[0] and a big four accounting company." was tje new story.

[0]: who investigated them for three years, first secretly, then openly after a previous false accusation.

That's very different from "Your supporters used a Nazi symbol, then your stage had that symbol, and you won't say explicitly that you aren't connected to Nazis."

> The Charlottesville protestors used that symbol explicitly

Okay, so what? Should I start adding all the random incidents where people made something that was coincidentally shaped like swastika to the Wikipedia article as examples of modern usage?

> CPAC hasn't come out with a denial that their stage was that shape intentionally.

They did, they called it slanderous.

> slander (noun) - the utterance of false charges or misrepresentations which defame and damage another's reputation

CPAC cancelled some black dude for anti-semitism. They didn't do that after he was saying anti-Christian and anti-white stuff, only after he started saying that Judaism is illegitimate or whatever. But yes, I'm supposed to believe that they're using Nazi imagery on purpose.

They called the attack on them slanderous. Interestingly they didn't actually deny it.

This is exactly how dog whistles work, dude...

Yes, because attacking them for that stage is slanderous? That's what slander is.

I haven't seen anyone picking up that "dog whistle" besides people like you.

edit: search on twitter the phrase "cpac rune based" or "cpac stage based". If it was a dog whistle, I would expect someone to pick up on it and call it "based". Yet the only people who are talking about it are the people who are making those stupid accusations. Literally no one cared about it until you made a big deal out of it. And still barely anyone cares.

I would NOT expect someone to talk about it publicly. That's why CPAC would hedge and not openly deny they used a Nazi symbol. This is how a group that knows they need to hide communicate with one another.

You know what? You convinced me, you're right. All those Jewish people that are involved in the CPAC are totally followers of Hitler's ideology. You're clearly a very smart and intelligent person, so I don't need to care if you will make yourself look like a fool, just like I don't need to care about this joke of a conference that called itself "America Uncancelled" and then proceeded to cancel people.

Please kill all of my snarky comments in this thread with downvotes, as they were inappropriate and it's a flamewar that has no place on HN.

Please don't use straw men on HN. I'm not claiming that, and this isn't a flamewar.

These ideas are the QAnon of the left. The GOP is without question stuck in a cult of personality, but that was not a Nazi symbol.

It's not clear that's the case. CPAC hasn't been willing to deny it. And the Charlottesville protestors did use that symbol: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/08/12/flags-and-oth...

How is it relevant to CPAC that it was used in Charlottesville?

Because all the Charlottesville people vote for that party.

Because people on that stage, even, openly agree with the things the Charlottesville people marched about.

> CPAC hasn't been willing to deny it.

That's not true: they denied it almost immediately. Like QAnon, it's a hard question on whether to even acknowledge these kinds of conspiracies[0], since denying them can even help to spread them.

The Trump wing is without question populist, nativist, often conspiratorial, and caught in a cult of personality. But they're not Nazis, and by trying to conflate these things, you do a disservice to the victims of actual Nazism (note the publication I linked to, from a country of founded by Nazi survivors that has quite a few supporters of Trump).

Charlottesville Nazis likely did use it, but they're far from being Trump supporters. They deeply distrust him because of Jared and Ivanka. And they're a tiny, tiny percentage of our population - all extreme right-wing groups combined (neoconfederates, Nazis, militia, etc) are well under 1%. You'll see SPLC trumpet things like "30% rise!" without mentioning how tiny these groups are (and they have a good idea about how small they are, it's just harder to fundraise when you discuss these things).

0. https://www.timesofisrael.com/cpac-denies-stage-was-intentio...

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