Proud Boys and other far-right groups raise millions via Christian funding site | Hacker News Reader

Proud Boys and other far-right groups raise millions via Christian funding site

theguardian.com

18 pointsColinWright59 comments

If Proud Boys are considered far-right neo-nazis, can anybody tell me of a not-far-right political advocacy group that’s allowed to protest without having them labeled as such?

I mean... given that this very article shows their leader and several large donors are not white.

You are asking for one example. A recent one that comes to mind are peaceful anti mask protesters.

I don't think they are labeled neonazis. I happen to disagree with them strongly and hold their views in low regard and believe they are directly contributing to the pandemic, but I haven't seen them widely labeled neonazis.

In normal political times, I think your example with disprove my premise, but here you have the SPLC lumping in the anti-maskers with nazis, murders and racists in their Year of Hate and Extremism.

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2021/02/01/year-hate-2020

Upon reflection, I think there’s two problems here: The left labeling everything they don’t like as being Nazi, and the right who is unable to police their own members from real jerks.

Here’s an example - when the Tea Party first started I sws a mildly-right group of people that had all sorts of people: Asians tired of taxes, pro-2nd amendment Blacks and quite a free people who were liberal but were tired of government waste. Even granola types who thought that the government was too big and too federal and thought that policy decisions should be more local.

Then the crazies showed up and within a month it became a group that I didn’t want to be associated with - we didn’t have the guts to tell them to leave and that was our fault.

I don’t like telling that story, because based on the evidence, their was barely any time at all when the Tea Party wasn’t nuts.

The link you posted mentions anti maskers once, and only calls some of them antigovernment.

But yeah, your broader point is worth exploring. People coopting movements is definitely a thing. Should the original groups do more to exclude the (your words) crazies?

Yes unless they're ok with being lumped together with them. If I like cars and so do nazis, I'm not gonna accept them into my club just because we share one thing in common. They're nazis.

The SPLC is describing anti-government groups among the anti-mask movement, not anti-maskers as a whole, but the Venn diagram of "anti-maskers", "right-wing militias", "conspiracy theorists" and "white supremacists" does overlap. Not perfectly, but also not inconsequentially.

The phenomenon you described as having happened within the Tea Party has happened everywhere among the right end of the American political spectrum over the last decade. Rhetoric which was once confined to the lunatic fringe of talk radio and forums is now mainstream. QAnon emerged from the bowels of 4chan, exploded and became popular enough to win elections, and now the Republican Party enthusiastically stands behind a Congresswoman who believes in Pizzagate and Jewish space lasers. The former president of the United States retweeting nazi memes was not even a story, it was just another Tuesday.

And yes, this has happened somewhat among the left, but not nearly to the same degree, and mostly as a reaction to what's happened on the right.

But can you really blame the left for seeing nazis everywhere when nazis keep showing up everywhere?

Depending on your definition of “protests” and “demonstrations”, go to almost any Planned Parenthood or any other clinic that proactively offers abortions and you’ll likely find a group of folks who show up with some regularity to protest against abortion. I’ve not heard those folks labeled as neo-nazis.

Good observation, but they’re not united based on being politically right of center - there’s many people in the Pro Life Movement who are left of center in many policies like government-run health care, government monopoly on schooling, and quotas for disadvantaged minorities.

They're called neo-nazis because they're neo-nazis: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/proud-boy-6mwe/

All of them ?

Even the Canadian government has cancelled the Proud Boys. Imagine being banned from a country, being judged under the suspicion of terrorism.

My response to the article headline is "and?". So what, who cares...trying to be some sort of tattle tale?

I find your framing to be really curious, considering there's evidence pointing precisely the other way:

My own research analyzed about 1,500 protest-related news stories published throughout 2014 in mainstream, alternative, partisan and online news publications. Articles about conservative protests — like protests opposed to immigration or LGBT rights, or protests supporting Trump and gun rights — are less likely to be negatively framed as “riots” than other types of protests. In contrast, Black Lives Matter protests are more likely to be framed as riots, as news coverage focuses more on violence, property damage and confrontations with police.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/13/theres-do....

Try checking for something a bit more recent than 2014. Media still attempted to muzzle the craziness of the left at that point.

I don't know if you looked at the article linked but it's from 2021.

> My own research analyzed about 1,500 protest-related news stories published throughout 2014

If you read the article it explains its methodology and that it is not limited to the year 2014, which should be evidenced by the reference to Trump supporters, which presumably didn't exist in 2014 because he had not yet announced his candidacy.

Trump had talked about running long before the initial announcement. My mistake for thinking that the quote I was replying to, which specifically limited the scope to 2014, was accurate.

> A week ago, a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to block the certification of Joe Biden as the next president. Even though some Capitol Police officers tried to hold back the mob and protect members of Congress, many observers wondered why the rioters did not experience the tear gas and rubber bullets used against the people protesting the killing of George Floyd. As the NAACP tweeted Wednesday, “They’ve killed us for less.”

They literally killed one of the protesters, and not with rubber bullets.

Anyway, the methodology is obviously flawed. They include alternative and mainstream news sources. Only one of these categories is granted "legitimacy", and that one skews far in the other direction.

I don't know the details here but just throwing this out; activists in Sweden managed to do a lot of damage to neo-nazi groups by attacking their finances.

Apparently there were discrepancies that the tax office needed to know, and also the services used to gather tithe from their members did not want to be associated with neo-nazis.

These types of articles give me the creeps. It’s fashionable now to dox people as long as they’re on the outside, presuming you can use enough “labels” to justify it, such as “nazi” etc.

American politics is now one big tribal crap show.

First they came for the Neo-Nazis, and I did nothing, because I was not a Neo-Nazi.

Then they came for the pedophiles, and I did nothing, because I was not a pedophile.

Then they didn't come for me, because the slippery-slope fallacy is bullshit.

I’ve seen this a few times on the net and it’s weird quote to me, because the nazis did incrementally come after more groups; Jews, gay, Gypsies, disabled, etc.

Is my takeaway that it didn’t happen or something else?

>I’ve seen this a few times on the net and it’s weird quote to me, because the nazis did incrementally come after more groups; Jews, gay, Gypsies, disabled, etc.

>Is my takeaway that it didn’t happen or something else?

It's supposed to be a shibboleth

You don't get the joke? Ok. The poem by Martin Niemoller is often used by far-right apologists to draw a false equivalence between themselves and their opponents, implying that anyone who would fight right-wing extremism is just as much of an evil as the Nazis, doing so under false pretenses, and will simply by virtue of their opposition act as the Nazis themselves did.

And yet, in reality, the people who want to "come after" Jews, gays, gypsies, etc are those extremists, not the people opposing them. The slope is in reality only slippery in one direction.

Assuming there's only two directions in your example. Do you really think the slope is only slippery on the right side?

Only one side intends for it to be slippery, yes, and it isn't the side that doesn't like nazis.

Because, you see, we've already been through this and fighting nazis and fascists and racists the first time hasn't led to the dystopian nightmare anyone is warning about now.

One of the benefits of having only one eye, you only see one side! :)

"At first they came for the people that wanted everyone to have health care, then they came for the people who wanted LGBT people to be treated fairly"...

You don't think a similar thing could be written about Communist Russia from 1918 to 1920, say? Do you think that didn't happen? Or do you think they and the Nazis were the same side?

They were extremists - I'm with you there - but more than one side has had extremists.

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