The title’s a bit disingenuous, I know: this didn’t come out of nowhere. White supremacism is as American as Manifest Destiny and has been heavily intertwined with Nazism from its inception. That overlap with the Republican party, and their gradual slip into the extreme far-right, is evident.
But Seig Heils? Even the most dense among them must know that blatant Nazism hurts their legitimacy in the eyes of the public, even among MAGATs (as is evident right now if you peek at their echo chamber on Reddit). Surely they would have a much easier time pushing their rhetoric and establishing their agenda by keeping a purposeful distance from that sort of indefensible imagery and symbolism. How do they expect to keep cohesion in the military when you imply to the soldiers that they are Nazis now, seig heils and all.
Why Nazis?
Any theories as to where this is coming from? Follow the ketamine-fueled leader? A directive for operative Krasnov, from Putin himself, to implode the country? True Nazi beliefs among the Heritage Foundation, Proud Boys, etc? I just don’t understand how they thought this would fly. I don’t understand anything anymore lol.
This is it, and we (in the west) have gone so far to the right that the richest man of the world, with a powerful position (formally) near government can do the Hitler salute and the established media just shrugs.
Doing the Hitler salute used to make you a pariah. Now, it’s just a thing the extreme right does to ‘provoke’ (that word I saw used to describe Bannon’s salute in a German newspaper title). In a couple of years, it is normal that the right does this, and the established media doesn’t bat an eye anymore.
It’s clear that you still can’t trust established media to be a force against nazism. They’ll start analysing the nazi takeover as nazi only when it’s much too late, out of fear of not being ‘neutral’.