bizmarkiefader

I was just thinking about making a pet pictures thread after how miserable politics and almost everything else is now

My perfect angel Winston. He's not actually pissed off, that's just his face.

Hey @CretanBull congrats you guys no longer hold the belt for weirdest wet bag available at supermarkets

They're named after a song from Aladdin I believe. The far right loves to couch extremist rhetoric in soft sounding tones and imagery so at first glance they don't seem dangerous. It's all plausible deniability, like "we're just a fun social and drinking club" which helps both recruitment because it isn't as scary and to obfuscate what they're actually doing. Like you see all the Pepe the frog shit and a lot of the far right including Qanon people refer to each other as "fren" and "frens" as a baby talk way of saying friend. People instinctively know things like "Atomwaffen" or whatever are probably militant and bad. Imagine if the Proud Boys were called some scary Nordic or German sounding name, the national conversation including the president mentioning them specifically would have been very different.

It's worth remembering the way people get recruited into something like this. It's (mostly) not a bunch of already radicalized people who were just lying around waiting to pick up guns, they get introduced with much softer rhetoric and are slowly introduced to extremist bullshit. It's part of why memes are such an effective tool for them.