I don’t know… but they are a pack of assholes who need to shut up and go do something productive with their lives.
12 Likes
Milo, perhaps?
It should be clear, but anti-LGBTQ fascists have always had an odd clueless blindness toward their adoption of homoerotic imagery, design, and rituals.
The important thing is that Verillas made a clear statement distancing their core values from a movement that’s inevitably going to be destructive to LGBTQ people.
17 Likes
There is a lot of explicit remarks of LBGQT+ support on that website. It’s pretty unambiguous.
12 Likes
If one is a Proud Boy one is likely not the sharpest Hitlerjugend dagger in the drawer, I guess.
By the way, I agree with you about the merchandise being very cool, if expensive. There’s something for everyone there.
12 Likes
12 Likes
I would suggest it’s intentional to muddy the waters and imply support for them that doesn’t exist by appropriating high-profile products from pro-LGBTQ companies, but that might be ascribing more dimensions of chess than they’re capable of operating on.
9 Likes
From what I’ve read, I think they’re aware that the LGBTQ community has been particularly active in undermining them and tr0lling them. This may also be a form of revenge, trying to co-opt the brand and sully it with their fascism.
18 Likes
Maybe they have special rituals that drive out or destroy all the fabulous, like Trump shuffling to YMCA?
2 Likes
I’m getting a little frustrated with equating a dangerous ideology with either a) “crazy” people or b) dumb people. It’s not about either of those things, it’s about ideology, that plenty of people can embrace for whatever reason.
12 Likes
I agree with your last statement. That scenario would require more thought than the entire group is capable of. More just, “hey, other boys, isn’t this just the coolest?”
7 Likes
Maybe not lack of intelligence, but there is certainly a lack of introspection and awareness that is very characteristic of hate groups like this.
14 Likes
That is very different from dumb, though.
I find it really frustrating, primarily because dismissing someone who embraces dangerous ideologies as “dumb” or whatever misses how this stuff spreads and gains hold. We’re not that far from when the mainstream ideology was white supremacy and that still holds sway for many people.
16 Likes
There can definitely be a level of seemingly rational self-interest behind joining up with such an ideology. In the end though, the various varieties of fascism are not sustainable paths to success for most RWA followers — these ideologies are tarted-up grifts. As with other confidence games, a modicum of critical thinking skills and attention to detail makes this evident, but for the bulk of active followers (as opposed to the go-along-to-get-along “good German” bystanders) those abilities seem to be sorely lacking. That same shortcoming might explain why the fashion arbiters of the Proud Boys didn’t look too closely at this Web site, even though it should be obvious from even a cursory glance that its values are progressive and inclusive.
What I get frustrated with is the MSM’s on-going narrative that this resurgence of right-wing populism is due mainly to “economic anxiety” rather than bigotry and a lack of critical thinking skills. Yes, fascism thrives in highly unequal societies, but ultimately it’s not an economic philosophy but one of ethnic supremacy.
14 Likes
I think it’s time we move past the common man is a mere rube being grifted. People have agency, they make choices. Including to embrace racism. Racism can and has been perpetuate from the bottom up as much as from the top down.
17 Likes
I agree that people have agency, of course. Making a bad, ill-informed, or fantasy-based decision is a form of agency. America’s foremost public grifter since the 1980s didn’t force or mesmerise those tens of millions of people into voting for him twice. They chose to go into the booth and cast their ballots, and when they’re interviewed they’ll give all sorts of reasons for their choice, sometimes in an articulate and educated-sounding tone. Every one of those reasons, when the light of critical thinking is shone on them, turns out to be completely wrongheaded or internally incoherent if not downright self-destructive.
Again, I agree. As LBJ described in his famous quote, the dynamic is usually for the latter to exploit the former.
9 Likes
Exactly. Both of the GOP voters I still interact with are far from dumb. I would call one a low-information voter, and barely engaged in politics at all. He voted for 45 in 2016 and didn’t fill in that section at all in 2020. The other one chooses to only get his political info from Faux News and OANN, so I would count him as an outright racist. He is definitely smart and experienced. He knows better, and doesn’t care. I challenge his bullshit constantly, but he always reverts to form.
Oddly enough, I don’t think he even voted.
12 Likes
Then you don’t believe those of us who aren’t powerful don’t have agency.
5 Likes
Not at all – as I said, a bad decision is still an act of agency. What I’m saying is that human agency can be limited and stunted by a number of factors, including the kind of bottom-up racism that’s perpetuated and encouraged by the powerful. When LBJ told Bill Moyers “if you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket,” the “you” to whom he’s referring is someone with power. I believe that LBJ, for all his faults, understood that this is a problem that has to be approached from both bottom-up and top-down.
Another way to stunt good political and economic decisions to discourage the teaching of of critical thinking, financial literacy, media literacy and other learned skills. There are a lot of people with high intelligence levels and/or stable mental health (i.e. not “dumb” or “crazy”) who are not taught these skills either in the home or at school. Despite the best efforts of a lot of educators, neglecting the development of these skills in young people is often deliberate policy.
He sounds like another type of RWA supporter: the chaos addict or griefer or “spite voter”. They know what they’re doing but just want to see the world burn and ensure that everyone else gets at least a little taste of their own personal misery.
5 Likes
I don’t think it’s so much that as much as he doesn’t want to have to change and evolve away from his bigotry, so he only takes in information that lets him stay that way. When I call him on his BS, he doesn’t get angry with me; he gets visibly distressed and has to escape.
9 Likes
That goes back to my earlier point: you apply even basic critical thinking skills to his bad choice and the whole thing collapses. As does every single rationale I’ve heard from people who aren’t white male cis-het multi-millionaires about why they voted for Biff (and, for the most part, for why they vote for the modern death-cult GOP). He runs away from you because he’s smart enough to know that he’s decided to make a bad bet but doesn’t have the learned ability to see any bets other than white supremacy that put him on top. In a lot of ways it’s a sunk-cost situation.
4 Likes
