Here’s a pattern you’ve probably seen:

  1. Racists/nazi shows up and says racist/nazi things
  2. Get called out for it and/or banned
  3. They claim they are unfairly banned “for disagreeing.” They completely leave out the part about them being a racist nazi.

You know, that move. I’ve seen it more times than I can count and I bet you have too. They call disagreement with nazism “opinions you don’t like”, leaving out the nazism part. Any way of framing disagreements with them while subtracting out the actual content of what they say.

It’s so common that I think it deserves a word. I know there are generic descriptions: e.g. “being a troll”, but I think something specific to this particular behavior deserves its own word. That way it can just be identified and dismissed for what it is and not argued with.

  • DrivingForce
    4·
    4 years ago

    I have never dealt with outright nazis before but I have seen users that are a step below nazis claim their comments were not racist. They carefully word their comments so that they can say that it was technically not racist. I mainly only see those types of people just trying to get flame wars started so the term troll is accurate for them.

    I don’t think I have ever seen a straight up nazi talking on a forum like that yet. Just almost nazis.

    • abbenmOP
      61·
      4 years ago

      They’ll never self-identify as nazis. They’ll just show up and do stuff like get into debates where they just happen to be defending nazis.

      My concern here isn’t how nazis self-identify themselves, although I know there’s a whole conversation to be had about how explicit they are choosing to be, and how they like to experiment and play around with plausible deniability, which they certainly do.

      My concern is the specific rhetorical move of trying to rebrand their nazism as “things you don’t agree with” after having been called out. This appears to be a pretty common thing, and it would be helpful to disarm it by having a word for it. The same way that we now have words for, say, Sea Lioning, the Coutiers Reply and stuff like that.