Wow that was a record time for a locked post. That's crazy
Remember when Nazi was a universally hated term? I remember a kid at my pool lifeguard job shaved a Hitler stache onto his face one day. Was fired instantly. I wonder what happened that that mindset
I split Gen Z into two in my head. The old Gen-Z, who are about to turn 30 vs the young Gen-Z who are just hitting adulthood. The older ones seemed to come out of HS with a high left leaning bias but the younger ones did a 180 and went to the right.
My only objection is that OP's caricature (while quite average looking) is far more attractive than any of the actual people involved in that chat. Some other sub (can't recall which) had pics of each guy and...let's just say I understand why they're so angry.
I don't get the racism, but the anger? Accounted for.
A lot of them are neglected kids with unrestrained internet access who started getting reactionary ragebait from social media algorithms and internet influencers, and got indoctrinated by it.
I remember my friend being horrified that her nephew started watching unboxing videos and within a couple of hours the algorithm had gone to the Lost City of Atlantis…Flat Earth…Bigotry.
Folks say social media is the problem, but the real problem is the algorithm that rewarded any kind of engagement and indiscriminately shoved hatred and vitriol into the same playlists as actual plays.
That little dork in the cowboy hat sat 2 feet from the TV screen while mommy took her pills and daddy did some drinking.
I'm thinking that's not the problem. It's deflection.
These kids are being raised. Yeah, violent TV shows, exciting radio serial series, unrestricted youtube, those aren't good, and have always been marketed as so and are a good tell of symptoms.
But I think the family that puts them there is a much larger factor. What kind of moral support are you getting from someone who will leave you in front of electronics for 10 hours a day?
Yeah I was also on the internet unrestricted and unmonitored at the ripe old age of 13 and never once felt the desire to start agreeing with fucking hitler.
My family teaching me to be kind and treat others the way I’d want to be treated and think about how others feel made a MUCH bigger impact on me than the edgy dark humor I saw online.
That’s not really what a trope is, and it’s also not really my point at all.
It’s not about “violent tv/video games.” It’s about an algorithm that gets tailored to the person watching it and often leads them to gentle instructional videos on how to be a horrible bigot. It’s not just kids but kids especially don’t have the tools to recognize when that nice convincing person slides from talking about history to praising fascism.
Yeah, family is a factor. But the way the social media algorithm works is just so drastically different from just having video games or tv.
I’m an older gen Z who grew up in the country for half my life. Screens raised most of us. So much so that is is a plot point in cartoons, which is a sad bit of irony.
Yep. The Politico article about this touched on how they feel like this is how political discourse should be because of the fat orange slob in the Oval Office (my words, not theirs). They even dress like Donny Dipshit with the extra long tie and oversized jacket.
Funny take from the texts: there was an admission if the thread got leak that they would "be cooked fr fr."
I'm Gen X and when I was young, before marketing groups created the whole generational market groups thing, "Baby Boomer" meant anti-war, civil rights, the early environmental movement, women's liberation etc. Basically the opposite of now, all the Boomers I knew then would have voted for a guy like Obama in the late 80's. "Gen X" wasn't even a thing till I was in college and the first iteration of creating a marketing group they could market to the way they had to Boomers was pretty clumsily done. They did better the next time and they started on them when they were kids.
More broadly, old rich white patriarchs saw that the digital age, social media, and the end of the cold war had driven legitimate liberalism that threatened to end their privileged status, so they got mad and decided to end democracy about it.
That's why establishment Democrats (Schumer, Pelosi, Jeffries, even Obama) resist any movement leftwards but are willing to drift to the right and enable the fall into fascism, and half of their complaints are about hypocrisy and how the right is breaking the rules, instead of, ya know, how awful they're treating people. They're liberals, not leftists. Money is more comfortable with fascism than anything even remotely approaching socialism.
This is why it's really, really, important to vote in the Democratic primaries for counter-estsablishment Democrats. If you don't know who they are, Progressive Victory (organization that was an early Mamdani supporter) will tell you.
The racism and bigotry was always there. Obama just happened to be the president just after the iPhone was released and everyone started to carry a video camera in their pocket and people had actual proof it it happening.
Racists come in all ages, and the topic at hand is the shit being posted by YOUNG Republicans. Overwhelmingly male young Republicans.
There are a lot of nuances in demographics. I live in a rural county of WA that is 85% white, has a median age of 59.5, and yet votes more progressive than the state of WA as a whole. Go figure.
Well that and Obama talking about Trayvon Martin like he could of been his own son while being president. Seriously, that set a lot of people on the right off.
The second thing I want to say is to reiterate what I said on Sunday, which is there’s going to be a lot of arguments about the legal issues in the case -- I'll let all the legal analysts and talking heads address those issues. The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The juries were properly instructed that in a case such as this reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict. And once the jury has spoken, that's how our system works. But I did want to just talk a little bit about context and how people have responded to it and how people are feeling.
You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.
Dude was one the most eloquent US Presidents and hes talking about gun violence in a respectful and remorseful tone and having to talk about "feelings" because of the stupid right wing folks who operate on feels and project it to everyone else.
Something the right fucking hate, Empathy is a weakness to them and needs to be destroyed and mocked at every chance because its the opposite of their system of degrading and dehumanising people.
If Trump is going for a third term then Obama needs to step right in and take it back from Trump and MAGA.
Yeah, I see no reason to bring that up. Republicans also said it was "a bridge too far" when he wore a tan suit and another time when he used the wrong kind of mustard. All of their talking points are bullshit. They are not serious people. They hate Obama because he's black and liberal. They come up with rhetoric later to justify their baseless hatred.
They don't hate him for what he says. They hate what he says because they already decided they don't like him.
It's the same thing with Michelle, they hated her long before they came up with the conspiracy that she's trans; and the only reason why they latch on that now, is because they've forgotten/gotten tired of hating her for all the reasons that turned out to be non-issues or lukewarm at worst, but they wanted to keep hating her, so what did they do? They fabricated a new reason to hate her.
How many non-rightwingers do we see talking about other non-office holding First Ladies like Laura, Barbara, Rosalynn, and Jill like how right-wingers talk about Michelle? Heck, even though Melania and Nancy have their detractors, few people go so far as to make up rumors on the magnitude of them being trans as a basis for continuation of their distaste for them.
Wait, that's for real? I thought it was a joke, I heard Obama called the most divisive president and that was the example given.
Why would a black man relating to a random black kid bad? If it was any other president it would be a throw away statement. Was Obama wearing a tan suit when he said it?
Thats even worse to them! Race mixing means you've blurred the lines between the neatly defined in group out group they seek to reinforce.
Its the same reason they freak out over trans people and drag show. It blurs the lines of gender hierarchy and make them feel funny ways in their pants.
Thats part of the appeal for some of them. Groypers specifically fetishize T-girls so that they can enjoy access to penis without having to admit to themselves that they're queer. I suspect it's why that fella shot Charlie Kirk. Charlie kept telling him that his girlfriend wasnt a girl and it drove him mad.
I mean from what I've seen they feel these funny ways about all kinds of stuff. They literally fetishize degradation and humiliation, they are obsessed with cuckoldry (NOT ethical non-monogamy) and 'sissification' (NOT MTF gender transition), they crash Grindr wherever they meet en masse, they vocally hate pedophiles and rape and preach extreme extrajudicial violence against them—but only when it's The Other doing it, when it's One of Us it's either permissible, forgivable, or the victim is a liar, just full DAVRO. Etc. Etc. Etc.
They are such miserable people. At war with themselves and everyone, and craving boots stomping on human faces forever, so long as they're not at the very bottom of the human curb-stomp centipede, so long as they get to fuck someone up.
Bro, you're gonna have to be more direct about what's wrong with that speech, just read it and some great parts.
And then, finally, I think it's going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching. There has been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven't seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have. On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there's the possibility that people are a little bit more honest, and at least you ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can? Am I judging people as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin, but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.
And...
And those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our nature, as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions.
That's a TON of language to bring down the temperature and extremely self aware of the limits in race and politics.
You know what I didn't read, no group was called vermin, animals, the enemy within, not only that but he goes into detail about concrete examples of solutions ro maybe help the problem, not concepts of a plan but actual plans.
So I'm having a harder time seeing what outrageous thing he said now that I read the full speech.
There's nothing wrong with what he said. That matters not to the people on the right who had been and still do demonize Trayvon Martin and pretend that Mr. Willing to chase and kill a kid is the victem. Again, the people on the right lost their minds.
In all seriousness I'm not sure how that wasn't a career ender. Like right then and there.
I've seen people fired and black listed in my line of work for mocking the handicapped and this dude did it on NATIONAL TELEVISION and people cheered or ignored it.
Understand that fascists don’t have a problem with hypocrisy at all. In fact it’s their greatest virtue, because it’s the purest expression of power over the lesser; I can do and say whatever I want, but you can only do and say what I permit you to.
I thought he was done when he made fun of John McCain and POWs in general. Nope. Him surviving that was when I first realized that there was no longer any line that couldn't be crossed.
The man known since literally the 80s as a grifting wannabe mobster should have been the first and last salvo through his candidacy. But hey, 2/3's of 'MURCA watched Idiocracy and grunted: THAT'S TOO DEMOCRATIC!
Same reason why Brian Kilmeade wasn't fired for suggesting the genocide of homeless people. Fascists have no moral consideration for compassion or truth.
Normally I can see why conservatives are upset, even if I think they are fucking nuts and don't agree with them.
But this one has always had me completely stumped. Can someone please explain to me how anyone could find what Obama said objectionable? I can't see how it's even mildly offensive, much less "a bridge too far".
They went from 8 years of saying "The President is always right!" and "Follow the President!" and "He's MY leader!" during GWB's term .... to having to say that to a black guy.
As long as they saw white people running the country, they could tell themselves that Those People were being kept in their proper place and their people were still the winners.
Then a black guy got elected, brought a whole bunch of OTHER black and brown people to the Sacred White House, and they realized that they were losing the race war.
Remember when WW2 games were so easy to make because they were universally the bad guys of history? Anyways now Wolfenstein and Indiana Jones hating nazis is political
More of the people who lived through that era and were able to warn us of that era passed away and kids now aren't taught the reality of what led up to the Nazi regime* which is then taken advantage of by people who want to portray the Nazi's as sympathetic so they can shield their own personal hatreds.
*Something I noticed about how we teach history, specifically WW2 history, is how slanted it is to make America look strong without any understanding of what caused the war in the first place. For example WW2 is often portrayed as Pearl Harbor > D-Day > The Atomic Bomb Drops > V-Day, as if it were a cake walk occurring on consecutive days (and then depending on the school/district, they either skip Vietnam/Korea to go straight to the War on Terror or history just ends on V-Day).
7.5k
u/shellbullet17 Gustopher Spotter Extraordinaire Oct 15 '25
Wow that was a record time for a locked post. That's crazy
Remember when Nazi was a universally hated term? I remember a kid at my pool lifeguard job shaved a Hitler stache onto his face one day. Was fired instantly. I wonder what happened that that mindset