Summary
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized Elon Musk after he made a gesture during Trump’s inauguration resembling a Nazi salute.
Musk and his allies dismissed the comparison, calling such accusations exaggerated.
Ocasio-Cortez, however, called the gesture unacceptable, emphasizing America’s history of opposing Nazis and the Confederacy.
She also condemned the Anti-Defamation League for defending Musk, accusing it of losing credibility.
Her comments sparked broader debate on symbols, gestures, and their implications amid Trump’s return to office.
Madam President 🖤
Damn straight. Every US WW II rolled in their grave twice when the sack of shit “Leon Hitler” went on stage. AOC, find a way to fix the Democratic party.
AOC, you personally might hate Nazis, but your country voted them into the White House, the congress, and the Senate. I wish you the best to fight the scum, like real Americans did 80 years ago.
This card says moops!
In This Country, We Hate Nazis
Lol! No they don’t.
The US has always loved fascism. It’s the only one of two political ideologies it endorses.
Nazism is almost an American export, even. See, for example, How the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow.
We love nazis so much we saved half of them after WW2 and brought them back home.
…and the other half was left in Germany to fill up West Germany’s intelligence services.
and all the remainders that survive mysteriously ended up in Argentina.
Just the most brilliant
And the other is passive fascist enablers.
Most based AOC, I wonder if the hate-thirsting over her will begin again now that she’s becoming such a needed voice in these trying times.
Only asking because the memes about Ben Shapiro wnating her feet pics were funny as hell.
But seriously, can it actually not? I low-key hated all the “Let’s just tell dumb blonde jokes with AOC instead of the dumb blonde.” memes, cause it’s like… when we call Trump dumb, we can point to shit he actually did (like turn every American into a woman because he’s too transphobic to know how to read), we aren’t just saying it to say it.
National identity is imaginary, powerful and useful. What she’s choosing to claim with hers is badass. It’s brash, in-your-face, heroic. Anti-apathy. And our world needs tonnes more of it.
As an activist irl, and someone targeted daily by nazis for years, AOC has no illusions about the current state of fash in the USofA, nor the history and current state of slavery and genocide in the world. Nazis (and other misogynists) will tell you she’s ignorant and deluded, but you know she’s not. She’s manifesting, and the irony is lovely.
If you want to live in the country she does - against all the opposition activists for the common good constantly face - claim it as she claims it. Go find your allies irl and stop letting powerful men tell you there’s no point trying anything. Your enemy says you’re not a real person, but a thing God put on earth for them to use or destroy.
Tough love: Hope is hard work. Apathy is an easy trap that flatters your intelligence while it kills your spirit. Trust yourself and make a choice: who is your enemy and how are you going to treat them?
Thank you, this comment section has some of this cynisim already. Yes she’s saying very eviden things but the other side is winning precisely by creating a culture of fear and overwhelming toxicity and locking you in echo chambers that eat at you by making you think their normal is The normal. It’s not lying than to project what you want into the world until enough people are in on it and pressure bad elements into hiding or into changing path.
I heard an interview with the sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson, and he said something that I love: “pessimism is almost a dereliction of duty.”
If we want the world to be a better place, we have to make it a better place.
Lewis or Chesterton had something similar, that optimism and pessimism were both dishonest, but patriotism was necessary to existence. Probably Lewis
Fuck, dude. Maybe I have become too cynical. I’ve become a little dejected these last few days/weeks/months, but that was actually inspiring.
I should follow your username’s advice more lol.
We used to kill Nazis.
Now we cheer them, shrug them off, or make excuses for them.
This nation is pathetic.
I wonder how many conservative’s ancestors fought the Nazis and now they’re voting for Nazis.
Hey 2A enthusiasts. This is the moment you’ve been saying you need your guns for your entire pathetic lives. Where you at?
Kill Nazis. Kill Nazi CEOs twice.
Assuming you’re American, you do understand the irony of America taking in the most nazi elite and scientists for their own personal projects right? Also if you read mein kampf you’ll find it fascinating how much he was inspired by American legalised racism and ethnic cleanings. America is a nation built like how Israel was, through ideological and legalized genocide, racism, fascism and racism. I’m starting to comprehend how the soviet did the real nazi killing and suffered the real consequences of the Nazis unlike America.
Yeah, the people who see this as a significant deviation from the norm aren’t exactly incorrect, but I wonder to what degree they really understand the total history and scope of america as it has existed for basically all of it’s span. What we’ve done, in this country.
WW2 was between Russians and Germans. All the other stuff was barely a side character subplot compared to the Eastern front.
For example, in the Western front the German forces dealt more casualities to US and UK troops than the Allies did to the Axis by quite a lot too. Reading stories and diaries of American troops they would remark how astonishing it is that their German POWs were all either very young, or very old, either way remarkably unfit for combat. German command in the Western front was in shambles, because the vast majority of their efforts were going to the Eastern front. More Germans died in the battle of Stalingrad alone than in the entirety of the Western front. There were sieges in the Baltics that made Omaha Beach seem like a pretty lucky bet. The Belarusian grassroots genocide by Germans is hardly talked about, yet were just as brutal as they were against jews. The Siege of Leningrad is the type of nightmare fuel, hell on earth that Spielberg would never dream of touching. The West puts so much self importance about their fight against the German Nazi Machine, meanwhile it was the communists who did all the work while Western capitalists profited every step of the way since the beginning. And as you pointed out, America had and still has a strong Nazi following, also curiously backed by billionaires.
Now the collective West is the new Nazi party, and like it or not it’s up to Russia and China to stop them again.
EDIT - Just wanted to point out that a lot of the horrors of the Eastern front is equally blamed on Stalin too, Baltic people hate Germany and Russia the same for WW2. Every side of WW2 sucked horrendous ass, and nobody won in WW2 (except for capitalists)
Hey 2A enthusiasts. This is the moment you’ve been saying you need your guns for your entire pathetic lives. Where you at?
They’re apparently calling for gun control in the threads discussing LGBTQ+ people arming themselves.
Sounds like they’re still cowards. Well, at least they’re consistent. Enemies that are consistent are easier to study and destroy.
As an LGBTQ+ person who supports the NRA and believes we need substantially more guns in America and to repeal all gun regulation, I really hope all LGBTQ+ and allies not only are armed, but realize the benefit of owning a variety of firearms.
Since conservatives are trying to say some or all LGBTQ+ people are mentally ill, and mental illness is often used to justify disarming people, it’s really important for LGBTQ+ people to be aware of these issues.
In the US, gender dyphoria is classified as a mental illness under the DSM and so technically any trans person who has seen a doctor is mentally ill and not allowed to own guns.
Therefore, trans people will hopefully realize the important of being armed prior to disclosing their trans status to a doctor and decent people should do their best to not only the discredit the DSM as the pseudointellectual biased phrenologyesque crock of shit that it is, but also to have gender dysphoria removed as a psychiatric issue and labeled for what it is, a medical issue resulting from brain differences that requires treatment.
That moment for 2A enthusaists came when Alabama banned abortion (before Roe v. Wade was overturned) and when Trump was putting children in cages. They didn’t then… they were the Nazis all along. The same people who just wanted to be the Brownshirts, but with their own personal firearms and not something issued to them.
We’re seeing a similiar bullshit in Israel with West Bank illegal ‘settlers’ carrying M4 pattern rifles with them to the ‘homes’.
Nazis used to be flesh and blood. Now they’re phantoms
Those phantoms are in our government and marching in our streets.
Let’s hope it’s true… you just elected trump
I’d kind of be willing to wager that we actually hated nazis mostly because they were foreign, more than anything else. I think all that ww2 valorizing history schlock about me and the good old boys from ken-tucky and all over going out and killing all the nazis has totally cooked america’s understanding of that war. I dunno, towards the end we did nuke a country, twice, in a totally superfluous and cruel act, and we also concentrated the domestic immigrant population that we were bombing during that war into camps. Everyone brushes over that part, though, and america is truly faultless. These aren’t our true characters, being revealed, no, this is just some errant deviation from a much more civilized and reasonable norm! Surely, that must be the case.
towards the end we did nuke a country, twice, in a totally superfluous and cruel act
thats… a tough one. I’m not saying you’re wrong. We have a global standard we decided after ww2 about the extent combatants can “legally” injure civilians in a war.
When you look at the level of resistence by the Japanese during battles in Iwo Jima and Okinawa in particular, It points to the idea that they would not have surrendered, especially on their sacred island homeland. They had a split definition for “defeated” and “surrendered”. They could logically acknowledge being defeated, but they still would not tender their surrender, and would have fought for every inch, to the death. Even now they say this. They expected to lose on the beaches in Kyushu, but they were still not going to envision surrender. Westerners don’t think with this model of war, so we have to take this into account when introspecting what was an optimal path back then-- already a dicey path, as armchair-warrioring the past always is.
The firebombing of Tokyo killed double the number of civilians that the two nuclear bombs did. And yet we dont talk about those events so much. Its an interesting distinction to ponder.
I’m not an expert or military person, but I hear “war crimes” are actually very common in war. As an example, people note that the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam was particularly heinous, but I’ve seen documentaries which say that that sort of thing happened all the time It just seldom got acknowledged. Mai Lai was extraorindary in its unusual amount of publicity. If this interests you, check out Kill Anything that Moves
On the other hand with my modern understanding of justification for using nukes, my heart agrees with you. There are always possibilities to do something else, or wait. But can I apply that to pre-UN pre-nurembourg pre-geneva convention times? tough one.
I can tell you that I am married into a Japanese family now, and many of them feel it possibly had to be done, but that it was heinous, along with the rest of the war. They also feel the start of the war was more or less mandatory, as the US had locked Japan away from resources it needed to continue existing in the form it was in. No apologies tendered for the initial attack. They feel the US started it, and not expecting the pearl harbor attack was simply stupid.
My wifes mother (still alive) talks about running as fast as she could from place to place in tokyo to get away from the firebombings, and the starvation that followed where people even ate all the grass, then laid down and died or wandered into the countryside. Her parents died in the fires so she walked into the countryside and walked 350 km to Nagoya as an 11 year old alone to find her relatives.
I dunno whether or not you’ve been hit with this before, but if you haven’t, it’s your lucky day, have a two hour miniature documentary on the bombs specifically, and how they weren’t really justified at all. People should probably still be pissed about it. I’d also say that stuff about japan being locked away from the resources it needed, is kind of dubious. I dunno if it passes the smell test, it smells like modern japan post ww2 nation building narrative stuff, to me. Maybe if we include “in the form it was in” to encompass the entirety of their imperial exploits up til that point. We maybe get, at some point, to the further debate about opening japan up as a more isolationist country through the use of force, by the US specifically. None of this is something I’m prepared to talk about in any respectable level of detail.
As for the prevalence of violence and war crimes in the world, I’d say, yeah, pretty undeniable, undeniably common. I don’t much like war, many reasons, that is among them. I think that vietnam, and the continued and unerring deviation from what vietnam basically was, all the way until the modern day, where we’re funding an apartheid state that’s bombing a minority population, is a testament to the character of the united states. Which is not to say it’s beyond rationalization, or is done out of pure evil, rather than cold self-interest, but I think that the true and fundamental character of the united states, as illustrated from those foreign escapades, is kind of self-evidently apparent. Trump’s only notable characteristic is that he’s turning that gun towards the domestic population a little more, or that he’s more rhetorically fascistic, or some other difference, but this sort of a behavior is something I fully believe to be within our fundamental character as a nation. As a political system. Elon exists on that continuum.
It was just cause of the war, they were popular before.
I was about to comment this. The American National Socialist group had massive rallies, if we never got involved with WW2, we’d probably be massive friends with Hitler and use his policies as a springboard.
Hitler was influenced by America’s mistreatment of natives and black people for his solutions to the “Jewish question”. We would have probably agreed if he was born in Mississippi and not Austria.
a gesture (…) resembling a Nazi salute
Fuck off with that shitlib overcautiousness, HuffPo! The only way it could have been any more obviously a Nazi salute would have been if he had screamed “sieg heil!” while doing it!
Wow, what an awkward way of saying hi!
Her comments sparked broader debate on symbols, gestures, and their implications amid Trump’s return to office.
Yea, no one was talking about this before AOC said something. Thank god she was here to shine light on this little known situation.
I want to live in the country she thinks she’s living in…
Do we though? Do we really, truly, hate Nazis? The evidence so far is not that conclusive.
I hate Nazis, but I don’t think the country as a whole hates Nazis.
Well, you certainly used to, judging by the efforts and sacrifices 80 years ago, but there’s certainly a lot of evidence to indicate a lot of Americans of today think you were on the wrong side back then.
You may want to reread some history, there were plenty of Nazi sympathizers and collaborators (read: nazis) in the US back then too.
Oh I’m well aware, but push came to show and the better minds prevailed, back then, and as a result, so did the country.
I’m not convinced the outcome would’ve been the same today.
The saying is “if push comes to shove” ie if shit gets real /escalates.
English is not my native tongue, and I knew I was on thin ice with that one…
It’s actually “on thin eyes”, i.e people are watching you closely.
Nah just fucking with ya.
And then those better minds snapped up as many Nazi scientists they could and put them to work for “the good guys”, and burnt a few crosses.
Fucking preach.
I really hope AOC considers a 2028 run for President.
Edit: please fuck off about the uncertainty of 2028 elections, I’m excruciatingly aware, your reminders are not helpful.
Bold of you to assume there will be a 2028 election
Edit: commenter made a good point. It’s foolish to abandon any potential avenue of change, even if it seems like a lost cause
oh alright let’s all just give up then
Good point, thanks for the correction
It’s hilarious that you think you’re getting another election before Vance dies of old age. I hope you’re right of course but I’m pretty sure your future “elections” will be performative. You’re going to have to take that right back.
Part of fighting for it involves planning in case the fight is successful, and that planning includes picking candidates, so my original comment stands.
“pray for peace, prepare for war.” As they say.
