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Comment by _qwfv | Hacker News Reader

You are asking for one example. A recent one that comes to mind are peaceful anti mask protesters.

I don't think they are labeled neonazis. I happen to disagree with them strongly and hold their views in low regard and believe they are directly contributing to the pandemic, but I haven't seen them widely labeled neonazis.

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In normal political times, I think your example with disprove my premise, but here you have the SPLC lumping in the anti-maskers with nazis, murders and racists in their Year of Hate and Extremism.

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2021/02/01/year-hate-2020

Upon reflection, I think there’s two problems here: The left labeling everything they don’t like as being Nazi, and the right who is unable to police their own members from real jerks.

Here’s an example - when the Tea Party first started I sws a mildly-right group of people that had all sorts of people: Asians tired of taxes, pro-2nd amendment Blacks and quite a free people who were liberal but were tired of government waste. Even granola types who thought that the government was too big and too federal and thought that policy decisions should be more local.

Then the crazies showed up and within a month it became a group that I didn’t want to be associated with - we didn’t have the guts to tell them to leave and that was our fault.

I don’t like telling that story, because based on the evidence, their was barely any time at all when the Tea Party wasn’t nuts.

The link you posted mentions anti maskers once, and only calls some of them antigovernment.

But yeah, your broader point is worth exploring. People coopting movements is definitely a thing. Should the original groups do more to exclude the (your words) crazies?

Yes unless they're ok with being lumped together with them. If I like cars and so do nazis, I'm not gonna accept them into my club just because we share one thing in common. They're nazis.

The SPLC is describing anti-government groups among the anti-mask movement, not anti-maskers as a whole, but the Venn diagram of "anti-maskers", "right-wing militias", "conspiracy theorists" and "white supremacists" does overlap. Not perfectly, but also not inconsequentially.

The phenomenon you described as having happened within the Tea Party has happened everywhere among the right end of the American political spectrum over the last decade. Rhetoric which was once confined to the lunatic fringe of talk radio and forums is now mainstream. QAnon emerged from the bowels of 4chan, exploded and became popular enough to win elections, and now the Republican Party enthusiastically stands behind a Congresswoman who believes in Pizzagate and Jewish space lasers. The former president of the United States retweeting nazi memes was not even a story, it was just another Tuesday.

And yes, this has happened somewhat among the left, but not nearly to the same degree, and mostly as a reaction to what's happened on the right.

But can you really blame the left for seeing nazis everywhere when nazis keep showing up everywhere?

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