Watch out! The Daily Stormer is coming for your children!
Or so they say. Earlier this week, Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer launched what he’s calling the “Pokémon GO Nazi Challenge,” urging his readers to descend upon their local Pokemon GO hot spots with crude flyers promoting race hatred in general and his site in particular.
Great news, everyone!
An enterprising Stormer has been handing out fliers at Pokémon GO gyms for the purpose of converting children and teens to HARDCORE NEO-NAZISM! …
HE’S HANDING THEM OUT TO CHILDREN!
THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING!
HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF ANYTHING SO GREAT AS THIS???
The Daily Stormer was designed to appeal to teenagers, but I have long thought that we needed to get pre-teens involved in the movement. At that age, you can really brainwash someone easily. Anyone who accepts Nazism at the age of 10 or 11 is going to be a Nazi for life.
The idea is so ridiculous, and the flyer in question so crude and over-the-top, that I assumed at first that it was a troll job — that either Anglin was trolling us, or that someone was trolling him.
The flyer (see the whole thing here) bristles with rabid denunciations of “n***er monkeys,” “burrito rats,” and “HOOK-NOSED JEWS.” It urges its readers to “vote for DONALD TRUMP” even while acknowledging that most of those reading the flyer are “probably too young to vote” for the “GOD EMPEROR.”
It promises its target audience of white not-yet-men that
Oh, and it compares catching Pokemons to … the Holocaust. Favorably
If Anglin is trolling, though, he’s trolling his readers as well as the rest of us.
In a followup post today, Anglin insisted that he was dead serious about the “Pokémon GO Nazi Challenge” — and defended it from alt-right critics saying the flyer was so over-the-top offensive that it could end up hurting the Nazi cause, and perhaps even Donald Trump as well.
“Trump has been called a racist six million times,” Anglin tells his readers.
If the media were to present these flyers and say “look, racist Alt-Right Neo-Nazi Pokemon conspiracy!!!!” it would simply be more noise.
It would also look ridiculous. There is so much news about so many different things related to the election, people just get these bits and bytes, and “TRUMP RACISM POKEMON NAZIS” is all their brain would absorb, which would simply cause the media to lose more credibility in their minds and cause them to draw closer to Trump.
As for all the racial slurs?
[Y]oung boys like rebellious things. It excites them. It makes them interested. The flyer, in my view, was perfectly designed to appeal to young boys, and I think we’re going to get a huge response once people start handing them out.
And what were the options, besides going hardcore?
Black IQ statistics? What kid is going to be drawn into that?
Saying “save your race” or some other generic, vague, low-energy statement? Most kids won’t even know what that means, let alone be interested in it.
Making it obscene and aggressive appeals to a primal drive in boys who are in or approaching puberty.
So there you have it.
I still think this campaign is more of a publicity stunt than an actual recruitment drive, but we’ll see, I guess.
This is a very strange year, no question about it.
PUAs Nazis get the fuck out of Pokemon you fake gamers.
Preying on young boys and girls in the middle of the street? I wonder what people will think? /sarcasm
Well, that explains the alt-right perfectly, dunnit?
Boy, going for the 3edgy5me demographic, a surprise there. /s What are they gonna do, find the one kid of the playground that hates Steven Universe?
Can you imagine the meltdown these alt-right shits would have if someone from Black Lives Matter did the same thing to promote their cause? Or feminists? Or LGBTQIA rights activists? And on another note, I would laugh so hard if Anglin got a DNA test from Ancestry.com and found out he’s not a pure-blooded European but a mutt like the rest of us.
… okay then.
If I ever need a great example of Poe’s Law, this is it.
@DreadFluffyRises
My sentiment exactly.
@MexicanHotChocolate
Let’s hope Craig “Bro” Cobb has some words of support for him when that happens.
It’s a bit bewildering to me how any kids could find Nazism attractive. I know there’s always been racism but when I was a kid even the self professed racists tended to be embarrassed at being called Nazis (or even fascists).
I’ve been wondering if it’s an American thing. Orwell said that even though England had its share of fascists, Nazism could never take hold because we’d find goose-stepping laughable.
I think though for my generation it was comics. We didn’t have superhero comics in the UK but we did have war comics, and even general comics always had war stories in them.
Now the thing was, it wasn’t just that Nazis were portrayed as evil or silly or stupid, it was that they were losers; and they lost in the most humiliating way.
What kid could ever see losers as something to emulate?
Is it maybe because American war stories are more concerned with the Pacific theatre? I’m going to ponder this further.
@Alan Robertshaw
I’ve been thinking about the same thing. We got the same war comics over here in Finland (mainly translations of Commando magazines), so for many boys of my generation (born in 1982) “Nazi” was synonymous with the greatest villains in history.
@ Alan Robertshaw
Captain America did punch out Hitler, in one of the more famous American comic covers of the era.
Ugh. How out-of-touch can you get?
@Alan
You might wanna take a look at what’s happening with some French young people and ISIS – I believe it’s the same sort of drive. They don’t necessarily believe in the shit that’s peddled to them, but they crave the escape. Belief comes later.
That’s a rough way to summarize it but I think it’s the same drive. The social worker who helps me with the move told me about a few cases. Additionally, I’ve met a 16 yr old self-described “ex-facho” last year – it was a bit heartbreaking to hear him recount how he came to believe that bullshit. And reassuring to see how he’d come round. He’s also turned to feminism as a tool to understanding toxic masculinity and how it led him to nazism.
My nym is AXE CALIBUR, and neither I nor anyone in my similarly inclined peer group in middle school thought Nazis were cool
Oh, I see what you did there, Andrew–besides making me lose my lunch.
@ monzach
Oh gawd, I loved those. Did you have them in that weird little booklet format?
@ sinkable john
Yup, same here. I think you know I follow ISIS quite closely. When they analyse the Web history of English recruits it’s usually stuff like “what is Islam?”. It’s the old thing of exploiting the naive and dispossessed and offering a surrogate family, a cause and simple answers to their unfocused discontentment.
@ vicky p
Hmm, good point. Another datum for my hypothesis.
Waaaake me up, when 2016 ends…
This worries me a bit because tweens are remarkably confuse and stupid in general. Let’s hope they are not that stupid.
@ Chiomara: It’s good to be concerned, but I doubt these flyers will convert many kids. Yes, there’s still a lot of bigotry in America (and everywhere else), but the flyers are so disgusting and over-the-top that they’ll probably repel most of their target audience. And then there’s the parents, most of whom won’t want their kids getting involved with Nazism. Always remember that the “alt right” and Manospherians, as dangerous as they are, are the minority. And any kid who does respond to the flyer was probably leaning towards extremism anyway.
@Alan Robertshaw
We used to have little booklets with a single story in each issue, published every other week, but since the 1990s they have published a four story book every 6 weeks. And yes, they are still published, to this day. I occasionally treat myself to a dose of Commando goodness to this very day. Actually, I should say “High Voltage” goodness, since that’s the name those stories are published under over here in Finland (well, “Korkeajännitys” which translates as “High Voltage”). The tagline is just as good: “Strikes like a million volts!” 😀
French nazis though – they’re not amused. There’s a lot of talk right now in the “respectable” nationalist spheres about how those pesky Americans are ruining nazism and giving it a bad image.
Anyone got spare popcorn ?
Funny that Anglin doesn’t talk about repatriating himself and his fellow White Supremacists to Europe from whence came his ancestors.
Americans grow up seeing lots of images of Nazis as Bad Guys and as goofy fools (because flipping the script making a terrfying person a fool is funny). Is Neo-Naziism really such an American thing? And indeed, why? I know there’s plenty of racism in Europe…
@Victorious Parasol
Ah yes, but over here we had George Formby knocking him out:
@ monzach
I’m going to find a way to use that somehow.
@ kale
Yeah, we’re getting self identifying neo Nazis now. I do think think it might be because they didn’t grow up in that zeitgeist of Nazis as pathetic losers. More recent media has perhaps downplayed that and concentrated more about on just the evil. But evil can unfortunately be cool and attractive.
Nazis being outwitted by some plucky Tommy = Loooooser! Occult Nazis summoning demons or inventing superweapons = compelling super-villainy.
@Kale
We’ve had neo-nazis in Europe since WWII ended. I mean, literally since it ended. Soon as Nazi Germany stopped being a thing, the old nationalists stepped up and started working on their apologia. Granted, ours aren’t as… “spirited” as Anglin or the alt-right in general, and they usually try to maintain some composure. But yeah, they’re here too, and they’re the same.
I think our stricter laws on hate speech might be the reason why they seem more quiet. They police their tone a bit, but they also do more “concrete” activism – they might be more dangerous, but they don’t have a Trump as of now, so they’re still pretty harmless.
what the fuck?
how do you straight up admit you want to brainwash children while still maintaining that your cause is good and just?
it doesn’t make any goddamn sense.
@brian
Well they assume every rights group is part of a conspiracy, so since their straw enemies are all insidious cowards, why shouldn’t they do the same?
“These feminists/jews/blacks/latino/leftist cultural marxists through insidious brainwashing, converting them when they are young with only the few of our allies able to escape their control. We must take our stand against this decadent society and develop the next generation of our neofascist movement, this event would be perfect.”
Or something like that I don’t know.
@Alan
That’s really interesting – I can see how “losers” could be even more thoroughly unappealing than “villains.” On this side of the pond, a lot of these same people (or ones with which they have significant overlap, anyway?) fetishize the civil war-era South, for which one of their affectionate pet names is “The Lost Cause.” So, they see the Confederacy as losers, yes – but romantic, beautiful losers. Maybe they see Nazis the same way? Some “Oh Adolf, you were too beautiful for this world” bullshit?