I wonder when The Usual Suspects will arrive to start "well actually-ing".,...

The proverbial porky 35-year-old virgins in Mom's basement. An important buttress of Trump's support.

1st thing: I agree Nazism is bad.

2nd thing/question: Authorities have (so-far?) found one person they believe responsible for placing "dozens of threatening phone calls to public venues, synagogues and community buildings in the US, New Zealand and Australia."

That person was a Jewish Israeli teen (lawyer is apparently trying to construct a defense around claiming the behavior was related to a neurological ailment).

IIRC I first heard this on KUOW last week (or something), and google search I just ran gave me the article I'm citing from: http://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-isra…

Do any Stranger reporters know if that guy was making calls to people in our community? Relatedly, do those effected in our community feel that the authorities are doing good by them (being kept appraised of investigations etc)?

Thank you.

They don't hide. Some of them show up at universities and don't even get arrested when they shoot someone.

@3: Eventually people are going to have to come to terms with the fact that it was not inbred Appalachian rednecks and basement dwelling Nazi manchildren who elected Trump.

The upper middle class voted for Trump by a large margin, the poor mostly voted Clinton. Trump got 42% of women and 30% of the Hispanic vote. He got about 45% of the suburban vote as well. About half of college educated individuals voted Trump, and he got the majority from those who have associate degrees or some college.

Your average Trump voter was a white guy living in the suburbs or a small town with some degree of college education and making upwards of 50k a year.

@6: It was not solely inbred Appalachian rednecks and basement dwelling Nazi manchildren that elected Trump. But Trump was absolutely the candidate for them.

Donald Trump publicly rebuked David Duke back in the '90s, then again in 2000 when he was "running" for POTUS as part of the Reform Party. In 2015, he pretended like he had no idea who the man was, or what he was known for. Before anyone suggests otherwise, that is proof that he was absolutely courting the white supremacist vote. [link]

You can con people into voting against their best interests if you lie to them often enough, and they're desperate enough. Trump is utterly bereft of integrity, so this was no problem for him.

@7: No doubt about your first point, but pretending that only dwindling, pathetic demographics are blocking the Dems from winning elections is living in a fantasy land, and a classic example of losing by underestimating your opponent. I certainly am not going to argue against Trump being a lying con man, but that is kind of irrelevant to my point.

@8: Something tells me that Mr. Savage missed that particular news item. The unfortunate reality of this situation is that JCCs being vandalized and getting bomb threats is really nothing new, it is just getting the spotlight now because of a desire to connect all bad things to Trump. If Trump were not elected, everyone likely would have continued not caring.

Maybe the Jewish Israeli is a trans-Nazi?

It must suck for your worldview when the Donald Trump Racist Redneck Nazi Army of your fevered imagination turns out to be a black Bernie supporter and an Israeli Jew.

Just because some threats did not come from "Nazis", does not necessarily mean that those sympathetic to the Nazi party's use of antisemitism are not making threats or doing other fucked up things.

Until arrests are made it's basically Schrodinger's phantom menace. It might also be that rather than dealing with actual "Nazi's" (specific ideology that includes more than antisemitism) -- it could be less highfalutin antisemitic assholes who appropriated Nazi symbols in order to harass and threaten people.

The pelvic thrust of Bill Savage's piece is about heaping amounts of cowardice, and whether we're dealing with actual Nazi's or not here doesn't make for any less cowardice.

Current communications technology/social media enables small groups and allows for magnification of message beyond actual size. Our collective culture is increasingly narcissistic with educational deficits (civic literacy, math/science literacy, etc), which has probably played a hand in fostering the more toxic forms of identity politics. Social media also creates atomized individuals (and scaled up it's an echo chamber) as much as it can connect people. That's a vulnerability for humans because the 'default setting' is to rely on those close to them to establish reality -- of course in no way does that make it an "objective" reality. Assholes emerge chaos ensues etc. -- hence why it's important at times to link arms and tell 'em to fuck off.

It took me until I read this article to see the joke in the name of the Illinois Nazis' acronym.

ASWPP.

Asswipe.