The group left in a U-Haul box truck that was driven out of the county, police said, indicating the demonstrators were outsiders.
A small group of neo-Nazis marched in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, on Saturday, drawing a few vocal opponents and ultimately leaving following a “challenge,” police said.
The demonstrators, all men, wore red, long-sleeve T-shirts and black pants, and some carried black Nazi flags, according to verified social media video from the scene.
“Neo-Nazi demonstrators … carried flags with swastikas, walked around the Capitol and parts of downtown Saturday afternoon,” Nashville police said in a statement.
No arrests were reported, and the group left in a U-Haul box truck that ultimately exited greater Nashville, police said, indicating the demonstrators may have been from out of town.
“Some persons on Broadway challenged the group, most of whom wore face coverings,” the department said. “The group headed to a U-Haul box truck, got in, and departed Davidson County.”
It’s the slippery slope problem. I agree in general with everything you said, but struggle with figuring out a way to define that problem that isn’t open to abuse by determined bad actors. Imagine for instance that we already had such a law on the books when Trump was in office and consider what he might have been able to do with it.
It really isn’t. many countries have dealt with this. Consider Germany’s outright outlawing of Nazi symbolism and rhetoric entirely.
the slippery slope, if anything, is allowing the Nazis to be open and free Nazis inside your own country.
You are promoting a slippery slope fallacy.
Punishing murderers is not a slippery slope to punishing someone for saying mean words.
Denying nazis the right to March when their entire ideology is based on racial superiority and hatred is not a slippery slope to denying marches for positive things like equality. Hell, there is already a history of positive protests being squashed, so why would we ever waste out breath defending nazis when instead we should promote the ability for positive messages and focus on only denying it when the message is actually harmful.
I’m not promoting anything, I’m just bringing up the very real threat that the GOP represent when provided with anything even vaguely related to restrictions on rights. I’m not saying we can’t or shouldn’t ban Nazis, in fact I very explicitly said I agreed with that, I’m just saying it’s not a simple problem. Any such law would need to be very carefully crafted to make absolutely certain it couldn’t be twisted into a weapon to target a group other than Nazis.
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Laws can be pretty specific. Consider, if you will, a law against Nazis. It can’t really be abused in any way because it’s only targeting Nazis. It’s the same reason why murder is illegal but handshakes aren’t.
The abuse is really simple, they just redefine Nazi to mean something else. Suddenly they’re arresting BLM protesters because they’ve declared BLM to be a Nazi organization. I’ve already had literal arguments with people claiming that BLM are Nazi supporters, as mind bogglingly stupid as that sounds.
It’s probably not impossible to craft the law in such a way that it isn’t able to be weaponized, but the trick would also be in leaving it flexible enough that it isn’t easily bypassed. A German style ban on Nazi imagery would probably be a good start but as we’ve seen in Germany that doesn’t actually stop the ideology, it just removes the “brand” which isn’t nothing, but falls a little short of the goal.
We should be enforcing current restrictions on “fighting words”, which are insults that incite violence. Right now calling someone a racial slur is protected speech, or at least not illegal. Even if the point of that speech is to incite violence, courts have not interpreted that as the fault of the speaker.
This is the original idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words
Here’s a more modern revision:
Like what?
It’s an interesting idea. I think I’d be fine if they just redefined fighting words as slurs. It seems like slurs would pretty easily meet the definition of fighting words without bringing in some of the more problematic cases like calling police fascists.
That’s where the specificity comes in. Like you said, the imagery bans etc. I’m not sure the ideology will be easy to get rid of but we can at least implement some common sense laws to help curb it. In Australia we had some nazi rallies and we made it illegal to do the nazi salute or display nazi symbols. We’re a bit backward and racist most of the time, but I’m glad we draw the line at literal nazis.
Reverse the order and the same can be said. Free speech has been abused to allow bad actors to rally for the death of people they don’t approve of. By your own logic, this is enough reason to support the issue.