Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate

Well. OK. But now I need a shower.

An obviously well-written, well-researched treatise on the alarming rise of hate groups in the modern era, I kept wondering if knowing the difference between factions of hate is really the point. Of course it is right to draw clear maps of such phenomena and define carefully the landscape, but at what point do we simply call crazy and delusional out for being just that? Knowing the difference between the eponymous Proud Boys and Neo-Nazis doesn't hurt, but at some point we have to start lumping rather than splitting, and then begin the process of dealing with those we have unfortunately if accurately lumped under the heading of crazy and delusional. Ultimately this all involves questions of freedom of speech, of assembly, of the right to bear arms. Do we, as a free people, need to curtail the rights of citizens to transgress too far over certain lines? (Of course we do. We do it all the time. But by how much and in what direction do we curtail? And who does the curtailing?) Germany postwar bans the use of Nazi symbols under certain circumstances. Even more of a reach is Germany's ban on publicly denying the Holocaust. And yes, the fact that Germany now represents the sanity to which we need to strive should give us all pause.

In a final tacked on chapter — Decoding and Derailing White Nationalist Discourse — Stern seems to be pointing to what she believes is solution, but it is so underwhelming in the face of the absolute horror that she has laid out up to that point as to be laughable:

My hope is that by dismantling and disassembling alt-right ideas, and scrutinizing their flawed logics and bigoted assumptions, we will be better able to defuse and short-circuit them.

interrogate and disassemble [the alt-right's] metaphors and language, and remain mindful of the perfidious implications of concepts such as the ethnostate and white genocide.