Some highlights; you can read the whole thing if you want to see how far into the motte-and-bailey, our-position-is-the-only-rational-one stuff she is. Her position is the only rationally possible one, which makes their positions unintelligible even though she claims to have met with them and joined their Facebook groups.
"What exactly that last phrase ["without coercion"] means is ominously vague....""Before 2016, I always thought of Nazis as mainly historical villains that belonged in Indiana Jones movies or old news reels or the sad stories my grandfather told me. Now, however... I am aware that fascism is creeping back into the world at large in terrifying ways..."
Nazis, you say?
"No, I don’t understand that argument either." [It is indeed plain she did not understand their argument, because the one she ascribes to them is absurd.]"I found the members were all stripes of Republican and I was pleasantly surprised to see opinion was not monolithic in the group...."
So, Nazis, right?
"I caught a gleam in the woman’s eye I didn’t like. Was there some flirtation with insurrection being suggested here? What, exactly, was she saying?""Despite my uneasiness, I couldn’t help but find myself liking the women in the room. They were charismatic. They were energetic. They had no problem letting my low-functioning autistic son play with their children, which is unfortunately rare among a lot of the other mothers I’ve encountered. But this made me even more uneasy. I realized these women were dangerous precisely because they were so friendly."
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that none of these women are dangerous by any standard I would normally recognize. While I'm out there, I'll lay down a wager that none of them are Nazis, either. Not remotely, in fact. I'll bet they're not even fascists in any reasonable sense of the word. Maybe just that one with the gleam in her eye. You can't tell about people like that, with gleams and stuff.
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She faults them for overinterpreting innocent phrases of the left as code-words for CRT. Then she does the same thing herself, overinterpreting their speech as code-words for naziism. At no point does she go below a very superficial level to see if the code words of either side have some validity in describing the philosophical underpinnings of the other.
It's all feelings.
"...ly Ballou here in America's suburban heartland, your peripatetic reporter is doing a deep undercover investigation of rampant White Supremacy and paranoia, right here in the Good Old USA."
That's the only way I can envision this kind of journalism now, as a Bob and Ray skit with Wally Ballou.
This cracks me up: "Run for Something was a movement started after Donald Trump won the presidency that was meant to encourage young progressives to start their own campaigns for local political office. This right-wing women’s group seemed to be following the same model, but there was an undercurrent of rage among the group members that I had never seen in a Run for Something meeting." She attended meetings for people who wanted to get into politics for the first time in response to the dreaded Orange Man, but there was no undercurrent of rage? Were they all Xanaxed to the eyeballs?
I don't think she understands what rage is or looks like, so anything other than torpor looks like rage. It's the same as when they see their side's direct, physical violence as "expression" and the other side's words as "violence".
On the CRT side, I'm not always sure myself what things are innocent phrases on the left and what codes for CRT, since I can't find anything on the modern left that is NOT from the realm of critical theory. This must be why they think their opponents have a single, unified, coherent and semi-secret ideology masked by code phrase. They can imagine none other. Marx created the idea and term 'capitalism' and his heirs apply it similarly, as though it is as coherent and comprehensive across all human domains as socialism. Funny thing is, over time it sort of has become so.
On the CRT side, I'm not always sure myself what things are innocent phrases on the left and what codes for CRT, since I can't find anything on the modern left that is NOT from the realm of critical theory....
I think there's a non-zero chance that they can't tell either. When she confidently asserts -- as NPR-types have assured her -- that CRT is not taught in public schools, she's forwarding a motte and bailey defense. I'm not sure that she knows that she is, though. She may have lost the ability to distinguish.
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