A Masterclass in Debating an Online Nazi
Listen to how four prominent Nazis on X simultaneously lost their minds when confronted with philosophy instead of rhetoric.
For the past few months I have been investigating the growing radicalism of White Nationalist/Nazism spaces online in effort to report on dangerous rhetoric and ideas that may lead to harm against regular civilians.
Just last week the nation witnessed the citizen lead response to Neo-Nazi presence in Ohio. Where mostly black residents (as the Neo Nazis did their demonstration in a black neighborhood) confronted them and successfully drove them right back into their UHaul truck before the police later arrested them. Black residents even managed to take one of their flags and successfully burned it.
The Neo Nazis held up a sign which read, “America for the White Man”. Clearly a statement about their support of the USA becoming a White Ethnostate.
Proponents of this ideology spend a great deal of their time planning and meeting each other on X and Telegram. Where their conversations and what they really feel can be easily listened to despite their rule of “no nons” (no non whites). X Spaces are relatively unpoliced. So these users often take their rhetoric to the darkest of possible places. Slurs, name calling, doxing, grievance stories and even thinly veiled threats against entire ethnic groups is acceptable in these spaces. The only time where a user may be asked to calm down is when they explicitly call for the death of others.
Even that is inconsistent.
These spaces are also excellent places for Nazis to be challenged when they leave their echo chambers.
On February 12th an X space was being had concerning IQ and the intelligence of non whites. Something that Neo-Nazis often harp on to legitimize their claims that non white people are not conducive to Western Society. In this space was a user named Ian Malcolm, who has managed to accumulate almost sixty-thousand followers on X since September 2023 by capitalizing on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Majority of Ian’s online persona centers on the Jewish Question, often shortened to the “JQ”. The Jewish Question is an Anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, claiming that the Jewish people have undue influence over media, banking and politics for the collective purpose of maliciously enforcing “Jewish Supremacy” over White Europeans specifically. The Neo-Nazis assert that in order for “the Jews” to enforce their disproportionate powers, Jews use non white minorities to subvert and degenerate Western culture.
Ian Malcolm’s main strategy is to encourage his listeners to “connect the dots” by making implicating statements that lack essential contexts. For example, one of Ian’s many quote tweets seems to be about the importance of Free Speech. However, with the context of Ian’s posting pattern and the inclusion of Jews being the center focus of the headline, Ian implicates Jewish people as an enemy of free speech issues.
But what does the article he links actually say?
Ian Malcolm wouldn’t know, as it’s behind a paywall that he certainly doesn’t pay into. The actual context of the article is about how various forms of speech may lead to antisemitic terror attacks in Australian society. This is factually the case, some forms of speech may contribute to violence. The article also discusses in relatively good faith the political nature of free speech, saying “no sane person welcomes limitations on freedom of expression'; being able to say what you think is one of the principal hallmarks of democracy.”
It goes on the mention the very true reality that Free Speech has never been absolute in Western Society. Criticism of the Monarch, the church, God was not acceptable for years longer than the current democratic norms of our societies today. Lastly the article states what they are weighing speech up against, “What is proposed is placing restrictions on speech calculated to incite hatred and harm from a small but vicious fifth column. Yes, this hurts. But a lot less than murder.”
I myself disagree with the author about the issue of free speech. I am essentially a free speech absolutist. However, if I were in a discussion with the author I would recognize the genuine issues with my position that i’d bite the bullet on and I would test the consistency of their position in return. Ian does not offer any such good faith. Instead, he insinuates that the author and Jews only seek to have Jews protected from “hate speech”. Despite well documented commentary from leftists on the subject of hate speech being an intersectional problem.
Lastly, Ian himself does not support absolute free speech. He doesn’t support Jewish people being voted in congress. He doesn’t support non whites using their financial means to lobby or engage in political activity, he himself supports White Ethnostates as made apparent in the debate which naturally restricts speech for non whites.
As an extreme example, would Ian support the free speech of a pedophile openly stating that they’d like to harm children? Would that not be absolute free speech? If you would not support that as legal speech, then congrats, you have restricted certain forms of speech.
Ian’s main complaint in our debate is that I refer to him as a Nazi. In the recording he acts horrified by this accusation, demanding over and over again to know how he is a liar and a Nazi and even defaults to saying that Nazis kick him out of their spaces (which is not completely true).
But Ian’s tweets tell a completely different story, he frequently posts content in praise of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. He goes out of his way to create posts and content that minimizes Hitler’s image from a genocidal dictator to a well meaning leader of the German people who was just trying to protect them from….you guessed it….degeneracy.
Ian believes that Nazis "righteously" attained power in Nazi Germany. Righteousness means to be "right" and to be "right" means to be morally correct and justified. If morality matters, and one wishes to be aligned with moral correctness, then one who says that Nazis are righteous (moral correctness) must believe that Nazis are as close to moral truth as possible. If Ian were a morally consistent human being, he ought be congruent with the moral claims, like righteousness, that he makes online.
Ian’s second complaint is that I refused to acknowledge what he believes in. He desperately wanted me to give attention to the Jewish Question. He argues that the Jews having power or influence is “unreasonable”.
Pay attention to my responses.
“Why is it unreasonable?” I pointed out that Malcolm is using Normative language. This means he’s invoking moral language here. He is essentially saying, “It is bad that Jews have power and influence.”
Ian never answers this question. He instead shifts the goalpost by changing the initial emphasis of “unreasonable” to now an emphasis on “overrepresentation”.
So I offer him a hypothetical, if there were any other group of people in power who were not Jews would this be an issue? Ian outright refuses to answer the hypothetical. There are two reasons for this:
Ian sees Jews as having a specific ideology or characteristic in which their power over others is particularly egregious.
Ian holds a contradictory ethic. He does not actually mind overrepresentation as long as the overrepresentation favors White Europeans.
Throughout Ian’s gish-galloping, a common and amateurish tactic where the arguer presents an excessive amount of arguments so that the opponent has two many things to respond to, we continue to focus on his normative claim of “unreasonable” to expose the real root of his ideology.
The biggest hole that Ian digs is his repeated reference to the issues of White Supremacy and White Privilege. He brings this up every time I ask why Jewish people having power and influence is unreasonable. He is either incapable of bridging the gap with the two claims or he actively chooses not to so that his audience “connects the dots”.
I finally ask Ian, “is White Supremacy unreasonable?”.
After scoffing incredulously he does his signature move, AVOIDING THE QUESTION. He does so twice until giving something of an answer by saying that he believes White Europeans should be able to collectivize and advocate for their existence and their future (more on how dishonest this language is at another time).
I push further, and ask if the existence of such advocacy is rightfully rejected because of the nature of the advocacy. That nature often being extremely racist and dehumanizing towards non whites. Such as the denial of their voting rights. Ian answers by saying that if it is legal to deny non whites their voting rights then it is fine with him.
Ian’s answers lead us to one of the fundamentally egregious natures of White Supremacism,
the denial of the rights of non white peoples in a society.
With everything that I have written here, I am correct to refer to Ian Malcolm as both a Nazi and a liar.
The next Nazi I debated is another anonymous identity called The Rev (Vybe_Rater). He began our engagement by saying he wanted to “axe” me a question. Obviously poking fun at the way some black people say the word “ask”. He did this twice before I asked why he was speaking that way and if he happened to have a lisp. This upset many of the Nazis onstage which shows how many of them do not seem to understand the offensive nature of overt racism but draw the line at potentially being insulted back.
This is an excellent time for me to explain why my strategy of staying calm and on target always works around online racists. Online White Supremacists spend most of their time in echo chambers where they build up outlandish ideas about other ethnic groups. They share a myriad of videos and images of mentally ill people of color and lie that this is naturally the behavior of black people.
There is very little to no philosophy or logic use in their groups. They supply tons of arguments and grievances but rarely ever do they justify their arguments.
Nazis, white supremacists and everything in between, are the worlds biggest empiricists and rarely are they ever rationalists. Their knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience, mostly observances about their relationship with non white people.
“When I was 18 and went to college I saw black people do this…”
“I was fired from my job and was replaced by an Indian person…”
These are the beginning of empiricist arguments that alone cannot derive oughts out of their is.
These men (whom most of them will be) are especially not used to women challenging them in debate. In their spaces white women are required to take a submissive role of speaking when spoken to. There is an attitude of the collective ownership of white women’s bodies, their minds and their spirituality. White women are often told to shut up, called slurs and epithets and older white women who can no longer have children are especially mistreated.
So, being a black woman means that I will be hit with a double whammy. I will be criticized and insulted for being black and I will be given extra heat and treated with vitriol for being a woman.
The only recourse is to push back on their rhetoric by staying calm, asserting my rightful place as a challenger in a conversation and push forward with an unapologetic attitude.
The Rev begins his interaction by placing the onus on me to question him straightforward. Credit to him, despite his Nazism, he demanded that we be able to speak without interruption and actually did seem interested in answering questions.
But this didn’t last when we got to the issue of the White Ethnostate. I asked Rev if he was in support of the White Ethnostate, to which he readily said he was. I explained why I think ethnostates are bad, the reason being that they naturally violate the rights of others. In my view, human rights are fundamentally derived from property rights, so I invoked their root justification in property rights and then asked Rev how he establishes rights-based systems.
As you can tell from the recording, this did not go well for him at ALL.
Rev’s scoffing and immediate refusal to answer seemed as if I had just asked the rudest personal question of his entire life. He claimed it was irrelevant. In actuality, because ethnostates make a major property claim, my question was perfectly justified.
If one ought have an ethnostate, WHY ought they have an ethnostate? What is the fundamental justification for an entire nation to be owned collectively by one race of people in which is unique and cannot be applied to any other group of peoples?
Throughout this interaction Rev became increasingly angry at the question and pretty much ends any further conversation by referring to me as, “one of the uppity ones,” an insulting way of saying, you are acting out of your place as a black person.
Rev’s classic southern racism was the language of a man who was threatened. He simply could not formulate a coherent answer to the question. Like most Nazis he had never thought about the philosophy and ethics of his Nazism. No one has ever asked him about property rights or even how human rights are derived. He’s never been sufficiently challenge on his politics because in the spaces he frequents fellow Nazis always use rhetoric and never logical argumentation.
The other two Nazis you’ll hear in the recording is a user named Truth Teller and Wulf. Two high profile Nazis who have a strong veneration for Hitler. They also both help operate a Nazism radio show. Playing translated Hitler speeches for hours before bringing people on mic to mostly complain about the existence of the Jewish people. You’ll notice that I directly engage Wulf and he backs off immediately, despite claiming that I am a horrible debater.
I think both users are excellent examples of ideological cowards.
Ultimately I enjoyed debating four Nazis at one time. I received various direct messages from people who even claimed to have been initially swayed by Ian Malcolm but see holes through his statements and views after my challenging of him. I also received direct messages from black men and women who were overjoyed that someone was finally standing up to these guys with real arguments. I was even invited to a second space but couldn’t attend as I was busy.
There are big challenges that the men I debated have to find logical answers to,
What is unreasonable about Jewish people being in positions of power?
What is universally different about Jewish people in which their access to power is fundamentally different than any other ethnic group.
Why do white people deserve an ethnostate?
Is your justification for the white ethnostate universal, ought other groups have an ethnostate or just white people?
Outside of your race, what about yourself makes you a valued member of society?
What are your accomplishments?
What makes human life valuable?
Where do Human rights originate?
Thank you for reading!
Oh and Ian Malcolm is a Nazi.