Inside The Online Community Where Home-Schoolers Learn How To Turn Their Kids Into ‘Wonderful Nazis’, by Christopher Mathias

Disgusting, heartbreaking, profoundly racist, and anti-semitic. Using their own words, who the heck are the "Gay Afro Zionist scum" running the schools? A figment of their own imaginations, to be sure.

Geez, "Nazi homeschooling." This is what happens when homeschooling is completely unregulated with zero enforcement mechanisms of any regulations they do have. 

Poor children. They don't know anything different from hating people who are different from them. What a disservice. How irresponsible these adults who live in fear, holding contempt toward those whom they see as "other," less than. What a dystopian world to live in and to create. And for this to be the core of their curriculum is shameless and vulgar. Othering, othering, othering. Dehumanizing the other. So bankrupt. So evil. So sad.

In addition to neo-Nazi homeschooling our free-market-ideology legislatures simultaneously packed with authoritarian, religious-right populists are regelating our youth and society to the Dark Ages with educations that they themselves would never subject their own children to. Such hypocrisy. 

These communities need to wake up and see how they're getting played—and very much to their own, and their children's, detriment. Nothing good will come of this. Exposés like these are nevertheless helpful.

Angela Valenzuela

Inside The Online Community Where Home-Schoolers Learn How To Turn Their Kids Into ‘Wonderful Nazis’  

A Telegram group called Dissident Homeschool has been a resource for neo-Nazis who want to teach their kids hate at home. Now its administrators have been unmasked.

By 

Christopher Mathias | Washington Post | Jan. 29, 2023

The Dissident Homeschool channel on Telegram shares "Nazi-approved material" for home schooling.

ILLUSTRATION: DAMON DAHLEN/HUFFPOST; PHOTOS: GETTY

 On Nov. 5, 2021, a married couple calling themselves “Mr. and Mrs. Saxon” appeared on the neo-Nazi podcast “Achtung Amerikaner” to plug a new project: a social media channel dedicated to helping American parents home-school their children.

“We are so deeply invested into making sure that that child becomes a wonderful Nazi,” Mrs. Saxon told the podcast’s host. “And by home-schooling, we’re going to get that done.”

The Saxons said they launched the “Dissident Homeschool” channel on Telegram after years of searching for and developing “Nazi-approved material” for their own home-schooled children — material they were eager to share.

The Dissident Homeschool channel — which now has nearly 2,500 subscribers — is replete with this material, including ready-made lesson plans authored by the Saxons on various subjects, like Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee (a “grand role model for young, white men”) and Martin Luther King Jr. (“the antithesis of our civilization and our people”).

There are copywork assignments available for parents to print out, so that their children can learn cursive by writing out quotes from Adolf Hitler. There are recommended reading lists with bits of advice like “do not give them Jewish media content,” and there are tips for ensuring that home-schooling parents are in “full compliance with the law” so that “the state” doesn’t interfere.

The Saxons also frequently update their followers on their progress home-schooling their own children. In one since-deleted post to Telegram, they posted an audio message of their kids shouting “Sieg Heil” — the German phrase for “hail victory” that was used by the Nazis.

Over the past year, the Dissident Homeschool channel has become a community for like-minded fascists who see home schooling as integral to whites wresting control of America. The Saxons created this community while hiding behind a fake last name, but HuffPost has reviewed evidence indicating they are Logan and Katja Lawrence of Upper Sandusky, Ohio. Logan, until earlier this week, worked for his family’s insurance company while Katja taught the kids at home.

The Anonymous Comrades Collective, a group of anti-fascist researchers, first uncovered evidence suggesting the Lawrences are behind Dissident Homeschool. HuffPost has verified the collective’s research.

The Lawrences did not respond to repeated requests for comment made via phone calls, text messages and emails. A HuffPost reporter also left a message in the Dissident Homeschool channel asking Mr. and Mrs. Saxon for comment about the Anonymous Comrades Collective’s research. That message was immediately deleted by the channel’s administrators, who then disabled the channel’s comment and chat functions.

A short time later, Katja Lawrence deleted her Facebook page.

Although the Lawrences will now surely face some public scorn and accountability, it’s likely their neo-Nazi curriculum is legal. A concerted, decades-long campaign by right-wing Christian groups to deregulate home schooling has afforded parents wide latitude in how they teach their kids — even if that means indoctrinating them with explicit fascism.

Meanwhile major right-wing figures are increasingly promoting home schooling as a way to save children from alleged “wokeness” — or liberal ideas about race and gender — in public and private schools. As extreme as the Dissident Homeschool channel is, the propaganda it shares targeting the American education system is just a more explicit and crass articulation of talking points made by Fox News hosts or by major figures in the Republican Party.

“Without homeschooling our children,” Mrs. Saxon once wrote, “our children are left defenseless to the schools and the Gay Afro Zionist scum that run them.”

Do we need to update Godwin's Law about the probability of comparison to Nazis?

Excellent read from the creator of Godwin's Law (GL) himself, Mike Godwin.   If embryonic of horror, it should be a conversation starter, rather than stopper.  We're there.  So The short answer is "yes."  

To this, I would only add that GL is perspectival.  Many, if not most, Native peoples are not only generally acutely aware of our own genocidal history and ongoing destructive, scorched-earth campaigns against the environment, but also the epistemologies, dispositions and mindsets that undergird them.  Read on.

-Angela Valenzuela

Do we need to update Godwin's Law about the probability of comparison to Nazis?

By MIKE GODWIN

JUN 24, 2018 | 4:05 AM

Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler in an open cabriolet as he acknowledges a SA parade in Berlin, April 20, 1938. (Associated Press)

Does Godwin’s Law need to be updated? Suspended? Repealed? I get asked this question from time to time because I’m the guy who came up with it more than a quarter century ago.

In its original simple form, Godwin’s Law goes like this: “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches one.” It’s deliberately pseudo-scientific — meant to evoke the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the inevitable decay of physical systems over time. My goal was to hint that those who escalate a debate into Adolf Hitler or Nazi comparisons may be thinking lazily, not adding clarity or wisdom, and contributing to the decay of an argument over time.

The question of evil, understood historically, is bigger than party politics.

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Most recently GL has been invoked in response to the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border policy that resulted in the traumatic separation of would-be immigrants from their children, many of whom are now warehoused in tent cities or the occasional repurposed Walmart. For example, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden — no squishy bleeding heart — posted a couple of tweets on June 16that likened that policy to the Nazis’ treatment of children in Germany’s concentration camps. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein (a Democrat but also a security hawk) has made the comparison as well.

The response has been predictable: Debate for some people has been derailed by the trivial objection that, even if it is terrible to separate children from their parents (and sometimes lose track of them, or make it impossible for their parents contact them, or even deprive them of the comfort of human touch), it’s not as awful as what the Nazis did. Or as bad as the slave trade. Or as bad as what the expansion of the United States westward did to Native Americans.

My name gets cited in a lot of these discussions. And of course my ears are burning. It hasn’t mattered that I’ve explained GL countless times. Some critics on the left have blamed me for (supposedly) having shut down valid comparisons to the Holocaust or previous atrocities. Some on the right have insisted that I’m “PC” for having tweeted (a bit profanely) that it’s just fine to compare the white nationalists who plagued Charlottesville, Va., last year to Nazis. (I think they were mostly aspirational Nazi cos players.)

I don’t take either strain of criticism too seriously. But I do want to stress that the question of evil, understood historically, is bigger than party politics. GL is about remembering history well enough to draw parallels — sometimes with Hitler or with Nazis, sure — that are deeply considered. That matter. Sometimes those comparisons are going to be appropriate, and on those occasions GL should function less as a conversation ender and more as a conversation starter.

So let me start another conversation here. Take the argument that our treatment of those seeking asylum at our border, including children, is not as monstrous as institutionalized genocide. That may be true, but it’s not what you’d call a compelling defense. Similarly, saying (disingenuously) that the administration is just doing what immigration law demands sounds suspiciously like “we were just following orders.” That argument isn’t a good look on anyone.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion »

The seeds of future horrors are sometimes visible in the first steps a government takes toward institutionalizing cruelty. In his 1957 book “Language of the Third Reich,” Victor Klemperer recounted how, at the beginning of the Nazi regime, he “was still so used to living in a state governed by the rule of law” that he couldn’t imagine the horrors yet to come. “Regardless of how much worse it was going to get,” he added, “everything which was later to emerge in terms of National Socialist attitudes, actions and language was already apparent in embryonic form in these first months.”

So I don’t think GL needs to be updated or amended. It still serves us as a tool to recognize specious comparisons to Nazism — but also, by contrast, to recognize comparisons that aren’t. And sometimes the comparisons can spot the earliest symptoms of horrific “attitudes, actions and language” well before our society falls prey to the full-blown disease.

By all means cite GL if you think some Nazi comparison is baseless, needlessly inflammatory or hyperbolic. But Godwin’s Law was never meant to block us from challenging the institutionalization of cruelty or the callousness of officials who claim to be just following the law. It definitely wasn’t meant to shield our leaders from being slammed for the current fashion of pitching falsehoods as fact. These behaviors, distressing as they are, may not yet add up to a new Reich, but please forgive me for worrying that they’re the “embryonic form” of a horror we hoped we had put behind us.

Mike Godwin is a distinguished senior fellow at the R Street Institute. He is a former general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation and was the first employee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

How to Interview a Nazi, by Gary Younger

This is an interesting piece. Thought I would share.
-Angela
  How to Interview a Nazi

White supremacists should be challenged—not indulged by Gary Younger | The Nation

NOVEMBER 29, 2017

White nationalist Richard Spencer poses between interviews in College Station, Texas, on December 6, 2016. (AP Photo / David J. Phillip)

Tony and Maria Hovater registered for their wedding at Target. During an interview at Applebee’s, she wore a sleeveless jean jacket and ordered the boneless wings. He likes Seinfeld and King of the Hill, and described his time playing with a metal band over a turkey sandwich at Panera Bread. Oh, and they’re both Nazis. He thinks Hitler was “chill” about Slavs and gays, and considers the claim that 6 million Jews were slaughtered during World War II “overblown.” She’s “pretty lined up” politically with him. The political party he helped establish sells swastikas online.

We know this because The New York Times told us. In an article running more than 2,000 words, the paper of record profiled Mr. Hovater, detailing the banalities of a young man that reporter Richard Fausset characterizes as the “polite and low-key” “Nazi sympathizer next door.”

Interviewing Nazis is a tricky business, as I can attest from personal experience. In late July, just a few weeks before Charlottesville, I spoke with alt-right leader Richard Spencer at a white-supremacist conference for a documentary I was making for British television about white anxiety in the age of Trump. In the clip of our conversation—in which Spencer appears visibly shocked that I turned out to be a black man—he argued that African Americans benefited from slavery and white supremacy and insisted that I could not be both British and black. After about half an hour, I called time on the interview, pointing out that he was ignorant and had nothing to say.

I was conflicted about whether I should have talked to him at all, but given his connections to Breitbart News and Steve Bannon and the racially divisive and explosive mood created by Trump, I felt, on balance, it made sense.

That balance is important. Nazis should not be ignored. They are dangerous. We need to understand where they’re coming from, what motivates them, and what their strategies are. Ignoring bigotry doesn’t make it go away. The basic principles of journalism still apply: They should not be misrepresented, lampooned, or caricatured. But neither should they be indulged. We should not inflate their importance, ignore their brutality, or enable their self-aggrandizement. They are not regular politicians. Violence is central to their method; exclusion is central to their meaning.

Instead, they should be confronted, challenged, and exposed. How we engage them—and why—is an issue of political morality. This is an imperative that sits uneasily with flaccid notions of journalistic objectivity, in which those views that make it through the filter are considered equal, regardless of their factual or moral integrity. “On the one hand, on the other hand” doesn’t work here: You can’t weigh genocide against relatively stable democracy as though any reasonable person might disagree on the outcome.

In these moments—and with the rise of the far right across the Western world, there are many of them—the claim that journalists sit above society, as though in a hermetically sealed chamber, responsible only to their editors and “the story,” becomes increasingly thin. We have responsibilities, both professional and human, to resist the allure of spectacle. There is too much at stake.

The Times article failed on most of these counts. Indeed, thanks to its obsession with the trivial details of the Hovaters’ daily lives, its effect was not to expose the obscenity of their views, but rather to underscore the normality of their existence. It offered this as a revelation, as though Hannah Arendt had never covered Adolf Eichmann’s trial. The idea that Nazis go shopping, watch television, and eat at chain restaurants shouldn’t surprise us: They generally live “next door” to someone. Fascism, as the British poet Michael Rosen pointed out, doesn’t arrive in fancy dress. Fascists do not appear with horns and a trident, any more than the proud advocates of segregation 50 years ago were anything other than ordinary Americans.

As Wednesday Addams explains in the Addams Family movie, as she heads off to a Halloween party in the same clothes she wears every day: “I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everyone else.”

This is essentially the same mistake that the British press makes every time it profiles a jihadi terrorist. The reporters marvel that the killer in question once supported Manchester United, ate fish-and-chips, drank in pubs, and had girlfriends. In short, having first set him up as an aberration beyond societal norms, they then salivate over how familiar a person who has made hate his mission can be. It is a function of white privilege that white terrorists get this treatment even as they freely voice their commitment to terror. If The New York Times ran a profile on Saturday of a Muslim associated with the kind of violence that Tony Hovater embraces (after Charlottesville, he wrote that he was proud of the comrades who’d joined him there: “We made history. Hail victory”), he’d be in prison by Sunday.

I make no great claims for my interview with Spencer. Television is a different beast, both less nuanced and more powerful. But I don’t think, by the time that sequence concludes, that anyone could be in doubt as to the vehemence of his racist views. I also believe that Spencer’s pomposity, ignorance, and inability to make a case for those views will leave anyone who watches it feeling less likely to identify with him rather than more.

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