The group left in a U-Haul box truck that was driven out of the county, police said, indicating the demonstrators were outsiders.

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.”

  • @[email protected]
    8•9 months ago

    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.

    • @orclev
      -2•9 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
        6•9 months ago

        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:

        The fighting words doctrine, in United States constitutional law, is a limitation to freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

        In 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court established the doctrine by a 9–0 decision in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire.[1] It held that “insulting or ‘fighting words’, those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace” are among the “well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech the prevention and punishment of [which] … have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem.”

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words

        Here’s a more modern revision:

        In R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992) and Virginia v. Black (2003), the Court held that cross burning is not ‘fighting words’ without intent to intimidate.

        Like what?

        • @orclev
          4•9 months ago

          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.

      • @[email protected]
        5•9 months ago

        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.