You don't get neo-Nazis like that anymore.

These days, it's all about the crypto-fascism.

Are you not familiar with crypto-fascism? All right, let me bring you up to speed.

Crypto-fascists are a particularly pernicious and pussified species of neo-Nazi. Unlike the old-school neo-Nazis, who at least had the courtesy to go around hollering Nazi slogans and heiling Hitler in public so that everyone knew that they were neo-Nazis, crypto-fascists are sneaky little cowards who pretend they aren't neo-Nazis and hide behind pseudonyms and coded rhetoric.

Their natural habitat is the Internet, but they can adapt to almost any environment, creepy little chameleon-like cravens that they are.

They are generally more intelligent than your Aryan Brotherhood-type of neo-Nazis. They do not tend to festoon themselves with swastika- and SS bolt-tattoos or display any other kind of Nazi insignia, as doing that would negatively affect their ability to furtively slink around fomenting racial hatred like a cunning little weasels.

Of course, your more prominent crypto-fascists don't hide behind pseudonyms and anonymous X accounts like a bunch of snickering little adolescent trolls. You might recognize the names of some of them, "alt right" creeps like Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, Andrew Anglin (although Anglin's neo-Nazism isn't exactly "crypto"), and European "Identitarians" like Martin Sellner and his wife Brittany, or Björn Höcke of the Alternativ für Deutschland party.

You can read up on all those creeps on your own. This isn't an in-depth investigative piece about crypto-fascism and its creepy adherents. There are more than enough of those articles on the Internet.

No, the main reason I was moved to write about these creeps is that I have to believe that there is still a large number of my conservative readers who are not neo-fascists, and who do not want to be lumped in with neo-fascists, whether of the old-school or crypto-fascist variety. Despite the fact that I'm an old hippie-looking lefty, I am fond of my conservative readers. I respect them. And thus I hate to see them being preyed upon by crypto-fascists.

Which is exactly what is happening currently.

Now, before I go any further with this, I need to clarify a few points. Because I have written scores of satirical columns mercilessly skewering the mainstream media and paranoid liberals for fomenting mass hysteria over "the crypto-fascist menace."

This mass hysteria was particularly pervasive during 2016-2020, when the Powers That Be were desperately trying to convince everybody that Trump was "Literally Hitler," and that he was organizing an underground army of Russian-backed American neo-Nazis who were going to frontally assault the United States military and annihilate Western democracy, and so on.