| Many Nazis support the AfD, not every AfD supporter is a Nazi. Some people are just idiots. And a not-so-insignificant amount of people are plain "protest voters" who vote for the most unacceptable party the media talks about (before AfD this was the NPD) to "stick it to the man". I watched most of the federal convention of the AfD and the party basically unifies a number of different political interest groups, including but not limited to literal Nazis. Almost all of these groups are right-wing and almost all of them are nationalist or ethno-nationalist. The moderates are actually almost palatable (their main argument always boils down to "but think of the children") but the party tries very hard to pretend there is no diversity of opinion among its members. FWIW, the aforementioned moderates are often extremely "conservative" (i.e. queers are destroying society and corrupting our children, gay men are pedophiles, sex education should be abstinence only, etc). There's also a disturbing amount of support for fringe conspiracy theories (chemtrails, holocaust denialism, sovereign citizens aka "Reichsbürger", etc). Saying "but some of the things some of them say are true" is missing the point. You can't take the AfD seriously because it's a hot mess that is heavily influenced by ideologies that are bordering on being anti-constitutional. It's like attempting to justify bringing Adolf Hitler into a conversation about healthcare because he's a vegetarian. Yes, vegetarianism might have a place in that discussion, but nobody would expect that to be particularly helpful because he'll likely derail the conversation to say something awful about Jews. The AfD's official position on so many things is so far off the mark you can't cooperate with them on any detail without suffering their taint on everything else. You can have reasoned discussions about immigration (e.g. how we actually handle immigration has resulted in plenty of problems on all sides) but you can not base it on a stance that is inherently anti-constitutional. |