I wonder what effect this sort of "debate" in public is having on people's ability to talk to each other.
In a normal discussion if you and I were just talking to each other and nobody was watching, it would be easy for you to just admit that you are wrong. You are wrong about your comparisons between center right American politicians being similar in any meaningful way to Nazis (for instance: both Nazis and American conservatives use spoken word to convey their messages. They both held political rallies. These are not meaningful similarities.), and you are also wrong about your understanding of people raising their hands in prayer.
https://churchleaders.com/worship/worship-articles/341942-10...
Do a google search for "lifting single hand while praying in church" and you will find pages and pages and pages of religious people debating the biblical relevance of this. There is absolutely nothing meaningfully similar between a religious person raising their hand in prayer (what was happening in the linked video) and a Nazi salute.
You were just simply incorrect about this, seemingly because you didn't know about the practice of religious people doing this.
In a normal conversation, it would be easy for you to just receive this piece of information you didn't have previously, integrate it into your understanding about the world, and rebuild your arguments around this new understanding.
But online, especially with twitter and the like, every one of these discussion is effectively happening on a stage in front of hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people. People (I think you are doing this right now) will go so far to avoid being wrong about something, that they eventually get to the point of having to build and present a world model that is totally rotated around the thing they were wrong about. The entire world has to change to support this minor inaccuracy in what was said.
So for example: instead of acknowledging the fact that you were just wrong about how people pray, you are now building out this world in which The United States of America is filled with thousands of churches full of millions of people who for the last several hundred years at least have been signaling their alignment with a genocidal, national socialist German death cult.
Can you see how that's a problem? Not the way you're engaging with this (which I do think is a problem), but the fact of making all of every conversation public?
Even suppose we were having this conversation in a private message. Even that doesn't matter because either of us could just screenshot it, put it on twitter, and invite the mob to ridicule the person who was wrong.
Look at the lengths people will go to protect their idea of "well actually the entire world is wrong and I'm right".
It's really scary stuff.
I don't think it's necessary to continue talking to you about Nazis and how American Christians are or aren't signaling an alignment with them. However in the spirit of good argument, I think it's also rude to try to take the last word and not let somebody reply. Feel free to respond to this, but after that I won't be replying to you anymore.
Please have a nice day.