“Kent, a former neo-Nazi, credits an African-American parole officer named Tiffany Whittier with helping him to see beyond skin color and changing his views about white supremacy.
“If it wasn’t for her I would have seeped back into it,” said Kent. “I look at her as family.”
Whittier, 45, even inspired Kent, 38, to take down the Nazi flags he had hanging in his living room and replace them with smiley faces.
“I’m not here to judge him. That’s not my job to judge. My job is to be that positive person in someone’s life,” Whittier said.
Added Kent, “When you wake up and see a smiley face, you’re going to go to work and you’re going to smile.”
Kent now works full-time on a chicken farm in Colorado, where all his co-workers are Hispanic.
“Before all this, I wouldn’t work for anybody or with anybody that wasn’t white,” said Kent. “[Now] we have company parties, or they have quinceañeras, I’m the only white guy there!”
Redemption Ink, a national non-profit that offers free removals of hate-related tattoos, helped connect Kent with Fallen Heroes Tattoo in Colorado to begin the 15-hour process of covering his swastikas. The sterile environment is new to Kent who had his previous ink work done in prison.
“I’ve never, never, never been inside of a tattoo shop getting a professional tattoo,” he said.
Kent believes the painful process will help him move forward after spending years as a member of a violent skinhead group based in Arizona. As a father of two young children, Kent also hopes his children will see the world differently.
“I don’t want my kids to live the life I lived and live with hate,” said Kent. “I want my kids to know me for who I am now—a good father, a hard worker, and a good provider.””
@ the punch a Nazi crowd
Huh… almost like just being there for someone and talking to them can change their minds
Oh now that’s just crazy talk.
I bet if she just punched him that would have worked sooner
Noice
awesome for him, that he got deradicalized.
but the people above me are goddamn idiots. one doesn’t kill (replacing punch with this since it’s good to clarify goals) a nazi for the nazis sake. it’s for their victims sake.
hell, revoking naziism may not even save this man’s life. if he ever did any harm in the name of supremacy, then his death would be righteous.
but all of this has no impact on the fact that it’s great that this guy is no longer a nazi.
even if he gets the death he may very well deserve, at least he didn’t hurt any more people, and at least he got to live not as a nazi for however long
This lady broke him of his shittiness for the victim’s sake too. This guy not only won’t hurt anyone for the sake of his beliefs, but he is actively doing good, and seemingly doing greater good by the community in which he found himself. Or are you thinking that going to prison and reforming isn’t enough of a punishment for crimes committed?
I wouldn’t even take this attitude with a fucking communist, and they’d happily murder both you and I given the chance if history is any indicator. People changing objectively for the better is always something worth celebrating.
i have no idea whether imprisonment was punishment enough, because the article does not specify what he was imprisoned for, how long, where, or what sort of things he may have done in prison as an active nazi.
prison didn’t reform him. the article was quite clear on that. his connection to outside humanity reformed him.
i’m not concerned with “greater good”, which is a bs term anyways. i’m concerned with what’s just, and the fact that there might very well be justice in this man’s death before reformation is an indicator that it absolutely wouldn’t be wrong to “punch” him then.
> thinks “greater good” is a BS term
> doesn’t think “justice” is a BS term
Look, I get that “greater good” has been used to justify atrocities… but what exactly do you think is used to justify inter-generational ethnic revenge killings, the kind that spiral out of control and start ethnic civil wars?
“Justice.”
You’re so eager to punch or kill, even though “any harm” could mean as little as graffiti.
Liberals may not understand how Liberalism works, but it does have mechanisms through which it does work. You have to think about the mechanics of the incentives.
When you let people marry their cousins, and those people are from extremely patriarchal families from extremely patriarchal cultures, those families can use the cousin marriage as means through which to control and isolate women and reinforce patriarchal cultural transmission, even when a cousin marriage between two others would not impose this effect.
There are mechanics to the incentives. For the liberalism to work, people can’t be so deeply controlled by their families. They have to open to atomization and cultural transmission.
When you want to kill someone regardless of the actual level of threat they pose or have posed, it undermines the incentives to quit.
For the Liberalism to work, “exit” has to be a viable strategy.
You might say “but it undermines the incentives to join!”, but the “lol punchanazi” crowd don’t understand the incentives to join and are ideologically prohibited from understanding or addressing them, so that doesn’t float.
Do you care about healing society? Or, like the man who launched van attacks on Muslims in the UK in response to multiple van attacks by Muslims in the same, even though they weren’t the same individuals, are you out for revenge?
And don’t give me “NAZIS ARE ON THE VERGE OF TAKING OVER AMERICAN SOCIETY!” thing. They aren’t, and those who think they are, are high on their own propaganda supply. Charlottesville required busing them from across the whole country.
Anyhow, if people thought that the “lol punchanazi” crowd would stop at actual, literal Nazis, they probably would just let it go, silently. But almost everyone knows they won’t.
So now we all have to be concerned about the safety of Nazis, because the “lol punachanazis” are terrible at things like “check that the man you’re punching is actually a Nazi first.” (”But why would a non-Nazi be afraid of being mistaken for a Nazi?” - because wearing a hat that said “Make Bitcoin Great Again” was enough to get maced.) Charlottesville may have resulted in a kill for them, but there was a masked man hitting people with a bike lock in Berkeley. It’s only through chance that “Antifa” (in the public perception) didn’t get “first blood.”
As such, each incident is going to drive justification for right-wing behavior.
“But what about the bad things right-wingers do?” - why the fuck do you think they’ve been losing the culture war (not fiscal policy) so badly? Would the nation be less right-wing if the Vietnam War hadn’t eroded confidence in national wars? There’s a sharp divide in Millennial support for Democrats based on age, which just so happens to coincide with the Bush Administration. They may have lost an entire generation over that dumbass Iraq war. Yes, the Iraqis got it worse, but bad right-wing actions have been part of the reason for society’s shift leftward, socially, for centuries, now.