Bigotry and swearing are not the same thing, and you fucking know it

I didn't claim it was, I also don't claim "maga" is bigotry. I'm saying both are something someone could take offense to.

What matters is the content and the admin/moderation team. Our instance has fantastic admins IMO, and I haven't had issues with mods either. I don't know what the mods/admins look like on maga.place since nobody seems to be interested in that, only the name of the instance and the posts in their conservative community.

It is rooted in a worldview that’s all bad faith, campism, and proudly intolerable behavior.

I think it's just saying the quiet part out loud. That type of behavior happens all the time from the left side of the aisle as well.

Look at all the people calling anyone remotely conservative "fascist," do you think that comes from a careful review of the facts, or more from tribalism? I think it's the latter. Yes, there are fascists on the right, but that doesn't mean everyone on the right are fascists, just like there are communists on the left but not everyone on the left is communist.

Accurate statistics about gang violence and birthrates don’t make hyperfixation on those things any less racist!

Sure, and the same can be said for leftist content with high factual accuracy (e.g. Mother Jones). I read both, as well as "neutral" news (minimal overall bias) to get a good idea of the facts. Spin is fine, provided I'm aware of it and can find the opposite spin with similar factual reporting.

You are defending the honor of a literal Nazi newspaper,

I'm not talking about honor, I'm talking about freedom of speech. I'll also defend the right for communist, tankie, and other far left content to exist on the same grounds. One of my favorite musical artists is Rage Against the Machine despite never agreeing with their political message, because I love that they can be so blatantly against our current system. I want more speech that I disagree with, not less, because challenging closely held ideas is how we make progress, because we're forced to elucidate why we hold them.

We don’t need Nazis.

But we do. Nazism was a popular movement, and we need people to understand it or we're doomed to repeat that era of history. If we hide it, people will forget why it was so bad and it'll fester until it gains enough power to cause problems.

I recommend watching some of Peter Thiel's talks, because he makes interesting points, while doing the thing he warns of. It's incredibly interesting to see how blind he is to what he's doing. Basically, he says people are so obsessed with security that they'll give more power to the state, which will bring about the Anti-Christ (i.e. someone like Hitler), who sells "safety" in exchange for absolute control. And then you look at his company, Palantir, which provides the tools to the government to do that exact same thing, provide security in exchange for absolute control.

Being so scared of fascism that we won't allow publication of fascist works is a huge part of this obsession with security in exchange for freedom. I reject that.

I believe the safest society is one where people feel so uncomfortable that they take that responsibility on themselves instead of outsourcing it to someone in power. I believe we need to strip entities from centralized control and provide tools for individuals to make decisions for themselves. I avoid fascist content because I find the ideas bankrupt, not because it's unavailable to me. In the context of Lemmy, it's a decentralized system, so we should be trying to decentralize moderation as much as possible instead of relying on admins to defederate when something looks scary.

Reddit being cool with fascists was a world-changing problem, and a big part of why I fucking left.

That's not why I left. I left because they removed choice by closing their API, which meant I was forced to use their clients. I stayed away because they cracked down on moderators who protested. I was never really happy with the way moderation worked, but I was able to vote with my subscription and move to subs whose moderation I liked, so it worked well while Reddit stayed out of it. The moment they asserted top down control is when I left.

This is also why I like sh.itjust.works. The admins have a very hands off approach and only step in when there's actual abuse, and leave the rest to the users. That's how platforms should work IMO.