It also doesn’t help there are at least two different totenkopf’s. The older Prussian cavalry badge, which has many variants, and the SS one designed specifically for them.

Context matters a lot. He got the tattoo with military buddies in the early 2000s, in Romania.

It's not very hard to imagine a group of drunk 20 year old men picking a skull tattoo because it "looks badass". There was almost certainly a language barrier with the tattoo artist and back then we didn't all have computers in our pockets to access all the world's information.

Really not that hard to belive they saw a skull as a skull. It's a relatively obscure symbol even in the modern day.

I think one of the issues is, to have these people that grow up into roles where they choose to shoulder a lot of responsibility, see the world's faults, and act beyond their station to resolve it...you kind of need a complex character for that. Someone who didn't just grow up in a poor environment, saying no to every opportunity (because they're all offered by evil crooks) to finally come out as a competent legislator with big social media presence.

We're very lucky to have waitresses turned Senator like AOC, but those perfect, morally unblemished stories of zero to hero are hard to come by. Hence why a lot of noir stories about a detective getting justice for the marginalized (anyone playing Mouse, PI?) will emphasize how morally grey they act. A lot of people are working to fight fascism because they want to recognize how they've unknowingly contributed to it (not necessarily by voting for Trump) and want to amend their mistakes.

To give an example: I haven't contributed to fascism. I also don't personally know people hurt by it. While I consider it a civic duty to fight, at times I struggle to develop motivation to do risky, above-and-beyond actions that may take up a large part of my day for low gains. That might be different for someone who's either been hit hard by it, or feels direct responsibility for it, eg by joining the army.

I get it… And if I lived there and had to vote I would absolutely do more thinking on it, but my view from afar is why can’t we just find people to run with these campaign platforms who don’t have Nazi tattoos? It isn’t that hard.

It really is. It's far, far harder than you're pretending. Do most people have tattoos that could be considered a Nazi symbol? No. But most people have some things in their background, some skeletons in their closet, that could violate one purity test or another and make them unelectable to you. Because you likely don't just have one purity test - you have hundreds.

The problem with purity tests is that paradoxically, your tests end up selecting for the absolutely most evil people in society. You're selecting for absolute power-hungry sociopaths - people who have lived their entire lives carefully controlling their public image. You get people with perfect social media profiles they've curated from childhood. You get disingenuous politicians that don't actually hold any real values and hold off from making any firm commitments.

Purity tests are precisely why we end up with milquetoast ineffectual Democrats that never fight for or believe in anything. Real people with real beliefs and real passions fuck up sometimes. And sometimes they hold some beliefs that go against today's social media zeitgeist.

And I'm not talking about forgiving truly unforgivable things like sexual harassment or assault. We don't need to carry water for rapists and actual criminals. But there is something incredibly dangerous about condemning people based on relatively minor mistakes from their past. It's unjust and it makes sure that you end up with the most evil people getting elected to office. Real human beings aren't saints. If you demand your politicians resemble saints, you won't get saints. You'll just get sociopaths pretending to be saints.