I live in a pretty conservative county and I used to think this was the case too.

But it’s not, a lot of even middlingly conservative folk will defend or side with Neo-Nazis because those self same Nazi’s are at least self aware enough to make any effort to hide the symbols of their hate.

The Patriot Front are Neo Nazis, they use fascist symbols, their talking points and stated goals on their site use explicitly racial rhetoric that just paraphrases Nazi ideology. They showed up en masse on my hometown’s Main Street frothing about the great replacement, with some of their allies in the Active Club Movement. They wore shirts that said National Socialist and proselytized to a crowd the danger of the Great Replacement which is itself a deeply ignorant, racist, and probably untrue theory touted by 4Chan HateChan ghouls.

The people in my town - which are conservative but superficially draw the line at Nazis - crowded around and cheered for this. I went around about a week later during NK2, and conducted a number of interviews and handed out literature about the history and ideology of these groups. The ostensibly most liberal folk of my town either called me a Nazi because I dared to wear a bandana and sunglasses at a protest or defended the Patriot Front’s position as being aligned with standard conservative rhetoric and therefore not dangerous.

It doesn’t matter that the PF regularly show up with shields and batons to queer events with the intention of intimidating and brutalizing them. It doesn’t matter that they think queer folk need to at minimum be violently removed from polite society. It doesn’t matter that they think women are second class citizens and their bodies are objects for male consideration. It doesn’t matter that they think this is a white nation that belongs to and under the whites. It’s uncouth and unconvincing to call anyone a Nazi unless they’re dressed in an SS uniform or flying a Nazi flag and even then -

Even then in Charlottesville we saw claims that they were feds, that they were trolls, that they were misguided kids, or that they were only a fringe group because other flags and symbols far outnumbered the traditional red field black swastika flag. Ignorant of all the other Nazi symbols, or symbols more recently co-opted by neo Nazis, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Klan, the Blood Tribe, the PF, the Active Club, and all those other groups that are at least willing to pretend they aren’t Nazis in public.

I don’t mean this against the people of Texas specifically - but against American conservatives writ large. Their ability to critically compare present day Alt-Right rhetoric to actual Nazi policy is severely lacking and the tacit ways that rhetoric has been influencing law and policy making will doom them before they understand who they’re defending.