From reading the particular thread, I don't know if it's the KX devs saying they will remove Pelley from the mod but more them either mocking/clarifying why the devs of the main mod did.
You can make a argument that Hoi4's gameplay makes Fascism and other Extremes Ideologies out to be good by how they play, and since most modders that make content based off real life have very overt political biases the last thing they'd want is to make their political opponents out to be logical or a good choice. Adding onto this, some people may see a mod featuring a real life political leader and take that mods portrayal of said person as either a endorsement of said Ideology or a condemnation of it.
Not to get too meta, but it's an issue that plagues every facet of WW2 media. If it's a film, you need Germans in endless Panthers and Tigers and Hanomags because that's sexy and gets explosions and looks cool and it's what the audience expects. If it's a strategy game you need the German economy to be as powerful as the Brits and Americans and Soviets, and if it's an action game you need a prodigious amount of mechanized forces everywhere to make the threats to a one man army believable. Even in simulators like Red Orchestra, the teams have to balanced so it never seems like the Soviets held a fire superiority advantage over the Germans at any point and the two sides are exactly equal in the meta sense; the forces are different by virtue of player skill rather than the material advantages of industrial production that wins big wars.
Pelley was an insane schizo with a retarded ideology and therefore perfect for alt-history mods of HoI4. Modders and the "community" are fucking stupid.
Oh they definitely aren't going to remove Pelley. He's not even that bad in KX (as has been said, he only got that way after witnessing the rise of Hitler IRL and was more just a legitimately funny schizo before that, and since Hitler never gets anywhere in the Kaiserreich timeline...). The most evil paths for a right-wing America in the mod all belong to the KKK, who aren't even in the same faction as him: they're in the CAR (Deep South), he's with Huey's AUS (based in the Western plains states mostly, though it does extend to Texas & Louisiana).
A lot of these people are too mentally fragile to have fun doing evil shit in games. If you lurk enough in any HOI4 mod subreddit, or even any gaming subreddits in general, you will find people who completely swear off specific paths just because they are racist/sexist/imperialist/etc.
It really is impressive, but I have to admit it is extremely annoying to start up a new game to test out some new country's tree only for a new update to come out and corrupt my save.
They announced it a while ago. The tl;dr here: Silver Legion is out, Huey Long rebranded as NatPop, pretend that this is a job well done.
So basically, they just cut the guy because they didn't like him and then proceeded to just make Huey fucking Long a NatPop and lump him in with the Iron Legion and then justify the thing by saying that "he's both nationalist AND populist", which basically just outright retardation. You can even see it in the post, they were so lazy about it that they still have him be a pretty normal guy that does welfare programs and destroys the Klan like in the old content. They did add a boiler plate Texan politician as the new Authorian Democrat (basically a right-of-center ideology slot for the non-KR players out there) and gave him the world's most generic tree ever and masqueraded that as actual content.
Oh my fucking God, KR is never ever going to let this meme of 'Long man bad' go, are they. Their characterization of Long has pretty much always been based entirely on It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis' long agendapost against the man and love letter to FDR (quite the tyrant himself and hardly as much of a democratic champion as liberal propaganda would have you believe), rather than any actual facts and this just further cements that nonsense. But it's made even funnier by the existence of Alfalfa Bill, the Oklahoma governor who was literally EVERYTHING they want to slander Long as. That man was a comically corrupt thug (yeah, Long was pretty shady too, but you basically had to be to have a prayer in machine-dominated Southern politics at the time and at least he actually brought benefits to the people instead of just himself & his cronies), generally friendly and protective toward big business, far more overtly oppressive (Long declared martial law once to square off with his rival the Mayor of Baton Rouge & to suppress an insurrection by a Standard Oil front group also supported by the latter, Murray invoked martial law more than 30 times & usually for bullshit that benefited nobody but himself), and a giga-racist with actual fascistic sympathies.So basically, they just cut the guy because they didn't like him and then proceeded to just make Huey fucking Long a NatPop and lump him in with the Iron Legion and then justify the thing by saying that "he's both nationalist AND populist", which basically just outright retardation. You can even see it in the post, they were so lazy about it that they still have him be a pretty normal guy that does welfare programs and destroys the Klan like in the old content. They did add a boiler plate Texan politician as the new Authorian Democrat (basically a right-of-center ideology slot for the non-KR players out there) and gave him the world's most generic tree ever and masqueraded that as actual content.
It's like HOI4 modders are having an arms race in political retardation.
There's virtually no reason to play KR over KX at the moment, besides maybe like 5 countries that are outdated in KX, like Qanon Serbia and such. Especially now that KX has graduated from being a collection of wacky sub-mods to being a parallel mod with far more frequent and robust updates that don't fall into the paradox of autistically trying to be as "reaslistic" as possible in a fucking alt-history game.
How interesting is the CAR? Is there more to them than just neo-COnfederate racists or is that their gimmick? Never played them and want to know for my next America run in Redux.
They also believe Long was a diehard racist because he didn't givee the blacks free shit or something and was from the South, despite evidence to the contrary that he was remarkeably progressive for a Southerner and actually provided the black Lousianans shit. Sure he didn't end segregation byt these retards don't understand political machines and how that would have nuked his career.
The only justifiable reason to play KR over KX could be stability and game speed, but it's either just my new PC not being a total potato or something KX devs did, but it runs pretty well now. Other than that everything you said is correct, playing KR now just feels like a bad tatse in the mouth, sort of like playing vanilla HOI4.
Surprisingly deep for the faction that's usually memed as the giga-racist hicks and little else. The Klan paths are their best-known, but they actually have a varied selection of alternatives if you don't want to burn a perfectly good cross...
I think an absolute unwillingness to extend any consideration of nuance to right-wing figures is to blame here, on top of the usual historical/political illiteracy common to the KR devs. Long's evil because 1) one of FDR's pet propagandists said so, and 2) he's a pre-civil rights era Southern politician who didn't dedicate his every waking moment & every bit of political capital on hand to undermining Jim Crow at all costs. They consider him fundamentally interchangeable with the likes of Murray, to an even greater extent than he himself or another contemporary white Southerner would've considered Japanese & Chinese people to be basically the same, because hey they're all unwholesome white Southern Christian guys who don't worship blacks and the alphabet soup. And being proudly & willfully ignorant leftards they will clearly never, ever allow their minds to be changed on this subject.
They're pretty fun overall. The only real Neo Confederate aspect is that the Old Klan can form the Golden Circle(the event doesn't mention the CSA though and is only described as being used to expand "Klannist" interests) and the Young Klan can have a modified Confederate flag as the new national flag. They focus on turning America into a racial corporatist state and can chose to give limited autonomy to the black belt. The other major Klan faction is Armstrong's Christian Identity. His path basically is Pelly's old KR path cranked up to 11 with the final choice being whether to fully isolate as America or go to war against Britain and Germany to unite the "lost tribes of Israel". During his tree you'll get events about a polio epidemic, if you chose to ignore it you'll get one about purging the Young Klan, chose to purge them and you'll get a coup where you can either elect George Lincoln Rockwell or Francis Parker Yockey. These two are obviously memey since both men were 19 at KX's start date, Rockwell just forms the American Constitutional Republic which consists of his IRL ideas sans NS since Hitler didn't come to power while Yockey gets to go and conquer all of Europe to form the Imperium.
One of the biggest criticism's I've heard of Long from leftists is that he vetoed an anti lynching law.
This FDR guy must have really been the devil if you had mildly racist at worst populists teaming up with actually racist populists to take him down. Speaking of Long, the whole placement of him taking the South in KR is bad as well, but another holdover from old KR. Even users of the subreddit have pointed out that Long's political base IRL was Louisiana, Texas, and the largely agrarian and impoverished Midwest where his programs would have been most beneficial.
