The GOP Can’t Hide From Extremism

Donald Trump has finally said openly what he has always wanted: suspend the U.S. Constitution so he can reverse his defeat in 2020.  Meanwhile, Elon Musk is unleashing a torrent of hate and extremism by retoring Twitter account to those previously banned for forment hate. bigotry and violence - supposedly to champion "free speech" - even as leading Republicans still prostitute themselves to Trump and the increasing hideous base of the party.   Under these circumstances, as a piece in The Atlantic describes, many believe it will be impossible for the GOP to turn away from extremism and even close to white Christian nationalist who are Christian in name only but open white supremacists. The irony, of course, is that the 2022 mid-term results demonstrated that a majority of Americans wanted nothing to do with Trump and the white Christian nationalist agenda.  Yet, this reality appears lost on the rank and file of the party and the talking heads on Fox News and other right wing "news outlets" despite a new survey showing  that the so-called "Nones" - the fastest growing religious category in the nation even as the number of evangelicals shrinks - voted two to one Democrat in 2022.  As noted in yesterday's post, the GOP seems locked in a doom cycle.    Here are highlights from The Atlantic:

The role of extremist white nationalists in the GOP may be approaching an inflection point.

The backlash against former President Donald Trump’s meeting with Nick Fuentes, an avowed racist, anti-Semite, and Christian nationalist, has compelled more Republican officeholders than at any point since the Charlottesville riot in 2017 to publicly condemn those extremist views.

Yet few GOP officials have criticized the former president personally—much less declared that Trump’s meeting with Fuentes and Ye, the rapper (formerly known as Kanye West) who has become a geyser of anti-Semitic bile, renders him unfit to serve as president again.

Even this distancing from Fuentes (if not Trump) comes as House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, the putative next speaker, is poised to restore prominent committee assignments for Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, two House Republicans who have publicly associated with Fuentes. It also comes as Republican officials, including McCarthy and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, are locking arms in support of Elon Musk’s push to allow extremist voices more access to Twitter.

Although it took days to develop, some believe the widespread Republican criticism of Trump’s meeting could signal a new determination to restore the barriers between mainstream conservatism and far-right Christian and white nationalism that eroded during the Trump era.

Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under Trump who focused on domestic extremism, told me she believes the backlash—however belated—combined with the GOP’s disappointing performance in last month’s midterm elections, could mark a turning point.

Yet others remain unconvinced that the GOP is ready to fundamentally break with Trump or ostracize the coalition’s overtly racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic white supremacists and Christian nationalists. “I think what we are looking at is the entrenchment of extremism, and that’s what is so worrisome,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told me.

Michael Edison Hayden of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project told me. If Musk opens the door to extremist organizing on Twitter, Hayden said, the white-nationalist presence in the GOP coalition will become “potentially irreversible in the short term.”

Other officials inside the GOP coalition have pushed through the boundaries Trump has weakened. Gosar and Greene both appeared at Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference. So did Republican Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers, who called the audience at one of the events “patriots,” and declared, “We need to build more gallows. If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them, and use a newly built set of gallows, it’ll make an example of these traitors who have betrayed our country.”

The Republican-controlled Arizona State Senate censured Rogers this year for threatening her colleagues, but she was nevertheless fulsomely embraced by Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor this year. Other prominent GOP candidates, including Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, also associated with white and Christian nationalists or directly echoed themes from those movements this year.

McCarthy also promised Greene and other hard-line conservatives that he would authorize an investigation into the government’s prosecution and treatment of the January 6 insurrectionists, many of whom are extremists tied to white and Christian nationalism.

“After Trump’s rise, these barriers became softer and softer, and they really broke down in the aftermath of January 6 altogether,” Hayden said. “And now you have this kind of opening between the fringe world and the mainstream world in a way that is very difficult to separate.”

Musk has quickly become a major new factor in further razing those barriers between the far right and the conservative mainstream, restoring the Twitter accounts of figures banned for misinformation, promotion of violence, or intimidation—including Trump and Greene. Hayden said the Southern Poverty Law Center’s research shows that some previously banned white nationalists have already been restored to the site.

In a torrent of combative posts, Musk wrapped himself in the mantle of “free speech” to justify restoring accounts previously banned for violating the site’s standards. And he’s accused individuals and institutions that argue for drawing a line against extremist rhetoric of threatening the core American value of free expression. In Musk’s formulation, even the most noxious forms of hate speech can be justified as free speech, and any effort to combat divisive rhetoric is an un-American attempt at censorship or intimidation by the “woke” mob. . . . According to Musk’s logic, it’s a form of “tyranny” to oppose his amplification of authoritarian, racist, and neo-Nazi views antithetical to democracy.

The rush of GOP leaders such as McCarthy, DeSantis, and incoming House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan to support Musk as he works to restore more banned accounts shows how hard it will be for the GOP to completely divorce itself from white and Christian nationalism.

[O]nly about one in 11 Republicans expresses directly favorable views of white-nationalist groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers . . . . But a much larger slice of Republican partisans express views that might be called white-nationalist adjacent. In various polls, preponderant majorities of GOP voters have said that discrimination against white people is now as big a problem as bias against minorities, that Christianity in the U.S. is under assault, and that the growing number of immigrants threatens American values and traditions. About half of Republicans have expressed agreement in other polls with tenets of white nationalism, including the racist “replacement theory” . . . .

[T]he receptivity of so many Republican voters to arguments, even if less virulent, that overlap with those championed by white- and Christian-nationalist organizations may be a crucial reason for party leaders’ reluctance to confront Trump and others, like Greene, who have associated with such groups. Given the extent of such views inside the GOP coalition, Neumann said, Republicans feel no political incentive to reject the far right “other than out of the goodness of their heart and moral clarity. And apparently that wasn’t enough.”

Neumann, now the chief strategy officer of Moonshot, a company that combats online extremism, worries that organized far-right violence could still erupt if Trump ever faces a trial as a result of the various investigations targeting him. But she sees the possibility that the visibility and influence of the extreme right inside the GOP peaked with this fall’s converging events, especially the party’s disappointing election results.

For the short term future at least, expect more hate, bigorty and extremism to explode within the GOP base.