The Grand Old Party has Joined the Grand Wizards by Embracing White Supremacy

Republicans who reject “Cancel Culture” have often embraced “Cuddle Culture”, giving bear hugs to the world’s most deplorable haters

In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security released a crucial report that foreshadowed our current crisis with white supremacy and drift toward fascism. The memo showed, among other things, that right-wing extremist groups and domestic terror organizations were recruiting police and military veterans returning from the Middle East. Fast forward to the Jan 6 coup attempt, 1 in 5 defendants in capitol riot cases had served in the military.

Unfortunately, America was unable to nip the problem in the bud. The scalding backlash to the prescient 2009 report by Republicans was so intense that then-DHS Secretary Donna Shalala put the kibosh on it. She was forced to embark upon a groveling apology tour and disbanded the team of experts that produced the groundbreaking research.   

"They stopped doing intel on that, and that was that," said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. "The FBI in theory investigates right-wing terrorism and right-wing extremism, but they have limited resources. The loss of that unit was a loss for a lot of people who did this kind of work.”

It was America’s loss too. In retrospect, this was a Neville Chamberlain moment for Democrats and a mistake of historic proportions that assisted the rise of today’s fascists and their Republican cheerleaders. With nothing to stop their madness from metastasizing, these shadowy hate groups rose from their dark, musty basements of bigotry to create online empires. They spread their bile unimpeded and found eager new recruits who felt humiliated by economic downward mobility. These angry, alienated young men and women were provided a sense of solidarity and convenient scapegoats to explain their plight.

Today, the neo-Nazi chickens have come home to roost. An 18-year-old white supremacist, with easy access to weapons of war, stormed a Buffalo supermarket, killing 10 people and wounding three others. “Buffalo has a 10% higher black population, that is the place I will go,” the killer posted on Discord, a chat app.

In response to the massacre, the Democratic-led House quickly passed a bill that would create new government offices to monitor domestic terrorism. Just as in 2009 with the Shalala DHS report, Senate Republicans are obstructing efforts to clamp down on violent hate groups and are opposing the bill.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) responded to the bill by saying, “I’m a little wary of the political motivation and charging Americans who otherwise engaged in peaceful protest with crimes.” Yes, of course, white supremacists are engaged in peaceful protest, in the same way that the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were simply tourists exercising their First Amendment rights.   

“It sounds terrible,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) speaking of the House-passed bill, predicting it won’t get 10 Republicans in the Senate. “It’s like the disinformation board on steroids.”

This is the same Sen. Hawley that fist-bumped the terrorists on Jan. 6. Of course, he doesn’t want right wing hate movements investigated, he’s on their team. The Hill reports that Hawley is arguing that the Department of Homeland Security has taken “a very different tone” with groups on the left.

Perhaps, that’s because right wing organizations are responsible for a disproportionate amount of our homegrown terrorism. The Anti-Defamation League has counted about 450 U.S. murders committed by political extremists in the last decade. Of 450 killings recorded, right-wing extremists are responsible for about 75 percent. Islamic extremists were responsible for about 20 percent, and left-wing extremists were responsible for 4 percent. Nearly half of the murders were specifically tied to white supremacists.

Additionally, a new study has found that for every 10 percent increase a county has in evangelicals, the number of hate groups increases by 17 percent. What the hell are they teaching in these right-wing churches? When they aren’t covering up chronic sexual abuse, it seems they are replacing the Prince of Peace with the Prince of Darkness.

This is important, because the Christian nationalist views championed by politicians like Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) are correlated with intensions to engage in political violence. An August 2021 Public Discourse and Ethics Survey found that  27 percent of White evangelicals agreed that “true American patriots may have to resort to physical violence in order to save the country,” roughly double the percentage for other religious groups.

Given these alarming numbers, it’s fair to ask if these are genuine houses of worship or houses of holy war?

The overwhelming evidence of lopsided violence on the right, compared to the left, undermines Hawley’s sophistic arguments and highlights the shallowness of “Senator Sedition’s” whataboutism and false equivalencies. The groups that Hawley and many Republicans identify with are singled out by necessity, because they are singularly violent and a unique threat to America’s stability.  

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) is another right-wing extremist who is exploiting his power to deflect from the genuine threat his movement represents. “The Democrats can’t even wait an hour before they blame the Republicans for the Buffalo shooting. I think it’s despicable,” he said.

The problem isn’t that the Democrats blamed Republicans, the issue is that they waited an entire hour, when the finger pointing should have occurred within 15 minutes. The Buffalo murderer, who slaughtered innocent shoppers, was directly motivated by the Great Replacement Theory. Where did he learn that toxic theory from? According to The Washington Post:

Over the last year or so, White Christian nationalism has become intertwined with the “great replacement” theory, which holds that a corrupt elite made up of Jews and Democrats is carrying out a plot to replace “real” Americans by engineering mass immigration from the Third World.

Since 2015, that theory has captured the fringes and some in the mainstream on the right, from angry young men bearing tiki torches in Charlottesville; to pundits like Ann Coulter, Charlie Kirk, Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson; to at least a half-dozen prominent Republican candidates and lawmakers, including Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.), Reps. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) and Scott Perry (Pa.), Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, and J.D. Vance, Ohio’s GOP nominee for the Senate.

To underscore the radically dangerous direction of the GOP, consider that the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was held last week in Hungary. This was to honor their new hero, authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Dr. Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University, explains the love affair with Orban:

He “has received attention in the United States for promoting global culture wars — defending Christian civilization, ethnic purity and traditional gender roles against ‘woke’ challenges.”

Orban has “effectively used political payback to inflict economic pain on his opponents while bestowing financial benefits on loyalists.”

The Orban model is being copied by many right-wing Republicans in the United States, most notably Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is using his raw power to punish Disney for speaking out against his homophobia.

Predictably, the real stars of the CPAC conference in Budapest were the basest of the base. Right after Donald Trump, Mark Meadows and Tucker Carlson addressed the crowd, Zsolt Bayer took the stage. A notorious media personality in Hungary, Bayer had previously called Jews “stinking excrement”, referred to the Roma people as “animals” and used racial epithets to describe Black people.

Of course, conservatives who reject “Cancel Culture” have often embraced “Cuddle Culture”, giving bear hugs to the world’s most deplorable and detestable haters. For his ugly outbursts, Bayer was awarded by Orban with the Hungarian order of merit in 2016. One wonders how long it might be before the GOP creates a bust to honor the Buffalo shooter? If Donald Trump is reelected in 2024, would he consider giving the killer a pardon? These days, anything is possible with the GOP.

The Republican Party is no longer simply enabling the fascist fringe. The Grand Old Party has effectively joined hands with the Grand Wizards. Perhaps, the Republicans are correct that we don’t need a new law to monitor extremism. After all, they are proudly and openly advocating white supremacy and domestic terrorism on a putrid path lit by leftover tiki torches from Charlottesville.

The derelict direction of the GOP was highlighted by remarks made this week by Trump-backed former Senator David Perdue in his failing campaign for governor of Georgia. He viciously attacked African American Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams in an overtly racist rant, saying that she is “demeaning her own race”.

There is a poignant lesson to be learned from the cowardice displayed by Democrats who snuffed out the brilliant 2009 DHS report: Hate won’t be appeased, and bigotry can’t be buried for political convenience. It can only be decapitated and defeated by brave Americans not afraid to fight back against fascism. As we head into one of the most important election years of our lives, we must prevail because the consequences are too great if we fail.