https://crooksandliars.com/2022/03/cpac-eat-your-heart-out
Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes Is Gloating About Taking Over The GOP
White nationalists like Nick Fuentes are bragging that they have more influence in today's Republican Party than CPAC. And maybe they do.
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By David Neiwert — March 2, 2022
The radicalization of the Republicans just keeps getting deeper and deeper. Already deeply enmeshed with the extremist far-right Patriot movement,
the GOP is moving on to its next phase of being gradually overwhelmed by the seep of white nationalist ideas and organizing intent into their mainstream, as this weekend’s America First PAC convention in Orlando, Florida, demonstrated vividly.
As always, America First’s founder Nick Fuentes provided his audience of “Groypers” their
usual white nationalist red meat: praising Vladimir Putin, joking about Hitler, applauding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, claiming that white people built America. But this year he was joined on stage by a number of elected Republicans who turned up as speakers—including Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and Arizona legislator Wendy Rogers—and eagerly joined in. Rogers even called for a “newly built set of gallows” to hang Democrats with.
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As Jared Holt of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab explained at Daily Beast:
There was a period in time where associating with Fuentes and his posse’s naked extremism and hate was a mark of death on conservative political figures’ mainstream careers, and rightfully so. Though Fuentes often denies considering himself a white nationalist, he espouses the ideology verbatim in public settings often and specifically. Fuentes also regularly proclaims antisemitic beliefs; he has engaged in Holocaust denialism and once denounced far-right commentator Matt Walsh as a “shabbos goy race traitor” because Walsh, who is white, works for an outlet run by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish. Fuentes was a leading figure in 2020’s “Stop the Steal” election-denial movement and has been resultantly subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the Capitol riot. At last year’s AFPAC, Fuentes praised the deadly attack and told the crowd at his conference that “we need a little bit more of that energy in the future.”
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America First’s mainstream traction reflects the disturbing trend over the past year in which rather than scattering for cover as their members and cohorts were placed under arrest,
extremist-right factions have doubled down and hardened their responses, encouraged by Republicans’ insistence that the insurrection was simply “legitimate political discourse.”
“These figures see the growth of the hard-right, anti-democratic faction of the Republican Party in the aftermath of January 6 as an opportunity to push their own reactionary agendas further into the mainstream,” Southern Poverty Law Center analyst Hannah Gais told Holt.
“What should be a widely condemned way of thinking linked to domestic terrorism and other forms of violence should never find a home among one of America’s major political parties,” Beirich told Daily Kos. “White supremacy was the justification for so many shameful eras in our history and the fact that Republicans are unable to condemn this barbaric ideology is incomprehensible. This is a dangerous development for our democracy.”
