I Hate Illinois Nazis

 I'm teaching the 1930s in US History right now, and it's fascinating looking at the rise of Nazi Germany, their co-conspirators in the US and the parallels to today's Republican Party. (Let's leave aside the merits of the New Deal and our need for a new Fair Labor Standards Act.)

This week we saw the annual freakshow that is CPAC, but simultaneously, we saw the America First PAC hold a conclave down the street. At CPAC, as I mentioned earlier, they are doing the usual coy flirtation with Nazis and Klansmen that has typified the GOP since Nixon's Law and Order campaign and Reagan's speech at Philadelphia, Mississippi. Shaping their stage like a Nazi symbol is not an accident and Matt Schlapp is lying when he says it is. The Odal Rune is a white supremacist symbol.

As white supremacy has passed from the foundations of American culture to its fringes, white supremacists have relied in little winks and nudges to communicate to each other and enrage those who are watching out for the symbols. A great example of this is the white power symbol that is basically the OK sign. Because it's a positive symbol ("OK!") they can plausibly deny that they are making a symbolic gesture of solidarity with white supremacists, while simultaneously doing so AND pissing off the libs, which is after all why a modern conservative gets out of bed the morning.  The Odal Rune is a great example of this. Shaping your stage like that was absolutely signaling the white supremacists whose side you're on and yet obscure enough to allow Schlapp to deny it is exactly what it is.

Meanwhile, AFPAC simply lets its swastika flag fly. Disgraced white supremacist Congressman Steve King basically makes a speech right out of prewar Nazism about how we need to have white babies to prevent the country from becoming non-white. Those are his literal words. Paul Gosar - who in normal times would be the worst member of Congress, but Louis Gohmert, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Trailerpark Greene, Lauren Boebert, Devin Nunes and Matt Gaetz are still there - basically echoed those themes. Gosar also embraced white supremacy in no uncertain terms, saying if America "loses its white demographic core and if it loses its faith in Jesus Christ, then it's not America anymore." 

The whole thing was organized by Nick Fuentes, an actual Nazi, represents an underground but interconnected movement of white supremacists and neo-Nazis who are successfully infiltrating College Republicans and other areas of white, young, make anger. 

Now, these are still fringe groups.  What is truly terrifying is that savvy DC operators in the Republican Party are not repudiating them and calling them out, beyond a few voices. 

The lesson Republicans have taken from Trump is this: The only way to win national elections is to explicitly appeal to white nationalists and white supremacists. The historic losses that Trump has actually accrued, the movement of suburban, college educated voters away from the GQP has apparently not made an impact on their thinking yet. 

Illinois Nazis used to be a joke, now they are the Republican Party's electoral strategy.

UPDATE: As always, the overlap is with "White Evangelicals" which might as well be synonymous with White Supremacists.