The white supremacist right is penetrating the mainstream right with increasing ease.

The Conservative Political Action Conference is the premier gathering of right-wing activists and politicians in America every year, and it serves as a bellwether for the direction of the conservative movement. This year Nazis showed up.

According to an NBC News report, “a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed ‘race science’ and antisemitic conspiracy theories.” (Hitler’s Nazi Party was officially called the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”) The reporter of the article has video of one of them giving a “heil Hitler”-style salute in the lobby of the hotel where the conference took place and of other members of the group reportedly used the N-word.

This is a critical frog-in-boiling-water moment for the right: The mainstream organs of American conservatism are apparently acclimating to Nazis in their pot. That this group was able to mingle with participants at a high-profile conference, wasn’t kicked out of CPAC, and wasn’t appropriately condemned is a sign of how contiguous mainstream conservatism has become with white supremacist politics today.

  • ctkatz
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    9 months ago

    this is why I don’t take seriously anyone who says that both parties are the same or two side of the same coin. maybe you could make that argument 40 years ago. but these days saying that is a shorthand to me that “I don’t pay attention to what’s going on in the news.” clearly one party’s mainstream has gone extreme and you have to be willfully ignorant to not see it.