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.
They very much do know. Christian Nationalists are the biggest segment of fascists in the US, and it’s not even close.
You know what the inciting incident for their movement was? The racial integration of schools back in the 1950s. They decided to make a wedge issue out of abortion so that they could get more Christians to vote for racist policies.
The KKK is a conservative Christian organization. The United Daughters of the Confederacy espouses “Christian values.” Nick Fuentes, an out-and-proud antisemitic fascist is loud about imposing Catholicism on the rest of the country.
It’s not a coincidence; it’s a plan.