Very recently—three days ago, in fact—a top priority of Republicans in Congress was to communicate that the party does not want to ally with white supremacists to overthrow the government, a clarification that was necessary because Donald Trump recently had dinner with two high-profile advocates of Nazism (Ye and Nick Fuentes) and then said that the Constitution should be terminated in order to restore his presidency.
One surprising participant in the disavowal of the far right was Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. She went out of her way to tell reporters that she was shocked by Fuentes’ extreme beliefs and, separately, that she supports current Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Speaker of the House candidacy. (McCarthy is what passes for a “mainstream” Republican in the House at the moment, and he is being challenged by more-hard-line MAGA members.)
In a blow to both Greene’s pivot to respectability and the wider Republican effort not to be associated with white supremacy, though, two reporters from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch site were able to gain entrance on Saturday night to a gala held by the New York Young Republican Club in New York City that appears to have been otherwise closed to members of the press besides a reporter from the right-wing New York Post. (Update, Dec. 15: The New York Young Republican Club clarified, in an email, that the event “was entirely open to the press” and that “zero requests were denied.”)
Among the notable Republicans who attended the event, per the SPLC, were Greene, Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, incoming Georgia Rep. Mike Collins, incoming Florida Rep. Cory Mills, and incoming New York Rep. George Santos.
Others included Peter Brimelow, a major proponent of the “white genocide” theory, who runs a website named after the first European person purported to have been born in North America and has said, for example, that Hispanic people “specialize in rape”; Jack Posobiec, who led the online movement that accused Hillary Clinton and other Democrats of operating a pedophilia dungeon in a D.C. pizza restaurant; and representatives of the far-right party Alternative for Germany, whose members include one of the individuals arrested last week over what German authorities describe as a plot to overthrow the country’s government. (Brimelow, for the record, has denied that he is a “white nationalist.”)
Overthrowing the government was also a theme of Greene’s speech to the assembled group, SPLC reports, quoting her as saying that if she and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon had “organized” the Jan. 6 riot, “we would have won,” and “it would have been armed.” (Bannon, who was also present, has a long association with the white supremacist movement as well; he has, for example, repeatedly endorsed The Camp of the Saints, a novel about race war popular among neo-Nazis.) The event’s organizer, New York Young Republican Club president Gavin Wax, said at the event that Republicans “must be prepared to do battle in every arena,” including “in the streets.”
The SPLC report was published Sunday, and no other congressional Republicans appear to have commented on it yet. The White House has signaled its intention to keep the subject in the news by telling CBS News that Greene’s comments are “a slap in the face” to Capitol Police.
So much for the pivot!
