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.
It’s not always possible for the hosts of major political gatherings to perfectly regulate who enters them — but there are always choices on how to react when, say, Nazis arrive.
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.
The clique of white supremacists who showed up at CPAC is embedded in extremist activist networks. One member of the group attended the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and another was a former member of the white supremacist “Rise Above Movement” and reportedly “touted associations” with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist firebrand who has denied the Holocaust. Another white supremacist influencer at the conference was Jared Taylor, a eugenics advocate who hosts the annual American Renaissance Conference, which, according to the Southern Poverty…
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