GUEST COMMENTARY--In November, several outright Nazis and white supremacists will appear on Republican ballot lines. Arthur Jones, a founder of a neo-Nazi group called the America First Committee, managed to become the Republican nominee for Congress in the heavily Democratic Third District in Illinois. The Republican candidate in California’s 11th District, John Fitzgerald, is running on a platform of Holocaust denial. Russell Walker, a Republican statehouse candidate in North Carolina, has said that Jews descend from Satan and that God is a “white supremacist.”
Corey Stewart, Virginia’s Republican Senate nominee, is a neo-Confederate who pals around with racists, including one of the organizers of the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville last year. The longtime Iowa Republican representative Steve King has moved from standard-issue nativist crank to full-on white nationalist; he recently retweeted a neo-Nazi and then refused to delete the tweet, saying, “It’s the message, not the messenger.”
Clearly, the time has come for a serious national conversation. And so political insiders across the land are asking: Has the Democratic Party become too extreme? (Read the rest.)
-cw
