“Not who we are” meets “who we are”
Talking Points Memo reports that two staffers in Rep. Paul Gosar’s office have close ties to Nick Fuentes’ white-supremacist “Groyper” movement:
TPM has uncovered an extensive digital trail of interconnected Groyper social media pages using variations of the “ChickenRight” and “Chikken” handles that can be linked to Wade Searle, who works as the digital director for Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), one of the most extreme, far-right members of Congress. ChickenRight’s posting on far-right websites and Searle’s alleged involvement with Fuentes occurred before and after he started working in Gosar’s Capitol Hill office. Gosar, his chief of staff, his press secretary, and Searle have not responded to multiple detailed requests for comment.
Well. You could have knocked over MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan with a feather. Not to mention his being “shocked” by Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) “conflation of white supremacists and Nazis with MAGA supporters and Trump supporters.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat (“Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present“) commented, “What we’ve got now is [Donald] Trump is openly appealing to people as a violent cult leader. He’s not a conventional politician. He’s a cult leader.”
“You got neo-nazis. You’ve got fascists. You’ve got people who love Pinochet and the military juntas … All the way up to the new right … Orbán and Putin” grouped around Trump, not to mention “historical racism and white Christian nationalism.”
From an old post of mine:
I once explained the resurgence of medieval spirituality, mysticism and superstition (even as technology accelerated) as resulting from people trying to navigate a 21st century world with a medieval collective unconscious.
Our inability to recognize a threat to the republic today stems, perhaps, from a similar cultural reflex, one that dates at least to the Silent Generation. Americans are “nice.” We are the “good guys.” God’s chosen. Whatever. Other people have “problems” we do not speak aloud for fear that in naming them we make them real. Like “Voldemort” that way.
Faced with ugly truths — Christian nationalism, resurgent white supremacy, daily gun slaughter, xenophobia, and more — we tell ourselves “that’s not who we are.” And yet, that’s who we are. Frogs slowly boiling.