The Republican Party is fighting an intra-organizational battle for control. On one side you have the Trump/MAGA/tea party wing of the GOP, filled with detestable folks like Reps. Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Madison Cawthorn, Paul Gosar, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. They have senators under their sway like Josh Hawley, and to a lesser degree (because of how baseline craven his absence of morality is) Ted Cruz. The other side is represented by neocons like Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and, to a lesser degree, Sen. Mitch McConnell. The battle is something to watch from the outside, with a variety of other characters (i.e. Dan Crenshaw) leaning lightly to one side and then the other like the vapid stalks of dehydrated celery their backbones are made of.
The one thing that the neocons have going for them is that the MAGA/tea party types are almost psychopathic in their blatant bigotries and open about their desire to turn our country into an oligarchy controlled by a minority of fossil-fuel billionaires. As a result, the hope for neocon types is that they, as Republicans, might be able make stories stick to the Gosars of the world in ways that less conservative messengers might not.
Earlier this weekend, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene decided to speak at the America First Political Action Conference organized by Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who began his little hate conference back in 2020. As if just realizing it, neocons and the rest of the traditional media pointed out that Rep. Paul Gosar spoke at a similar event with the same collection of bigots last year. The two GOP representatives did this because they support white supremacist ideology and find a good deal of electoral and financial support from racists.
On Sunday, Sen. Mitt Romney, who like the rest of the Republican Party fell humiliatingly in line with Donald Trump after he won the Electoral College in 2016, went on television and called Reps. Gosar and Greene “morons” for their part in espousing (once again) openly white supremacist, anti-American positions.
Romney, after making sure that America knows he doesn’t “know them,” said they reminded him of the line from the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: “Morons, I’ve got morons on my team.” He followed that up with “I have to think that anybody that would sit down with white nationalists and speak at their conference was certainly missing a few IQ points."
Greene was on brand during the antisemitic event, saying she wouldn’t leave the white men at the conference behind and criticizing the “Pharisees in the Republican Party.” You see, in this analogy, Greene and Gosar are a Jewish Jesus, and the neocons are the corrupt temple leadership. But more likely, in this analogy, Greene is really saying the Republican establishment is in league with the amorphous globalist Jewish cabal running the world.
Maybe the neocon wing of the party, seeing that the far right isn’t polling particularly well thanks to their continued praise of Vladimir Putin at a time when the worst aspects of supporting Vladimir Putin are on display to the entire Earth, has suddenly decided to throw out some strongly worded admonishments at tweedledumb and tweedledumber. Maybe the neocons are desperate, and do most of their best propaganda when they’re frothing in front of microphones talking about invading countries. Whatever it is, neocons came out in droves in an attempt to cleave off these two barnacles.
Even the truly spineless GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a man who could be blown over by the word “breeze,” told reporter Jake Sherman that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s decision to appear alongside a pretty blatant antisemite who is literally leading chants for Vladimir Putin in his introduction to her appearance, was not a good look. He even said she has to “personally” answer for it and that she should have “walked off stage.” He told Politico that he would have “a discussion” with both Gosar and Greene.
And if you don’t think Kevin McCarthy does anything without having someone in leadership prod him with a hot poker, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell busted out of his turtle shell to release a statement condemning the pair’s actions a short while before McCarthy, saying “there’s no place in the Republican Party for white supremacists or anti-Semitism.” Senate Minority Whip John Thune was able to peek out from under whatever fossil fuel donor money pile he was bathing in long enough to tell reporters that it was “unacceptable,” and he wanted to “disassociate myself from it.”
The Republican Party: We don’t believe in anything, but you know exactly what we believe in, amiright?
Here’s a reminder of what people like Nick Fuentes (and former Trump adviser Stephen Miller before him) are actually fighting for:
But never fear: This has been the underlying motor of the Republican Party for decades. The chickens have come home to roost and, fingers crossed, they won’t bring a bunch of fascists to take over the farm. See how easy it is to mangle analogies while vaguely making a point?