IF RACISM WERE REALLY A LIABILITY FOR THE GOP, PAUL GOSAR WOULD BE A HOUSEHOLD NAME

A Politico story suggests that Republicans are worried about racists in their midst.

GOP grapples with extremist episodes among its own

The House GOP’s No. 3 leader recently urged Republicans to make clear they’re not the party of white supremacy. Two days later, one of their members spoke at a conference organized by a known white nationalist.

The whiplash between Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) plea and Rep. Paul Gosar’s (R-Ariz.) public speech underscores just how tough it is for GOP leaders to rein in members who cater to the extreme wings of the party.

... some fear that if the conference ... doesn’t stomp out those political brush fires now, there’s a risk they will spread and engulf the party.

However:

The House GOP has so far confronted no large-scale blowback from Gosar’s speech to the America First Political Action Conference, or from other incidents that link a few of its members to far-right imagery or rhetoric.

Right. Gosar isn't a household name like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's better known for dabbling in QAnon theories than for her anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic bigotry.

Gosar gave the keynote address to the America First Political Action Conference.

AFPAC’s organizer, white nationalist figurehead Nick Fuentes, took the stage next, telling the crowd that “white people are done being bullied” and that America needs to protect its “white demographic core.”

The next day, Fuentes and Gosar sat down for coffee, according to a photo Fuentes posted to Twitter.

“Great meeting today with Congressman Gosar,” tweeted Fuentes, a 22-year-old Holocaust denier who once compared Jews killed in Nazi gas chambers to cookies baking in an oven. “America is truly uncancelled.”

Great meeting today with Congressman Gosar! America is truly uncancelled. pic.twitter.com/JLYN8d1UUt

— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) February 27, 2021

We're told,

In the week since AFPAC, the Republican Party has yet to rebuke Gosar. HuffPost this week reached out to the offices of seven prominent Republican politicians — including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) — to see whether they would condemn Gosar for attending an explicitly white nationalist conference. None responded.

And really, why should anyone condemn him? Apart from the stories I'm quoting and a brief wave of others, there's been very little attention to Gosar. Imagine the uproar the right-wing media could stir up if the parties were reversed and a Democrat spoke before a convention of racists. A story like that could displace Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head on Fox News. Every Republican in Congress would be making resignation demands.

So many Republicans are doing harm in so many ways that it's exhausting trying to keep up. But the baroque nature of QAnon and the florid self-promotion of folks like Greene and Donald Trump shouldn't distract us from plain-vanilla racism like this. We need to focus on it, we need to highlight it, and we need to hang it around the neck of the GOP. As Politico notes, some Republicans worry that we'll do that. So why don't we?