THE GOP'S "NORMAL" CHOICE FOR 2024 ... ISN'T

A week after Donald Trump hosted anti-Semites Nick Fuentes and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago, many Republicans, whether they dare to admit it publicly or not, are hoping they can keep Trump off the 2024 ticket in favor of that nice, normal Ron DeSantis. But Jonathan Chait is right -- DeSantis is a racist enabler, too:

DeSantis ... has reached out to QAnon supporters and insurrectionists and suggested January 6 was a setup by the FBI. He has denounced Liz Cheney for participating in the January 6 hearings but refused to denounce a gang of Nazis who showed up in Orlando and menaced local Jews. This is a clear signal of whom DeSantis sees as inside the coalition (white supremacists) and who is out (pro-democracy Republicans like Cheney.)

DeSantis’s supporters have greeted the idea that he would issue a pro forma statement denouncing white supremacists with mockery. Tablet’s Noam Blum suggested DeSantis is too busy governing for his spokesperson to issue a statement. “Contrary to how he is characterized in the national media,” sniffed National Review’s Dan McLaughlin, “Ron DeSantis’ personal approval is not required for the list of guests Floridians may invite to dinner.”

These people are not idiots. They understand perfectly well that DeSantis weighs in on national political and culture fights routinely. He is not too busy to attack the white-nationalist right. He wants to maintain its support but quietly.

And Christina Pushaw, DeSantis's former gubernatorial press secretary, who later became the press secretary for his reelection campaign and will almost certainly be his presidential campaign spokesperson, is also racist-adjacent. Here she is stanning for a bigoted Trump appointee named Darren Beattie:

The Trump White House fired Beattie for speaking at a white nationalist conference. (He spent 1/6 tweeting at black politicians telling them to kneel before MAGA.)

Yet DeSantis’ spokesperson is already dreaming about appointing him to the next GOP administration. pic.twitter.com/MyqihXwgrr

— Christian Vanderbrouk 🇺🇸🇺🇦🌻 (@UrbanAchievr) April 30, 2022

Here's the tweet from Pushaw:

Time for a fun thought experiment! Whom should the next Republican president appoint to lead the Disinformation Governance Board? 😎

My vote is @DarrenJBeattie 👀

— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) April 30, 2022

And here are Beattie's January 6 tweets:

White House appointee & former @RepMattGaetz staffer Darren Beattie is a white supremacist. While Nazis were storming the Capitol, Darren was telling Black people to “take a knee to MAGA” and “learn their proper place in society.” pic.twitter.com/lPKCvSX4co

— Sophie Ellman-Golan (@EgSophie) January 7, 2021

Here's the story of that firing:

Darren Beattie, who was a visiting instructor at Duke University before he joined the White House speechwriting team, was fired Friday after a media inquiry about his appearance at the 2016 H.L. Mencken Club conference, where Beattie spoke on a panel alongside Peter Brimelow.

Brimelow, founder of the anti-immigrant website Vdare.com, is a “white nationalist” and “regularly publishes works by white supremacists, anti-Semites, and others on the radical right,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy group that tracks extremists.

Earlier this year, Brimelow described himself as a believer in “racial nationalism” who sees the future of the United States “precipitating out on racial lines.”

Trump later appointed Beattie to a board whose work involves preserving Holocaust sites in Europe, a position in which he served until he was removed by President Biden. The Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish groups protested the appointment. When it was announced, Yahoo News reported,

The appointment comes shortly after Beattie, in comments made on Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show, compared supposed efforts to oust President Trump to the “color revolutions” that defeated authoritarian leaders across Eastern Europe. Beattie said those efforts were being engineered by Norm Eisen, an ethics attorney who served in the Obama administration. As he described the case against Eisen, Carlson cut Beattie off, thus concluding the segment.

Beattie has also suggested that George Soros was behind attempts to remove Trump from office, though the financier and philanthropist’s efforts constitute little more than the kind of ordinary political contributions that both sides routinely engage in.

A couple of days ago, Beattie appeared on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast and talked about Sam Bankman-Fried; a clip of that appearance is posted at Beattie's Revolver News under the headline

Darren Beattie blows the lid... SBF’s FTX extremely dark money laundering operation “bigger than Soros”... fueling “Clinton-Underworld Democrat Machine”...

You can watch the clip at the link if you care0, but I think I've made my point: Anyone who thinks Trump is at the racist, conspiratorial fringe but DeSantis represents a return to normality is delusional.