YOU DON'T THINK THE ROT GOES DEEP BECAUSE YOU DON'T BOTHER TO DIG

The conventional wisdom about the Republican Party tells us that it barely exists, and then only as a vehicle for the ambitions of Donald Trump. Here was that argument being made last week by the editrorial board of The New York Times:

The Republican Party ... has become an organization whose goal is the election of one person at the expense of anything else, including integrity, principle, policy and patriotism.... when an entire political party, particularly one of the two main parties in a country as powerful as the United States, turns into an instrument of that person and his most dangerous ideas, the damage affects everyone.

But the Republican Party is trying hard to elect many party members with extremely bad ideas, not just Trump. Yesterday, Media Matters told us about one awful candidate who hasn't otherwise received national scrutiny:

Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee for state superintendent of public instruction in North Carolina, frequently promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory in newly unearthed social media posts. She also referenced a QAnon-fueled conspiracy theory to suggest that actor Jim Carrey drinks the blood of children.

Morrow['s] ... history includes marching in Washington, D.C., on January 6 (Morrow said that she didn’t storm the Capitol) and attacking public schools as “socialist indoctrination centers.” She espouses anti-LGBTQ views, such as saying during Pride Month in June 2023: “As a nurse, I want you to understand something: There is no pride in perversion.”

Morrow is also anti-Muslim: She has written that the country should “ban Islam” and “ban Muslims from elected offices.”

... Morrow frequently engaged with the [QAnon] conspiracy theory in the lead up to the 2020 election.

One of the movement’s hashtags is WWG1WGA (“where we go one, we go all”). In 2020, Morrow posted the QAnon hashtag at least seven times....

Additionally, in 2020 she promoted the QAnon-fueled adrenochrome conspiracy theory in response to a post about actor Jim Carrey and added the hashtag “JusticeIsComing”. The conspiracy theory essentially claims that elites are harvesting and drinking the blood of tortured children to extend the drinkers’ lives.

Remember that some national media outlets couldn't be bothered to present a complete portrait of Mark Robinson, the anti-Jewish, anti-Black, anti-LGBT candidate who won the GOP gubernatorial primary the same day Morrow won her primary. So it's predictable that she's not getting national coverage.

Please note that Donald Trump has never been in the vanguard of QAnon propagandists -- he plays to the QAnon crowd at times, but QAnon developed without his input, although it has invoked him regularly. This is a reminder that Republican messaging isn't always about Trump. The widespread, ongoing belief in a massive global celebrity pedophile ring focused on adrenochrome doesn't depend on Trump at all, even if he's been seen as the man who'll save civilization from it.

It should be national news when a candidate for statewide office is a conspiracy-believing crackpot, especially in a battleground state and especially when she's running for a position involving the education of children. But the conventional wisdom in our media is that all the rot in the GOP is directly linked to Trump, so nobody cares about downballot candidates in far-flung states.

And now here's a story about a Republican student organization at UCLA that got social media attention yesterday but isn't national news:

This is a step beyond Trump's anti-immigrant message -- which, let's not forget, was the GOP vanguard's message in George W. Bush's second term, when nativists prevented a president of their own party from revising America's immigration laws. At a time when the mainstream media gets the vapors every time an elite Acela Corridor university's student body flirts with anti-Semitism (or even questions Israeli policy in Gaza), shouldn't this bigotry also receive saturation coverage? But it's not happening on the East Coast between Cambridge and D.C., so it didn't really happen.

Dig a bit and you find that the Bruin Republicans Twitter feed is a cesspool, and not always in a Trumpian way. The Bruin Republicans are very fond of Xi Jinping's China, for instance, mostly because it's authoritarian and anti-gay. And today the Bruin Republicans feed is full of praise for Andrew Tate, the Anglo-American ex-kickboxer and (alleged!) sex trafficker, who was arrested again in Romania yesterday:

And here are the Bruin Republicans using the language of the "manosphere"/incel culture to denigrate women at their school. ("Ran-through" is a particularly repulsive term referring to the physical damage manosphere members believe women suffer when they have sex with multiple partners.)

How do so many women at UCLA manage to be ugly, fat, ran-through, and liberal all at the same time?

And all of this while the majority of the men here are homosexuals

SAD!

— Bruin Republicans at UCLA (@BruinGOP) January 25, 2024

This is the future of the Republican Party, and if the press wanted to cover it -- and express horror about the state of our youth, as happens every time anti-Israel language on an East Coast campus gets heated -- we'd see many, many stories in The New York Times and elsewhere about the Bruin Republicans and similrly inclined GOP youth groups. But the press doesn't care. And so much of America believes that the GOP will be nice and normal once Trump is gone.