Thread by @BenLorber8

BREAKING: Marjorie Taylor Greene announced as surprise speaker at white nationalist Nick Fuentes' America First Political Action Conference tonight in Orlando, FL. MTG has now joined Paul Gosar in embracing Fuentes. Fuentes claims alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos made it happen

Shortly before bringing up MTG, the camera showed a sizeable and raucous crowd. Fuentes praised "our secret sauce...young white men." Fuentes then solicited a round of applause for Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, and the groyper crowd chanted "Putin, Putin."

Three current GOP elected officials-- Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar in Congress, and AZ State Senator Wendy Rogers-- have now embraced the leader of the contemporary white nationalist movement in the U.S. and an explicit, unapologetic antisemite.

As the 2022 midterms heat up this year, this will undoubtedly lend Nick Fuentes' groyper movement, and their politics, greater legitimacy within a big-tent GOP that is casting about for new ideas and new frameworks to animate its future. Open white nationalism is on the table

Another mystery speaker announced tonight is hard-right Idaho Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin, whose current insurgent campaign for Idaho Governor against an establishment Republican has been endorsed by Trump

https://twitter.com/BenLorber8/status/1497397026505601029?s=20&t=X-huQloSAPby76mC_yxuqw

In the audience tonight are the leading grandfathers of the white nationalist movement, Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow. A year ago, GOP elected officials wouldn't dare be caught in the same room as folks like this, much less headlining the conference. Times are changing, fast.

Longtime white nationalist leader Vince James lauding the "historic American nation" and the "founding stock" of the country-- common white nationalist buzzwords for white people. The groyper chat room erupts with cheers of "White Lives Matter". MTG and Gosar are in the audience

Vince James has been a stalwart white nationalist since the early days of Trump's presidency. In tonight's speech he just condemned the "Israel lobby", an antisemitic trope claiming supposed Jewish control over the government. Gosar retweets him frequently mediamatters.org/white-national…

A moment later in his speech Vince James again laid out the central tenet of White nationalism- "they want to replace you...Western white culture is the majority culture, to which even non-whites assimilate into today- and they're better off for it"

Here's Vince James calling out the "Israel lobby", as the crowd boos and the groyper chat immediately recognizes it as an antisemitic conspiracy theory, applauding that Vince "named them" (the Jews). Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene are in the audience

Andrew Torba, CEO of hard-right alt-tech platform Gab (where the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter made his final post), again attacks Israel from the Right, & the groyper chat applauds the antisemitism. Later he celebrates Jesus for "rebuking the synagogue of Satan"

(To be clear, I'm deeply critical of Israel's oppression of Palestinians, & it isn't antisemitic to name that. But this is a different, America First anti-Israel narrative that is inherently antisemitic, & it's astounding that GOP electeds are in the audience for this tonight.)

In her televised address, Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers advocates for building gallows to hang named enemies, then calls on the groypers to keep "pushing the Overton Window towards Christ"

Far-right online pundit Stew Peters' speech was full of virulent, aggressive and violent homophobia, this was the least of it. Hilarious description by Amanda

https://twitter.com/noturtlesoup17/status/1497417302131757057?s=20&t=X-huQloSAPby76mC_yxuqw

Hard-right video streamer Jesse Lee Peterson- "the civil rights movement was the worst thing to ever happen to black people"

Peterson is apparently a minister who has "thanked God for slavery", and has associated for decades with white nationalists and reactionary black nationalists like Louis Farrakhan splcenter.org/hatewatch/2011…

Peterson with a viscous anti-black and white nationalist diatribe- "White people- you are hated because you founded the greatest country this side of heaven...if black people are smart enough to build a country, why don't they build Africa?"

Idaho Lt. Gov Janice McGeachin (current Trump-endorsed candidate for governor) congratulated the groypers on 3 years of AFPAC- "keep up your good work fighting for our country". Then the screen seemed to accidentally display five minutes of rehearsal footage. Groypers dismayed!

Nick Fuentes- "the United States is the evil empire in the world...now they're going and saying 'Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler', as if that isn't a good thing-- oops, I shouldn't have said that"

Nick Fuentes-- "the US government has become the Great Satan that many have called it", borrowing a phrase from Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. He then suggests that comparing Vladimir Putin to Hitler is "a good thing", before nervously laughing "I shouldn't have said that"

MTG “doesn’t endorse” Fuentes or white nationalism, but still believes in “getting everyone together to save our country”, in other words, including Fuentes and white nationalists in a broad conservative coalition

https://twitter.com/costareports/status/1497621644180869124

Fuentes’ long-term goal is to push his groyper movement into the conservative mainstream, so that its core white nationalist demand- ending non-white immigration & preserving white demographic majority— becomes common sense policy & discourse on the Right politicalresearch.org/2022/01/05/we-…

Assembling last night’s bench of current & former GOP elected officials— Gosar, MTG, Rogers, McGeachin, Arpaio, Steve King— certainly gives the appearance that he’s moving closer mainstream. There’s also reason to be skeptical for the future, with a closer look.

According to Fuentes’ introduction last night & MTG’s comments today, MTG was brought on as a last minute replacement, a favor called in by Milo Yiannapoulos. She doesn’t know much about Fuentes or AF, & there wasn’t a strategic calculation on her part to help his movement grow.

Gosar’s televised address was about 1 minute long, formal & distanced. He’s been celebrating groypers all year on social media— if he really wanted to help them wouldn’t he give a speech with rousing energy, like he did at AFPAC last year? Is he backing away as midterms approach?

Any conservative insiders watching last night would’ve quickly seen these guys can’t run a tight conference. McGeachin’s 30-second address was accidentally spliced with 5 minutes of rehearsal footage. Stew Peters & Jesse Lee Peterson (who?) gave long, unhinged rambly speeches.

Most crucially though, Fuentes’ off-the-cuff praise of Hitler was terribly unstrategic for anyone wanting to break into the conservative mainstream, & he immediately knew it. That alone- never mind the Putin cheers- will make him toxic for anyone in 2022.

As I detail in this article, his entire movement was born from the realization that neo-Nazi aesthetics made white nationalists look bad in the Trump era. The groypers were supposed to be the ‘respectable’ racists in contrast to the ‘unoptical’ alt-right. politicalresearch.org/2021/01/15/ame…

It seems like Fuentes has lost the script. From one angle AFPAC III was a steady march into the mainstream; from another, it looks like he’s circling the drain & hoping to go out with a splash. It’s too soon to tell, & the Trump era reminds us that predictions are unwieldy.