Republican quislings help make white nationalists stronger than ever

White nationalists and right-wing hate groups are stronger than ever after a year in which their political patron lost the presidency and they led a violent mob assault on the United States Capitol.

“They have become more emboldened,” says Kathleen Belew, a University of Chicago professor who has written extensively about white power terrorism. “There is a very concerning rise in activity.”

Former President Donald Trump continues to celebrate some of these goons. Establishment Republicans, including congressional leaders and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, say “Let’s move on,” rather than demand accountability.

These “move on-ers” should read the fabulous Washington Post three-part series on the lead-up to Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the assault, and the aftermath.

The Trump-inspired intent of the mob was to overturn an election — Congress was counting the electoral ballots — and violence was in the playbook. They failed that day, but the false claims of a stolen election, the Post reports, has “become a galvanizing force for the GOP.”

The “move on-ers” want to avoid the consequences of their own silence, the reality that these hate groups are stronger today in part because of the complicity of the “move on-ers.”

A survey by Robert Pape, director of the University of Chicago’s Project of Security and Threats, analyzed 377 perpetrators arrested for the Capitol violence. He found a dominant driver of their rage: “The great Replacement theory” that holds that minorities are “progressively replacing White Populations,” threatening — in their view — the American experience. They saw Trump as their guardrail against this tide, why the election had to be overturned.

It’s a theme struck by some right-wing media, notably Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who has produced a streaming documentary on Fox Nation defending the Jan. 6 attackers and blaming it — inexplicably — on the “deep state.” It echoes the line of the Jan. 6 criminals themselves, the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum notes, stirring up “hatred” and “mistrust” of American institutions.

This elevates the danger of more violence from these emboldened haters. Months after the Capitol assault, the U.S. intelligence agencies, in a joint analysis, warned of the white nationalist threat. The fallout from Jan. 6 and the conspiracies about a stolen election “will almost certainly spur” these extremists “to try again to engage in violence this year.”

Although almost 700 of the Capitol perpetrators have been charged, 105 have pled guilty, most with relatively light sentences. This punishment seems inadequate for crimes where four people were killed and a number of police officers seriously injured.

A Trump-appointed judge, Trevor McFadden, questioned whether the Jan. 6 defendants were being unfairly singled out by the Justice Department in contrast to the more lenient treatment of last summer’s Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

I’m not making that up.

More seriously, Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, said the Justice Department was going too easy on some rioters, given the horror of their activities.

A rationale may be that tougher sentences would create a backlash.

That is a big mistake, warns Professor Belew: “There already is a backlash with this group. If we use half measures against them, we have no chance.”

The white nationalist terrorists, she guesses, can be divided into two broad categories: those who long have espoused a violent overthrow, waging guerrilla warfare, and those who now consider taking the electoral route to push authoritarianism. “The white nationalists used to feel there was no way they could infiltrate through mainstream politics; that goal post has moved,” she told me.

When a vacancy occurred this fall in the North Carolina state House, the Gaston County Republican party picked the replacement: Donnie Loftus. He was part of the group at the Capitol on Jan. 6. In now-deleted tweets, he said he had been at the doors when the Capitol building was breached and had been gassed. In one deleted tweet he reportedly wrote “We didn’t want to be there, but we had no other choice.” In a statement to a local TV station after his appointment, Loftus said he had “absolutely zero involvement in the rioting” and condemned the storming of the Capitol.

If prominent Republicans joined the Liz Cheneys and would take on the stolen election lie and the Jan. 6 assault, Belew says, “It would make a huge difference.”

Yet few establishment Republicans have stood up to the lies. They now are spinning a narrative that the just-elected governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, “moved on” from Trump.

Youngkin did — belatedly — acknowledge that Biden won the presidency, but Youngkin kept the lie alive by calling for election audits. When a right-wing Trump surrogate held a Virginia rally for Youngkin this fall — Trump phoned in to praise the candidate — they honored a flag carried by one of the “peaceful protesters” at the rally before the Jan. 6 riot. Youngkin had a scheduling conflict, but thanked the event’s sponsor. When asked, he tried to duck the flag issue before finally acknowledging it was “weird and wrong.”

These stains on American democracy are a narcotic to the hate groups, who are aided by the refusal of the leaders in the Republican Party — old and new, in office and out — to demand the truth, and accountability. And those “move on-ers” have paid little price.

Al Hunt is the former executive editor of Bloomberg News. He previously served as reporter, bureau chief and Washington editor for The Wall Street Journal. For almost a quarter century he wrote a column on politics for The Wall Street Journal, then The International New York Times and Bloomberg View. He hosts Politics War Room with James Carville. Follow him on Twitter @AlHuntDC.