Consider a few moments from this past week featuring politicians and pundits in the present-day Republican party.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama refused repeatedly to admit white nationalists are racists. (SPOLER ALERT: They are, by definition.) Last week he told CNN: “My opinion, of a white nationalist – if somebody wants to call them a white nationalist – to me, is an American. It’s an American.” By week’s end he relented and accepted reality, but it seemed like someone had to twist his arm to get him to do it.
On Thursday, Republican Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona referred to Black people as “colored people” during a debate on the House floor, a debate that – in a moment of volcanic irony – centered around pulling diversity, equity and inclusion training from the military. He later apologized, saying he meant to say “people of color,” which is about as likely as a summer snowstorm in Arizona.
And Charlie Kirk, head of the influential conservative student group Turning Point USA, said on his podcast that Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, along with two other high-profile Black women, used affirmative action to get where they are because: “You do not have the brain-processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go take a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
When Republicans show you who they are, believe them
Lest you question whether Kirk matters in GOP politics, both former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – the two frontrunners for the GOP presidential primary – spoke at Turning Point USA events last year, and Trump was scheduled to speak at another in Florida this weekend.
Republicans in the Trump era will bend over backwards to claim they are reasonable, that the racist, bigoted, sexist, nonsense-spewing denizens on the far-right fringes of their party are not representative. But the one-time party of personal responsibility doesn’t do much to take responsibility for the words spoken by its members, fringe or otherwise.
If you want to know what the Republican Party is all about, what the party formerly devoted to national security and law and order presently stands for, give a listen to one of its highest-ranking members sending a message to the military.
“Stop using taxpayer money to do their own wokeism,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Friday after passage of a defense bill Republicans loaded up with culture-war-nonsense amendments. “A military cannot defend themselves if you train them in woke. We don’t want Disneyland to train our military.”
When ‘woke’ is the root of your party’s language, Americans aren’t going to follow
A majority of Americans would hear or read that and ask: “Is that English? What on earth is that guy going on about?”
The usually bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act the Republican-led House passed Friday is a window into where the GOP’s collective head is as the country plods toward the 2024 presidential election.
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The more extreme elements of the party demanded amendments that do away with: funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the military; a policy that helps women in the military travel out of state to get reproductive health services, including abortion, if they’re based in a state that has banned such services; and specialized health care for transgender soldiers or family members.
Democratic Rep. Jill Tokuda of Hawaii said on the House floor that “the sacrifices made by so many who feel marginalized – our communities of color – simply pale in comparison to the hate and fear that drives this obsession with DEI.”
Hate and fear might as well be the GOP’s motto. And while there was a time when a liberal like me saying that would be accurately labeled hyperbolic, that time has passed. Show me what, aside from hate and fear, the modern Republican Party is all about.
In his already disastrous presidential campaign, DeSantis keeps railing menacingly about “gender ideology” and “defeating the woke” and the “woke mind virus” and “cultural Marxism.” Trump posts things like “These Radical Left Democrats, Communists, Marxists, and Fascists are destroying our Country” on his sad social media site, Truth Social.
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On Fox News, President Joe Biden is daily portrayed as either an inept octogenarian incapable of thinking or a staggeringly corrupt criminal mastermind fleecing America of its blood and treasure.
When your party’s focus is on protecting the legacy of Confederate soldiers, you might have a problem
Republicans want to defund the FBI and are doing everything possible to cast doubt on the American judicial system. They want to ban books as they fear-monger parents into believing their children are being indoctrinated by teachers.
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One GOP-supported amendment to the defense authorization legislation that was just barely shot down would have kept the Pentagon from changing the names of U.S. military bases named after Confederate soldiers.
There’s a reason a senator like Tuberville felt comfortable repeatedly denying that white nationalists are racists. There’s a reason right-wing squawkers like Kirk are happy to babble overtly racist nonsense about a Supreme Court justice and a former First Lady.
And there’s a reason Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates want their voters to see them fighting the promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion, women’s access to reproductive health care and transgender rights in the military and everywhere else.
When diversity and women’s healthcare rights become a threat
These things are seen as threats. Not as rights, not as science-backed medical needs, not as proven steps to create stronger, smarter workforces or more cohesive military units. Just threats.
And that opens the door for the bigots and racists and sexists to show the world just how easily they can utter a horrendous term like “colored people” on the floor if the U.S. House in the year 2023.
Show me the hope, show me the goodness, show me the kindness in the Republican Party.
Because what the party’s leaders and leading voices are showing me, from the fringes right to the center, is either hate and fear or a tolerance of both.
You’ll forgive me if I’m inclined to believe that’s all they’ve got.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Twitter @RexHuppke and Facebook facebook.com/RexIsAJerk
