WASHINGTON: Arthur Jones is an avowed Nazi. John Fitzgerald says the Holocaust is a myth. Rick Tyler wants to “make America white again.”
Their fringe ideas are reminiscent of another age, but the unapologetic men who espouse them are all on US election ballots in 2018.
Extremism and bigotry, even outright white supremacy and anti-Semitism, have found new lives in 21st century US politics and the era of President Donald Trump, beyond just the toxic rhetoric of a few little-known cranks.
They have received more exposure this year on the national stage than at any time in recent memory. And the mainly conservative proponents of hate running for office are proving to be a major embarrassment for the Republican Party.
In Illinois, Jones, who called the Holocaust “the biggest, blackest lie in history” and once ran a newspaper ad with a large swastika in the middle, is the Republican candidate for Congress, after he won the party primary by running unopposed in a largely Democratic district.
Russel Walker, running for a seat in North Carolina’s state house, proclaims “there is nothing wrong with being a racist” and that Jews are “descendants of Satan.”
In Wisconsin, Paul Nehlen, the leading Republican running to fill the seat in Congress currently held by retiring Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, has emerged as a leader of the alt-right movement, someone who critics warn wants to provide white nationalists and anti-Semites a stronger foothold in US culture and politics.
And the campaign website for Tyler, a Trump supporter running for Congress in Tennessee, depicts the Confederate flag flying atop the White House. One of his campaign billboards read: “Make America White Again.”
Experts say there is an unprecedented number of openly bigoted candidates this year, and that their chief enabler may well be the president of the United States himself.
“Trump’s unorthodox use of racism-related and anti-Muslim stuff — all of that bigoted language — has opened a door in politics that wasn’t there before,” Heidi Beirich, who as an expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been tracking hate groups since 1999, told AFP.
“We’ve always had a smattering of neo-Nazis... but this is ratcheting the situation up much higher than it was before.”
Overt bigotry by a candidate would spell his or her “death knell” up until recently, Beirich said. But in today’s hyper partisan political environment, such rhetoric may no longer be a deal breaker.
“By blowing through those taboos, and winning the presidency, Trump has shown a path to electoral success that people assumed wouldn’t work,” she said.
This bigotry has spread into public life. Several incidents caught on video showing white people calling the police on African-Americans going about their business have gone viral.
One, which showed two young men dragged out of a Starbucks coffee shop in handcuffs, helped spark a national dialogue about race.
The racial and ethnic divides are on clear political display in places like Virginia, where the Republican Senate nominee, the anti-immigration county supervisor Corey Stewart, is under fire for his provocative associations.
Stewart has praised Nehlen as “one of my personal heroes,” and has appeared with Jason Kessler, the man who organized a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville last August.
However Stewart has since disavowed both men, and the move may have swayed some voters. On June 20 he won the Republican Senate primary.
Last week he found himself on the debate stage with Democratic Senator Tim Kaine — Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vice presidential nominee — where Stewart insisted “there’s not a racist bone in my body.”
But he maintained he is a vigorous defender of Virginia “heritage,” and strongly opposes the removal of any Confederate monuments.
Extremist candidates tend to flourish when they and their supporters feel unrepresented and ignored by the mainstream US parties, either the GOP or Democrats.
In 2016 Trump appealed to millions of such blue collar voters, unemployed coal miners or factory workers or farmers whom Trump labeled the “forgotten man.”
They felt betrayed by globalization and US trade agreements, worried about illegal immigration, and mindful that their communities were changing.
Stewart says Democrats had the chance to reach those voters. But their failure to do so helped contribute to a scenario where far-right candidates can thrive.
Democrats “abandoned the working guy,” Stewart told CNN. “They slammed the door in their face, and now it’s president Trump and the new Republican Party that is supporting working Americans.”
The GOP has disavowed several extremist candidates, including Jones and Nehlen.
But the SPLC’s Beirich says Trump’s embrace of controversial Republicans like former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who ran concentration camp-like jails for undocumented immigrants and is now running for Senate after being pardoned by Trump, is dog-whistle messaging to his party’s fringe elements that there is space for them in political discourse.
Nazis, racists, bigots: Extremism on US ballot in 2018
Nazis, racists, bigots: Extremism on US ballot in 2018
- Extremism and bigotry, even outright white supremacy and anti-Semitism, have found new lives in US politics
- Experts say there is an unprecedented number of openly bigoted candidates this year
Australia bans a citizen with alleged links to militant Daesh group from returning from Syria
- The woman was planning to join another 33 Australians and fly on Monday from Damascus to Australia, Burke said
- “These are horrific situations that have been brought on those children by actions of their parents”
MELBOURNE: Australia’s government banned an Australian citizen with alleged ties to the militant Daesh group from returning home from a detention camp in Syria, the latest development in the case of fraught repatriation of families of Daesh fighters.
The woman was planning to join another 33 Australians — 10 women and 23 children — and fly on Monday from Damascus, Syria, to Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Wednesday.
But the group was turned back by Syrian authorities to the Roj detention camp, due to unspecified procedural problems.
The Australian government had acted on news that the group planned to leave Syria, Burke said. He said the woman, whom he did not identify, had been issued with a temporary exclusion order on Monday and her lawyers had been provided with the paperwork on Wednesday.
She was an immigrant who left Australia for Syria sometime between 2013 and 2015, Burke said, declining to elaborate on whether she had children — though he generally blamed the parents for the predicaments of their offspring stranded in Syria.
“These are horrific situations that have been brought on those children by actions of their parents. They are terrible situations. But they have been brought on entirely by horrific decisions that their parents made,” Burke told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Burke has the power to use temporary exclusion orders to prevent high-risk citizens from returning to Australia for up to two years.
The laws were were introduced to in 2019 to prevent defeated Daesh fighters from returning to Australia. There are no public reports of an order being issued before.
Burke said security agencies had not advised that any of the other Australians in the group warranted an exclusion order. Such orders can’t be made against children younger than 14.
Confusing messages at a cramped camp
At the Roj camp, tucked in Syria’s northeastern corner near the border with Iraq, the Australian women who had expected to travel home refused to speak to The Associated Press on Wednesday.
One of the women, Zeinab Ahmad, said they had been advised by an attorney not to talk to journalists.
A security official at the camp, Chavrê Rojava, said that family members of the detainees — who she said were Australians of Lebanese origin — had traveled to Syria to arrange their return. They brought temporary passports that had been issued for the would-be returnees, Rojava said.
“We have no contact with the Australian government regarding this matter, as we are not part of the process,” she said. “We have left it to the families to resolve.”
Rojava said that after the group had departed the camp to travel to Damascus, they were contacted by a Syrian government official and warned to turn back. The families were “very disappointed” upon returning to the camp, she said.
“We recently requested that all countries and families come and take back their citizens,” Rojava said.
She added that Syrian authorities do not want to see a “repeat of what happened in Al-Hol camp” — a much larger camp, also in northeastern Syria that once housed tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, with alleged ties to Daesh.
Last month, during fighting between Syrian government forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which had controlled Al-Hol, guards abandoned their posts and many of the camp’s residents fled.
That raised concerns that Daesh members would regroup and stage new attacks in Syria.
The Syrian government then established control of Al-Hol and has begun moving its remaining residents to another camp in Aleppo province. The Kurdish-led force remains in control of Roj camp and a ceasefire is now in place.
The thorny issue of repatriating Daesh-linked foreign citizens
Former Daesh fighters from multiple countries, their wives and children have been detained in camps since the militant group lost control of its territory in Syria in 2019. Though defeated, the group still has sleeper cells that carry out deadly attacks in both Syria and Iraq.
Australian governments have repatriated Australian women and children from Syrian detention camps on two occasions. Other Australians have also returned without government assistance.
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Wednesday reiterated his position announced a day earlier that his government would not help repatriate the latest group.
“These are people who chose to go overseas to align themselves with an ideology which is the caliphate, which is a brutal, reactionary ideology and that seeks to undermine and destroy our way of life,” Albanese told reporters.
He was referring to the militants’ capture of wide swaths of land more than a decade ago that stretched across Syria and Iraq, territory where Daesh established its so-called caliphate. Militant from foreign countries traveled to Syria at the time to join the Daesh. Over the years, they had families and raised children there.
“We are doing nothing to repatriate or to assist these people. I think it’s unfortunate that children are caught up in this, that’s not their decision, but it’s the decision of their parents or their mother,” Albanese added.
