Last week a Georgian owned the internet — parts of it, anyway — and it wasn’t Jon Ossoff for a change.
After spreading the word that he was going to “name names,” connecting many of the “white nationalists, Christian nationalists and neo-Nazis rising on the right,” conservative WSB radio host and blogger Erick Erickson dropped a piece titled “The Midwestern Fuhrerbunker Driving the Right Off the Cliff.”
“A group of white guys have subtly inserted themselves into conservative institutions and church organizations,” Erickson wrote. “They all embrace racial grievances. To varying degrees, they embrace white nationalism, antisemitism and even Nazi sympathies. They are getting added to conservative institutional boards, attempting to purge churches, and are desperate to indoctrinate young conservatives into fascist ideology. They even surround the Vice President of the United States.”
He was not the only conservative drawing a line against elements of the far right last week. There was widespread condemnation of Bo French, the Republican candidate a Republican candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, for posting a photo of a group of South Asian-American students celebrating after the University of Texas’ big win over Ohio State, with the comment that it showed “how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners.” That even prompted the Texas Republican strategist Carl Rove to write a Wall Street Journal piece announcing he’s going to vote for French’s Democratic opponent.
But for sheer ad hominem bile, it would be hard to top the furious online reaction to Erickson, “an insecure, obese, middle-aged man with braces,” “the Right’s hall monitor,” “a washed-up, degenerate old man,” “effectively no different than any other leftist,” the “Godhaters’ pet evangelist,” one of the of so-called conservatives who are “traitors of the worst kind, and must be purged from the movement entirely.” That’s just a sampling.
One reason for these attacks on the Macon-based conservative commentator is that he really did name some names, beginning with that of Charles Heywood, a far-right retired businessman who, Erickson wrote, has used his wealth to infiltrate conservative organizations like the Claremont Institute and drive them toward a more radical vision with a secret network of like-minded followers.
After Erickson was booked as a panelist on the Sunday news show This Week, an organization representing one of those name sent a letter to the chief counsel of Disney Entertainment warning of repercussions if Erickson were to refer to their client as a Nazi, which would make him vulnerable to the “growing phenomenon of assassination culture,” a term which has been taken up in right-wing circles following the murder of Charlie Kirk. The subject didn’t come up Sunday morning.
“It’s pretty simple: If you’re calling people Nazis who are not Nazis after what happened to Charlie Kirk, you’re trying to get them killed,” one of Erickson’s critics wrote.
There’s another reason why Erickson’s piece stirred such vitriol. Most mainstream analysis of the rise of the religious right has tended to look past the specifically religious side of the story, so that the role of people like the late Paul Pressler isn’t widely known and the impact of Charlie Kirk may not be fully understood by a lot of people. Erickson’s piece is framed as a warning to the right generally, but it comes down to that most incendiary subject, religion.
“This is ultimately a spiritual problem rather than a political one. Inside the church, Satan spreads kinism, racism and ethno-nationalism, and he does it by telling frightened men that their blood is their birthright,” he wrote.
The following day on his radio show, he spoke directly to Southern Baptists and Presbyterians, telling them these well-funded missionaries of a twisted theology “are coming for you.”
Heywood and his acolytes derive some of their religious/political arguments from the German jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt, who considered himself Catholic because he was born that way, and Nazi because he chose to be that way, although he was denounced by the SS for not being as anti-semitic as he claimed to be.
Schmitt isn’t the only obscure European philosopher whose ideas have found an American home on the far right. Paypal/Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who has lectured on his ideas about the Antichrist in San Francisco and Rome, has been heavily influenced by the French philosopher René Girard and his idea that societies need a common scapegoat to shape their violent energies.
For those not attracted to theological hairsplitting, some of these ideas may seem pretty loopy. But there is a serious war in progress, with implications far beyond the denominations which are its battlefield.
The post For some, the civil war on the right has become a battle for souls appeared first on SaportaReport.
