With alarming frequency, Trumpists, including Qanon cultists and white nationalists, are running for political office across the United States at the local level, a strategy known as entryism. Entryists have no desire to improve government or public education. They seek office only to subvert good governance and civic responsibility.
The German Nazis were artful entryists. The Nazis were satisfied with poor election results and biding their time. No one would have given them much of a chance when they received a paltry 3 percent of the vote in the 1924 national elections and even less—2.6 percent in 1928. But in 1929, at the regional level they began winning seats in state legislatures. That year, the Nazis won seven seats in the Schleswig-Holstein Landtag (Parliament). Their new parliamentary leader made no secret of his party’s true intentions when he said, “We don’t go to local bodies to do positive work. There is only one thing, and that is to work together to remove this system.” The same is true of the Trumpist and Qanon cultists.
The right-wing goal of seeking takeovers of local bodies as Republicans is yet another clear indication that any hope of purging the “Party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt” of its extremist Trump base is doomed to failure.
Buoyed by the political success of Qanon cultists like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Nazi sympathizers like Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who have been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the far-right has unveiled a battle plan to gain control of local school boards, municipal councils, and election boards. [While Cawthorn's admiration for Adolf Hitler is common knowledge, in 2018, Gaetz invited neo-Nazi Chuck Johnson to be his personal guest at Donald Trump's State of the Union address, despite the fact that the U.S. Capitol Police warned Gaetz of Johnson's ties to white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups. Gaetz's invitation to a Nazi to sit in the House chamber was a harbinger of worse things to come].
White nationalist pro-Nazis have actually won Republican primaries in some states for the U.S. House and Senate, as well as state legislatures. These include California, Illinois, Wisconsin, Virginia, and North Carolina. In New Jersey, a self-described Zionist named Seth Grossman, a white supremacist who identifies with the neo-Nazi faction in his Republican Party’s ranks, has run for both the U.S. House and governor of New Jersey. In Massachusetts, GOP U.S. House candidate Shiva Ayyadurai, an Indian-American, has campaigned with neo-Nazis and has issued campaign pins featuring the Groyper symbol of a green frog, which was purloined from a respected cartoonist.
Another white nationalist, former Iowa congressman Steve King, served in the U.S. House from 2003 to 2021. He was defeated in the GOP primary in 2021 but he has continued to be active in far-right and neo-Nazi politics in the United States and Europe.
Perhaps the most unabashed neo-Nazi is Donald Trump, himself. He has had no problem using Nazi iconography on his 2020 re-election campaign’s social media output and he even proudly stood on a stage crafted as the Waffen SS’s Odal Teutonic rune symbol at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando in February 2021, almost two months after his attempted Nazi-style putsch at the U.S. Capitol.
Far-right extremists are targeting school board seats from the Milwaukee suburb of Mequon-Thiensville to Loudoun County, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC. These far-right activists have also lured financial support from deep-pocketed right-wing funders like the Bradley and Uihlein Foundations.
School board seats are also being targeted by the far-right in Arizona, Indiana, Ohio, Georgia, California, Wisconsin, Florida, Texas, and Oregon. The Trumpists, Qanon cultists, and other fringe extremists are following the German Nazi playbook in attempting to alter public education curricula to produce future generations of similarly-minded societal zealots.
In battles for the control of school boards there has been a blurring of the lines between opponents of critical race theory, which entails nothing more than teaching students the truth about American history—warts and all—and anti-public health advocacy, such as opposition to the wearing of masks in schools, student quarantines, and student vaccine requirements for Covid-19, polio, rubella, measles, chicken pox, and other life-threatening viruses.
When one peels away the political onion of opposition to fact-based history and social studies education, public health requirements in schools, and gun-free schools, the true and very ugly face of neo-Nazism and white nationalism reveals itself.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2021 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and nationally-distributed columnist. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
