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Republicans have officially embraced the lynch mob.
Last week, the Republican National Committee passed a formal resolution to censure GOP Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois for participating in the House Jan. 6 committee's investigation into the Capitol riot.
With that resolution, which defined the probe as a "Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse," the Republican Party officially endorsed the insurrectionist mob. It made clear the GOP's support for the violent rioters over some of its own party members.
Despite their attempted revisionism, it’s important to remember the type of people the RNC is classifying as “ordinary citizens” and the behavior the party is classifying as welcomed political speech.
Some rioters who breached the Capitol hurled racist epithets while chasing police officers. Other attackers waved flags, signs and symbols of white supremacist groups. Others literally brought a gallows and shouted "Hang Mike Pence!" And all of them were engaged in a plot to overthrow the 2020 election, focused in part on baseless allegations of voter fraud in predominantly Black districts.
This was unmistakably a lynch mob. And it’s important we see Republican efforts to defend it for what they are: attempts to normalize racist violence as a political strategy. Their stance harks back to the early 1920s, when a resurgent Ku Klux Klan tried to assert its legitimacy by claiming to represent many Americans’ political interests. They, too, sought to establish their brutal tactics as a form of acceptable political speech.
You can read the RNC resolution and hear echoes of Hiram Wesley Evans, the head of the Klan in the 1920s and '30s. In his 1926 essay “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” Evans said the group spoke for "the great mass of Americans of the old pioneer stock," which didn't include “intellectually mongrelized liberals.”
The Klan does "fairly and faithfully represent them," Evans wrote of the "old pioneer stock" of Americans. "And our proof lies in their support."
Evans went on to write of “low-standard aliens” whose influence he claimed hindered American freedom.
“Those who know the American character know that if the problem is not soon solved by wisdom, it will be solved by one of those cataclysmic outbursts which have so often disgraced — and saved! —the race,” he wrote.
All that is old is made new again. Just as white conservatives accepted racist violence as a political tactic in the past, white conservatives today — those with actual power, at least — are suggesting violence is a fundamental part of political discourse.
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