The Georgia GOP’s Extremism Problem
Peach State Republicans are turning a blind eye to extremists in their ranks. Rising antisemitic acts in the state are one result.
All politics is local, Tip O’Neill famously said. But the late Speaker of the House doubtless would have agreed that when state politicians spar in the country’s 50 different political rings, they keep an eye on each other’s moves. That’s what makes the statements by Georgia Republicans about antisemitism earlier this month worth noting. They’re an example of why the GOP’s problem with calling out extremism goes beyond the Peach State.
Residents of a largely Jewish neighborhood in Sandy Springs Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, woke two week ago to find antisemitic flyers on their driveways and lawns. The flyers weren’t a one-off event. These days antisemites who call Georgia home are producing a growing share of the local far right’s effluvia. Governor Brian Kemp promptly denounced the hatemongering. “This kind of hate has no place in our state and the individuals responsible do not share Georgia’s values,” Kemp declared the next day.
Kemp’s remarks, pro forma pronouncements, are fine as far as they go. To be sure, many Republican voters and their elected representatives are doubtless appalled by the ugliness. Responding to several earlier incidents, in January Republicans joined Democratic state legislators from the Atlanta area to introduce a bill to define antisemitism. Presumably intended to energize law enforcers, it encourages officials “to consider” the definition in determining whether a harmful act involves discriminatory intent.
The attention is long in coming. Indeed, for years attacking hate crime wasn’t a Peach State priority . A hate crime law passed in 2000 but the state’s Supreme Court struck it down in 2004. Kemp finally signed legislation in 2020 following the national outcry over the racially motivated murder of Ahmaud Arbery. The law imposes sentencing guidelines for anyone intentionally committing a hate crime. Whether the latest bill, if it passes the Republican controlled legislature, will prod police and prosecutors to action remains to be seen.
In any case, hate crimes in Georgia, antisemitic versions included, are growing. The FBI’s annual hate crime reporting released in December recorded 238 incidents targeting racial, ethnic, religious and other identities in Georgia in 2021, a 22 percent rise over the previous year. Last April, the annual audit from the Antidefamation League (ADL), which tallies a wider variety of acts than the Bureau, previewed the trend: the ADL’s 2021 report showed a 133 percent increase in antisemitic incidents in Georgia—from 21 to 49—compared to 2020.
Local news organizations, of course, are covering the incidents when they occur. A half-dozen Georgia counties in the last few months have witnessed antisemitic hatemongering. The FBI and ADL statistics notwithstanding, recent articles curiously appear to downplay the problem. As one news story put it, “much of the activity in Atlanta traces to two relatively new, online racist groups: the Goyim Defense League (GDL) and White Lives Matter. The loosely organized groups use social media, especially the (Telegram) encrypted messaging app…and live-streaming platforms, to publicize otherwise relatively low-impact, low-cost activities.”
What’s obviously missing in the day-to-day news coverage—and what Republicans are trying to ignore—is hidden in plain sight. Antisemitism isn’t just the product of a few web-enabled, leafleteers and swastika painters. It’s woven into the politics of the extremist menagerie that Donald Trump has drawn under the GOP tent. Georgia is no exception. Neo-Nazi creeds and Holocaust denial may not be their crie de cœur but the vast majority of the 21 hate groups identified by the ADL as headquartered or represented in the state are cases in point.
From white nationalists, neo-confederates, right wing militias, and proto fascists to Christian nationalists, the antisemitic language in their credos, slogans, and statements isn’t hard to parse. Take the League of the South. The League champions the antebellum “Lost Cause,” the creation of a Christian theocracy, and white supremacy. A few years ago, its spokesman proclaimed, “Powerful Jews oppose the assertion of White identity while encouraging the expression of every other identity in order to weaken Whites!”
Georgia’s extremists haven’t been shy about displaying their political affections. For instance, the American Patriots led by Chester Doles, a former Ku Klux Klansman, made that plain in 2020 when Doles rebranded the group as “an organization dedicated to the Constitution and the re-election of Donald Trump...” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the GOP radical right’s poster girl in Congress, beamed in a photo beside Doles during her 2020 congressional campaign. Then, Taylor Greene also was peddling QAnon as well as antisemitic conspiracies to pull in the vote.
When it comes to offering photo ops and sympathetic stump speech noises to the radical right, MTG clearly isn’t alone. Republican senatorial candidate Kelly Loeffler mugged for the camera with Doles and other American Patriots in her failed 2020 Senate run. So did then Georgia state representative Matt Gurtler during his 2020 congressional primary. In his failed congressional primary that year Michael Boggus, a Republican and far right militia member, went Gurtler one better. Boggus said he sincerely accepted Doles’ disavowal of previous KKK views.
Peach Staters aren’t the only ones ignoring hatemongers among their political supporters. Last October, Insider, a political news site, contacted some three dozen serving and former Republican congressional and national party leaders after former President Trump dined with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. The pair’s antisemitism and white supremacist views respectively made the meal a front page event. When asked about growing antisemitic sentiment in the GOP, Insider reported, the Republicans’ evasions eclipsed explicit statements hands down. But then, why not? As Trump reportedly said during his 2016 campaign, “a lot of these people vote.”
What can Georgia’s Republicans do about the extremists among them? If the statistics from the FBI and ADL are any indication, it’s obvious that ritualized statements decrying the problem are not enough. Reflecting last November on the New York City Republican Club’s 2018 welcome to the founder of the Proud Boys—the group’s members are now on trial for seditious conspiracy for their role on January 6th—at its annual dinner and the invitation’s implicit endorsement of political violence, the New York Times offered an idea that just might apply.
“One of the most effective ways to deter political violence is to make it unacceptable in public life,” the New York Times Editorial Board wrote last November. “To do that,” the Board continued, “all political leaders have an important role to play.”
For Georgia’s Republican Party and the task of confronting the extremists in its ranks, the state convention beginning on June 9 would be a good place to start. There’s ample time before then for GOP leaders, such as Governor Kemp, to produce a statement and party policies that identify the hatemongers and categorically reject their participation in the party as well as their views.