Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America

by John P. Avlon

  On Election Day, Goldwater won only six states—his native Arizona and the deep South, including every state Strom Thurmond carried as a Dixiecrat in 1948. Mississippi cast 87 percent of its votes for Goldwater—the first time the state had voted Republican in its history. In turn, Vermont voted Democratic for the first time in its history.

  And so the electoral map began the slide toward the red-blue alignment we know today. When he signed the Civil Rights Act over southern conservative objections, Lyndon Johnson presciently remarked to his press secretary Bill Moyers, “I think we delivered the South to the Republican Party for your lifetime and mine.”29

  Former Senate majority leader Trent Lott was among the many conservative southern Democrats who switched parties in the ensuing decades. In 1984, the Mississippi congressman gave a revealing interview to Southern Partisan magazine in which he said, “I think a lot of the fundamental principles that [Confederate President] Jefferson Davis believed in are very important to people across the country, and they apply to the Republican Party.”30 The party labels had changed, but the southern conservative power structure remained largely the same. In 2008, a young Republican operative from Mississippi apologetically told me, “Let’s face it—the base is racist.”

  The Party of Lincoln may have sold its soul, but the Faustian bargain contributed to four decades of political gain. Between 1968 and 2004, Republicans won seven of ten presidential elections. Before 1968, the opposite was true—Democrats won seven of ten.

  But now the bill is coming due. Demographics are destiny and America is becoming less white and rural—more diverse and urban. Republicans find themselves in danger of becoming a regional party, based in the socially conservative South. In 1999, Republican governors dotted the Northeast in states like New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Ten years later, those states are under Democratic control. In New York, there were thirteen Republican congressmen at the time—in 2009 there are two. And there is not a single GOP congressman left in all of New England, the historic home of the Republican Party.

  To contemporary ears, it almost sounds like an urban legend to hear that the first African-American and the first woman freely elected to the Senate were both Republicans: Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. And here’s a stat that puts the cost of the southern strategy in sharp perspective: Of the twenty-three African-Americans who served in Congress before 1900, every single one was a Republican. They would not have dreamed of being anything but members of the Party of Lincoln.

  But since the civil rights era, there have been only three African-American Republicans elected to Congress—Senator Brooke and representatives Gary Franks (CT) and J. C. Watts (OK)—while there have been ninety-three Democrats.

  The Party of Lincoln has almost entirely lost the allegiance of the African-American community to the point where the reasons for this historical alliance seem dusty and irrelevant. There have been historic appointments of African-American Republicans to high office—such as secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice—but to date the electoral aspirations of African-American Republicans have been basically DOA because the party is not seen as representing their community.

  “They can’t appeal to African-Americans and at the same time oppose everything that’s in the interest of African-Americans,” said former Senator Ed Brooke, now approaching ninety years of age and spending much of the year in the warmth of Miami with his wife, Anne. “When you talk about equality and justice, you can’t just preach, you’ve got to act. That old statement of Abraham Lincoln’s—that government should do for people only what they cannot do for themselves—depends on knowing that there are some people who cannot do for themselves. It’s got to be a party with a head and a heart.”

  Brooke told me he applauded the selection of African-American Michael Steele to be the Republican National Chairman, but with a cautionary note: “They made an excellent choice in Michael Steele. . . . But if the desire or hope was that it would generate more African-American or Hispanic votes for the GOP, well it’s a good step in the right direction but it’s not going to get the job done. . . . I think that alone won’t be a change that is sufficient to have masses of African-Americans or all those young people come into the Republican Party.”

  Young Republicans and Racist E-mails

  “Obama Bin Lauden [sic] is the new terrorist. . . . Muslim is on there [sic] side . . . need to take this country back from all of these mad coons . . . and illegals.”31

  So typed a man named Eric S. Piker on a Facebook page operated by Audra Shay—a thirty-eight-year-old army veteran, mother and event planner from Louisiana—who was running to be chairman of the Young Republicans.

  Shay responded to Piker’s post eight minutes later: “You tell em Eric! lol.”32

  It didn’t take long for other posters on Shay’s page to do the math. First, a regular poster, Derek Moss, wrote: “What’s disheartening is the use of the word ‘coon’ in 2009. Wow . . . I’m usually outnumbered about 500-to-1 on Audra’s threads so go ahead, lemme have it, I deserve it.” He apparently expected to be criticized among this crowd for calling out the racist comment.

  Cassie Wallender, a national committeewoman from the Washington Young Republican Federation, then wrote: “Someone please help a naïve Seattle girl out, is Eric’s comment a racial slur?” She answered her own question one minute later: “Okay, why is this okay? I just looked it up. ‘It comes from a term baracoons (a cage) where they used to place Africans who were waiting to be sent to America to be slaves.’ THIS IS NOT OKAY. And it’s not funny.”33

  This was followed soon after by the African-American chairman of the D.C. Young Republicans, Sean L. Conner, who wrote, “I’m really saddened that you would support this type of racial language . . . wow! Thanks Cassie for standing up . . .”34

  Word started spreading throughout the Young Republican circuit, open to GOP members under forty. For hours, Audra Shay stayed silent.

  Finally, she took action. She “de-friended” Wallender and Conner—in the world of Facebook, that means cutting off relations—after calling her out. Piker, who made the original “coon” comment, remained her Facebook “friend.”

  Shay’s immediate concern was damage control. She deleted the controversial exchanges from her page (but not before screenshots were taken) and tried to tamp down the fire internally.

  Almost eight hours after Piker’s comments, and Shay’s ensuing “lol,” Shay posted an official-sounding Facebook status update stating that neither she—nor her Young Republican political slate, ironically called Team Renewal—“condones the use of racial slurs on my wall. . . . It is not right to nor appropriate to talk that way and will not be accepted!” But soon she was back in jaunty country-girl denial mode (“amazed at all the fuss so here is what you need to know. The 6th song on the new Billy Currington CD is the most awesome song!”).

  At 10:31 p.m., a friend named Dale Lawson raised the P.C. flag, writing “the over reaction to it was a little amusing.” Then Eric S. Piker came roaring back: “I agree with dale . . . this is still America . . . freedom of speech and thought is still allowed . . . for now any ways . . . and the last time i checked I was a good ole southern boy . . . and if yur ass is black don’t let the sun set on it in a southern town . . .”

  The next morning, the black conservative site HipHop Republican.com posted a story on the exchange. “There is a culture war going on inside the Republican Party,” one of the site’s founders, Lenny McAllister, told me. “At some point, we will see one of two things—either a decline that comes from our inability to move away from the image of an older, exclusive, white-males-only party or to a party that befits the Party of Lincoln, one of more diversity that reflects America today.”

  It probably doesn’t help that Audra Shay grew up dancing in the shadow of a Confederate flag. She was a popular cheerleader for the Southside High School Rebels in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Class of 1990. It was a predominantly white s
chool in those days, with the town’s African-American population attending rival Northside High School. The racial disconnect was symbolized by Southside’s mascot, Johnny Reb, a Confederate soldier in the mold of Ole Miss’s white mustachioed mascot. Supporters would wave the Stars and Bars in the stands. Even then, the mascot came under fire for its politically incorrect imagery. “Save Johnny Reb” was a rallying cry for students who sought to save their mascot from what they saw as censorship.

  “I’m ashamed to say it, but looking back, we didn’t have many black students, and that kind of stopped many of us from appreciating what the big deal was,” explained one former classmate. “In our white suburban neighborhood, cultural conservatism was more important than what political party you belonged to.”

  After graduating from Southside, Audra attended the University of Arkansas for one year and then joined the army, eventually serving in the Second Infantry Division in Korea. After finishing active duty at Fort Benning, she worked in internal affairs of the Muscogee County Police Department and had the first of two children.

  She married for a second time in 1999 and moved to Louisiana, where she opened a small events planning business and got involved in local young Republican politics, eventually serving as field director for pioneering Indian-American Bobby Jindal’s first, unsuccessful, gubernatorial campaign. Audra was subsequently hired to be the state grassroots director for the free-market-advocacy organization Americans for Prosperity—which later was instrumental in funding the Tea Parties—and concentrated on climbing the ranks of the national Young Republicans. Her bio proudly states that “she helped to showcase the YRs at the Republican National Committee’s Southern Republican Leadership Conference by manning a booth [and] rubbing elbows with Presidential hopefuls.”35

  The Young Republicans have always included a mix of young idealists, aspiring politicos and ideological warriors, and occasionally that combination has veered from ambition into rank ugliness. During the mid- 1960s, the crew-cut militants of the young conservative movement had their own scandals to contend with.

  One pungent if forgotten incident involved a group of Young Republicans from the mid-Atlantic states known as the “Rat-Finks,” who amused themselves with mimeographed racist songbooks at events like the Young Republicans’ national conventions. Here is a sample lyric to one choice anti-Semitic number, which was to be sung to the tune of “Jingle Bells”:Riding through the Reich, in a Mercedes Benz,

  Shooting all the kikes, making lots of friends.

  Rat tat tat tat tat, mow the bastards down,

  Oh what fun it is to have the Nazis back in town!36

  The Rat-Finks were eventually censured in a close vote of twenty-five to nineteen by the Young Republican Federation in 1967, but Audra and others have reason for comfort that scandals don’t preclude a life in politics: One of the Rat-Fink’s leaders went on to a successful career as a New Jersey state senator and judge.

  In the past, racist incidents could be relegated to a distant stack in the library, but now the Internet provides indelible evidence of every racist aside. Racist jokes that may have passed in pool halls and country clubs become permanent proof of callousness and cruelty online.

  You’d think the right would have gotten the message when e-mails provided the initial smoking gun in the Jack Abramoff scandals. The story gained traction in part because of the difficult-to-defend sensationalism of e-mails in which Abramoff described his multimilliondollar Native American casino clients as idiots, troglodytes and monkeys—as in, “I have to meet with the monkeys from the Choctaw tribal council” and “We need to get some money from those monkeys.”37

  They haven’t:• Election Night 2008, South Carolina GOP operative Jeffrey Sewell tweets: “The agony of defeat, we just elected Curious George president.” And “Breaking: Obama replaces Secret Service with Black Panthers.” 38

  • Florida Republican State Committeewoman Carol Carter sends out the following e-mail a week after the inauguration under the subject line “Amazing!” “How can 2,000,000 blacks get into Washington, DC in 1 day in sub zero temps when 200,000 couldn’t get out of New Orleans in 85 degree temps with four days notice?”39

  • Los Alamitos, California, Mayor Dean Grose forwarded an e-mail in April showing a watermelon patch lining the White House lawn under the title “No Easter egg hunt this year.” He said that he was unaware of racial stereotypes about African-Americans and watermelon. No word, in that case, why he thought the e-mail was funny enough to forward.40

  • Former South Carolina state election director and Richland County GOP chairman Rusty DePass “joked” on his Facebook page in June that First Lady Michelle Obama was descended from a gorilla which had gone missing from a local zoo: “I’m sure it’s just one of Michelle’s ancestors—probably harmless.”41 DePass initially reached for a defense from the Scopes Monkey Trial era, claiming that Michelle believed in evolution and was therefore descended from apes. He later apologized to the local NAACP.

  • Three days later, Tennessee state legislative aide Sherri Goforth e-mailed out an image labeled “Historical Keepsake”—showing august portraits of all the presidents of the United States, ending with a pair of googly-eyes peering out from a black background to symbolize President Obama.42 When confronted, the aide to State Senator Diane Black said only that she regretted sending the image to the wrong e-mail list and from her government address. She was “reprimanded” by her supervisors but not otherwise punished (a forced furlough at Memphis’s National Civil Rights Museum would have been an inspired penalty).

  • Florida neurosurgeon, GOP fundraiser and founder of Doctors for Patient Freedom David McKalip forwarded an image of President Obama as a New Guinea witch doctor with a bone through his nose to a Tea Party listserv group under the subject header “funny stuff.” There was a Soviet-style hammer and sickle through the “c” in “Obama Care.”43

  • The million-dollar relaunch of GOP.com hit a snag in October 2009 when its Facebook fan page featured a rogue posting of a photo showing President Obama eating a chicken wing over the old-school racist slogan, “Miscegenation is a crime against American values: Repeal Loving v. Virginia”—the 1967 Supreme Court decision that outlawed bans on interracial marriage.44

  • When President Obama’s speech announcing 30,000 new troops for an Afghanistan surge pre-empted a December ’09 airing of a Charlie Brown Christmas Special, Arlington, Tennessee, Mayor Russell Wiseman took his frustrations out via Facebook, writing about “our Muslim president.” “Try to convince me that wasn’t done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation [sic] about it . . . when the answer should simply be ‘yes’ . . . you obama people need to move to a muslim country . . . oh wait, that’s America . . . pitiful . . . you know, our forefathers had it written in the original Constitution that ONLY property owners could vote, if that has [sic] stayed in there, things would be different.”45

  This is the environment that incubates an incident like the slur on Audra Shay’s Facebook page. This time, the uproar grew louder and began to get widespread attention when I wrote about it on The Daily Beast. But Shay was not about to let a little racist e-mail scandal stop her Tracy Flick meets Strangers with Candy quest for election.

  And so an online whisper campaign against Shay’s opponent Rachel Hoff began. An anonymously built temporary Web site targeted Hoff’s support for same-sex civil unions as the real scandal, expressed in li’l Lee Atwater tones:As one of only a very few Young Republicans nationwide in favor of Civil Unions, Rachel Hoff attempted to convince the YRNF in 2007 to adopt a stance IN FAVOR OF CIVIL UNIONS. Although Rachel was not wearing a dress like her female counterparts, but her typical suite [sic], her attempt was met with ridicule and frustration. It was overwhelmingly shot down and left the idea in many delegates minds of: Why would Rachel Hoff support Civil Unions?

  Got to love the all-caps for her support IN FAVOR OF CIVIL UNIONS, a brave stanc
e entirely consistent with the party’s stated belief in individual freedom (and well short of conservative icon Dick Cheney’s belated support for gay marriage). Then there’s the weird 1920s-era anti-feminist dig at her for “not wearing a dress like her female counterparts.” And the last sentence, with all the subtlety of a Tom DeLay sledgehammer. It’s an exceptionally ugly piece of insinuation and propaganda, casting new light on Shay’s campaign claim that “the only way to change something you don’t like, is to get in and get your hands dirty.”

  As the two candidates wound their way to the Young Republican Convention in Indianapolis, it became apparent that this was not an isolated incident.

  In October 2008, in the wake of news that an effigy of Sarah Palin was being hung outside an affluent Hollywood home as an offensive Halloween decoration, Shay posted: “What no ‘Obama in a noose?’ Come on now, its [sic] just freedome [sic] of speech, no one in Atlanta would take that wrong! Lol.” She picked up the thread again the next morning with a club-footed clarification. “Apparently I could not spell last night. I am wondering if the guys with the Palin noose would care if we had a bunch of homosexuals in a noose.”