White Nationalists With Lanyards: Orlando Showed The Ugly Future Of The Republican Party

Join HuffPost for a Twitter Spaces conversation about this story on March 4 at 1 p.m. Reporter Christopher Mathias will discuss what it was like to cover the white nationalist conference and the future of the GOP. For weeks ahead of this year’s AFPAC, Fuentes teased even more GOP officials — Gosar again, Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and former U.S. congressman Steve King — plus two “mystery speakers.” At about 9:30 p.m., Fuentes stepped in front of the Marriott lectern, according to a livestream viewed by HuffPost, and got the night underway. She began her speech by invoking her faith, leading the groypers to break into a chant of “Christ is king!” Then Greene — a transphobic QAnon conspiracist booted off Twitter for promoting COVID denialism who was stripped of her committee assignments last year for advocating violence against Democrats — told the assembled white nationalists that they, like her, were “canceled Americans.” “You’ve been handed the responsibility to fight for our Constitution and stand for our freedoms, and stop the Democrats who are the communist party of the United States of America,” she said. “Western white culture is the majority culture, to which even non-whites assimilate into today — and they’re better off for it.” State Sen. Rogers thought this was just great. Scott Olson via Getty Images Shortly after Greene’s speech, an 89-year-old man sat down at a table inside CPAC’s expo hall and started to sign copies of his book, “Sheriff Joe Arpaio: An American Legend.” Arpaio — the former Maricopa County sheriff who terrorized Arizona’s Latino population for a quarter century, unlawfully detaining undocumented people in a jail he once proudly likened to a “concentration camp” — had also spoken to the groypers mere hours earlier, at 1 a.m., regaling the young fascists with tales of putting his prisoners in chain gangs, or emasculating them by forcing them to wear pink jumpsuits.