Santee Politicians Decry Nathan Fletcher’s ‘Hateful Rhetoric’
Today’s GOP: Klantee’s Gonna Klantee; Grifters Gonna Grift…
It’s getting harder by the day to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to Republicans. Right wing militants are now accepted as normal by much of the party’s leadership.
The leading group opposing the party’s authoritarian tendencies is in full self destruct mode in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal and allegations of financial self-dealing.
Locally, Santee (aka Klantee) has long been seen as a backwater because of its connections with right wing kooks and extremists.
Two incidents last spring in the East County city brought old memories of cross-burnings and KKK meetings to the surface as a man was spotted wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood and a couple were seen with Nazi swastikas while shopping in local grocery stores.
Now the Santee City Council has issued a letter asking County Supervisor Nation Fletcher to step down as board chairman and apologize for alerting the public about the far right groups embedded in the Recall Newsom campaign.
They’re saying his warning --based on reporting in the Los Angeles Times-- amounted to “hateful rhetoric.”
While the State Democratic Party may have jumped the shark by calling the recall movement a “coup attempt,” there is no denying the overlap between groups backing the recall and those participating in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol:
,,,a Times investigation found that recall campaign leaders, seeking to capitalize on the darkening public mood, allied with radical and extreme elements early on to help collect signatures. Those included groups promoting distrust of government, science and medicine; peddlers of QAnon doomsday conspiracies; "patriots" readying for battle and one organization allied with the far-right extremist group, the Proud Boys.
The recall gave those fringe factions a higher profile and a shared villain. They helped energize the campaign with large and often inflammatory rallies over masks, in support of Trump and against the election they falsely say was stolen from the former president — ripe venues to harvest petition signatures...
...The Times found multiple examples of such messaging across groups. Some included misinformation from QAnon — a nonsensical mythos that Trump was fighting a secret war with deep state occults who traffic children, and would declare martial law with executions.
These include posts from San Diego that carried the QAnon motto, W1GWGA (where one goes, we go all). Other posts depict Newsom as Adolf Hitler and compare pandemic restrictions to the rise of the Third Reich.
Santee Mayor John W. Minto was interviewed by KUSI News and tried to spin the City Council’s demand as an attack on democracy itself, inferring that Fletcher’s remarks were somehow aimed at discrediting the process of citizen petitions and recall movements.
From the Union-Tribune:
The letter, approved Wednesday, admonishes Fletcher for comments he made during a Jan. 12 Zoom conference call to Democratic Party supporters in California. During the video, Fletcher spoke generally about the need to safeguard democracy, saying that some of the extremist groups involved in the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol are involved in the recall effort.
“There is substantial evidence that those who are leading this recall effort are linked and associated with neo-Nazi, with white supremacists, with right-wing militia groups, and we cannot stand for this here either,” Fletcher said on the Zoom call. He did not criticize the recall effort or a person’s right to participate in them.
Supervisor Fletcher’s response to the letter from Santee's city council:
“I never once made any statements about all people involved in the recall efforts of Governor Newsom. I suspect you know this and yet you continue to promote a lie. My comments said that some elements of the recall movement are tied to various right wing groups. I stated, '... these same extremists. They are involved in recall elections against our Gov. Gavin Newsom.’ I spoke out against the recall campaign’s alarming ties to right-wing extremist groups, which have been well documented by the LA Times’ investigative reporting. You might not like that reality, but it is without dispute that those elements are involved in the recall movement.”
Yo, Santee, as we used to say back in Junior High School: He who smelt it, dealt it.
There’s a reason why wannabe-vigilante groups like Defend East San Diego chose Santee as a favored location to express their views; it’s a safe space.
https://twitter.com/Wendy4SD/status/1360035542323195904?s=20
***
The principal source of anti-Trump advocacy cloaked as reputable Republicanism, known as the Lincoln Project, is seemingly self-destructing.
The group raised millions of dollars during 2020 and was responsible for popular social media campaigns attacking ex-president Donald trump and his enablers.
Although the group denounced co-founder John Weaver after reports of sexual harassment surfaced, there are now allegations that earlier complaints were ignored.
From the New York Post:
On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that Lincoln Project leaders were informed in writing and phone calls of at least 10 specific allegations of harassment against Weaver as early as June.
The revelation calls into question the organization’s statement last month that it was “shocked” as the accusations against Weaver were made public.
The Lincoln Project — best known for raising millions to fund the “Never Trump” movement — announced plans late Thursday to launch an external probe into Weaver’s tenure.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called out the Lincoln Project in November, saying data failed to back claims made about their media prowess in convincing disaffected Republicans to vote for Biden. She said the $67 million (at that point) raised by the group ended up diverting funding from organizers that played a larger role in Biden’s victory.
And, now, according to the Associated Press, only about $27 million of the $90 million ultimately raised by the group (which continued to raise money past the election) was spent on media.
The vast majority of the cash was split among consulting firms controlled by its founders, including about $27 million paid to a small firm controlled by Galen and another $21 million paid to a boutique firm run by former Lincoln Project member Ron Steslow, campaign finance disclosures show.
But in many cases it’s difficult to tell how much members of the group were paid. That’s because the Lincoln Project adopted a strategy, much like the Trump campaign they criticized, to mask how much money they earned.
While several firms did collect payments, Weaver and Wilson are not listed in publicly available records. They were likely paid as subcontractors to those firms, an arrangement that avoids disclosure. Schmidt collected a $1.5 million payment in December but quickly returned it.
“We fully comply with the law,” Schmidt said. “The Lincoln Project will be delighted to open its books for audit immediately after the Trump campaign and all affiliated super PACs do so, explaining the cash flow of the nearly $700 million that flowed through their organizations controlled by Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner.”
Whoa. So now they’re holding themselves to the same low standards embraced by Trump & Co? Not good.
I’m beginning to think if one were to create Venn diagrams illustrating the makeup of the GOP, you’d have one circle including nutcases and those who enable them and another indicating grifters, with (I presume, given all their evangelical support) a large overlapping area.
Are there many Republicans who don’t fit into the above categories? I’d like to think so, but given reports of mass defections by voters changing their political party registration declarations, that may be wishful thinking.
Hey folks! Be sure to like/follow Words & Deeds on Facebook. If you’d like to have each post emailed to you check out the simple subscription form on the right side of the front page.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com