I Fear the GOP Is Heading Down the Rabbit Hole

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On Tuesday, I was outside the Fiserv Forum, where the Republican National Convention is taking place, when I bumped into Florida Rep. Cory Mills. 

Mills, whose Seventh Congressional District stretches from Orlando to the Atlantic, had just wrapped up an interview with right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk. 

They’d been discussing the possibility of Donald Trump’s near assassination being an “inside job,” as Mills put it, and we were squeezed between a makeshift stage and a gaggle of cops, press secretaries, and fangirls angling for selfies with the congressman.

When I asked Mills whether it was dangerous to suggest that the Secret Service had tried to kill Trump when there was no evidence to back that up, Mills accused me of being a “liberal.”

“Don’t even start talking to me about dangerous rhetoric nonsense right now,” Mills told me. He said that the president himself had once used his own dangerous rhetoric on a recent phone call with donors, saying, “It’s time to put Trump in a bull’s-eye.”

Then, Mills went on: “The problem with left-wing media—they always want to try and spin things around but not take accountability for their own words.”

I’ll cop to being pro-choice. I think gay marriage is a good thing. I’m not against a social safety net. I’m not sure what that makes me in 2024.

As for the spin that the legacy media is a Democratic media organ—I get that. I work at The Free Press.

Where he loses me—and where I fear the GOP is headed to judge from some of the conversations I’ve had and the speakers I’ve heard this week at the RNC—is straight down the rabbit hole all the way to Alex Jones Land.

The roots of this shift can be traced to the 1950s—recall Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 Harper’s essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”—but it was always kept in check by the guardrails, the institutions. It wasn’t until Donald Trump that it was legitimized. It was Trump, as everyone knows, who promulgated the lie that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. 

And it’s Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who reportedly believes Alex Jones is a teller of inconvenient truths.

The convention that is crowning Trump and Vance gave Charlie Kirk—the head of Turning Point USA, which aims to spread conservative values on campus—a spot as a speaker on the opening night. 

This is the same Charlie Kirk who recently complained: “I have impatience for American Jews that have put up with the anti-white sentiments the last decade and thought it was perfectly fine. Because guess what, American Jews, you’re considered white in the eyes of the Marxists.” 

In the days after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, Kirk took the lead in spreading the lie that Israel allowed Hamas to attack, that there was a secret “stand down” order. (Ben Domenech, the former editor of The Federalist, said at the time that if Kirk “remains the head of TPUSA, the right has an antisemite problem that will follow them into the coming elections.”)

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was also on the menu this week. (She spoke Monday.)

The Georgia congresswoman recently opposed a bill condemning antisemitism because, she tweeted, it “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.” And that’s to say nothing of the infamous “Jewish space lasers.”

And how about North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson? He spoke Monday. Among other things, he has denied the Holocaust and suggested Black Panther was a Jewish plot meant to denigrate and marginalize black Americans.

It’s wrong to say the new GOP is run by antisemites. There are lots of Jews here. There are Israeli flags and Trump kippahs on the convention floor. On day one of the convention, Republicans prayed for the hostages in Gaza. On Wednesday night Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Jewish graduate of Harvard who is suing the school for failing to address antisemitism on campus, spoke of how the far left “has not only abandoned the Jewish people, but the American people.” Orna and Ronen Neutra, whose son is one of the Americans held hostage by Hamas in Gaza, led chants of “bring them home,” and described October 7 as “not merely an attack on Israel. This was an attack on Americans.” 

The problem is that any culture that does away with guardrails, that doesn’t allow for a delineation between truth and untruth, is opening a Pandora’s box that inevitably leads to a dark place—for Jews, for all civilized peoples.

But it’s hard to see how we reinsert the genie back into the bottle. The border separating reality and unreality, acceptable versus unacceptable opinion, has been dissolved. In today’s postmodernized Republican Party, everyone has a legitimate point of view, and facts are just “narratives” or “constructs,” and the only thing that really matters is how big your audience is and whether your content goes viral.

Peter Savodnik is a writer for The Free Press. Follow him on X @petersavodnik, and read the piece he wrote after Trump was shot, “Don’t Fall for the Partisan Trap.” For more on-the-ground reporting from the RNC, read Olivia Reingold’s piece about the young, bleach-blond Republican influencer who told her: “You can be any demographic and be a conservative.”