When far-right candidate James Fishback won 10% of the vote in Florida’s Republican gubernatorial primary race this year, it was an indicator of the extremism coursing through the MAGA movement.

It showed that a not-insignificant portion of Florida conservatives preferred someone offering overtly racist and antisemitic rage bait over a Black Republican like Byron Donalds, who has been shamelessly loyal to the MAGA cause as a congressman and whom Fishback has called a “slave.”

The fact that Fishback’s support came largely from young voters fueled concerns among Republicans in Florida and elsewhere about young conservatives embracing Nazism and other forms of bigoted extremism. And a large Florida school district cut ties with Fishback over allegations that he had an inappropriate relationship with an underage student. He has denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged.

All this to say, he comes with a lot of baggage. And his presence in the conservative movement is adding to ongoing divisions between members of the far right — think: Fishback and online “groypers” — and other conservatives who think these people are politically toxic to the MAGA movement for one reason or another.

Former Auburn basketball coach Bruce Pearl, who has fashioned himself into a MAGA propagandist in recent years, provided an example of these divisions in a post targeting Auburn’s chapter of Turning Point USA for inviting Fishback to speak at the school:

To give you a sense of Fishback’s rhetoric, The Times of Israel reported that during his speech to the Turning Point USA chapter at the University of Mississippi last week, he said, “Abortion is a holocaust, and by every single historical metric available, it was worse than the other one.”

TPUSA is a vector for extremism, so no one should be surprised that someone like Fishback is being asked to address its chapters. Some of the replies to Pearl’s post came from MAGA activists defending TPUSA and accusing Pearl of censorship. But other conservatives denounced the organization for partnering with Fishback and called for self-examination. For examples, see here and here.

In one such post, right-wing commentator John Cardillo referred to TPUSA as a “trash organization” and said its leadership should “disclose that groyperism is Turning Point’s new direction.”

Behold: A bunch of MAGA types are reckoning with the fact that the movement they’ve built has harbored some of the most vile bigotry the nation has to offer — and they don’t seem thrilled.

The post Turning Point faces fury over its ties with James Fishback and his bigotry appeared first on MS NOW.

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