Former Oklahoma GOP State Rep. John Bennett is, in a word, despicable. He has a history of spewing anti-Muslim hate and racist comments, and he has called for political violence. And now a guy who is the poster child for dangerously toxic politics is the leading candidate to be Oklahoma’s next state Republican Party chair.
But you know what? He deserves to win because he represents the true face of today’s Republican Party. In fact, Bennett should be elected by acclamation as the national Republican chair so that there’s no disputing that the GOP is a racist, bigoted party that increasingly embraces violence on its path to fascism.
Let me tell you about Bennett, whom I started writing about in 2014. He’s not your run-of-the-mill anti-Muslim bigot. I view him as “Patient Zero” in mainstreaming anti-Muslim hate in the GOP. In 2014, Bennett made headlines when he called Islam “a cancer” that must be cut out of America, declaring that the goal of Muslims, like myself, was “the destruction of Western civilization from within.”