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.”
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Today that might sound like typical GOP anti-Muslim fare—especially after Donald Trump. But what Bennett did after he spewed these vile words was unprecedented at the time. When Republican officials prior to Bennett had made comments like that, they tended to walk them back or say it was out of context. For example, Herman Cain apologized during the 2012 presidential campaign for his comments that mosques should be banned in America, Muslims want to impose sharia law, etc.
But not Bennett. He went full anti-Muslim bigot. After the firestorm caused by his comments, he doubled and tripled down on Muslim-bashing with remarks like, “Muslim Americans who subscribe to Islam are just as bad as ISIS.” In response, Bennett received a standing ovation from GOP supporters at an event in Oklahoma, and the then-state GOP chair stood behind his views.
From then on, GOP politicians no longer apologized for spewing hate against the Muslim community. Instead, they openly embraced it to attract supporters, headlines, and donations as we saw during the 2016 presidential campaign with Trump and Ben Carson.
But Bennett is much more than just bigoted towards Muslims—as is often the case with these types of people. In 2014 he slammed the Obama administration for sending a representative to the funeral of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, smearing the 18-year-old Brown by calling the memorial a “thug’s funeral.” Bennett also wrote sarcastically on Facebook at the time that the police officer who shot and killed Brown could not be innocent because he was a “WHITE COP” (his capitalization).
Bennett also went way beyond Trump’s call in 2016 about Hillary Clinton to “Lock Her up.” The then-state representative shared a news story about Clinton on his Facebook account in 2016 and added the comment, “2 words … firing squad.”
Recently, Bennett served up more violent imagery when he announced his candidacy for Oklahoma state GOP chair just two weeks before Trump’s allies attacked the Capitol to “Stop the Steal.” In his Dec. 21 announcement statement, Bennett featured a picture of himself shaking Trump’s hand and touted himself as “among the first few Oklahoma elected officials supporting the Trump 2016 candidacy.”
Then, in language that sounds very much like the words Trump used to incite the Jan. 6 riots, he wrote, “Patriots can no longer afford to circle the wagons; it is now time to lead the way and storm the beaches to take back the Republic that we hold so dear."
The Oklahoma state Democratic chair, Alicia Andrews—who is the first-ever Black leader of the state party—didn’t hold back in speaking of Bennett when she called him point-blank a “racist.” Andrews added that after four years of Trump, if the Oklahoma GOP now chooses Bennett it will be “beyond disappointing and disheartening—they will be doubling down on hate and racism.”
Adam Soltani, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)’s Oklahoma chapter, explained to me that after the Jan. 6 Trump insurrection, “What we need now more than ever is healing and unity,” but Bennett is the very antithesis of that. Soltani added that the GOP choosing Bennett “would be bad for the Republican Party of Oklahoma as it would solidify their party as a party of hate by allowing the most vile, anti-Muslim legislator in the history of our state to lead their party.”
As of now Bennett only faces one opponent for the state chair gig, former GOP state Rep. Charles Ortega, who served 12 years in Oklahoma’s House of Representatives. As one local Oklahoma activist explained, Bennett is well positioned to win, especially given that he was recently endorsed by the Oklahoma Second Amendment Association, “the state’s leading advocate for Second Amendment rights,” an influential group within GOP circles.
While Bennett is despicable, I don’t want him cancelled. In fact, he deserves to be the Oklahoma GOP state chair. Let’s be blunt: What more accurately reflect today’s GOP—Ortega, a 65-year-old man of Hispanic heritage who in the past opposed stricter immigration legislation and championed small business-owners like himself? Or an angry white man in his forties who is an anti-Muslim racist and has openly called for political violence?
It’s time this BS debate over a GOP civil war come to an end. There isn’t one. There are simply a few exceptions to a party defined by white supremacy, bigotry, and violence in the pursuit of power. In other words, they are almost all John Bennetts.
