Washington State GOP Official Resigns After Inviting Alt-Right Leader To Speak
James Allsup Image by wikicommons
(JTA) — A Washington state Republican Party county chair resigned after saying that she made a mistake in inviting a white supremacist to speak at a local GOP event.
Cecily Wright said she wanted to “profoundly apologize” for giving James Allsup a platform to speak at a Spokane Tea Party gathering, the Daily Forward reported Thursday.
Wright introduced Allsup — who marched with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017 — during the July 11 meeting as a victim of “label lynching” before showing a video of him speaking at a 2016 Trump rally.
“The Spokane County GOP remains committed to standing against white supremacy, racism, and bigotry in all forms,” she wrote on the group’s Facebook page on Wednesday. “We will always support a free society where individuals are judged on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.”
Prioer to her resignation, Wright had defended her hosting of Allsup.
Allsup, a former Republican campus leader at Washington State University, has advocated infiltrating the GOP from the grassroots level and recently won a seat as a local party precinct officer. During the Charlottesville march, he is seen chuckling as people he marched with shouted about “ni***|rs.” He said while marching: “If you want diversity, just move to South Africa. You’ll also get raped and beaten and murdered.”
He also filmed himself walking alongside a fellow protester flying a Nazi flag.
Allsup said in a September 2017 appearance on the white nationalist podcast “Fash the Nation” that followers could take over a local College Republican group if they had “three or four fashy goy” (fascist, non-Jewish) friends.
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
