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the New York Young Republican Club recently held its annual gala in New York's financial district, and former President Donald Trump gave the keynote address with some of the global far right's most notorious political figures in attendance.

According to Talking Points Memo (TPM), the gala's attendees included not just American far-right politicians like Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), but also European right-wing extremists like Austrian politician Gerald Grosz and European Parliament member Susanna Ceccardi, who is from Italy's far-right Lega party. German politician Maximilian Krah — whose party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been criticized as a "neo-Nazi party" — was also at the event.

"Donald Trump rubbing elbows with Nazi-linked groups might be surprising if Trump’s last month wasn’t defined by him parroting Hitler and Mussolini, and promising to rule as a dictator so he can rip away Americans’ freedoms and round up millions of Americans into detention camps," said Ammar Moussa, who is the rapid response director for President Joe Biden's reelection campaign.

"The American people rejected Trump and his MAGA attacks on democracy in 2020, and it’s why he’s going to lose again next November," Moussa added.

Gerald Grosz was initially a member of Austria's far-right Freedom Party, which was founded by Anton Reinthaller — a former Nazi Party leader and SS officer. Grosz and his colleague Jorg Haider, who was the son of a Nazi stormtrooper who praised Adolf Hitler's regime, eventually joined a Freedom Party offshoot. While they all come from different countries, TPM described Grosz, Ceccardi and Krah as comrades-in-arms in movements that are "staunchly nationalist and anti-immigrant" in nature.

Prior to Trump's speech, he was introduced as the "45th, 46th and 47th presidents of the United States," which alludes to Trump's baseless conspiracy theory that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. Trump doubled down on his "dictator" comments during his speech, repeating that if elected to another term he would assume dictatorial powers on day one of his administration to build a border wall and "drill drill drill."

The New York Young Republican Club's flirting with global far-right figures is in line with how international political scholars have described the modern GOP. In 2019, Harvard University political scientist Pippa Norris surveyed roughly 2,000 political experts around the globe on the authoritarian leanings of various modern far-right parties. She found that the American Republican Party has more in common with authoritarian, fascist-adjacent parties like Turkey's AKP and Hungary's Fidesz than with their counterparts in G7 countries like the Tories in the UK and the conservatives in Canada.

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Far-right U.S., European figures to gather at NYC gala

2022

far-right U.S., European figures to gather at NYC gala

By Joseph Konig Manhattan

Dec. 08, 2022

Some of the most conservative and controversial Republicans in the United States are gathering at an unlikely destination this weekend – Manhattan.

With some prominent Democrats and other critics raising concerns, the New York Young Republican Club is holding its annual gala on Saturday, featuring Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump Jr., former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The guest list also includes far-right operative Jack Posobiec, members of an Austrian political party founded by a Nazi SS officer, and a number of U.S. and European right-wing activists, commentators and politicians.

What You Need To Know

“It’s sort of an iconic event in a way that it brings all these people together, they’re able to communicate, they’re able to, you know, network, share experiences, contact with each other,” club president Gavin Wax said. “It’s sort of like a coming together of the minds and sort of an event of the year is how we like to push it, both for the club and for the movement at large.”

A City Hall spokesperson said in a statement that city officials are “monitoring the event for any alarming activity.” Wax said he is coordinating with the NYPD and event security in expectation of protests.

Ten members of the far-right Proud Boys group were arrested in Manhattan in 2018 following an attack on protestors outside the Metropolitan Republican Club. Wax was in attendance that night and witnessed the violence, later writing an article for a conservative website titled "We Are All Proud Boys Now."

Greene and Posobiec are headlining the event, which Wax says will be held in Midtown. Organizers are not revealing the precise location out of security concerns. The club’s invitationdescribes Greene as “a wife, mother and Christian nationalist patriot.” Posobiec, a former Navy officer-turned-conspiracy theorist, is one of the most prolific spreaders of misinformation in the country, critics said.

"I think you can safely argue that no single person is more responsible for spreading politically charged disinformation during the Trump era than Jack Posobiec," Southern Poverty Law Center senior investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden told NY1. "He is unequivocally an extremist who has demonstrable ties to neo-Nazis, white nationalists and anti-government extremists."

Posobiec could not be reached for comment.

“We reject the framing and the accusations of the SPLC,” Wax said. “These are all sort of baseless accusations that are thrown ad nauseam at anyone who even dares to veer just slightly right of center.”

Among his long, well-documented – by researchers and journalists, including the SPLC – history of collaboration with white nationalists and antisemites, Posobiec notably worked with two Washington, D.C., brothers the SPLC identifies as neo-Nazis and whothe FBI alleged had ties to the man accused of killing 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.

“There should be no legitimizing white supremacists or people who are associated with neo-Nazis, period,” Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine said, citing rising numbers of antiseimitic incidents in the city. “This is a toxic environment where antisemitism is being mainstreamed. And it’s outrageous that the New York Young Republican Club is contributing to that.”

Along with Greene, three incoming Republican congressmen, Dutchess County legislator Ben Geller, incoming upstate Assemblyman Brian Maher, 2022 New York gubernatorial candidate Andrew Giuliani, and a spate of Trump administration officials are featured guests. The younger Giuliani will serve as toastmaster, according to the gala invitation.

George Santos, an incoming member of Congress who will represent parts of Queens and Nassau counties, is listed as a guest. Santos, who attended the Jan. 6 rally near the U.S. Capitol, did not return requests for comment.

Representatives for state Republican Party chair Nick Langworthy and City Council Minority Leader Joe Borelli did not respond to requests for comment.

An alliance with a party founded by Nazis

At least half a dozen European political figures will be in attendance, including two leading members of the Freedom Party of Austria, a far-right party founded by an SS officer in the aftermath of World War II as a political home for Austrian Nazis after the Nazi Party was banned.

“Historically, the Freedom Party can be described as a kind of a successor of the Nazi Party,” said Bernhard Weidinger, a visiting Fulbright Fellow at Northwestern University and a researcher tracking right-wing extremism at the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance in Vienna. “They’re certainly not a neo-Nazi party right now. But they are a far-right party. And they have a long history of both racism and antisemitism, of xenophobia, of a systematic vilification of asylum seekers and refugees and other minorities.”

Both Austrian Jewish leaders and the government of Israel refuse to work with Freedom Party ministers when they are part of governing coalitions, which they have been on and off for the past two decades, Weidinger said.

Wax, who is Jewish, said he did not believe the Freedom Party holds bigoted views and pointed to their willingness to forge ties with the club, which has numerous Jewish members in leadership, as evidence of their modern-day tolerance.

“I think a lot of the same accusations that are leveled at them now could be leveled at the Republican Party, and those are usually baseless,” Wax said. “I think the German angle, the Austrian angle adds to the attacks, obviously, because, you know, you go back far enough, everyone in those countries were affiliated with Nazis at some point in history.”

Rep. Jerry Nadler, who in January will represent the neighborhood where the gala is being held, denounced the gathering.

“Antisemitic and far-right extremists have become central figures in the GOP. Even the former president is dining with known racists and antisemites,” Nadler said in a statement. “The event’s headliners have built brands on the backs of hatred and bigotry. The New York Young Republican Club–and national Republicans–should be ashamed. It’s dangerous and disgraceful, and New Yorkers deserve far better than this.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/the-disturbing-connections-between-trump-putin-and-austrian-neo-nazis/

Trump hadn’t even been inaugurated on December 20, 2016 when I wrote “Trump, Austrian Neo-Nazis, and Putin,” but I had already detected a troubling nexus between the three. Here is how I began that piece:

In the process of pointing out that their flirtations with John Birchers and other general “rightwing nutballish” behaviors are quickly turning the Trump administration “into the grease trap of American political history,” Charles Pierce stops to notice that incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is still in league with the Russkies. To wit, the lunatic far-right Austrian Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache traveled to New York in November to meet with Flynn. The Freedom Party presidential nominee, Norbert Hofer, just came within a whisper of winning an revanchist Anschlussian political victory in the early December election. He had hoped to do better, saying just prior to the vote that he was drawing “encouragement from Donald Trump’s presidential victory in the United States.”

The November meeting in Trump Tower between Michael Flynn and Austrian neo-Nazis wasn’t the reason I wrote the post, though. I was responding to an article in Foreign Policy that reported:

Heinz-Christian Strache, Freedom Party leader, and Norbert Hofer, the candidate who narrowly lost Austria’s presidential election earlier this month, signed a “working agreement” on Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party, according to a statement from the Freedom Party.]

Charles Pierce responded: “At the risk of being called a neo-McCarthyite, may I point out that this smacks an awful lot of the incoming administration’s involvement in a worldwide right-wing movement at the center of which is our good friend Vladimir Putin.”

Here was my reaction to Pierce:

Of course, this is impossible because liberals who lived through the Cold War keep telling me that all this Russia-bashing is just so much Dulles Brothers flimflam designed to distract the plebes from their rightful destiny at the head of the dictatorship of the proletariat. To bash Russia is to bash the left here at home in order to crush the left everywhere from Ho Chi Minh City to Buenos Aires.

It therefore cannot be that our president is in the thrall, if not the control, of a “worldwide right-wing movement” to restore the purity of essence to the European bloodstream and bring Christianity back to its former central and crusading glory.

Or, in other words, you need to check that “grease trap of American political history” carefully, because a few of the roles have been reversed.

I revisit this all today because Heinz-Christian Strache has just found himself in a pickle. He apparently took the “working agreement” with Vladimir Putin a few steps too far, and he did it on six-hour video tape recorded in July 2017. In truth, he was set up—by whom it is still not clear. People posing as highly-connected Russians discussed various corrupt schemes that involved trading favorable contracts for assistance in helping Strache’s political party in the upcoming elections. There was also this:

The supposed investor already had a plan: She proposed acquiring a 50-percent stake in the Kronen Zeitung, a highly influential Austrian tabloid, and to use the newspaper as a mouthpiece backing Strache and his FPÖ party in the election campaign. Strache, dressed casually in a slightly ratty T-shirt and jeans, seemed enthusiastic – mostly about the proposal, but also about the woman herself. “Are you kidding? She’s hot,” he said, with a Viennese lilt.

Strache, who is currently Austria’s vice chancellor and the head of the Freedom Party, took the bait and failed to notify the authorities that Russians were attempting to bribe him.

I don’t know who set this trap or why they waited almost two years to expose Strache, but the episode provides one more example of how neo-Nazis believe that the Russians are their allies and seek to work with them to further their political ambitions. As I pointed out in my November 2017 “A #TrumpRussia Confession in Plain Sight” piece, there’s plenty of evidence that something similar happened between the Trump campaign and Russia. That is why we need to see Robert Mueller’s counterintelligence report.

We already know that Trump used the National Enquirer to help him cover up his affairs and promote his candidacy. We know that Michael Flynn is currently awaiting sentencing after exposing attempts to bribe him into silence. Now we know that Heinz-Christian Strache is not only a nexus between Trump and Putin, but corrupt to the core. We’ve seen the white nationalist strains of Trumpism and the president’s strange affinity for Putin.

And yet somehow the president says he’s been exonerated.

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https://thinkprogress.org/austrian-party-founded-by-nazis-is-in-d-c-for-political-meetings

A major Austrian party founded by Nazis is in DC for political meetings

The leader of the Austrian Freedom Party says he met with Trump’s NSA adviser in December.

Heinz-Christian Strache, chairman of the anti-migrant and anti-EU Freedom Party FPOe, smiles as he arrives in a TV studio in the Hofburg in Austria’s capital Vienna Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016. CREDIT: AP Photo/Ronald Zak

An Austrian right-wing party founded by Nazis sent a delegation to Washington, D.C. this week for a series of political discussions.

“There is a series of invitations to talks with interesting political representatives of the United States on the sidelines of the US president’s inauguration on our packed schedule,”Heinz-Christian Strache, leader of the Freedom Party,said recently.

The Freedom Party was founded in 1956, and its first leader was a former SS officer. The nationalist, nativist party recently lost domestic elections, albeit by a narrow margin. Norbert Hofer, the party’s presidential candidate, made anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments the core tenets of his campaign.

Strache recently called for “minus immigration” and compared Islam to Nazism. He claimed to have attended a meeting with President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn at Trump Tower in December, though Trump’s team denied the meeting.

Strache’s itinerary is unclear. His delegation was pictured with Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) Thursday evening, though there is no indication whether or not they will be in attendance at the inauguration.

One right-wing figure who will be at the inauguration, though, is Nigel Farage, former leader of the U.K. Independence Party and a key figure in pushing for Britain’s split from the European Union.

Farage was invited to attend the inauguration by Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R). Farage also threw an inauguration party Thursday night in honor of Trump’s ascent to power, the Guardian reported.

Other right wing figures in Europe, like France’s Marine Le Pen of the Front National (FN) and Frauke Petry of Alternative for German (AfD), will be attending a conference in the German city of Koblenz. Le Pen was seen in Trump Tower last week, though she claimed it wasn’t to meet Trump, despite her steadfast support for his campaign.

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