Republicans are engaged in a brutal culture war with itself now

Not content to wage battle against its perceived enemies among liberals, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color, the right-wing has turned its sights inward. To enforce ideological purity, a subgroup of the extremists is intent on attacking some of the key institutions and figures on the right as being insufficiently committed to the cause. It’s the right’s version of cancel culture, except they only cancel their own.

One of the most ludicrous displays of this infighting occurred just last week when Daily Wire host Matt Walsh proclaimed that Fox Corp. was promoting gloryholes.

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Did he do it for… baseball?

Of course, the connection between the right-wing broadcast outlet and gay sex in bathrooms was much more tenuous than Walsh let on. As part of Pride Month, Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News, encouraged employees to read Fairest, a memoir by trans writer Meredith Talusan. The book happens to include a description of a gloryhole, which Walsh interpreted as a how-to meant to indoctrinate employees.

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Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk promptly jumped on the outrage bandwagon, looking up “gloryhole” on his laptop on his show to prove his ignorance of the term and describe how disgusted he was by it.

“I don’t understand. Wait, so then why is Fox… they’re subsidizing gloryholes for their employees?” Kirk wondered.

Just to be clear, gloryholes are not part of the employee benefits package at Fox Corporation. Indeed, no one would mistake Fox News as being remotely pro-LGBTQ+. The same day that Walsh was fulminating on Twitter, Fox News published a tweet saying that the Pride flag showed support for “grooming and pedophilia.”

Fox News isn’t the only organization suspected of being insufficiently hateful. Chick-fil-A is feeling the wrath of ultra-conservatives for being woke. Yes, the fast food franchise that made a name for itself by donating to anti-LGBTQ groups. Because the company has made some modest contributions to diversity and inclusion groups, they have, in the words of one critic, “chosen the side of evil over the Christian community on whom they built their fortune.”

The quest to be the purest culture warrior has peaked in Michigan, where even the farthest right members of the GOP are being excommunicated as liberal squishes. There, Republicans who have sued the state over mask mandates and insist the 2016 election was stolen from Trump are still being branded as Republicans in Name Only (RINOs) in a fierce inter-party fight.

“This is more MAGA-on-MAGA violence, or more MAGA versus ultra-MAGA,” Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the state Republican party, told the Washington Post.

The fight over who is the most ideologically pure goes straight to the top of the party, of course. Trump set the standard by branding anyone who disagreed with him as a traitor and a RINO. He’s called his primary opponent for the presidential nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a “RINO globalist.” DeSantis has returned the attack, tying Trump to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is despised on the right for his role in responding to the COVID epidemic.

Ultimately, the obsession with purity is about power. The threat of violating the prevailing ideology is meant to keep institutions in line. The problem is that there is no arbiter of purity to determine what is acceptable and what is not. Instead, they will search for every possible betrayal: Bud Light, Target, or anything at all.

Any MAGA fanatic can declare, through some bizarre reasoning, that a person or outfit is promoting woke ideology or even gloryholes. The base has been so trained to look for such betrayals from the elite that they have come to expect them. The base has also been trained never to forgive.

It’s a recipe for an endless feeding frenzy. In a way, it’s also a farce as the fringes push even farther to the fringe. Unfortunately, they are determined to take the entire nation with them.