I fired up the old email machine this morning and one of my morning emails informed me that a Michigan elected official is married to a neo-Nazi, and apparently some constituents have a problem with that. Some, I thought, is significantly less than you'd want to see for something like that. The official in question is Maple Valley Township Treasurer Meghyn "Meg" Booth, who it just so happens is a Republican if you can believe it. Her husband is Johnathan Christopher “Chris” Booth, and he'd been posting on YouTube videos that make claims like "Black people oppress themselves" and "America was built by and for white people” and talk about Nazis in the 1930s breaking “the chains of Jewish tyranny in Germany.” And there's a lot more, too. It's really sickening. Read up!

Anyway, the community is divided, I guess, because their Treasurer is married to what can only be described as a Nazi, and she's liked a number of his Facebook posts dealing with extremist themes, and because her husband has issued some rather direct and menacing threats against those who criticized him, and while she says she doesn't condone what he's said, she doesn't condemn it either, and she doesn't think differences of opinion should break up relationships—a position that frames being a Nazi as a "difference of opinion," rather than an alignment with an ideology that is absolutely unacceptable, given that in living memory it industrially murdered human beings by the thousands every day, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

And this is an increasingly common position! The adult leaders of Young Republicans were just caught in a group chat loving Hitler and slurring it up, and the criticism they received for this was so great that it inspired Vice President Juvenile Delinquent "JD" Vance to hitch up his big-boy pants and trot out to the cameras to admonish people for making such a big deal about what a few misguided little 30-year-old kids have to say behind closed doors. Some prominent Democratic influencers and advisors have even started recommending we redraw the lines of what is permissible to include a lot of this sort of thing, in order to "win." And there are many people, Democratic influencer or otherwise, who will make the point that the reason the community is divided is because some people make Nazi-adjacency a hardline purity test, which makes it hard to build a coalition ... with Nazis, I guess.