Washington State GOP Official Resigns After Inviting Alt-Right Leader To Speak
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
(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
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
