CULTURE

GOP Leaders Speak From Nazi Platform At Conference, Literally

CPAC 2021 Republican stage resembles Nazi SS insignia

Left: Nazi parade uniform with odal rune patch of SS Race and Resettlement unit from Lofoten War Memorial Museum by Wolfmann, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons; Right: CPAC 2021 stage in Orlando, Florida

Former President Donald Trump is scheduled to speak today at the Conservative Political Action Conference, commonly known as CPAC, to close out a four-day medley of leading GOP keynote speakers. Earlier in the weekend, prominent Republican figures including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and John Hawley spoke from the stage in hopes of appealing to Trump’s base live from an Orlando Hyatt hotel and streamed on Fox News.

When Trump takes the same stage for the final keynote, he is expected to continue the big lie about a mythical stolen election. And when he does so, Trump will be standing on an apparent forty-foot Nazi symbol.

That’s because the unique stage design closely resembles the Othala rune — a symbol of the far-right movement, and is a near-exact replica of its cousin, the Odal rune. To most, this may not be obvious. The most recognizable symbol adopted by Nazis in Germany is, of course, the swastika. But that’s not the only one the German military used.

In their quest to “reconstruct a mythic Aryan past,” according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Nazis adopted imagery from a runic alphabet system with…