Know-Nothings create 'day of reckoning' for GOP

Dennis Lennox, the Republican activist who spearheaded the push for Republican National Committeeman Dave Agema to resign, sees the GOP split over Agema’s hateful, homophobic views as part of a larger picture.

In his column today for the Mount Pleasant Morning Sun, Lennox decries the influence of right-wingers who spew nonsense and disrupt reasonable political discourse.

“It has become fashionable,” he wrote, “for some to call sensible conservatives – the kind who want to ensure the Republican Party looks and talks like the America of the second decade of the 21st century – a RINO, the endangered creature otherwise known as a Republican In Name Only.
“This has resulted in neo-Know Nothings infiltrating a party and a movement that would have once defrocked and excommunicated them.”
Lennox  goes further, expressing concern that the Michigan GOP will splinter if Agema-style politics prevails in a substantial section of the party.

Here’s his conclusion: “… Some are unwilling to stand up to this small, but highly vocal, element whose militant rhetoric against not only government but accepted aspects of modern society not only turns off sensible conservatives but isolates swaths of the electorate that are otherwise inclined to support policy until they learn Republicans propose it.
“A day of reckoning is coming between those who continue to deny there is a problem and those who realize what is ahead if major changes aren’t undertaken.”

You can read the entire column here.