After Donald Trump had become the GOP nominee for president, some people chose to quit the Republican Party. I cannot say I blame them. It wasn’t so much Trump, the nominee as it was Trump, in so many ways the antithesis to what it means to be a Republican. That other Republicans quickly jumped on board was depressing to watch.

From the depths of Trump’s base support rose an ugly segment commonly known as the “alt-right.” Unconcerned with conservative ideals such as free markets, lower taxation, strong national defense, and recognizing the benefits of immigration (while working to keep illegal immigration down), the alt-right cares almost entirely about nationalism, specifically, white nationalism.

Led by figures such as Richard Spencer, who attempts to put a “regular” face on bigotry, the underbelly of the alt-right exhibited an ugliness I have never witnessed in the 25 years of my involvement in politics. While some of it originated with Russian bots and fake profiles, much of it was very real. The ugliness put lives at risk with many people who refused to board the Trump train the recipients of death threats and the kind of bigotry you’d expect to see at a Neo-Nazi convention.

There was another reiteration of the alt-right, manifesting itself as an off-shoot of Donald Trump. Content with fighting with the media, “pissing off the libs,” and spreading conspiracy theories, this group wants to break free from the standard alt-right, despite propping them up and happily going along with them for so long — until they found they could make more money going off on their own.

Andrew Marantz has an excellent piece in The New Yorker where he details the split. This particular paragraph is worth highlighting:

As soon as Spencer was announced as a participant in the Rally for Free Speech, Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer, two advocate-journalists who were also scheduled to speak, backed out. “It’s pretty simple,” Loomer, who is Jewish, told me at the time. “I’m not sharing the stage with an anti-Semite.” The next day, Posobiec announced that he would host a competing event, the Rally Against Political Violence, in front of the White House. This rally would feature a new slate of speakers, including Wintrich; Cassandra Fairbanks, of the pro-Trump Web site Big League Politics; the political consultant and Periscope pundit Ali Akbar; and the social-media star and InfoWars contributor Mike Cernovich. The events would be held at the same time, to draw a clear distinction between people who would stand with Spencer and those who would not. In effect, the Rally for Free Speech became an alt-right event, and the Rally Against Political Violence became a right-wing event organized in opposition to the alt-right. The two factions spent the intervening week talking trash, on Twitter and YouTube, about which rally would draw a bigger crowd.

He goes on to detail how the movement split and then gets to how Cernovich, Posobiec, and others see themselves:

We returned to the Rally Against Political Violence just as it ended. Murphy, Cernovich, Loomer, and about a dozen others walked to a rooftop bar and sat at a banquette with a view of the Washington Monument. “The alt-right keeps labelling us alt-light, but I don’t think we should give in to that,” Loomer said. “Yeah, you don’t want to define yourself as the absence of something,” Cernovich said. “Although there is precedent for it—7UP, the un-cola. So it has worked at least once.” He ordered a burger and a bottle of Riesling. Will Chamberlain, the D.C. organizer of maga Meetups, said, “I think New Right is the best of the ones I’ve heard so far.”

Cernovich nodded. “New Right is my favorite,” he said. “It makes clear that we’re not basing a movement on nastiness and resentment, like the alt-right,” Chamberlain said. “We’re about appealing to what actual Americans want and need.” “Exactly,” Cernovich said. “That’s why today was a success, optics-wise. A good, clean split—us over here, them over there.”

What Americans want and need? These people bring zero value to the Republican Party. Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec between them have nearly 500,000 followers on Twitter (which they used to define “success”). Their entire livelihood is made up of advancing conspiracy theories such as #PizzaGate and Seth Rich’s murder coming at the hands of the DNC. Cernovich often floats the idea of there being a pedophile ring that’s taken hold in Hollywood, Congress and the mainstream media. One of Cernovich’s favorite ways to push back on those who criticize him is to label them as pedophiles.

They’re the purveyors of the “victory” of people interrupting a Shakespeare play (Julius Caesar) in Central Park, claiming the play depicts the “assassination of Donald Trump.” They’re not smart enough to have even read the Shakespeare work and cannot fathom the production uses modern-day contemporary figures to tell the story, including one that resembled Barack Obama.

They care nothing of conservative or Republican principles. They have none. They’re too cowardly to stick with the very people they aligned with during the GOP primary and are now trying to polish a turd. These people are frauds. They care nothing for conservatism and nothing about the Republican Party. They’re an embarrassment to the party, to its ideals and to the people who worked hard to make the party about ideas and principles, phonies like Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec know nothing.

The GOP is not their party. At some point, somebody is going to have to go. It won’t be me. They can crawl their way out of the gutter and back to Richard Spencer and into the sewer. They’re not fooling anybody outside their little ignorant social media followers.