Chip Berlet, a researcher and author covering civil rights and civil liberties, posted the following article on Huffington Post November 3, 2010:
Fred V. Malek, is a key political strategist for the American Action Network which just spent some $7 million to unseat Congressional Democrats with votes from the Tea Partiers. Malek is in the midst of a renewed controversy stemming from an incident in 1988. Malek resigned his post at the Republican National Committee in September of that year after it was revealed that in 1971 he had compiled a political hit list of Jewish employees at a federal agency that his boss, President Richard M. Nixon, felt were not team players. Nixon thought it was a pro-Democrat “Jewish Cabal.” That’s a sordid story, but forgotten today is that in the same month in 1988, while Malek was still a leader at the Republican National Committee, it was revealed the RNC was actively recruiting aging Nazi collaborators to assist the election of George W. Bush.
Fast Forward. Tea Partiers today are obsessed with the idea that President Obama is both a communist and a fascist. Their zeal to throw out the Democrats was assisted by the billionaire Koch brothers, and conservative groups like Malek’s. Most of the Tea Partier votes in the mid-term election of 2010 went to Republicans, but most of the money for the election ads against Democrats came from right-wing money-baggers like those at Malek’s American Action Network. The Tea Partiers and the Republican strategists are in a political coalition for the next two years whether they like it or not. Now that they are in the big leagues, the Tea Partiers and their representatives need a fast study on what a Fascist or Nazi really is.
During the Cold War, Republicans (and some Hawkish Democrats) thought it was preferable to work with fascists and even former Nazis to fight communism. Sometimes it was rocket science. Aeronautical engineers and scientists who were Nazi collaborators and who used slave labor built the foundation of the U.S. space program. A number of Nazi collaborators and even Nazi spies were utilized by the newly-formed Central Intelligence agency after World War Two. It was as American as apple blintz.
During this same time period, hundreds of Nazi collaborators and outright Nazis were brought to the United States, often using dubious immigration paperwork, to help establish anti-communist networks throughout Europe, and especially in Eastern Europe. Over time, due in part to their conservative, traditionalist, and anti-communist views, many of these folks gravitated toward the Republican Party-a bastion of Cold War anti-communism. To organize émigré European anti-communists into an active voting bloc, the Republicans set up a Republican Heritage Groups Council. Later another group, the Coalition of American Nationalities was established within the Bush campaign.
Continue reading at Huffington Post.