The Speaker of the House sat across from Jake Tapper this week and called a congressional nominee who goose-steps to a Nazi marching song and jokes about Nazi submachine guns "a very thoughtful guy." Not a fringe podcaster losing followers over it. The sitting Speaker, defending him on CNN, fundraising for him the same week. Days earlier the acting general counsel of a federal agency walked away from his own Senate hearing after admitting in writing that he has "a Nazi streak," and kept his West Wing role anyway. Buckley spent decades trying to keep this material at the edges of the party and mostly managed it, because the institutional wing still had something to lose by letting it in the door. That wing is gone. What replaced it calls a goose-stepping candidate "thoughtful" on national television and calls the Vice President telling a Dallas crowd he is tired of being called racist just another applause line. The gatekeepers did not lose an argument. They stopped showing up for work. nytimes.com/2026/09/16/opini…