ThinkProgress has an important piece on Saul Anuzis, onetime head of Michigan Republican Party, who is running for the job of increasingly-attacked Michael Steele, who is head of the Republican National Committee (RNC). According to their article, Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC, see their general hate-group map here) has reported Anuzis’s links to a right-wing student leader

Kyle Bristow, who was the head of the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (MSU-YAF). “This is exactly the type of young kid we want out there,” Anuzis said . . . [in] 2007. “I’ve known Kyle for years . . . .”

Bristow’s YAF has reportedly been involved over these years in an array of racist and homophobic events, some like those the YAF groups engage in at various other campuses:

MSU-YAF staged events like “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day,” held a “Koran Desecration” competition, jokingly threatened to distribute smallpox-infested blankets to Native American students, and posted “Gays Spread AIDS” fliers across campus. Bristow … invited Holocaust denier Nick Griffin, . . . leader of the whites-only British National Party, to give a speech at the Holocaust Memorial Center … .

Recording these events, the SPLC listed the MSU-YAF among its 2006 hate groups, a designation that Bristow apparently reacted to strongly:

He recently wrote a novel with a plot that “evolves around a series of violent revenge fantasies against Jewish professors, Latino and Native American activists,” …. “Several notable white supremacists and anti-Semites have endorsed the novel.”

Anuzis knew of MSU-YAF actions when he made his comments about Bristow. Has the Republican Party decided, once again, to ally itself with those operating out of an extreme white racist framing of society? Whatever happened to the moderates and liberals (like Jacob Javits) in that party?

Such actions as those involving the MSU-YAF rather clearly counter notions that we are in a “post-racial society” where whites, including young educated whites, are no long openly racist, but at most only subtly or implicitly acting on their racist impulse and ideology.