Joan Walsh has an interesting piece on the rising popularity of the gross term “cuckservative” on the right, and what it actually means: The GOP Crack-Up Continues: The Raging Civil War Over the Disgusting “Cuckservative” Slur.

“Cuckservative” started showing up in my Twitter mentions last week, after I suggested Donald Trump supporters might not be the brightest bulbs. As I clicked around, I came to a shocking conclusion: I’ve been uncharacteristically downplaying the amount of racism and misogyny powering the right today. The spread of the epithet “cuckservative” is a sign that the crudest psycho-sexual insecurity animates the far right.

“Cuckservative,” you see, is short for a cuckolded conservative. It’s not about a Republican whose wife is cheating on him, but one whose country is being taken away from him, and who’s too cowardly to do anything about it.

OK, that’s gross and sexist enough already, but there’s more. It apparently comes from a kind of pornography known as “cuck,” in which a white husband, either in shame or lust, watches his wife be taken by a black man. Lewis explains it this way: “A cuckservative is, therefore, a race traitor.”

This is not merely a new way to shout “RINO.” It’s a call to make the GOP an explicitly racist party, devoted to the defense of whites. It’s no accident it’s taken off in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign launch/performance art, where he attacked illegal Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “criminals.”

Joan is absolutely on the money here; the term bubbled up from the white supremacist fever swamp that powers so much of the modern right wing base — the racist contingent that played such a large part in my own decision to renounce the right years ago.

White supremacist Richard Spencer makes the motivation behind this term exceedingly clear:

The #cuckservative meme doesn’t make any sense without race. It’s all about race…What’s powerful about #cuckservative is that it is call for a racially conscious politics—and not the kind of shot-gun spray muckraking that Johnson specializes in.

And it’s also very interesting to see some of the bloggers who ignorantly mocked my concerns about the rise of racism and white supremacism and attacked me for pointing it out suddenly beginning to notice what’s been happening in their precious conservative movement:

By last week, alarm about the use of the blatantly racist slur was beginning to spread on the right. The blogger Ace of Spades is a little concerned about what all of it means for the conservative movement, writing:

I am right now thinking that there are more white supremacists than I previously acknowledged, and am currently up in the air as to whether to dismiss this solely as a fringe-of-the-fringe phenomenon.

Sure, just keep telling yourself it’s “solely a fringe-of-the-fringe phenomenon.”