Update March 3, 2021, 3:45PM EST: In an interview with Forward, Design Foundry, a stage design firm based in Hyattsville, Maryland, said it “had no idea that the design resembled any symbol, nor was there any intention to create something that did.” The organizers of CPAC have announced that it will not use the firm for future events. Forward reported that American Conservative Union approved the design. Ian Walters, director of communications for the ACU and CPAC, told the Forward on Tuesday that the design firm “provided several options for us to choose from and what we ended up with was the most workable of the options they submitted.”
Update: Feb 27, 2021, 9:30 PM EST: Matt Schlapp, president of CPAC, has tweeted the following:
TWH’s editors note this fits into the pattern of behavior we describe within our editorial.
This weekend marks the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), this year being held in Orlando, Florida. CPAC is a major point in the political calendar for American conservatism, featuring the most powerful members of the Republican party. Donald Trump is expected to speak on Sunday, where he will undoubtedly argue that he remains the leader of the Republican Party and the American conservative movement, despite his loss in the November 2020 elections.
This year’s theme is “America Uncancelled,” bringing with it sessions titled “Protecting Elections Part 2: Other Culprits: Why Judges & Media Refused to Look at the Evidence,” and “Protecting Elections Part 4: Failed States (PA, GA, NV, oh my!)” We can expect a long stream of victimhood on display here, as in other parts of the conservative media.
All of this is to be expected, perhaps. All political parties, major or minor, right or left, enjoy the occasional syrupy display of party affiliation and political unity.
CPAC, and by extension the Republican Party, has a problem, however. Throughout the Trump presidency, and especially since the Capitol insurrection on January 6th, conservative leaders have played a dangerous game of appealing to white supremacists, then denying having done any such thing, only to again find themselves caught in the act.
Let’s put aside the golden fetish of Donald Trump that echoes the idolatry rebuked by Moses in Exodus. Let’s also put aside that in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, the golden calf represents the abandonment of their god and serves to condemn the adoration of wealth. The irony is unsubtle and speaks to how greed and ignorance have infused a certain brand of American Christianity.
A golden statue of Donald Trump wearing American flag shorts and flip flops at the 2021 CPAC [Getty]
Yet even leaving that symbol aside, there is something shocking, especially to a Pagan eye, happening in Orlando this weekend – something in the very foundation that the nation’s most powerful conservatives literally stand upon.
Bear in mind that all stage design, including for political theater like CPAC, is done intentionally, with every design approved by many hands.
So then, why is the CPAC stage shaped like the odal rune?
The main stage of the 2021 CPAC, bearing a disturbing resemblance to the odal rune. [Youtube]
To make the resemblance clearer, here is the design outlined in green:
The CPAC stage with the odal design outlined in green. [Youtube]
The wings of the CPAC stage lead nowhere – they do not lead to stairs, and the stage’s entrances and exits are in the rear, flanking the back wall. The red triangle toward the rear of the stage similarly serves no apparent functional use. This means that the set was intentionally designed this way, not for its utility, but for its visual appeal – an image that looks, unquestionably, like the odal rune.
A skeptical viewer might protest. “Anything with the right amount of straight lines might look like a rune,” one might say. At least one alt-right commentator has already attempted to lampoon the idea that there is any special resemblance.
The reality of planning an event of this size, importance, and scope, though, is that the design for the set and stage would’ve been decided on months ago. Organizations like the American Conservative Union, which hosts CPAC, spend many months planning their annual event. The design for the stage would likely have been reviewed by a number of people, and most likely had to be approved by a committee.
The idea that no one would’ve noticed the similarity to the odal rune and how that might be interpreted by attendees and viewers is a non-starter. This would be especially true when reviewing set designs that include black and white schematics of the layout. The odal design would have been impossible to miss.
The fact that the design so precisely mirrors the odal rune, in particular, is cause for scrutiny. While Norse imagery has been found among the far right for decades – including its recent appearance tattooed on the body of Jake Angeli, the so-called “Qanon Shaman” – the odal rune has a deeper history of use by fascists and white supremacists, being a symbol widely used by the Nazis during World War II and their descendants.
It beggars belief that the design went through approval and construction without anybody realizing what it looked like – and how it has been used, in the past and in the modern-day.
The odal rune’s historical meaning deals with inherited estates, homelands, or the aristocracy. While the rune is not attested in the Younger Futhark of Scandinavia during the Viking Age, the Old English rune poem described its reflex of the rune as “very dear to everyone / if there in their home they may enjoy / what is right and proper most often in prosperity,” according to Robert Bjork’s 2014 translation.
Volksdeutsche flag from Yugoslavian SS-regiment (the 7. SS Freiwillingen-Gebirgs — Division Prinz Eugen), featuring the odal rune on a red background. [Ktims, public domain]
The use of this particular form of this rune, the “serifed” odal, originated in a Nazi Schutzstaffel (S.S.) unit’s flag; the odal rune was meant to assert the unit’s ethnic German identity while stationed abroad in Yugoslavia during World War II. It was based on the standard flag of the Nazi Party, substituting the odal rune for the swastika. The serifed “odal,” is part of the distinctive iconography of the Nazis and their supporters, although non-serif versions of the rune have appeared in far-right contexts as well. This volkisch interpretation of the odal rune has spread among the far-right internationally as a symbol of white power, and white supremacy.
In Germany, the odal rune, especially in this serifed form, has been the target of bans under the nation’s post-war outlawing of symbols belonging to “unconstitutional groups,” specifically for its use by Neo-Nazi groups like the Hitler Youth inspired “Wiking-Jugend.” (Unlike other Nazi symbols like the swastika or the “S.S.” runes, which are widely banned in Germany, the odal rune has had some official use in the postwar German military and its legal status is disputed.)
In the present day, the odal rune has been adopted as a replacement for the swastika in American far-right circles, notably by the National Socialist Movement (NSM), who changed their logo to the odal rune in November 2016. The change was specifically in response to the election of Donald Trump, as the NSM’s leadership hoped there would be an opening for their entry into mainstream conservative contexts under Trump and believed the odal rune would be more presentable to the public than the swastika. (“Our flags and banners now bear the odal rune, and our patches will soon follow suit,” the NSM’s then-leader Jeff Schoep wrote at the time. “The party leadership has every intention to bring our party, our leaders, our members and supporters into the halls of government here in the United States, and to do that we must reach more of the public.”) The NSM’s odal flag was seen at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in the death of anti-fascist protestor Heather Heyer after a self-identified white supremacist rammed her with his car.
Just two weeks ago, the Army special operations center at Fort Bragg warned personnel about extremist imagery, including the odal rune, reflecting its rising prominence among the far-right. It is hardly an unknown symbol to those familiar with the far right – which should certainly include CPAC’s organizers and guests, many of whom were only weeks ago in charge of federal law enforcement in the United States.
Members of the National Socialist Movement hold their flag, which features a non-serifed othala rune, at a 2018 rally in Newnan, Georgia [Getty]
Is the design of the CPAC stage intentional? Again, it depends on what we mean when we say “intentional” – while it is unlikely that the American Conservative Union deliberately set out as an organization to invoke Nazi imagery, the fact is that somebody in the organization created this design and the conference seems to have little trouble accepting such imagery when it is pointed out.
They reacted earlier this week when other issues were pointed out. “We have just learned that someone we invited to CPAC has expressed reprehensible views that have no home with our conference or our organization,” tweeted CPAC’s organizers on Monday. They were de-platforming the rapper Young Pharaoh for anti-Semitic tweets he made, in which he called Judaism a “complete lie” and “made up for political gain.” But this posturing is a shell game that at once presents their sensitivity to criticism while they continue to embrace conspiracy theorists, insurrectionists, and, yes, white nationalists. At the time of writing this editorial, CPAC had yet to rebuke the use of the odal or even admit its presence.
Like “very fine people on both sides,” like “stand back and stand by,” like “you’ll never take back our country with weakness,” the question of whether a statement or an image was intended to attract the far right is almost beside the point. These supposed coincidences and gaffes continue happening, and the far-right keeps interpreting them as signals rather than noise.
The so-called mainstream conservatives of CPAC seem just fine with that.
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