MSNBC Guests Compare GOP to Mussolini, Hitler

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

On Saturday, two MSNBC guests claimed that “radicals” control mainstream conservatives, and there is an equivalence to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.

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Guest host Sam Stein, also the Politico White House editor, filled in on MSNBC’s “Velshi” and asked his guests, New York University Professor Ruth Ban-Ghiat and Vox Senior Correspondent Zack Beauchamp, about an article written by Beauchamp. According to Fox News, the article covered conservatives and the Republican Party no longer policing radicals in their ranks. Beauchamp began the article by mentioning “the distinction between conservatives and the radical right.” He continued:

“There’s a consistent element of the population and intellectual vanguard that believes very firmly that the idea of equality of democracy is a mistake … It is the ideology of slaveholders, the Ku Klux Clan, of the John Birch Society, George Wallace’s presidential run.”

Beauchamp noted conservatives today are different than those that “emerged after World War II.”

“But what had happened, at least as the conservative movement emerged after World War II as a coherent entity, is it attempted to align itself with these radicals on the theory that it could contain them and bring them into the political coalition, harness their incredibly, sort of, strong feelings and beliefs and turn them into votes for basically pretty normal tax cuts and anti-abortion politics, and the kind of things that really the things that animate mainstream conservatives.”

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Beauchamp mentioned conservatives “culminating in Donald Trump” as he continued his statement:

“And this worked for a little bit. What happened is that over time, slowly, and ultimately culminating in Donald Trump, the radicals started to influence the mainstream conservatives, not the other way around,” he continued … It wasn’t the conservatives controlling the radicals. It was the radicals whose ideas, based on their shared hatred for liberalism and sort of the mainstream of American political society, that they gradually started to resemble each other to the point where the mainstream right was willing to fully capitulate to the radical right if it meant gaining political power.”

In 2020, the GOP gained ground among Hispanic voters. They are working overtime to win the majority of the Hispanic vote in 2022.

As we reported last week, the majority of Hispanic voters disapprove of President Joe Biden.

It seems like the public is seeing the damage that far-left policies are causing, whether it’s leftist DA’s, State Assemblies, or Congress.

When NYU Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat was asked whether she agreed with Beauchamp’s evaluation, she said:

“So, I do agree and, in fact, my book is about all these case studies all over the world of when conservatives, like, starting with Mussolini and Hitler, conservatives brought these extremists and their militias into power thinking they could control them and ally with them and then the logic of authoritarianism is increasing radicalization.”

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She continued:

“And, really, we’re going to have to find a new language because conservative no longer fits a party that perpetrated a coup and would do it again tomorrow because the GOP is unrepentant and also it’s very important to know that the GOP is now co-mingling and fusing at local and state level with extremists. There one-in-five local and state GOP officials has sympathies or affiliations with radical groups.”

Ben-Ghiat concluded:

“And that’s why we also see the logic of the party eating its own as it becomes the far-right extremist party. The whole RINO phenomenon where moderates have to be pushed out. So, this has happened before in history. Also, when there’ve been military coups. It’s happened whenever you have far-right authoritarians that get to power.”

It’s ironic hearing the left speak about authoritarians and extremism. Although there are some extremists in the party, the leftist base of the Democratic Party openly embraces extremism and Governors like Gavin Newsom (D-CA). Newsom, notably, has kept the COVID-19 State of Emergency still intact, locking people in their homes, setting curfews, mandating vaccines, and shutting down in-person learning while sending his children to private schools — all of which sounds like something an authoritarian would do.

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When the 2020 Summer riots took place, we heard nary a peep from MSNBC about them, as host Ali Velshi stood in front of a burning building, characterizing the situation as “mostly a protest” and not “unruly.”

Voters are not buying it. With crime on the rise, as well as inflation, the southern border crisis, and the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, among other concerns, voters seem fed up and ready to turn the House and Senate majority from blue to red.

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