Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “All In” that in the “core of the Republican Caucus in the House of Representatives,” there are “legitimate white supremacist sympathizers.”
Ocasio-Cortez said, “I actually sense a profound difference between the Republican Caucus of last term, the 115th Congress, and the Republican Caucus of this term, that we are now, what, a few weeks into at this point. And that difference was that it really felt that last term, the Republican Caucus was one of extreme fealty to Donald Trump. There were some that were true believers. Others that simply remained quiet out of cowardice and out of fear of the president’s retribution. This term, there are legitimate white supremacist sympathizers that sit at the heart and at the core of the Republican Caucus in the House of Representatives.”
She continued, “When you see someone like the House Minority Leader of the Republican Party respond to white supremacists vitriol coming from his own members, not with censure like they did with representative Steve King of Iowa, not with, you know, being stripped of committees, not with any consequence, you have to wonder who actually has that power. It increasingly seems, unfortunately, that in the House Republican Caucus, Kevin McCarthy answers to these QAnon members of Congress, not the other way around.”
Ocasio-Cortez added, “When I hear that representative McCarthy is going to pull a member aside who has made white supremacist sympathizing comments, the thing that I think is, what is he going to tell them, keep it up? Because there are no consequence in the Republican Caucus for violence. There’s no consequence for racism, no consequence for misogyny, no consequence for insurrection. No consequence means that they condone it. It means that that silence is acceptance, and they want it because they know that it is a core animating political energy for them. ”
She concluded, “This is extremely dangerous, and extremely dangerous threshold we have crossed because we are now away from acting out of fealty to their president that they had in the Oval Office, and now we are talking about fealty to white supremacist organizations as a political tool. For Republicans that are in that caucus that are unwilling to hold that accountable or to distance themselves from it, we really, really need to ask ourselves what they are evolving into. This is no longer a party about limited government. This is about something much more nefarious.”
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