MSNBC commentator Jason Johnson during a Thursday appearance on “Deadline” called the Republican Party “a cult not radically dissimilar from Al-Qaeda.”
Johnson said, “This is the thing that’s more scary for me. You have got 62% of self identified Republicans in 2021 are saying ‘Hey I think the election was rigged.’ I look back at 2011 and you had 45% of Republicans in 2011 who thought Barack Obama was born in Kenya. So literally the Republican Party has gotten dumber or crazier or more conspiracy-oriented in the last decade. It would be a lot easier to convince people that Obama was born in Kenya than it should be to think that Joe Biden and somehow a collection of Democrat and Republican state senators and secretaries of state managed to rig an entire election. But that is what we are facing right now.”
He added, “It is not just a crisis of confidence, it is not just a crisis of competence, it is a crisis of truth. At some point you have to recognize that when people worship white supremacy, when people worship Trump, when people worship whatever kind of QAnon conspiracy they want, it is now a cult. It is a cult not radically dissimilar from Al-Qaeda. At least as what we have seen so far as far as the belief system. And when you deal with cults, you can no-longer defeat those people with logic. You have to defeat them with laws and you allow people to live in whatever crazy fantasy world they want as long as they are not harming other people.”
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