MSNBC’s Heileman: ‘Hate’ Runs Republican Party — It’s a ‘Big, Ugly, Hate Machine’

MSNBC national affairs analyst John Heilemann said Monday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that the Republican Party had become “a big, ugly, hate machine.”

Anchor Nicolle Wallace said, “I don’t know if you saw the tape we played in the last hour of George Will describing Republicans as feeling terror from their own voters. That feels like a copout for why Kevin McCarthy won’t deal with Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s been harassing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the halls of Congress, who is brazenly anti-Semitic. She doubled down. We didn’t play the original comments, but she said, ‘I’m anti-Semitic, and I’m staying anti-Semitic. ‘That’s the point of the doubling down. She’s essentially waving a red flag in front of Kevin McCarthy and saying, ‘Come get me.’ Does he have anything in him to try to eradicate sort of this fountain of antisemitism and extremism and lunacy within his caucus?”

Heilemann said, “This is an area where you have to stand up to hate…Of course, Kevin McCarthy doesn’t have anything in him to do this because the entirety of the thing that animates now, the Republican Party. Which is to say, the thing that George Will is talking about, what is the Republican Party? It’s now its basest part of its base. The basest part of its base is animated by hate. It’s very hard to make a distinction between one kind of hate and another kind of hate. If you’re Kevin McCarthy, you start denouncing hate. Where are you going to stop? Once you start to denounce this kind of hate and you take a stand, you’re now surrounded by all kinds of hate, and the only thing that runs the GOP is hate. It’s now a big, giant hate machine. So, of course, he can’t denounce her for this because once he denounces her for this, where are you going to stop? You have to denounce the entire party because that’s all it is. That’s all it is, a big, ugly hate machine.”

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