Former Bush strategist Steve Schmidt said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that he believed the Republican Party’s racism, misogyny, and violence threatened American democracy.
Schmidt said, “We see a lot of intimations towards violence from Republicans. We see on the part of Kevin McCarthy a threat by powerful public officials saying I will use the power of the state to punish you if you comply with lawful orders by the Congress regarding a murderous insurrection that occurred by the incite of the president of the United States for the purposes of overturning the results of the election, the counting of the electors on January 6th. It’s important to understand that democracies are moral because they’re the only system of government that places the power of the individual, the rights of the individual, including companies, above the power of the state. This isn’t something you see in a healthy democracy.”
He added, “We’re seeing this in the United States, and it’s very unsettling. Everybody should understand when people talk about taking punitive actions, using the power of the state, talk about murder, talk about violence attached to politics, lessons of history are very clear, take it very seriously. take it deadly serious.”
Anchor Nicolle Wallace said, “What do you think the January 6th investigation will unearth about what Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan and others seem trying very hard to keep hidden?”
Schmidt said, “We’ll find out everything. We’ll find out who talked to who, what was said to who by whom. We find out all of it. The facts will be laid there before the American people, and the American people are the jury of last resort. The elections we have in this process, the period of a month or so, we get to vote and decide who to assign lawful responsibility to discharge public duties for the public good. We need to have a conversation about that. We have a party that’s not just corrupt financially, not just corrupt morally. It’s become nihilistic. We see that with the mask mandates, the perversion of embracing junk science to tear down the institutions, to tear down the public good, to satisfy a nihilistic base an extremist base that’s teaming with violence, that’s teeming with religious fundamentalism, that’s teeming with racism and misogyny and is a threat to the continuation American democracy as we approach the 250th anniversary of the independence of the country in 1776.”
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