Lincoln Project founder Steve Schmidt said Thursday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that right-wing extremism “is very quickly metastasizing into violent extremism.”
Referencing a male suspect throwing a Molotov cocktail into the headquarters of the Travis County Democratic Party in Texas on Wednesday, Schmidt said he was “radicalized like a young man drawn to the lies of ISIS.”
Schmidt said, “We have an autocratic movement teeming with violence and the intimations of violence in this country. And it’s a threat to democracy. So let’s look at that domestic terrorist, that criminal who desecrated the American flag by wrapping it around his head, who committed violence in the name of right-wing extremism. What is it that he has heard? He has heard that he lives in an occupied country with an illegitimate president who lost the election, who was put into power by millions of fraudulent votes, mostly Black and Brown votes out of the inner cities.”
He continued, “He turns on Tucker Carlson, and he hears that he’s going to be replaced in a great plot where the Democratic party is importing people from the third world to strip him of his franchise, of his rights. He has been stoked. He has been instigated. He has been radicalized like a young man drawn to the lies of ISIS in a different part of the world, and we will have more of it. Since the beginning of time, all right-wing political movements try to create chaos, including violence. And out of that chaos and out of that violence that they have caused, they then claim that they can bring order, that only they can bring order, and it is with that order that we will lose our democracy.”
He added, “There is a fundamental difference between these political parties in two big ways. And those two big differences exceed every other difference. One party will abide by election results. They’re called the Democratic Party. The other political party no longer will. They’ve made it clear that they’re engaged in an ongoing effort to seize power by any means necessary, including through contingencies where they lose the election. That’s the meaning of the Eastman memo. Number two, the Democratic Party’s politicians from left to right do not make intimations towards violence. It has become routine on the right and inside the Republican Party. With Republican members of Congress pointing high-caliber weapons at objects and firing them, the language of violence, the image of the gun, the idea that their countrymen are their enemies. So, historically, we know, when you put all of that fuel on the ground, and you start throwing sparks at it, that you can ignite a conflagration, and when you dehumanize people the way that this man and this movement has, in the end, it kills people. Historically, this type of politics has wound up, in its worst excesses, killing tens of millions of people. That’s why it’s such a frightening moment, and that’s why it’s time to wake up and understand that we don’t have a shortage of panic buttons problem. We have a political extremism problem that is very quickly metastasizing into violent extremism that we’ll be dealing with for a generation because of what happened over the last five years.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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