Pennsylvania Republicans can’t stop talking about the Nazis, and their leading candidates refuse to speak out to stop it.
PENNSYLVANIA — Pennsylvania Republicans continue to incite violence and invoke Nazi Germany when attacking Democrats, and their leading candidates for statewide office continue to stay silent and refuse to denounce these dangerous, hateful comments. As Vice News reported today, at the conservative Pennsylvania Leadership Conference in early June, Rep. Scott Perry compared Democrats to Nazis and told the audience of conservative activists and Republican leaders to “go fight them” — and yet none of the GOP candidates for statewide office condemned his remarks.
This isn’t the first time the Republican candidates have tacitly endorsed Nazi-infused rhetoric from Party leaders — in April, several leading candidates sat idly by while Berks County GOP Chairman Clay Breece said that “Democrats’ vision was clouded by the same evil that infected Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Japan’s Prime Minister Hideki Tojo during World War II.”
“Even after they helped incite an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead, Pennsylvania Republicans continue to spew dangerous rhetoric, making outrageous comparisons and telling their supporters to ‘go fight,’” said Pennsylvania Democratic Party spokesman Brendan Welch. “This is part of a pattern — every time the leading Republican candidates for statewide office get together, someone makes a comparison to Nazi Germany, and it’s their responsibility to speak out and denounce these statements. Until they do, the Republican candidates for governor and Senate will share responsibility for the rise in hatred and division throughout our Commonwealth.”
In case you missed it, you can read more from the Vice News report below:
Vice News: GOP Rep. Compares Democrats to Nazis, Says They Want to ‘Destroy the Country’
By Cameron Joseph, 06/25/21
A prominent Republican congressman recently gave an extended tirade that argued Democrats are disloyal, unpatriotic, dangerous traitors to America—and twice invoked Nazis to make his point.
“They are not the loyal opposition. They are the opposition to everything you love and believe in,” Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry said of Democrats as he concluded a speech to the conservative Pennsylvania Leadership Conference on June 11. “Go fight them.”
[…]
The congressman argued that differentiating between Democrats was like discerning between Germans during the Nazi reign—that it was fair to lump all Democrats together as extremists because even those who don’t support those views don’t stand up to their members who do.
“We can acknowledge that maybe not every one of them is that way, but that doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’ve seen this throughout history, right? Not every not every citizen in Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s was in the Nazi Party. They weren’t. But what happened across Germany? That’s what’s important. What were the policies? What was the leadership? That’s what we have to focus on.”
[…]
Later, Perry argued that the corporations who opposed Republicans’ attempts to crack down on voting access mirrored the creep of fascism in Germany before the Nazi Party firmly cracked down on its citizens.
“It wasn’t a government in Germany that took the people’s rights away immediately. It was fascism. Fascism took it away, because the government put the heavy hand on the companies and the companies did the government’s work. Well look around, ladies and gentlemen,” he said.
[…]
That’s far from the first time he’s made such a claim: After Trump lost last November’s election, Perry emerged as a leading proponent of the lie that the election was stolen from the president, speaking at a Stop the Steal rally to bolster the case that Trump had actually won Pennsylvania and telling Fox Business that his state’s election was a “horrific embarrassment.”
Perry was the person who introduced Trump to an obscure official in the Justice Department for Trump who supported his false view that the election had been stolen, and encouraged Trump to fire his acting Attorney General to install that crony. Trump almost went along with the plan, only backing down when his top officials threatened to resign en masse.
Just hours after those claims led to the January 6 Capitol riots, Perry rose in the House to object to certifying Pennsylvania’s own electoral slate for Biden.
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