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Joy Reid paints whole ‘white’ Republican Party as dictator-loving anti-Semites: ‘They hate the culture’

December 1, 2022 | | Print Article

Joy Reid asserted that the white nationalist antisemite Nick Fuentes is representative of the Republican Party as a whole.

The host of MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” suggested that “there’s only a very small degree of difference” between the far-right Fuentes and the Republican platform. Reid told her guest, Democrat strategist Kurt Bardella, that what Fuentes supports isn’t “fundamentally different” than the GOP.

Reid’s comments came as she was trying to break down the backlash former President Donald Trump received after the news of his dinner with Kanye ‘Ye’ West, and Nick Fuentes met rousing disapproval. The MSNBC host was attempting to identify the problem that Republicans would have with this meeting because, according to her, the far-right and the conservative party are simpatico.

 

During the broadcast, Reid played a clip of Fuentes from a recent podcast of his where he called for a dictatorship in America. “We need to take control of the media, take control of the government, and force the people to believe what we believe,” Fuentes said.

“So you had Kurt, you know, some people come out and say, well, that’s horrible, you know, and say he’s a terrible person,” Reid began. “They don’t want to talk about Trump. They say, but Trump’s not an antisemite. They carve out of that. Trump is not a bad guy. He shouldn’t have had him at the table.”

“To me, it doesn’t sound much different than fundamentally what the party platform is,” Reid told Bardella. “They don’t believe in elections. They don’t necessarily like the idea of democracy. Mike Lee said democracy is a bad idea. They don’t like the idea of women controlling their bodies. They clearly wouldn’t mind having a dictator because they don’t think that elections matter and they think they should decide who the president of the United States is.”

Reid was referring to a couple of 2020 tweets from the Utah senator where he claimed that the United States is “not a democracy” and said that wasn’t “the objective.” Lee did not say that democracy was a bad idea, he argued that “rank democracy” can hinder what he believed to be the American objective. The intention of Lee’s comments can be debated but the context in which he said “We are not a democracy” is important, as he was contrasting democracy with the concept of a republic, an age-old debate in American politics – not exactly what Fuentes is after.

“They hate the culture. They are angry the culture is too friendly to LGBTQ people. I  see a very small degree of difference between what he believes and what they believe,” Reid continued.

“The Republican Party is a white party and they traffic in white nationalistic policy,” Bardella replied.

While Fuentes doesn’t represent the party as a whole, his appearances at the annually held America First Political Action Conference and his leadership of the “Groyper” movement are a matter of concern when the man is at a dinner with a 2024 presidential candidate. The groyper movement consists of young, nationalistic white males who are mostly online. Their message boards and conferences propose white nationalism and continually peddle antisemitism.

Among the growing list of GOP officials who have denounced Fuentes is Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who shared the stage with him at this year’s AFPAC.

“Of course I denounce Nick Fuentes and his racists anti-semitic ideology,” Greene responded to a tweet by CNN’s Laura Barrón-López. “I can’t comprehend why the media is obsessed with him.”

Axios reported that while Trump was likely unaware of who Nick Fuentes was, a source claimed that he “seemed very taken” with Fuentes. Fuentes, on his podcast, said that the contents of the Axios article were fairly accurate, but couldn’t divulge the entirety of the conversation for the time being.

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