President-elect Joe Biden implied GOP Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri are Nazis on Friday in remarks on the Capitol complex riots two weeks before the “unity” president takes office.
“I think they should just be flat beaten the next time they run,” Biden said, rather than demanding their resignations for opposing certification of the election results that fueled Wednesday’s demonstrations. “They’re part of the big lie, the big lie,” the president-elect continued, in an apparent reference to Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Biden previously used the same comparison to characterize President Donald Trump on the campaign trail.
“He’s sort of like Goebbels,” Biden said of Trump on MSNBC in September. “You say the lie long enough, keep repeating it, repeating it, it becomes common knowledge.”
The “Big Lie,” was an idea first espoused by Goebbels and German Dictator Adolf Hitler in the early 20th century across Nazi propaganda, first coined in Hitler’s 1925 book “Mein Kampf.”
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” Goebbels often said.
Cruz condemned the comparison on Twitter.
“At a time of deep national division, President-elect Biden’s choice to call his political opponents Nazis does nothing to bring us together or promote healing,” Cruz wrote.
Really sad. At a time of deep national division, President-elect Biden’s choice to call his political opponents literal Nazis does nothing to bring us together or promote healing.
This kind of vicious partisan rhetoric only tears our country apart. https://t.co/YMMepv1OhV
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) January 8, 2021
Biden’s Nazi reference follows the former vice president’s remarks weaponizing identity politics to stoke divisions Thursday, when he dubiously claimed social justice protesters would have been treated far differently than the virulent crowd of Trump supporters flooding the Capitol building.
“No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very very differently,” Biden said in response to the prior day’s events. “We saw a clear failure to carry out equal justice.”
US President-elect Joe Biden says that if it had been Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, "they would have been treated very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol"
Latest: https://t.co/N4ccyue25z pic.twitter.com/RLcIKel84D
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) January 7, 2021
Incoming Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris expressed the same sentiment.
.@KamalaHarris: "We witnessed two systems of justice when we saw one that let extremists storm the United States Capitol, and another that released tear gas on peaceful protesters last summer…We know this is unacceptable. We know we should be better than this." pic.twitter.com/Uc1FC8aZKg
— CSPAN (@cspan) January 7, 2021
There was no mention, however, of Democratic leaders in Portland and Seattle who allowed leftist occupations to take over downtown city centers for weeks without meaningful action and even chastised the Republican president for demanding mayors do something.
Seattle is fine. Don’t be so afraid of democracy. https://t.co/o26PkJnYhA
— Jenny Durkan (@MayorJenny) June 12, 2020
The Capitol complex, on the other hand, was secured hours after infiltration, with Congress meeting Wednesday night to finish officiating Biden’s claim to the Oval Office. When Washington, D.C., burned seven months ago, however, Democratic leaders hesitated to mount a response.
Reminder that our nation's capital looked like this at the beginning of the summer and most Democrats/media shrugged it off as mostly peaceful https://t.co/1zvsLVRuQc
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 6, 2021
In fact, Democrats and their allies in the media spent the entire last year attempting to justify or even encourage the social justice riots that swept cities in repeated waves of unrest, traumatizing a pandemic-ridden nation.
