A Republican congressman from Pennsylvania compared Democrats to Nazis and told supporters: “Go fight them.”
Scott Perry, a member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, made the remarks earlier this month in a speech to state conservatives – as reported by Vice News.
“They are not the loyal opposition,” the former soldier said. “They are the opposition to everything you love and believe in. Go fight them.”
He also said: “We can acknowledge that maybe not every one of them is that way, but that doesn’t matter. 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.”
Another Republican in Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, recently compared public health measures to combat the coronavirus to Nazi repression of Jewish people. She ended up outside the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, saying she had learned a lot on a visit.
Perry told his audience corporations which oppose restrictive voting laws introduced by Republicans also mirror the rise of Nazism.
“It wasn’t a government in Germany that took the people’s rights away immediately,” he said. “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.
“… We support big business, but not if it’s anti-America, not if it’s anti-American, and we shouldn’t be afraid to say it.”
Perry, who backed Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn his election defeat, also accused Democrats of trying to destroy the economy via inflation and oil scarcity.
He said: “Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a plan. They’ll tell you they’re patriots. But the patriots like the patriots in this room must acknowledge that things are different now. They want to destroy the country that you grew up in. They want to destroy the country that the founders made. That is their plan. That is their goal. That’s why they’re doing these things.”
Vice said it attempted to question Perry about his remarks as he ducked into an elevator on Capitol Hill. He answered: “I reject the premise of the question … I’m not interested. Thank you.”
The website also said “Missouri Republican Billy Long, a former auctioneer who had also boarded the elevator, broke into an auctioneering chant to intentionally drown out any possible follow-up questions”.
