When word got out that a hardcore Bernie Sanders supporter turned a Republican baseball team practice in Alexandria, Virginia into a shooting gallery, a number of Republicans wasted no time pointing fingers. Newt Gingrich blamed potty-mouthed Democrats, while Donald Trump, Jr.–undoubtedly speaking for his father–blamed a version of “Julius Caesar” with a man who looked a lot like his father playing the title character.
But one of the loudest voices on the religious right took it one step further. He believes that it’s time to launch a mass purge of the Democratic Party and its backers.
In a movement full of loathsome characters, Rick Wiles is one of the most loathsome characters of all. He once claimed Obama was possessed by the devil, and believes Obama sacrificed Antonin Scalia in a pagan ritual. He also believes that Obama stole the 2012 election with the help of American intelligence. He was one of the religious right’s loudest Trump supporters, going as far as to claim those who oppose him are guilty of sedition. His enthusiasm for Trump cooled somewhat after the Syria missile strike, which he blamed on the influence of the “deep state” and its supposed agents in the White House, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
However, after Wednesday’s broadcast, it’s pretty safe to say that Wiles is back on the Trump train. Mere hours after the shooting, he declared that it was time for a real-life version of Order 66. People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch got a clip.
Wiles believed that since the gunman was an ardent Democrat, it was time to ask an important question–“Should the Democrat Party be banned?” To his mind, the answer was a resounding “yes.” He claimed the shooting, along with Kathy Griffin’s beheading stunt and the Public Theater’s portrayal of “Julius Caesar” as a Trump-like figure, were all products of a “propaganda campaign” by the deep state–or “the dark state,” as he calls it–to force Trump out of office.
To Wiles’ mind, the shooting was “the sound of revolution”–an attempt by Democrats to start a civil war. He claimed that the “deep state” and its allies in both parties are “whipping up sedition” against Trump, so it didn’t surprise him that a “far left progressive socialist Democrat who watches MSNBC and Rachel Maddow” would open fire after asking if this was a Democratic or Republican baseball team practice. He believed that it was much like what Abraham Lincoln must have seen in the run-up to the Civil War.
Wiles believed that the Democrats were trying to take back what the people took from them in the 2016 elections. For that reason, he called for the Democratic Party to be branded as “a violent, seditious political movement” and disbanded. Co-host Ed Szall asked if the “agitators in the news media” should share the same fate. Wiles’ reply has to be reproduced in full.
“I think they should be rounded up. It’s getting out of control. This was an attempted mass assassination today. Are we going to wait another month or two, until 30 or 40 members of Congress are mowed down? Are we going to wait until a Democrat socialist progressive commits an act of violence against Republicans?”
Wiles then railed about Democrats attacking Trump supporters across the country, both during and after the campaign–apparently glossing over the numerous instances of violence by Trump supporters, as well as the ugly Twitter harassment by alt-right thugs acting in Trump’s name. But such things as facts didn’t stop Wiles from claiming that the Democrats were trying to launch “a modern, American-style French Revolution.” He believed that the Democrats had progressed to the point where “they were willing to shoot Republican congressmen”–and it was now time to drop the hammer.
“Rachel Maddow ought to be taken off the air right now. MSNBC should be shut down. The Democratic Party should be disbanded as a violent, socialist seditious organization. It is NOT the party of Harry Truman. It’s certainly not the party of Thomas Jefferson. This is a seditious group. These are violent revolutionaries.”
Wiles apparently has a short memory. He was actually calling for a military coup in the event of a Hillary Clinton victory. But then again, Wiles is part of an element on the right wing fringe that doesn’t consider any Democratic incumbent to be legitimate.
In hindsight, this rant from Wiles isn’t at all surprising. Remember, he denounced any opposition to Trump–nonviolent or otherwise–as sedition that breaks divine law. And now he’s calling for a party to be disbanded in a “Revenge of the Sith”-style purge. Never mind that members of both parties–including Sanders–denounced this shooting as an attack on democracy.
Let’s not beat around the bush. What Wiles is proposing is fundamentally un-American. That term is rather loaded, there’s no other way to describe someone who brands any opposition to the president as sedition, and calls for that opposition and its backers to be arrested.
(featured image courtesy Wiles’ Twitter)
