Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) scolded Democrats on Wednesday for continuously and freely calling President Donald Trump and members of the Republican Party “Nazis.”
“I always tell people when they’re complaining about something Trump said and they’re like, ‘Look at the violence he’s inciting,’ and I say ‘Well, you call us all Nazis,'” Crenshaw told host Joe Rogan while appearing on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. “When you call someone a Nazi, you are calling somebody something that we all agreed as Americans to bomb, and kill, and destroy.”
“So, you’re labeling me with a label that we all agree should be destroyed,” he continued. “Like, how is that not inciting violence by your standards?”
Crenshaw’s remarks arose during a conversation with Rogan regarding Google’s censorship of conservative voices. In June, the Texas congressman questioned Google executives during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing after an internal memo surfaced that claimed conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager, as well as clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson are all Nazis. Two of the three individuals are Jewish.
“This continues to be said by basically everybody running for president, that Trump is a white supremacist,” Crenshaw said. “And white supremacist and Nazi are practically the same thing.”
“I think we have an understandably deep objection to anything white supremacist, as we should. It should be condemned totally,” he continued. “When you’re calling the president that – and they often call his supporters that, too – so you’re calling 60-something million people who voted for him the same thing. I just can’t imagine a worse way to engage in dialogue and a quicker way to escalate things to just the worst possible scenario.”
The majority of candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination have long been accusing the president of being a racist, however, their rhetoric ramped up in the wake of back-to-back mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, one carried out by a man espousing white supremacist ideas and the other by a self-described leftist.
“How did the word Nazi just get tossed around like a beach ball at a concert?” Rogan asked. “Because it’s so free to use now. And people on the left are the ones who are using it, it’s not people on the right who are labeling left-wing people Nazis.”
“[Maybe] they found the word and they liked it,” Crenshaw replied. “They found something effective, I think.”
The freshman lawmaker suggested that part of it might stem from the radical left-wing thinker Herbert Marcuse, who theorized the goal of progressivism should be to “take the previously oppressed and suppress the previous oppressors.”
“So, in a sense this isn’t new,” Crenshaw said. “The kind of radicalism we’re seeing, it started in the ’60s, it was imbued into our universities and now we’re seeing it manifest again and amplified, I think, by social media.”
He also noted that the increase in prevalence of Democrats labeling their opposition as Nazis was concurrent to the rise in identity politics over the past decade.
“I think identity politics is one of the worst things we could do to each other,” Crenshaw added.