Sen. Chuck Grassley took time away from defecating all over the Constitution and women to assuage the few small pangs of guilt being felt across the conservative landscape. Those pangs result from intimate examples of protest, such as survivors and others confronting Sen. Jeff Flake in an elevator. It’s hard to explain how you can rush through a wildly unimpressive man like Brett Kavanaugh when there are numerous allegations against his character in relation to women.
On Friday, Sen. Grassley was on Fox Business and was asked by host Maria Bartiromo to talk about all of the protests that have gotten up close and personal with fascists like Stephen Miller and Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen. She asked him about Republican boogeyman George Soros: Was the Jewish billionaire behind all of this resistance?
Expecting someone with an absence of morality like Chuck Grassley to denounce such an idea as baseless is a bit much, but one would have possibly thought he might say something meaningless like, “I don’t know about that.” But Chuck is all in on the oligarchy of the Republican donor class, so he said this:
I have heard so many people believe that. I tend to believe it. I believe that it fits into his attack mode that he has, and how he uses his billions and billions of resources. I think it promotes incivility in American society, but I also think that the Résistance that’s been in existence since November 2016 is headquartered here at Capital Hill, when you have congresswomen say you get in the face of anybody that’s in the cabinet, we have senators say “Get in the face.”
The thinly veiled anti-Semitism that runs through the Republican Party and its white-supremacist base is never more obvious than when George Soros’s name is brought up. Soros is the billionaire “Hungarian Jew” who “Hates America” and is pulling the strings of the “liberal elite.” But the great Freudian slip here is using the French pronunciation Résistance. Maybe Chuck Grassley was simply playing to the ignorance of the Fox Business viewer, or maybe he was admitting that the occupation of our executive branch, legislative branch, and (soon) judicial branch by the conservative movement is analogous to the Nazi German occupation of France during World War II.
I would guess a little bit of number 1, and a whole lotta number 2.