Well, it appears to be happening. House Republicans, a majority of whom are sedition-promoting traitors who backed hoaxes claiming the election of a non-Republican president was illegitimate, hoaxes that led to an attempted overthrow of U.S. government by insurrection, are going to clean their ranks of those unwilling to abide the sedition. House Republicans are making moves to toss Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming from her current leadership post after Cheney again emphasized that Trump's claims that the election was stolen from him are "the big lie."
To say Liz Cheney is a diehard, archconservative Republican is an understatement, but in a caucus of avid promoters of Trump's hoax, challenging their fraudulent claims has made her a party pariah. In a hot mic moment earlier today House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Trump loyalist, told a Fox News interviewer that "I've had it with her," and "I've lost confidence," saying he now "assumes" her removal from leadership will take place.
In addition, Republican leaders are reportedly whipping votes against Cheney, and Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Trump-allied hoax promoter, has reportedly been calling colleagues to gain support for herself taking Cheney's current leadership position.
It is impossible to feel sympathy for Cheney, whose odious version of conservatism was never far afield of the lie-fueled, panic-promoting opportunism that has now reduced the movement to conspiracy theory and demands to tamp down on democracy itself, but the Republican move is a dire one for the country. Supporting fraudulent claims that the last United States election was "stolen" and therefore invalid due to invisible "fraud" that not even Trump's gaudiest of allies has been able to identify is now an absolute requirement for maintaining a Republican leadership position. Even after violent attempted insurrection and the attempted assassination of Trump’s declared enemies, the hoax is now not just an unofficial Republican Party policy but a mandated position.
It is all based on a lie, and a lie Trump publicly insisted he would rely on if he lost even before Election Day. Even before the Capitol insurrection, the party had embraced propaganda as major governing tool, but is now claiming that U.S. democracy itself is no longer fully valid because reasons. It has stood by all these claims even after they resulted in violence at the Capitol itself perpetrated by hoax-believing militants. It has coupled these same hoaxes to white nationalist claims, to furious condemnation of anti-racist efforts throughout the nation, to new laws curtailing voting rights and to new powers its members have granted themselves to take command of state elections that might go against the party.
It is a fascist movement, and a fascist party. All who remain in it are helping it to attain those crooked and dangerous goals. This includes Cheney, and Mitt Romney, and every Republican voter, and every supposedly conservative pundit and wag who frets about the party's overt embrace of fraud as party policy but refuses themselves to abandon it. If the Republican Party now insists on support for fraudulent, anti-American attacks on democracy as litmus test, there is no possible redemption. It is a fascist party, and all those remaining in its ranks have betrayed their country either through their support or through their silence.
