Chris Hayes Goes Off on GOP’s Treatment of Liz Cheney: A Full-On ‘Ideological Purge’ and Orwellian ‘Authoritarian Delusion’

On Tuesday night Chris Hayes addressed the upcoming vote among House Republicans on whether to remove Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) from the party’s leadership. She is the third-ranking member of the House GOP. Earlier in the day, audio of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) talking into a hot mic and trashing Cheney was obtained by Mediaite. “I’ve had it with her,” he said saying. “You know, I’ve lost confidence.”

Cheney has irked McCarthy, her fellow congressional Republicans, and not least of all Donald Trump for repeatedly stating that the 2020 presidential wasn’t stolen. Her position fails an unspoken purity test within the GOP, and that failure is about to result in a Republican conference vote on whether she gets to keep her position in the party’s leadership. That vote is expected to happen on May 12.

“Right now,” Hayes told viewers, “the Republican Party’s binding message is a kind of anti-democratic conspiracy theory, an authoritarian delusion. And their leader in the House has no problem saying publicly that all Republicans must abide by it.”

Hayes proceeded to draw a parallel between the likely “ideological purge” of Cheney to party members in communist Russia who did not toe the party line:

What we are seeing with Liz Cheney and the ‘party line’ here hearkens back to the origins of that phrase in the Marxist-Leninist left, and the ways in which political factions, most embodied in Lenin’s bolsheviks, adhered to a principle called democratic centralism. That is, within the party they could argue within the vanguard of the party behind the scenes. But once a decision was set, once they decided what the party line was, there could be no public dissent.

And that principle, that way of operating, grew more and more cultish and insane over time. And it manifested in all sorts of awful ways throughout history, culminating in the Stalinist cult of personality and the reign of terror under Stalin of constant murder and disappearances of people who committed some ideological sin they may not even have understood. On Tuesday, it could be that the party line was two plus two equals five, and on Wednesday everyone who said it was two plus two equals five was banished to the gulag because now it was two plus two equals seven.

Hayes immediately noted the GOP is “a very, very long way from that” and that we’re not in fact in Stalin’s Soviet Union. “But,” he said, “the tendency on display here to turn a simple statement of fact, of reality, what happened, into a political litmus test is unnerving to say the least.”

Hayes even used the word “Orwellian” and talked about how George Orwell “saw up close these tendencies to deny reality and impose discipline and force people to swear ideological fealty to whatever the whims of leadership were.”

“It is also the tendency that we are seeing on display right now in the modern Republican party.”

Watch above via MSNBC.