Trump ally cheered by Republicans for speech claiming Bernie Sanders presidency would lead to ‘another Holocaust’

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Louise Thomas

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Glenn Beck, a former Fox News pundit an an ally to Donald Trump, was cheered on by Republicans during a conference in which he claimed a Bernie Sanders presidency would lead to “another Holocaust”.

In an incendiary speech full of false claims and misinformation, delivered at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr Beck compared Mr Sanders and his supporters to the Bolsheviks while warning of violent revolution should the “democratic socialist” assume office.

“These are not grassroot groups of Democrats, they are Marxist revolutionaries who believe in nothing short of the complete overthrow of the United States and destruction of the Constitution and the free market system,” Mr Beck told an audience of activists and White House officials at CPAC 2020.

“And, please, let us stop calling them Bernie bros. Because they are not my brother. They are not something that is funny. They are Bernie Bolsheviks. They are Bernie Brownshirts. That’s what they are,” he added, to cheers of support from the crowd.

“And their revolution will result in death and misery. Another Holodomor. Or another Holocaust. Or whatever we call the next great socialist atrocity.”

Mr Beck also suggested that Mr Sanders’ followers — who he falsely claimed are armed with “pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, and guns” — are worse than the Nazis.

“Our fathers and grandfathers, they fought the socialists in Germany and the communists in Russia,” he said. “But in a way, they kind of had it easy. In their time, the bad guys wore black SS uniforms made by Hugo Boss and had little funny moustaches. But our bad guys come off just as crotchety humanity professors whining about ‘class warfare and how crappy white people treated the Native Americans.’”

Mr Beck, whose comments lack any form of evidence and have been widely condemned, was one of a number of high-profile conservative commentators and White House officials, including Mr Trump, to speak at CPAC 2020.

On Friday, the acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, accused journalists of exaggerating the threat of coronavirus because “they think this will bring down the president — that’s what this is all about.”

The president, meanwhile, took aim at his political rivals during an animated 90-minute speech in which he also boasted of his administration’s achievements, lauded the decision to fire James B Comey as the FBI director and mocked senator Mitt Romeny — the sole Republican to vote in favour of Mr Trump’s impeachment.

Mr Trump, a regular speaker at the conference, has credited CPAC with providing him the platform needed to raise his profile long before he campaigned for the Oval Office.

He has been previously criticised by Mr Beck, who compared him to Adolf Hitler and warned that Mr Trump poses a possible “extinction-level event” for American democracy and capitalism.

But in May 2018, the conservative talk show host announced his support for Mr Trump while predicting a “landslide” victory for the president in the 2020 election.

“Gladly, I’ll vote for [Mr Trump] in 2020 and not really even on his record, which we’ll talk about here in a second, is pretty damn amazing,” he said at the time.