Tuesday on his radio show, talk show host Glenn Beck likened supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to the so-called “brownshirts,” the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party of the 1920s and 1930s that aided the rise of Adolf Hitler.
Beck referred to remarks from Trump at a rally in Cedar Rapids, IA on Monday, which Trump lobbied attendees to “knock the crap out of” any person in the audience that might try to throw tomatoes at him, adding he would pay their legal fees.
“That’s not who we are,” Beck said. “And when you start to plant those seeds, what is he doing? I’m going where everybody knows I’m going — that’s brownshirts, teaching people to be brownshirts. It is. And what happened with the brownshirts? The brownshirts were trained to knock the hell out of people who disagreed with Hitler. They were trained to do that, then Hitler distanced himself from that and said, ‘Oh my gosh, these guys are so out of control.’ But behind the scenes [he] was helping them, yes, ‘Keep going, keep going.’ In the end the brownshirts were all killed by Hitler because he outgrew the need of those kinds of thugs when he got the black-suited thugs of the SS. You don’t train people to do that. You don’t train people to do that.”
Beck went on to add Trump was a “revolutionary,” but the more appropriate comparison he said wasn’t to Hitler, but to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“This guy is as much of a revolutionary as anybody in SDS,” he added. “It’s just a different – he’s just a crony capitalist revolutionary. He is an oligarch. He’s the kind of guy Vladimir Putin is. He and his friends will get rich. And he’ll keep order. That’s exactly what Vladimir Putin did. The better example — he’s not Hitler — he’s Putin … and he jokes about how Putin kills the press and he would never do that. Well, OK. It’s not cool. It’s not cool. But Iowa did the right thing yesterday.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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