Far-right commentator John Zmirak appeared on “The Eric Metaxas Show” last Friday, where he likened those who stormed the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection to the Founding Fathers and equated the Democrats to the Nazis for supposedly persecuting these heroes.
Zmirak appeared on Eric Metaxas’ program to promote his recent column, “Will January 6 Be the New July 4 for Our Descendants?” Zmirak and Metaxas were particularly outraged about the 4-year prison sentence handed down to Nicholas Ochs, a member of the far-right group the Proud Boys that was instrumental in fomenting the insurrection and whose leaders are now on trial for seditious conspiracy.
During the discussion, Zmirak urged “the next Republican president” to pardon all those convicted for their roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection and then urge them to run for Congress.
“The folks who are in prison right now, when they get out, they’re going to get activated,” Metaxas predicted.
“The next Republican president needs to first pardon the Jan. 6 dissidents and then endorse them as candidates for Congress,” Zmirak replied. “I want to see a Republican Congress who’s the majority of Jan. 6 people. That is what we need in America: people who have first-hand experienced the jackboot of our elites and our new public health dictatorship on their faces, who still have the tread marks of the jackboots on their faces.”
Zmirak compared the Jan. 6 insurrections to “the American patriots who survived the crackdown in 1773” and “went on to lead their new free country,” comparing the treatment of the insurrectionists to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany.
“This is precisely what the Nazis did to take power in the 1930s,” Zmirak asserted. “They had their street thugs—the Brown Shirts, the SA—beating people up over politics. If those people fought back—like the Social Democrats or the Catholics or the communists—if they fought back, everyone will be arrested. The pro-Nazi judges would let the Nazis go and prosecute the communists and the socialists and the Catholics who had defended themselves against the Nazis, and this is how the Nazis took power in Germany, and it is what the Democrats are doing in the United States today, and we should simply call them what they are: Neo-Nazis.”
Of course, this argument was readily accepted by Metaxas, who has in the past compared Black Lives Matter, liberals, and intelligence agencies to the Nazis. An influential evangelical radio host, Metaxas became one of the most prominent Big Lie promoters after former President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020.
Metaxas emceed the pro-Trump rally on the National Mall at which Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes threatened bloody civil war if Trump did not use the military to stay in power; Metaxas responded with a “God bless you” and told the crowd that Rhodes was “keepin’ it real.”
Zmirak and Metaxas have long made their stance on the Democratic Party clear, agreeing earlier this year that “the Democratic Party is possessed by preternatural evil.”
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