NBC News presidential historian and bestselling author Michael Beschloss went off the rails Wednesday night when reacting to of President Biden speech claiming ‘MAGA Republicans’ are a threat to democracy – warning that if the GOP’s so-called ‘election deniers’ make it through midterm next week, ‘our children will be arrested and possibly killed’.
Beschloss, who appears regularly on MSNBC, was a guest on the cable network “All with Chris Hayes” to analyze the president’s speech earlier in the evening at Washington’s Union Station.
Hayes said the Nov. 8 election will determine whether the country goes down a “path of chaos.”
“We could be six days away from losing our rule of law and losing a situation where we have elections we can all count on. You know, those are the cornerstones of a democracy,” acknowledged Beschloss, the author of nine books on the US presidency.
Biden in the speech recalled the scene of January 6, 2021, when a mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump ransacked the US Capitol in a bid to overthrow the 2020 presidential election and declared that “democracy is on the ballot this year”.
“The extreme MAGA Republicans aim to challenge not only the legitimacy of past elections, but also current and future elections,” Biden charged. “The extreme MAGA element of the Republican Party – which is a minority of this party, as I said earlier, but which is its driving force – is trying to succeed where it failed in 2020.”
Beschloss said the president was “absolutely right” and predicted what historians will say about the speech in the future.
“Fifty years from now, if historians are allowed to write in this country and if there are still free publishing houses and a free press – which I’m not sure, but if that’s true – a historian will say, what was at stake tonight and this week was whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and possibly killed,” he said. .
“We are on the brink of a brutal authoritarian system, and it could take a week,” he added.
Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, reacted to the lopsided rant by tweeting “so much for gas prices.”
“The choice now is to vote Democrat or line your children up before a firing squad…” Turley added on social media.
“Michael Beschloss needs to consider decaf!” posted Rebecca Henry Hatton.
“Michael BeschLOSS”, said Tommie Huang on Twitter.
“From ‘historian’ to hacking in 1 easy lesson. What a fraud!” said Top O’Mind.
“This rhetoric is so over the line that I’m just glad no one is putting it on cable TV, wait what,” the Washington Examiner magazine editor wrote. Seth Mandel.
“Really curious what these guys will be saying in a week after the world doesn’t fall apart. How many times can you cry wolf before MSNBC viewers even stop paying attention?” asked pseudonymous Twitter critic AG Hamiltonwho challenged the apocalyptic rhetoric of Beschloss following attacks on Paul Pelosi and the New Hampshire GOP Senate candidate Don Bolduc.
“[W]What do you think happens if a crazy person believes this rhetoric? If they think the GOP wins a midterm = the end of the country and their children are locked up? Hamilton asked in a later tweet. “[This is] The exact type of rhetoric that can justify violence for someone who is not well, but it is respected [with] the silence.”
Beschloss did not respond to the outrage on Twitter, spending much of Thursday posting photos of former presidents voting in elections.