Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida told Breitbart News yesterday that “political-correctness culture” was preventing Republicans from more directly impeding efforts to count all the ballots in the tight Senate race in Florida between Rick Scott and Bill Nelson. Gaetz insisted that “the new conservative movement has to take on Trump’s sense of boldness” when it comes to the issue, reassuring listeners that “in the era of Donald Trump, we can go farther.”
As RWW’s Peter Montgomery wrote yesterday, factions of the Right are huddling around President Donald Trump and other Republicans who are loudly asserting without evidence that efforts to count remaining absentee and provisional ballots in still-undecided races are attempts to “steal” elections. Figures associated with GOP operative Roger Stone have organized protests around election offices, even picking up Stone’s “Stop the Steal” slogan, which has attracted right-wing hucksters to Florida en masse.
Gaetz told listeners of “Breitbart News Daily” on SirusXM that Republicans should push back on the vote-counting efforts without fear of outraging voters.
“If the Democrats were in charge and this was happening in a Republican county, do you think that those supervisors of elections would still have jobs? I mean, they’d be gone. They’d be out on their rear ends,” Gaetz said.
“With the media and with the political-correctness culture really coming down on Republicans, some get gun-shy and they think, ‘Oh, well we might get called a racist or we might get called a bigot, or people might criticize us for some other reason,’ and we get paralyzed in action,” Gaetz said.
He continued, “I think the new conservative movement has to take on Trump’s sense of boldness in that you’ve got to do the right thing.”
Gaetz said that Democrats will never “get better” and “treat us better,” so it’s important that Republicans “take the gloves off and fight like they do.”
He added, “In the era of Donald Trump, we can go farther. Our voters reward us for being bold.”
