Liz Cheney managed to hang onto her job after voting to impeach Donald Trump, but she hasn’t been having a great month. Compounding matters is her curious choice to reinforce liberal stereotypes of Republicans this week. During an online meeting hosted by the Reagan Institute yesterday, Cheney decided to chime in on how she thinks the GOP needs to polish up its brand. She insisted that the Republican Party needs to make it clear that “we’re not the party of white supremacy.” While I’m pretty sure nobody actually wants to be the party of white supremacy, her remarks were all the more confusing because she was saying this in the context of responding to the January 6 Capitol Hill riot. So how is she managing to conflate these two topics? (NY Times)

Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, on Tuesday called on her party to “make clear that we aren’t the party of white supremacy,” arguing that elected Republicans must forcefully condemn those responsible for the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

“It’s very important for us to ignore the temptation to look away” from the attack, Ms. Cheney said during a virtual foreign policy event hosted by the Reagan Institute. “It’s very important, especially for us as Republicans, to make clear that we aren’t the party of white supremacy.”

“You saw the symbols of Holocaust denial, for example, at the Capitol that day; you saw the Confederate flag being carried through the rotunda, and I think we as Republicans in particular, have a duty and an obligation to stand against that, to stand against insurrection.”

How is this supposed to be helpful? Cheney is one of the highest-ranking members of the House GOP caucus. We don’t need her going around and repeating the talking points of Democrats and the liberal media. Is she just trying to continue to go to war with her own party even after Donald Trump is gone from office? I’m not trying to sound like Joe Biden here, but… where’s the unity, Liz?

Republicans are not the party of any racial affiliation. Republicans are supposed to be the party of conservative governance and the opportunity for economic success for everyone who is willing to work for it, regardless of any demographic pigeonholes. The Democrats have spent so long trying to paint everything said or done by any conservative as being somehow racist in nature that they’ve watered down the word to the point of meaninglessness. But now you can rest assured that the cable news outlets will be playing that clip on a loop, saying, “see? Even Liz Cheney admits it!”

Cheney went on to say that we must not “trivialize the gravity of the Capitol riot.” I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen any high-profile Republicans “trivializing” it. That was a complete disaster. But by tying these two subjects together, Cheney is once again playing into Democratic tropes. She’s talking about “symbols of Holocaust denial” at the riot (which I apparently totally missed) and Confederate flags.

Some Confederate flags always showed up at Trump rallies, but Cheney should know better than this. While the act of attacking the Capitol Building is unforgivable, there was no racist component to what was going on there. The rioters were angry because they believed that the election was stolen from Donald Trump and they didn’t want to see it certified. The videos coming out of that debacle included clips of some of the rioters yelling “where’s Nancy?” That was a clear reference to Speaker Nancy Pelosi who happens to be white.

The attack on the Capitol was despicable, but let’s not make it into something that it wasn’t. That’s all Cheney was doing yesterday and she’s playing right into the hands of the Democrats.