Fox contributor: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer criticized Trump so she could “shut down churches” without any “heckling”
Charles Hurt: Whitmer is “so infected by politics” that she turned a kidnapping plot “into a weapon to beat up” Trump
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From the October 9, 2020, edition of Fox News' Outnumbered
DAGEN MCDOWELL (CO-HOST): Charlie, to you on this, I'll point out straight off that President Trump has condemned, repeatedly, such groups. But [Gov. Gretchen Whitmer] uses this threat on her life -- very serious -- as a political baton.
CHARLES HURT (THE WASHINGTON TIMES): As you know, Dagen, I do completely agree with you that everybody in Washington has completely lost their minds, but this is evidence that it is not just people in Washington. There are Democrats outside of Washington who have become so infected by politics, they're just so completely -- they've completely lost all sense of proportion and reality, that they take a truly terrible thing like this plot that was foiled by the FBI. They take something like this, and they want to turn it into a weapon to beat up their political rivals. And it is absolutely insane. It's tearing the country apart, and as you point out, the president has clearly, openly, repeatedly condemned all sorts of people that Democrats claim he's never condemned.
He's done nothing -- we've had a very vigorous debate about profoundly important constitutional issues like freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. And what I think that people like Gov. Whitmer want to do, they just want to shut down any debate about these things, because they want to shut down -- she wants to shut down her state, she wants to shut down churches and do all this stuff without having any heckling from political opponents that disagree with her. And it's a really shocking thing.
And the president is right, all of this happens at a time where you have the major political party, the people running for president for a major political party in America, who are openly kowtowing and pandering to a group that is openly doing things in American cities today that are absolutely reprehensible. And while I think that the Biden campaign has attempted to sort of condemn some of it, they will not condemn the actual actors behind it. And while I'm a little uncomfortable sort of attaching the worst people in a party to their party leaders, it is kind of questionable. And it takes a lot of gall to then turn around and accuse the president of encouraging a bunch of wack nuts in Michigan who plotted some crazy scheme to abduct the governor.