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In another sign of just how untethered to reality the right wing has become, a Republican representative said on Thursday that the Charlottesville white supremacist march was just a “set up” by liberals to make Donald Trump look bad.

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, GOP Congressman Dana Rohrabacher called the events in Charlottesville “all baloney.”

With a tin foil hat firmly planted on his head, the Republican claimed that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters rounded up a bunch of Civil War re-enactors to pretend they cared about protecting Confederate statues.

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“It was a setup for these dumb Civil War re-enactors,” Rohrabacher said. “It was left-wingers who were manipulating them in order to have this confrontation.”

The GOP representative said liberals just wanted to “put our president on the spot.”

Rohrabacher may like to blame progressives for making the president look bad, but Trump – particularly when it comes to Charlottesville – has done the heavy lifting on his own.

Shortly after the tragedy, the president refused to strongly condemn white supremacists and Nazis, and instead placed blame “on many sides.” Just today, in fact, he doubled down on those comments, saying “many people” believe he is right to blame Charlottesville on both sides.

At the end of the day, it’s sometimes hard to tell if Republican figures, whether those in government or in the media, actually believe what they say when they belch out this type of rhetoric – or if they’re just saying it because they know it’s what their audience wants to hear.

Still, it’s the kind of unhinged and crackpot rhetoric that may be common on Info Wars, but it has no place in American government.

Whether or not Dana Rohrabacher actually means the offensive nonsense he spewed on Thursday isn’t the issue – the fact that he said it is the problem.

Somebody like him has no business walking the halls of Congress.