On the eve of the Republican convention in Cleveland, Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake was quoted in The New York Times as saying that Trump and his supporters are racists who need to be purged from the Republican Party like John Birchers were back in the 1960s.

In a piece entitled “Donald Trump Forces G.O.P. to Choose Between Insularity and Outreach,” it is alleged that Trump is courting racist working-class and rural white voters while shutting the door in the face of urbanites and minorities.

After setting up its premise that the GOP has become the party of racists, and after quoting Speaker of the House Paul Ryan insisting that a post Trump election would have the GOP fighting “for the soul of our party,” the Times then turns to Senator Flake, who appears to be only too happy to follow along with the liberal media narrative that the GOP is filled with racists that must be purged from the party.

Flake, the paper informs its readers, has stood against Trump’s temporary halt to immigration from jihad-wracked countries. Indeed, Sen. Flake has addressed the issue many times, calling Trump “toxic” and insisting that the real estate mogul must “soften” his position on Muslim immigration and support Obama’s importation of hundreds of thousands of Muslim “refugees.”

Flake, the Times said, apparently hopes that Trump’s campaign will “wake” Americans up — not to the dangers the country faces, but to Trump and his supporters’ racism.

“You’ve got to hope that, if this race keeps going the way it looks to be going, that it’s enough of a jolt to wake people up and say we don’t want to be relegated to second place in every future presidential campaign,” Flake is quoted as saying.

The paper goes on to say Flake “suggested a purge of racists from the party that would recall the expulsion of the John Birch Society, a fringe nationalist group, from Republican ranks a half-century ago.”

“Those who want a Muslim ban, those who will disparage individuals or groups — yes, we ought to, we need to,” the senator concluded.

So, far from reaching out to the millions of voters who pulled the primary lever for Donald Trump, Sen. Jeff Flake wants them purged from the party, and branded as racists and Islamophobes.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.