BULL. SHIT.
First it was the KKK. Then it was "states' rights" and segregation. Then it was fundamentalist christians. Then it was the Tea Party. Then the Birther movement. And now it's the Proud Boys and their ilk. Republicans have been encouraging, enabling and relying on the votes of far-right demographics for decades, and the "boring center republicans" are fully culpable for being complicit in this horseshit. I guess the civil rights movement and those damn uppity gays protesting Reagan in the 80s were "left wing extremists" creating right wing extremists to you. It wasn't the decades of fundamentalist religion, homophobia, racism, ultranationalist patriotism, gutting education and the welfare state, "south's gonna rise again", "don't tread on me", NRA propaganda, labor unions getting crushed leading to neoliberal economic policies etc. but the gawd demn fake noos CNN!
Nobody even knew who the fuck Bernie Sanders was before 2015, and he's basically the only major american politician to have ran for president who could be characterized as actually left wing in at least my lifetime. People widely and openly identifying as communist or socialist in the US is like 5 years old at most. Meanwhile the right wing has decades worth of radio hosts, politicians and different movements to their name. Was Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh created by left wing extremism too?
Seriously, how braindead must one be to unironically try to push this take?