Voicing political disagreements and calling Donald Trump “wannabe Hitler” is not the same as “saying, go out and hurt somebody,” Rep. Jasmine Crokett said on “The Breakfast Club” Friday.
Crockett joined host Charlamagne Tha God for a conversation about political violence in the wake of the death of Charlie Kirk.
“We’ve got to talk about what it means when you’re running for president or you’re running for one of these higher offices and you go out there and you talk about beating people [up], you go out there and you say things like, I could shoot somebody in the middle of the street in New York and still win — we’ve got to talk about, like, that is next level,” Crockett explained.
(While speaking to voters in Sioux Center, Iowa, in 2016, Trump infamously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”.)
“Me disagreeing with you, me calling you, you know, wannabe Hitler, all of those things are not necessarily saying, ‘Go out and hurt somebody,’” Crockett continued. “But when you’re literally telling people at rallies, yeah, beat him up and that kind of stuff, you are promoting a culture of violence so we need to talk about what it looks like when you don’t promote a culture of violence.”
After Charlamagne pointed out that “both sides of the aisle do it,” Crockett added, “They call us socialists, they call us all things, but I don’t think that that actually evokes an environment of violence.”
“I think literally saying things about like, oh, these people don’t deserve to live or the images of what we’re seeing right now as ICE is going into communities and dragging people and kicking them and taking them down to the ground and busting windows out, like that is the, we have never seen these types of images of ICE,” she added.
Watch the interview with Rep. Crockett in the video above.
