Sen. Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate, on Friday condemned actor Jussie Smollett for pretending to be the victim of a hate crime.
“Anytime you try to weaponize hate through false accusations, it is awful, it is despicable,” the South Carolina Republican said on Fox News.
Scott said a real hate crime happened this week on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, where a man repeatedly punched a conservative student.
“If you want to look at hate and the real manifestation of hate, look at UC Berkley’s campus, what happened to a conservative [who was] just trying to find a way to attract more conservatives,” Scott said. “That response from the university so far is unexplainable.”
The university has said it is looking into the incident and working with police to identify the attacker. But Scott said it would be a raging national debate if the attacker were conservative.
“Can you imagine that happening to an African-American or to someone else on that campus? The kind of uproar that would have happened because of that hateful act would have had national attention, and yet only Fox News is covering it thoroughly,” he said.
Scott dismissed the idea that people wearing “Make America Great Again” hats in support of Trump aren’t inciting violence, and that instead it’s the fault of the intolerant Left.
“The MAGA hat has nothing to do with inciting racism,” he said. “It’s the Left that wants to demonize Donald Trump, even though we have the lowest unemployment rate we’ve seen in 50 years, even though we have the lowest African-American unemployment rate that we’ve had in the history of the country, even though we keep moving in the right direction.”
