Speaking at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine parishioners were killed by a shooter in 2015, Cory Booker blamed President Trump for the El Paso killings last weekend.
The New Jersey senator and 2020 presidential candidate called on Americans to become “freedom fighters” against hate, and said Trump is stoking divisions that encouraged a white nationalist shooter to kill 22 people with an assault-style rifle in an El Paso, Texas Walmart.
“The act of anti-Latino, anti-immigrant hatred we witnessed this weekend did not start with the hand that pulled the trigger,” Booker said at the Charleston church. “It was sowed from the highest office in our land where we see in tweets and rhetoric hateful words that ultimately endanger the lives of people in our country, people of color, immigrants.”
Booker’s address comes as presidential contenders clash with Trump and congressional Republicans over how best to react to the twin shootings that occurred over the weekend. A second, unrelated shooter killed nine in Dayton, Ohio, on Sunday, one day after the massacre in the border town of El Paso.
Booker, 50, a repeat visitor to the church where nine people were shot dead in 2015 by a white supremacist, told the congregation the response to these tragedies can’t simply be pointing out “the shortcomings of our leaders” and squabbling over “who is or isn’t a racist.”
“There is no neutrality in this fight. You are either an agent of justice, or you are contributing to the problem,” he said. “We have the power to act, and we can act to legislate safety even if we cannot legislate love.”
The former Newark mayor’s far-reaching gun control plan includes the rollout of a federal licensing program where firearms are also microstamped, the introduction of restrictions on the number of weapons that can be bought each month, and the implementation of reporting requirements for lost or stolen inventory should he win the nomination and the White House next year.
On Wednesday, he urged the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI to disclose domestic terrorism threats posed by white nationalists every year to Congress and the public, as well as the FBI to improve its coordination regarding the identification, investigation, and reporting of hate crimes with local law enforcement.
But Booker added the nation needed to “confront our past,” arguing that touting the U.S. as a place “of tolerance is no great aspiration.”
“Bigotry was written into our founding documents. Native Americans in our Declaration of Independence were referred to as ‘savages’ and in our Constitution black people as fractions of human beings,” he said. “Tolerance suggests that if you disappeared off the face of the earth, I would be no better or worse off because I was just tolerating you and your difference like I tolerate a cold or a headache. We are not called to tolerate injustice; we are called to combat it.”
