Over the weekend, Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters called for protesters to “get more confrontational” if former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is acquitted of murdering George Floyd.
This rhetoric is no different than that of former President Donald Trump, who used bombastic and extreme rhetoric ahead of and on Jan. 6. The day when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, destroying property and ending lives. In his speech moments before the Capitol riot, Trump told a crowd of supporters, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” This nullified his earlier call to march “over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Now compare that language with Waters’s. “We’ve got to stay on the street, and we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational,” Waters said. “We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”
This incendiary rhetoric is part and parcel of Waters’s record for confrontation. In 2018, she told supporters to intimidate certain members of the Trump’s administration in public. “Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd,” she said. “And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere. We’ve got to get the children connected to their parents.”
Here’s a question: Why are so many in the media and elsewhere willing to condemn Trump’s hostile rhetoric but stay silent when it comes to Waters?
Regardless of who you are or what side of the ideological spectrum you are on, rioting and looting should be unequivocally condemned. Certainly, politicians should seek to cool rather than stoke tensions before they descend into violence.
In this week, when Chauvin’s fate may be decided under law, let us all unequivocally condemn political violence.
Jackson Richman is a journalist in Washington, D.C. Follow him @jacksonrichman.
