Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett slammed Republicans for “presuming” that conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk was killed by “somebody that came from our side of the aisle.”
“I hate that some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle immediately came out and they were like, ‘Oh, you know, this is on the Democrats.’ Like, we don’t even know who did what,” Crockett said on The Breakfast Club Friday. “It’s wild” that Republicans “are presuming that this is somebody that came from our side of the aisle,” she added.
“Obviously the first thing that anybody would say—and you didn’t have any Democrat that went out there and said otherwise—is, ‘We’re denouncing political violence,’” she added.
Not only could the killing have been “personal,” she said, but it could have been committed by someone who supports the right: “The vast majority of these shootings, whether they are seen as political or not, if we look at the numbers—white supremacy ideology. But we don’t want to do anything about that.”
“We’ve seen writings and manifestos and we’ve seen where it looks like the two people that went after the president, before he was the president, had ties to the Republican Party,” Crockett sad. The motive behind the shooting is still unclear, but authorities apprehended 22-year-old suspect Tyler Robinson on Thursday.
“As soon as” Kirk was murdered, Crockett said, “the next thing you know the trans community is under attack again,” alluding to commentary from right-wing figures like Megyn Kelly and Donald Trump Jr. But there’s another group that should be considered a point of concern to prevent this type of violence, she added. “When we look at these mass shootings, most of them are linked to neo-Nazism or, you know, Proud Boys or whatever… Every time you say white supremacy, they want to yell, ‘Oh, you’re race baiting.’ No, I am going on facts.”
Crockett said the rhetoric that “radicalized” Kirk’s murderer has created an atmosphere in which she herself feels the need for increased security. “I have to pay for my own security,” she said Friday. “I have to raise money to keep myself safe.”
“Hopefully we can engage in some real conversations around what it looks like to get us some real safety, but also we need to engage” in conversations about free speech and in “what really does cross the line.” Host Charlamagne Tha God expressed similar sentiments about free speech in response to Kirk’s assassination on Thursday.
“We don’t get to determine the consequences of our free speech,” he’d said, referencing Kirk’s comments that it was “worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
Crockett also said Friday, “We do have free speech in this country, but are you free to say just any and everything? There are limits to all of our constitutional protections, as well as what kind of standard are we going to hold ourselves to, when you are sitting, say, in the Oval Office?”
She concluded, implicating Trump, “When you’re literally telling people at rallies, ‘Yeah, beat them up’ and that kind of stuff, you are promoting a culture of violence.”
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