Far-left Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) remains in hot water over irresponsible rhetoric spewed by her that many on the right see as her repeated attempts to stir up riotous violence during protests that sometimes turned to urban unrest, with conservatives demanding that the DOJ investigate whether her comments constituted incitement.
Most prominently, many have pointed, in the wake of other high-profile Democrats calling for protests “in the streets” against Trump, to comments that Rep. Waters made in 2021, during the high-profile trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, for protesters to “get more confrontational” if Chauvin was found not guilty.
During that incident, which took place when she spoke in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, during a period of immensely heightened national tension due to the trial of Chauvin and general tensions and past riots surrounding George Floyd’s death, Waters began by saying, “We’ve got to stay in the street and demand justice.”
Continuing, she demanded that people “stay in the street” and “fight for justice” if Chauvin was acquitted in the trial, saying, “We’re looking for a guilty verdict and we’re looking to see if all of the talk that took place and has been taking place after they saw what happened to George Floyd. If nothing does not happen, then we know that we got to not only stay in the street, but we have got to fight for justice.”
She further added, on that same point, that the protesters need to “get more confrontational” and “active” as they “stay on the street” to protest, saying, “We got to stay on the street. And we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”
And, when pressed on the curfew put in place by law enforcement authorities, Waters indicated that she thought protesters should disobey the law and keep “gathering,” saying, “I don’t think anything about curfew. Curfew means: ‘I want you all to stop talking. I want you to stop meeting. I want you to stop gathering.’ I don’t agree with that.”
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Her comments, and others like them, have come back up thanks to the irresponsible rhetoric of other Democrats, this time protesting the ICE raids and tough immigration enforcement policies of the Trump Administration. For example, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffreis called on people to “fight” Trump “in the streets.”
During that press conference, he said, “Right now, we’re going to keep focused on the need to look out for everyday New Yorkers and everyday Americans who are under assault by an extreme MAGA Republican agenda that is trying to cut taxes for billionaire donors and wealthy corporations and then stick New Yorkers and working class Americans across the country with the bill.”
Continuing, he got to his seeming call for violence against the Trump Administration “in the streets” of America’s major cities, saying, “That’s not acceptable. We are going to fight it legislatively. We’re going to going to fight it in the courts, and we’re going to fight it in the streets.”
Featured image credit: By Chad Davis from Minneapolis, United States – Maxine Waters – Daunte Wright Protest – Brooklyn Center April 18 2021, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=103867244