Maxine Waters Denies She Ever Encouraged People to Harass Members of Trump Administration
Waters in 2018: “The people are going to turn on them. They’re going to protest. They’re absolutely going to harass them until they decide that they’re going to tell the president, ‘No, I can’t hang with you.’”
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) is aghast that President Donald Trump’s impeachment lawyers might her dangerous rhetoric to defend him in his impeachment trial. She claims she never “glorified or encouraged” any violence against Republicans or members of Trump’s administration.
Waters made the declaration on MSNBC. Do you know what she said on MSNBC in 2018? She wanted people to harass Republicans and Trump’s administration.
Sunday, February 7, 2021
MSNBC host Ali Velshi asked Waters, “Can you say that you have not glorified or encouraged violence against Republicans?”
Waters said:
“Absolutely, I can say it. As a matter of fact, if you look at the words that I used, the strongest thing I said was, ‘Tell them they’re not welcome. Talk to them. Tell them they’re not welcome.’ I didn’t say go and fight. I didn’t say anybody was going to have any violence. And so they can’t make that statement.”
She also said:
“There was a movement at the time where restaurants were denying members of his administration, of his cabinet, and saying, ‘You guys should speak up for the children,’” she said, referencing the family separation policy that had gone into effect at the time. “And so that does not in any way equal what this president has said and what he has done.”
But no matter what Waters says or does, she insisted it cannot compare to what Trump did to America:
“Nothing any Democrat that I know of have ever said or acted in the way the president of the United States has acted. People must realize, this president was out to destroy our democracy if he could not be president. He sent those people, those domestic terrorists, to the Capitol, to take over the Capitol. Even they are saying so, they’re saying they were invited by the president. The president was rallying them right before they went. He told them to ‘be tough,’ he told them to ‘take back their government.’”
.@RepMaxineWaters now says her urging supporters to be increasingly “confrontational” and “forceful” against Trump allies was not actually meant to incite violence pic.twitter.com/tRkHOUxD33
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 8, 2021
Flashback to June 24, 2018
Waters told a crowd:
Maxine Waters calls for attacks on Trump administration: "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 and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere." pic.twitter.com/jMV7wk48wM
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) June 24, 2018
She said the same thing on MSNBC:
MAXINE WATERS: I have no sympathy for these people that are in this administration who know it’s wrong for what they’re doing on so many fronts. They tend to not want to confront this president or even leave, but they know what they’re doing is wrong. I want to tell you, these members of his cabinet who remain and try to defend him, they won’t be able to go to a restaurant, they won’t be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop at a department store. The people are going to turn on them.
They’re going to protest. They’re absolutely going to harass them until they decide that they’re going to tell the president, ‘No, I can’t hang with you.’ This is wrong. This is unconscionable. We can’t keep doing this to children.
We’ve got to push back. We’ve got to say no. I, for example, have stepped way out there. I said this man needs to be impeached. I know a lot of people think we’re not ready to say that. Some people have said a long time ago he would become presidential. He will never be presidential. This man does not have any good values. I believe he needs to be impeached. As a matter of fact, a long time before he’s doing what he’s doing now with these children. I think he had done enough to undermine this country and to have us understand we cannot trust him, that we should have come with an impeachment resolution. So, I believe we cannot wait until the next presidential election. We have to resist him. I want to see him impeached.
She doubled down on the comments:
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Comments
Let’s go to the video……… Mad Max should be expelled from Congress for some of her rhetoric.
And then put in stocks so that people show her how they feel about her.
The headline is wrong. She is not denying having encouraged people to harass member’s of Trump’s administration. She’s denying having encouraged violence, and she is correct. She didn’t.
And neither did Trump.
Trump didn’t even encourage harassment; all he called for was good old-fashioned protest, the way the first amendment says. He told people to go down to the Capitol and let Congress know how they felt. Give courage to the Republicans who plan to challenge the electors, so they know the people are with them and don’t back down. Exactly the same as every protest at the Capitol for the last two centuries.
“Fight”, in a political context, is no more a call for violence than is “campaign”, or “struggle”, or a dozen similar words that all politicians use all the time, often without even thinking of their literal meanings.
Maxine most certainly represents all of what is wrong with some people.
Right, calling for people to mass in groups to harass a person/people isn’t a call for violence. You can play semantics, but we know what she said and the context with which it was said.
Get up in their face and tell them they aren’t welcome – how do you think that works? Is intimidation not violence? It is if the imitation is is meant to provoke said violence.
Can we just drop the word play and call it out for what it is?
No, harassment is not violence. Getting in someone’s face and telling them they’re not welcome is not violence. It’s not violence until it becomes assault, which means putting someone in reasonable fear of imminent bodily injury. The fear must be objectively reasonable, and the event feared must be imminent.
You’ll have to forgive Milly, he is challenged in areas of nuance.
That said, you can objectively argue that anyone or group of anyones that surround someone and it leads to violence is looking mighty guilty in a court of law. Can’t claim self defense if you create the hostile situation. Would that be Mad Max’s fault? No….should she encourage such behavior? Only if she wants to drum up violence for her own political gains.
……Milly…..
10,000 up-votes just for that, if I could.
Doesn’t Waters believe that her people have a right to assault, riot, loot? Her mentality is representative of the people she represents, crime stats are damning, collectively they are tragic.
It is also tragic that most of her flock do poorly, at low skill jobs or on public assistance, while she has squirreled away 2 million dollars. So, how did she get 2 million, hook or crook?
Depends on the harassment. Some definitely is violent.
So, using bullhorn, banging on doors, vandalizing propery, at night, of a Senator’s home. At home where a newborn resided, is NOT harm? Trust me, that infant suffered harm being assaulted by those noises. The mother suffered mental harm being unable to protect her child from that assault.
Is that linked to the speech in question? Those incidents relate to more recent events surely?
What the HELL has that got to do with the topic, you moron? Stick to the topic. Did Waters encourage violence? No, she did not.
And no, using a bullhorn, at any time of night, is not violence, unless you are using it to hit someone, or to burst their eardrum.
kyrrat mentions using bullhorn, banging on doors, vandalizing property implicitly as examples of violence.
Milhouse responds that using a bullhorn, at any time of night, is not violence, unless you are using it to hit someone, or to burst their eardrum. While Milhouse might be right about the bullhorn, his response is all wrong. Why? Because vandalizing property certainly is violence. Posing as contradicting kyrrat while not actually doing so is, in my opinion, bad form.
So, while more often than not I agree with Mllhouse, including his comments in this thread, his response to kyrrat is wrong—and Maxine Waters clearly was encouraging violence.
Here is a broadly analogous hypothetical with questions. Person A is approaching a doorway to a building on a public street. It is the only entrance to the building. Person A wants to go through the doorway to enter the building. Person A has every right to go through that doorway to enter the building. Person B, who has nothing whatever to do with the building and has no legal right to interfere with anyone’s entering the building, places himself in front of that doorway and refuses to budge so that Person A cannot go through the doorway without tossing Person B aside. Person B is blocking Person A’s simply because he (i.e., Person B) just does not want Person A to enter the building.
1. Is Person B engaging in violence?
2. If Person A does toss Person B aside, is Person A engaging in violence?
3. Is Person B’s conduct wrong?
4. If Person A does toss Person B aside, is Person A’s conduct wrong?
Ira, vandalism is violence; nobody has ever suggested otherwise. But Waters did not call for vandalizing anything. Kyrrat was dishonest in introducing it because the topic is what Waters called on people to do, and that is harassment, not violence.
Using a bullhorn from a safe distance, even at 3 am for the purpose of harassing a person, is not violence, and that is the most extreme thing that can be fairly read into her words.
As for obstructing someone from going about his legitimate business, no, it isn’t violence. In my opinion it ought to be completely acceptable for the person to remove the obstruction or to force his way through it, even if he is compelled to use violence, and even if it injures or kills the person creating the obstruction. But unfortunately that is not the law.
How about her speech at the LA riots? “If it’s not a guilty verdict, go to war.” That inciteful enough for you?
I tried to find video of that speech without success. It looks like Adobe inadvertently(?) created a huge Memory Hole when they deliberately made Flash stop working. A lot of video content from those days is in Flash, and now it’s entirely unviewable.
Silence is violence
According to the Left, negative words are microaggressions at best, and outright aggression at worst, and aggression IS violence. And silence in the face of verbal violence is also violence. By their own logic, harassment IS violence.
“Go gather a mob and push back on these people” is a lot more violent than anything Trump ever said.
Of course it is. But it’s still not violence. Harassment is a crime, but it’s not assault.
Harassment becomes assault the second those harassing offer a threat of physical harm. Her use of the words “gather a mob” Anyone who has graduated from High School knows that word choice conveys intent. Mobs are violent and destructive by definition. So yes, Waters was inciting violence.
By that definition Trump is guilty. He gathered a mob too. “Mob” is just a pejorative term for any large and disorderly crowd, which Trump gathered. Nothing wrong with that. Mobs can be violent, but many times they are not, and she didn’t call for a violent one.
Like Trump, she said what their message ought to be. Trump said the purpose of rallying at the Capitol should be to encourage those congressmen who planned to challenge the electors. Waters said the purpose of gathering against Trump administration members should be to deliver the message that they are not welcome. Neither of these messages is violent.
Millhouse – the difference is that Waters specifically ysed the words “gather a mob” with all the implications of violence inherent in the words. Trump did not call for a Mob. He called for protest and specified that it should be a peaceful protest even as he told them to get wild. I see a pretty big difference in both intent and purpose between the two. Now if Trump actually did say “get a mob together and get wild” then I’d say he is just as guilty of inciting violence as Waters.
Um, hey, her exact words were NOT “gather a mob.” Those were my words. She said “create a crowd.” I just frequency shifted the dogwhistle.
As Dennis Prager often says
” Leftists lie with the ease you breath”
this isn’t 1960 anyone can go to youtube or better places to prove your cover up.
This is a really pointless discussion. If someone was upset with Congresswoman Watter’s comments at the time, they should have followed through in a timely way. Here, there was a rally organized by President Trump’s allies at the Ellipse with busloads of supporters brought to Washington for it. It was deliberately staged for the same day that a joint session of Congress tabulates the Electoral College results. he promised his twitter followers “a wild time.”
Trump gave a speech at the rally saying that Trump would walk with the audience to the Capitol. He actually stayed at the White House.
I don’t believe that Congresswoman Watters actually expected anyone to follow her advice. I don’t understand what President Trump expected to happen at the Capitol if the audience went there.
I don’t buy their crap anymore. It’s a political hit job. No witnesses called. My government really stinks.
That’s not a very thorough analysis, nor is it objective.
I find it funny how you gauge intent in the negative for Trump but in the naive and innocent for Waters.
Thumb up by mistake.
That’s bullshit. First of all, everyone was upset with Waters at the time. The reason we’re bringing it up again now is because Trump, who did even less than she did, is now being accused of incitement. That’s wrong coming from anyone, but coming from her it’s chutzpah.
Yes. So what? How is that different from the hundreds of rallies that have marched to the Capitol. Of course it was staged for the same day as the event it was meant to protest; when else should it have been?
So what? I don’t know why he changed his mind. Maybe something came up. Maybe his feet hurt. Maybe the Secret Service asked him not to go. Who cares? Is that why you’re upset at him?! If he’d gone you wouldn’t be complaining?! Don’t spit on us and tell us it’s raining.
Its different because they broke into the Capitol Building. You may not put much stock in democratic processes but the vast majority do. It was a deliberate attempt to frustrate a democratic process, and included a number of actions which included the threat of violence such as those who attempted to take weapons into the building, pipe bombs, people with cable ties and so on.
I think you know my opinion on which is worse MW speech or Trumps and contextually what Trump has been saying for ages. There is a considerable difference between the two. That said I respect your view that MW’s speech was poor.
Some would undoubtedly claim that far from attempting to frustrate a democratic process in fact they were fortifying it. If they were Trump supporters that might be nearer the mark than the insurrection claim. It is highly unlikely that the actual criminals were Trump supporters, as per the observations and assessment of veteran war correspondent Michael Yon is clearly much more believable than anything the Democrats claim without investigation or evidence in their bad-faith article of impeachment.
Thanks for posting that link to segments of Joshua Phillips’ interview with Michael Yon. With his experience reporting from combat zones, Michael Yon seems to be the only one pulling together all the details of what happened outside the Capitol on 1/6/21.
I’m confused by your argument on one hand you say that the act of breaking in to the capitol building is a good thing (even when thee were a number of criminal acts in the process) and on the other you say it was Trump supporters at all.
Both are deeply flawed arguments.
Firstly peaceful protest doesn’t involve breaking and entering (other crimes not withstanding). And yes I condemn the Antifa BLM riots where they happened before you go down that route.
Second the vast majority of attendees were Trump supporters. The evidence for other actors is scant at best and even if that were true the Trump supporters are still responsible for there own conduct, that’s no defense. Although interestingly a number of those Trump supporters directly blame Trump for there actions.
I have a hard time believing that.
I don’t. It isn’t. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
I can only assume you took my “some might call it fortifying”-parody of the Time magazine piece relabeling attacks on the integrity of the election that way. And I do indeed have a much harder time believing sophisticated elites planning for months and months in the shadows only want to help fortify the election than believing that of any genuine Trump supporter swept up in emotion stoked by agents provocateurs.
I agree with your first point. I am not sure about the vast majority of attendees – that seems to depend on which subset of people in Washington we are looking at.
Certainly, the vast majority of the rally attendees were Trump supporters. If we are looking at the crowd at the Capitol building when the first attack started the ratio of non-Trump supporters will be much higher since most Trump supporters surely listened to Trump’s speech at the time.
If you substitute “people wearing some sort of MAGA attire” for “Trump supporters” in that paragraph it would clearly be true. But wearing MAGA attire does not turn an Antifa agent provocateur into a Trump supporter, nor does it turn a “clown” into a Trump supporter.
As for scant evidence: the report of an experienced correspondent specializing in reporting on this sort of conflict seems to be much more reliable than anything MSM had to offer. Or Twitter. Or Democrat politicians determined to not let this crisis go to waste. And FBI and DoJ press releases so far are not incompatible with Yon’s observations.
The function of “clowns” is to pretend to be their enemy and to make them look bad. The most incendiary expressions of rioters certainly fit right in with that modus operandi.
1. The Capitol is not special. Breaking into it is not one tiny bit worse than breaking into a store. Actually less bad and more defensible. Nor is there anything special about “democratic processes”; ordinary people’s legitimate business is a lot more important than anything government does.
2. In any case, Trump didn’t tell them to do that, didn’t intend for them to do it, and those who did it were not even at his speech, having planned it in advance and gone straight there, so Trump had nothing to do with it.
1) by your standard preventing the transition of power is acceptable. I’m not sure how you can’t see that is a bad thing.
2) well we can disagree on that, it’s entirely possible for them to have watched or listened to the speech what with modern technology and all. As for the planning part, well Trump had been peddling the same line for months. So sure they planned it so what. Everyone new what he was going to say , blah fraud blah. The intention was clear Trump didn’t like the result and made it known that he thought the incoming administration was illigitimate.
OK, Mark, it is certainly possible to attend the speech while you are in Washington using your phone. Because, let us face it, who would want to go to a MAGA rally live if he could stay away?
If people could have they would have avoided any Elvis concert and watched it streamed instead, surely…
Now, when you watch on your phone you are not part of a crowd but isolated, so it stands to reason that you are not in the “part of the crowd” state of mind reducing your inhibitions. Can you please explain which exact words President Trump did use that triggered these alleged Trump supporters—who were not attending the Save America rally were he was speaking live although it was only under two miles away—into launching the insurrection? Can you point to the exact moment? And if the trigger was “peacefully and patriotically,” for example, can you point us to where we can find the code-book of the MAGA cult that translates the pre-arranged code word “peacefully and patriotically” to “attack now!”?
1. The transition of power is on the 20th, not the 6th. Nobody disrupted that.
1a. Neither the transition nor the count are sacred rituals. They are no more important than any other activity. They are “the business of the people”, but disrupting them is no less acceptable then disrupting those very same people’s actual business with a “peaceful protest” that blocks a highway, or shuts down a city center. People who riot and use violence should be punished; but no more for doing so at the Capitol than anywhere else, and in fact less so, because doing it at the Capitol does less damage than pretty much anywhere else.
But most importantly, rallying in front of the Capitol, which is what Trump actually called for, is a sacred rite of the American people, and thus more important than anything that takes place inside that building. It’s the people who are important, not the government.
2. Talk about completely missing the point. The point is that the people who violently broke into the Capitol planned it in advance, and did not attend Trump’s rally. Therefore how can he possibly have incited them? Whether they were listening to his speech or not, nothing he said could have caused them to act as they did, because they’d already made that decision before they came. Thus it is illegitimate to blame him for it.
2a. “Everyone new what he was going to say , blah fraud blah. The intention was clear Trump didn’t like the result and made it known that he thought the incoming administration was illigitimate.”
Um, yes. What is your point? You seem to be claiming that that is what he should be impeached for. Not the violence, not the attack on the Capitol, but expressing his honest opinion, that “blah fraud blah, Biden is illegitimate”. And that is obscene. Whether you agree with him or not, it is a legitimate opinion, and it cannot be an offense, let alone a “high crime or misdemeanor”, to say it.
But if it is an offense to express false opinions on something this important, then both the Russia hoax and “Black Lives Matter” are far bigger and more important falsehoods, so everyone who has expressed those should be punished before Trump is.
And by the way, the incoming administration is illegitimate. I will say it out loud, and I didn’t need Trump to tell me that. I don’t actually care what Trump thinks about it; he could tell me Biden is legitimate and it wouldn’t affect me one bit.
Quite a job at distortion. You are to be commended for that.
You admit that you
From internal evidence found in his speech, I’d assume that he expected that there they would “peacefully and patriotically make (their) voices heard.”
That seems to be the inference most rational observers would draw given that the exhortation in question was:
It walks. It talks. It comes with a family of freeloaders. Get your lying sack of crap today!
So let’s go and do our review of “Party of the People” to see how this stacks up:
-Max tells violent agitators to “push back” “confront” and “be forceful” against regular everyday Americans….Dem party covers for her and says not incitement to violence.
-Trump tells people to exercise their first amendment rights against a political aristocracy that undermines its people to its own ends and buries any chance of an objective investigation into that subterfuge….Dem party screams violence and begins rooting out any heretics to burn at the stake with Trump.
I don’t recall hearing a statement from her about Steve Scalise or Rand Paul….
Yeah? Let’s respond the way they do, shall we?
“We know she was just using code words and dog whistles. We know what she really meant, don’t we?”
You know that’s how they’ll respond to anyone using Trump’s actual words in his defense.
We know what she really meant, don’t we?
The corruption has been so deep, so profitable and for so long, that the arrogance of corrupt scum like Waters is just as large – she simply follows the lead of the queen of corrupt scum, Pelosi.
We either soldier up and bulldoze our way back into our government, or we move on to a new nation.
The longer we wait – and react at the snail’s pace we are (forget the GOP – it’s a junk brand you wouldn’t even buy paper towels from) we’ll be enslaved in a year. Literally enslaved.
Oh come on law grad. (Hint I graduated from law school and practice law for almost forty years). Mad Maxine aka “Gatemouth” Waters has always flapped her jaw. There’s no connection between her brain and her mouth. But to say “she didn’t really mean it” is silly. How do you know what the old girl intended? All you can do is look at what she said–and what she said was pretty bad.
Maxine is a vile, corrupt dimwit.
It’s breathtaking to hear one of the truly stupid people appear on TV and Gaslight the country in this age of everything saved on the internet. But, the dinosaur media, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat party, will cover for her.