OPINION:
Rep. Maxine Waters, the California Democrat known best, perhaps, for her repetitive calls for impeachment of President Donald Trump, has found a new schtick, and it goes like this: The alt-right is coming to kill me.
And not just her. “Others,” too, she direly predicts, in public statements made — yes, in public — this week.
OK, enough waiting. Here are her words, made during a hearing on Capitol Hill that saw Waters ask terror experts for advice in dealing with white nationalists, who’ve threatened to kill her.
“What can we do to deal with the KKK, the white nationalists, the extremists, the alt-right? They’re on the Internet, they’re Breitbart. If you look at the YouTube, you see how much they want to kill me and others,” she said, during a Subcommittee on Terrorism and Illicit Finance hearing, PJ Media reported. “What can we do?”
Her desperate pleas are somewhat of a hoot.
This is a woman, after all, who’s painted Trump in as darkest of lights as possible, calling far and wide and ever-so-frequently for his impeachment — all the while knowing he’s not even committed any impeachable offense. Yet it’s the rhetoric of racist nut-jobs that concerns her?
She ought to look to her own reputation.
Surely, a seated congresswoman holds more sway with the public than the off-the-chart ugly rantings of a small and vicious segment of society? Most people dismiss KKK talk as crazy.
Most people don’t automatically dismiss a congresswoman’s rhetoric. Rather, a congresswoman is given a certain amount of due regard — a level of respect — that’s not afforded a KKK loon.
But that respect should breed a sense of responsibility.
In other words, political officials shouldn’t use and abuse their high public perches to shake their partisan hatchets. They ought to speak with some level of decorum, meeting some standard of gravitas.
Waters instead has squawked like a pinched parrot, “impeach, impeach, impeach.” And now that she’s discovered some KKK videos on, as she put it, “the YouTube,” that are filled with angry, vicious rhetoric and messages — she wants to pretend shock and awe and cry offense?
As if we’re supposed to believe she doesn’t know the openly KKK is racist against blacks?
How disingenuous. But really, how deceptive.
What Waters, with her questions to terror experts, was trying to suggest was this: These white nationalists are simply domestic terrorists and are so threatening they don’t deserve freedom of speech.
And that’s just one small step from saying this: These white nationalists ought to be booted from YouTube, silenced on social media.
And that, while very tempting, is an outright slap to the Constitution. The First Amendment, after all, wasn’t intended to protect inoffensive speech.
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