Democrats on Friday worked on an article of impeachment charging President Trump with “incitement for insurrection” in a continuation of their four-year campaign to remove him from office.
The charge is based on the breach of the Capitol on Wednesday after Trump invited supporters at a rally to “walk down to the Capitol” and “cheer on our brave senators and Congress men and women” who were about to object to slates of electors due to evidence of voting irregularities and fraud.
Catholic League President Bill Donohue on Friday argued that Trump never instructed anyone to engage in violence while conceding, as critics say, that he “stoked people’s passions.”
But if “inflammatory rhetoric” is the standard, he said, “then Trump’s critics are at best ethically compromised.”
He pointed out Barack Obama in 2008 said: “I need you to get out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.”
And his attorney general, Eric Holder, said in 2018: “When they go low, we kick ’em. That’s what this new Democratic Party is about.”
U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., went much further in 2018.
“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that [Trump] Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and create a crowd,” she told a raucous crowd. “And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Rep. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said last year, “Please, get up in the face of some Congress people.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi downplayed rioting, saying, “People will do what they do.”
Donohoe also cited Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.: “You know, there needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as there is unrest in our lives, and unfortunately there is plenty to go around.”
And soon-to-be vice president Kamala Harris said: “They’re [left-wing protesters] not gonna stop before Election Day in November and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day. And that should be—everyone should take note of that on both levels, that this isn’t, they’re not gonna let up and they should not. And we should not.”
Then there was New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio justifying violent street protests.
“When you see a nation, an entire nation, simultaneously grappling with an extraordinary crisis seeded in 400 years of American racism, I’m sorry, that is not the same question as the understandably aggrieved store owner or the devout religious person who wants to go back to services.”
There were journalists, as well.
“The notion that nonviolence is tactically more effective…has not only been proven wrong over the past week by sheer numbers; it cannot be historically supported,” wrote H. Lossin in The Nation magazine in 2020.
Donohoe concluded: “Many more examples could be given. In fairness, these comments, while incendiary, are not direct calls for violence. But it is also true that nothing Trump said was a direct call for violence either.
“Left-wing commentators and activists (pretty much the same these days) have no moral authority to lecture the rest of us about violence committed by right-wing protesters,” he said. “They nurtured a climate of violence over the past year by giving Antifa and Black Lives Matter their blessings. If they were principled, they would do as the Catholic League does and condemn violent protesters regardless of their cause. But they are not.”
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