At a press briefing on Monday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer criticized the Left for immediately rushing to judgment and assuming hate crimes must be committed by right-wingers without evidence.
Spicer said leftists need to be “held to account” for their baseless accusations against those on the right.
During the press briefing, a reporter asked Spicer about a murder that was committed in New York City by a man who allegedly targeted a black man on account of his race.
After a back-and-forth about president Trump condemning hate crimes, the reporter asked Spicer, “So what do you say to this? It was clear, it was racism at its ugliest.”
“Yeah, two issues,” Spicer responded. “Number one, I think hate crimes, anti-Semitic crimes of any nature should be called out in the most reprehensible way. There is no room for that in our country and I think the president noted that in the joint address, that there is one issue that despite policy, should unite us, and that is calling out hate, that is calling out divisiveness based on the color of one’s skin, one’s religion, one’s gender.”
“The president has been very clear on that and he’s called it out before," Spicer continued, "with respect to certain particular situations, he made it very clear at the opening of his joint address. That’s what he led with, is a call to denounce hate no matter where we come from politically. He’s also talked about it the night that he took the stage on that Wednesday morning at 2:40 a.m. about how one of the things that he needed to do and wanted to do as president was unite all Americans."
The White House press secretary said that while the administration “unequivocally” calls out hate, there is an “immediate jump to criticize folks on the right” and have them denounce hate crimes that were not perpetrated by right-wingers:
“But I think that there’s one other piece to this, April, that I just want to be clear on. While we unequivocally, no question about it, need to call out hate, anti-Semitism where it exists, there is another thing that we have to do and in your case in particular, while I don’t know all of the details and I don’t want to reference any specific case, but I think we saw this the other day with some of the anti-Semitic behavior that was going out with respect to people of the Jewish faith. It’s that we say these threats coming into Jewish community centers and there was an immediate jump to criticize folks on the right to denounce this, to denounce people on the right and ask them to condemn them. And it turns out, that in fact, it wasn’t someone on the right, and it was the president, from the get-go, had said I bet you it’s not someone on the right. And he was right.”
After an interruption about the particulars of the situation, Spicer yet again condemned hate crimes.
He then continued, “That being said, while we’re on the topic, I do think that there has been a rush to judgment in a lot of other cases when it comes to, in particular, some of the anti-Semitic discussion, where people have jumped to the conclusion about denouncing people on the right and asking for this. And in that particular case, we saw that the president was right and that this rush to judgment by a lot of folks on the left was wrong and none of them have been held to account on that.”
“And that is something that equally needs to be called out,” Spicer stated. “When people are charging something of someone that is not true, there has been nothing to go back to those individuals on the left who came and asked everyone on the right to denounce something that they weren’t guilty of. And I think there needs to be an equal--go back in time and call out those individuals for rushing to judgment and calling out those individuals.”
Check out his remarks in the video clip below.
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