And the left shrieks about the right inciting violence? On Nicolle Wallace's MSNBC show Thursday afternoon, MSNBC contributor and former FBI agent Clint Watts said:
"If you took what President Trump said, and instead put it in Anwar Awlaki's mouth, we would be talking about a drone strike overseas."
WHAT?? How is that not incitement to violence? How is that not inciting left-wing extremists to believe that President Trump deserves to be assassinated? According to Watts's bio, he's " a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC."
Here's the context:
MSNBC
Deadline White House
1/28/21
4:16 pm ETNICOLLE WALLACE: I wouldn't waste my breath with them [Republicans.] And I'd say to Democrats, it's time to roll out a terrorism-era choice for Republicans. And this should come from every Democrat: you're either with them, or with us. There are not two sides to be taken on the question of incitement.
And Clint Watts, I'd like you to speak about fighting terrorism, just generally, and as an art and a science. I don’t know of any examples where they simply go to the crime scene and deal with the person who was radicalized to carry out violence. It always starts at the other end of the fish’s head, and goes to the incitement, the people sending out messages. How do you deal with a domestic-terror threat without dealing with those inciting it and spreading it?
CLINT WATTS: Nicolle, you can’t. You’ll always be on your heels, you'll always be reactive. We had a period after 9/11, where we were trying to get "left of boom" as they would say in counter-terrorism. Which is, can you get way up, up the stream of an attack and start to root out all of the confluences which bring about that attack?
So, as Myles was talking about, he's exactly right. If you took what President Trump said, and you instead put it in Anwar Awalki’s mouth, we would be talking about a drone strike overseas. So that's one aspect of our political leaders talking about this rhetoric.
Note that Awlaki, a recruiter and organizer of terrorist attacks for al-Qaeda, was a US-born, US citizen. His killing via drone strike was ordered by President Barack Obama. Wallace teed up Watts to make his extreme statement by suggesting that you have to deal with domestic terror by dealing with those inciting it.
MSNBC contributor Clint Watts saying that if what President Trump said had been said by fellow US citizen Anwar Awlaki, "we would be talking about a drone strike," was sponsored in part by NewDay AT&T.
