Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, does not mince words when it comes to expressing her contempt for Jeff Sessions and his “zero-tolerance” immigration policy.
The Hill reported that: “former first daughter Chelsea Clinton slammed Attorney General Jeff Sessions for quipping about child separations while speaking to a conservative criminal justice organization on Tuesday.”
Clinton took to her Twitter account, bashing Sessions in response to a speech he gave Tuesday at the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Los Angeles.
Clinton called his comments evidence of “indecency and incivility” in the national arena.
CNN reported that: “Sessions accused the Trump administration’s critics on immigration of being radicals and hypocrites as he railed against his opponents in pointed remarks.”
“The rhetoric we hear from the other side on this issue — as on so many others — has become radicalized. We hear views on television today that are on the lunatic fringe, frankly. And what is perhaps more galling is the hypocrisy,” Sessions said.
“These same people live in gated communities, many of them, and are featured at events where you have to have an ID to even come in and hear them speak. They like a little security around themselves, and if you try to scale the fence, believe me, they’ll be even too happy to have you arrested and separated from your children,” he added.
Clinton fired back, tweeting: “You want to know what indecency and incivility sound like? People laughing and applauding at the ‘joke’ about forcibly separating parents from their children.”
You want to know what indecency and incivility sound like? People laughing and applauding at the “joke” about forcibly separating parents from their children. https://t.co/4A81UKymPY
— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) June 26, 2018
This isn’t the first time that Clinton has spoken out against the Trump administration. In May, she sat down for a far-reaching interview with The Guardian to discuss her third children’s book, She Persisted Around The World, “a picture book in which she tells the stories of 13 extraordinary women through the ages, from Marie Curie to Malala Yousafzai, who persevered in the face of prejudice and changed history.”
Discussing bullying and Trump’s impact on children, The Guardian wrote that Clinton used to believe that the proper thing to do “about all the meanness” was to ignore it. However, “Now I’ve come to feel differently, because I think that the way that our president and many people around him have not only mainstreamed hate, but mainlined it, is so deeply dangerous.”
Continuing, The Guardian reported that “[Clinton’s] eyes fill with dismay as she cites the rising reports of bullying in schools cataloged by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
Not just the hundreds but now thousands of instances in schools across America, where children are citing the president as they’re demeaning a little girl, or they’re chanting ‘Build a wall’ in an attempt to demean and degrade brown children. So the reason, now, I no longer ignore it when people say hateful things to me on the street or on social media is, I think we have to shine a light. I think those of us who have platforms to do that have to say this is wrong and unacceptable, so we don’t normalize it but try to detoxify what has been unleashed. Because if we don’t, we leave a vacuum. And I think the darkness fills that vacuum. [emphasis added]
Asked if she has any advice for people in the U.K. considering whether or not to protest Trump’s anticipated visit, she responded that her children, Charlotte and Aidan, have attended rallies:
Well, I’ve been to multiple protests since the election. Charlotte’s been to at least three, maybe four. Aidan’s been to one. If I lived in Britain I would show up to protest, because I don’t agree with what he’s doing to degrade what it means to be an American. [emphasis added]
Asked if she thought Trump would be impeached, she expressed support for Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation:
I don’t think about that yet. But I strongly believe it’s important that Robert Mueller be allowed to continue his investigation [into Russian collusion in the election]. I’m more focused on what can I do to help elect Democrats.
She concluded the interview, telling The Guardian that she has thought a lot about “intentions” since the death of former First Lady Barbara Bush:
I disagreed with her husband on so much, and with her on so much. But I also never doubted that she believed what she and her husband were fighting for was going to be to the benefit of most Americans. She really believed that what they were doing was the right thing to do.
I used to believe all that mattered was the bottom line of the outcome, like, how many lives were improved, how many people were saved, how many more people got to go to school without debt, how many people had healthcare, how many women got to have paid maternity leave. I still believe that is what matters most. But I also now believe that intentions and tone and decency matter, because I think the wreckage that we’re seeing at this moment is one that will, I hope, be repaired on the policy standpoint when we elect Democrats. But I think we will still then have work to do on repairing the tone in our country, the exposure of the real racist and sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic and antisemitic feeling which is on the rise in our country – a rot that has been exposed.
I think one of the big mistakes was, for so long, we focused on tolerance, which I just think is insufficient. People tolerated casual misogyny, but casual misogyny is maybe the gateway drug. We have freedom of speech, which I do think is hugely important – and yet people thought you couldn’t dispute hateful things, because they’re like – well, it’s freedom of speech. Well, freedom of speech doesn’t mean there is freedom of consequences.
Sure, you should not be in prison because you said something racist. But you also shouldn’t be able to run for president. And yet here we are. [emphasis added]
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