Over the weekend, Graham Platner held a town hall in Maine where he advocated for more political violence against Republicans and called ICE agents “masked armed thugs.”
“Saturday was the anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination and Platner chose to mark the occasion by telling his supporters to choose violence against those they disagree with,” said NRSC Regional Press Secretary Samantha Cantrell. “Unfortunately it’s not Platner’s first time calling for violence as a means of achieving political change, and considering how his campaign is going, it probably won’t be the last.”
Platner had previously been criticized for touting violence as a means of political change in since-deleted Reddit posts, but now he’s moving that rhetoric into his town halls. As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, Platner told the crowd to harass members of Congress who oppose Medicare for All:
“In the future, when we’re trying to vote on something like Medicare for All, if there are other members of the Maine delegation that don’t want to come along, we need to be able to impose costs,” he said during a Saturday town hall in the southern Maine town of Windham. “We need to be able to turn people out to flood their offices. Frankly, I want people to follow them around and don’t let them have a public dinner without getting yelled at. Because that’s power. That’s real power.”
Platner also went on to call for the abolishment of ICE and to drag agents before Congress. As reported by the Washington Free Beacon:
“People need to go to prison. We need to have public hearings, public, frankly, probably trials down the road, because the American people deserve to know what the hell is going on right now, and how the people doing it can justify it to themselves,” Platner said Saturday during a town hall in the southern Maine town of Windham. “If I have my way, even if we can’t get anything to happen in the Justice Department immediately, I want to drag every single ICE agent that’s been wearing a mask in front of a Senate subcommittee, make them take their mask off, and explain to the American people what the hell they’ve been up to.”
Platner went on to call ICE agents “masked armed thugs” and accused them of “kidnapping people off the streets of the United States because of their skin color.”
“Organizations that are used to kidnap Americans are not organizations that should exist in the future,” he said. “Down the road, hopefully once we’ve rebuilt the power, there needs to be accountability for what’s happening right now.”
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