Message to right-wing cancel culture: “Shut your mouth”

“ Respect the chair, and shut your mouth.” That’s what Rep. Maxine Waters, the feisty, 82-year-old Democrat from Los Angeles, told Trumpian loudmouth Rep. Jim Jordan when he tried disrupting Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony before her Congressional committee. Now House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and Georgia nutjob Marilyn Taylor-Greene want to shut up Waters, urging Congressional punishment for Waters’s forthright remarks about police violence. As Minneapolis and the rest of America poised for the verdict in the police murder of George Floyd, Waters urged a Brooklyn Center audience to keep up the political pressure for police reform. Incendiary stuff. Right out of the Constitution. McCarthy and his wacky colleague tried comparing Waters’s rhetoric to Trump’s, when he whipped up a crowd to storm the Capitol on January 6. But sorry, Republican cancel czars, that’s apples and oranges.

Look, in these fractious times, there’s a lot of loose speech on the left and mostly the right that should be countered by facts — and in extreme cases by the law. But Maxine Waters urging the community to stay vigilant for justice as police violence continues unabated? That’s perfectly legitimate speech — even as Minneapolis clenches for the verdict.

Rep. Maxine Waters at protest against police brutality in suburban Minneapolis