Florida state Democratic lawmaker Angie Nixon blamed Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ "anti-woke" policies for motivating the Jacksonville shooting.
The Jacksonville sheriff’s office announced on Sunday that Ryan Christopher Palmeter, 21 White male, killed two Black men and one Black woman at a Dollar General store in a predominately Black neighborhood, before killing himself at the scene.
"Plainly put, the shooting was racially motivated, and he hated Black people," Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said during a news conference over the weekend.
After showing clips of DeSantis declaring that "Florida, the state, and its people condemn the horrific racially-motivated murders, perpetrated by a deranged scumbag," MSNBC anchor Lindsey Reiser asked Nixon for her thoughts about his comments
FLORIDA SHERIFF REVEALS IDENTITY OF SUSPECT IN 'RACIALLY MOTIVATED' JACKSONVILLE SHOOTING
Nixon criticized DeSantis for making "hollow" statements, and suggested his rhetoric and policy were partially to blame for the shooting.
"This is a governor who has done nothing but fan these types of happenings throughout our state. Look, at the end of the day, the governor has blood on his hands," she said. "He has had an all-out attack, on the Black community with his anti-woke policies, which we know very well was nothing more than a dog-whistle to get folks up and riled up in the way in which it just happened on yesterday."
She continued, "Myself and other representatives, particularly Black representatives, throughout the past few legislative sessions, we have repeatedly told him what his rhetoric was going to do, and that is exactly what transpired on yesterday."
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She blamed DeSantis as "one of the causes to this" and appeared to claim a past warning of his not to "’monkey this up’" was intended as a racially charged dog whistle that "only leads to things like this."
DeSantis made a statement during the 2018 gubernatorial debate that his critics claimed was racially tinged.
"The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state," DeSantis said at the time.
Democrats accused him of coded racial rhetoric because the Democratic nominee at the time was Andrew Gillum, who is Black.
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