Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) made a direct appeal Tuesday night to anyone “falling in the grips of hatred and white supremacy.”
“Come back. It’s not too late,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a tweet.
{mosads}“You have neighbors and loved ones waiting, holding space for you,” she added. “And we will love you back.”
Ocasio-Cortez included a video from Monday in the tweet of her denouncing white supremacy and calling President Trump a racist.
“When we allude to people as an invasion, as an infestation, we are directly pulling from the language of white supremacy,” she said in the video. “So I don’t want to hear the question ‘Is this president racist?’ anymore. He is.”
She then offered a plea for those who may be “radicalized in a funnel of vitriol.”
“There is a mother waiting for you, I know it,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I know there’s a teacher waiting for you, saying, ‘What happened to my kid? What happened to my friend?’ And we will always be here and hold space for you to come back. We will love you back. You are not too far gone.”
The speech came after authorities say the suspected gunman who killed more than 20 people at a crowded Walmart in El Paso, Texas, over the weekend allegedly authored a racist, anti-immigrant manifesto before the attack.
The manifesto described fears of a Latino “invasion.”
The El Paso shooting was followed by another deadly mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, early Sunday morning that claimed another 10 lives, including the gunman’s. Race does not appear to be a factor in that shooting, though it is still under investigation.