The purpose of a keynote speech at a college graduation ceremony is for an eminence to send those in caps and gowns out into the world with a sense of purpose.
At Tougaloo College, a historically black liberal arts college in Mississippi, Texas Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett gave the hundred-plus graduates a clear-cut message: It was their role to go out and beat white people with folding chairs.
Metaphorically? Perhaps. Probably, in fact. But, unlike her usual racial shenanigans, there was no plausible deniability in what the Democratic Party’s biggest growing single-person problem said during her speech on Sunday.
Mind you, it wasn’t in the pull-quotes local media took from the speech: “You should take time to better understand yourself in this newly acquired alumni status and evaluate where the pull is coming from, that tug on your heart that you feel that bread crumb of the events that are leading you on your path to purpose,” WJTV in Jackson, Mississippi, near where Tougaloo is located, reported.
Similarly, WAPT took other inspiring platitudes from her 20-minute commencements in its report: “Black people have always had to fight for everything that they got,” Crockett said. “There’s very little that has been given to us, and while progress has been made, there’s always a need to make even more progress.”
Yes, and how to make that progress? Crockett made that quite clear.
“I am here to tell you, over and over and over, that you absolutely belong,” she said. “There are people that are going to tell you that there is not a table in which there is a seat for you, but I am here to remind you of Montgomery and those folding chairs.
“Let me tell you that we know how to use a chair, whether we pulling it up or we doing something else with it.”
Should the House censure Crockett for presenting violence as an acceptable option to young people?
You may notice the black academics in the background looking repulsed. That’s because they know what she’s talking about — and while the media knew it, too, they didn’t report on that part.
In 2023, the case of a man named Reggie Ray gained momentary notoriety. Ray, then 42, became involved with a heated argument-turned-fracas with racial undertones about where a boat was docked in Montgomery, Alabama.
According to AL.com, several white individuals got into an altercation with a black co-captain of a riverboat on the Montgomery riverfront. There were questions as to whether or not racial slurs were exchanged — The Daily Beast reported one white attacker used the N-word in the moments leading up to the the melee, for whatever that’s worth — but that was never confirmed.
What was confirmed, however, was that Ray decided to use a folding chair to attack one of the men, repeatedly striking one man without a shirt and another woman who had been knocked down on the dock and clearly was a threat to no one
WARNING: The following video contains violent footage that some readers may find offensive.
In December 2023, Ray was given a 90-day suspended jail sentence, ordered to pay $357 in court costs, and agreed to perform 50 hours of community service as part of a plea deal.
And, by the way: There were a lot of white people charged in this, as they should have been. All charges were misdemeanors, and the longest sentence actually served was 32 days in jail on weekends for defendant Richard Roberts.
All of these people, irrespective of their melanin content, acted odiously and criminally. I can only hope that through counseling, prayer, reflection, and heaven knows what else, they do not engage in behavior like this for the remainder of their time wandering this vale of tears. While a one-minute video clip cannot precisely tell us the state of someone’s character, I’m pretty sure court-ordered penance isn’t going to cure what ails any of these people.
Tougaloo College, meanwhile, is a prestigious institution, which contributes 40 percent of Mississippi’s black physicians and dentists, according to The Princeton Review, and is the curator of the Medgar Evers Museum — located in the house in Jackson where he was slain in his driveway on June 12, 1963, by Klansman Byron De La Beckwith.
Its mostly black graduates are now being told, by a sitting U.S. congresswoman with an abnormally high profile for unusually cretinous statements, that their way in the world — a way built by men like Medgar Evers — is to adopt the mentality of a black man who beat a white woman over the head with a folding chair and beat the rest of the world over the head with theirs.
Mind you, there is zero — zero — plausible deniability here, even by the low standards that Crockett usually practices.
Crockett, for instance, tried to pass off a comment where she called wheelchair-bound GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott “Hot Wheels” by saying she was referring to the fact that he used buses and planes to transport illegal immigrants to blue cities during the border crisis. (It was later found that she liked social media posts that used the term “Hot Wheels” for him long before this policy began, indicating that this clearly was what it sounded like, but the story had already run its course by that point; there’s a reason, and a good one, why Rush Limbaugh used to refer to them as the “drive-by media.”)
Then there was this quote at a mostly black church congregation in which she implied — but didn’t outright say — that since blacks were no longer cotton-picking slaves, we needed illegal immigrants to fill that slavery role:
NEW: Rep. Jasmine Crockett suggests the United States needs illegal immigrants because “we done picking cotton.”
Crockett made the argument that the U.S. needs immigrants for farming while speaking at Grace Baptist Church in Connecticut.
“So I had to go around the country and… pic.twitter.com/DUEZ4PskEg
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 7, 2025
Here, there’s not even the merest veneer of plausible deniability. Not a whit of it. At an HBCU, she referenced a black man in Montgomery, Alabama and folding chairs. There is no other correlation there besides Reggie Ray, a man who beat two white people, one of whom was a woman that was already on the ground, with a folding chair. That is their inspiration. Get yourself a seat at the table by bludgeoning others with it.
It’s not so much Crockett anymore, because she’ll say whatever it takes to get attention, and race plus vile inferences will do that for a person. Rather, this is her entire party. They did the least amount possible when Rep. Ilhan Omar, then freshly minted as a congresswoman, began routinely and without surcease, speaking or tweeting anti-Semitic tropes.
What started as a censure of her, rightly deserved, ended up as a meaningless resolution that condemned President Trump more than the woman who made the statements and included so many kumbaya statements of sympathy for the multitudinous oppressed that all that was missing was Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer doing a karaoke rendition of “Free to Be You and Me” during a joint session of Congress.
Meanwhile, as they rail against Trumpian perfidies that are mostly nonexistent, Democrats continue to serially refuse to punish their own — and, as a result, a Jasmine Crockett-esque self-caricature egging on violence is the natural outgrowth of this mentality. Don’t expect a single peep out of her cowed party, either.
However, those faces on the distinguished academics behind Crockett on the dais as she made her execrable remarks ought to say it all. You almost have to watch it multiple times to realize whether she actually said what she really just said. This is beyond the pale even for a woman becoming the most vile racist in American politics since David Duke — and if it hasn’t earned her her first censure, the House is beyond broken.
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