Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), the quip-ready Texas legislator, is the type of social media user who gets into it with her online antagonists — and Crockett’s detractors are legion on X, where vitriolic armies of MAGA adherents are always on the attack.
Crockett took the bait again this week, responding to a trolling poster who questioned the legitimacy of her position in Congress. An attorney and former public defender, Crockett likes an argument and descends into the comments to fire back at her snipers — even when their criticism is illegitimate on its face.
The Congresswoman, like many Democrats and Republicans, posted an encomium about the late President Jimmy Carter after word spread of the Georgia Democrat’s death this week at age 100, saying that “he & his bride committed their lives to service in the most selfless way.”
Crockett commended Carter by associating his life’s work with the Bible verse Matthew 25:21: “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”
“Well done, my good and faithful servant”… are the first words that came to my mind when hearing of the passing of President Carter. He & his bride committed their lives to service in the most selfless way.
— Jasmine Crockett (@JasmineForUS) December 30, 2024
Let us all honor his legacy by doing our part to serve our country &… pic.twitter.com/tt0w1TbE6O
In response to her Carter praise, an X user with the handle Walter Right laughed at Crockett’s sincerity and asserted that she isn’t “even a real congressman.”
I’m an entire CongressWOman… I agree. This must be what Vivek & Elon were talking about the lack of talent in a certain base… due to a lack of education.
— Jasmine Crockett (@JasmineForUS) December 30, 2024
We had an election 2 years ago & I won… we just had another last month and I won that one too… so one day when you…
The default gender assumption in Right’s phrasing — “congressMAN” — was Crockett’s invitation to engage, and she took the opportunity to rip into the mistake, characterizing it as indicative of a dangerously undereducated segment of the population she implies are largely finding a home in the new GOP.
Conscripting the current “MAGA civil war” heroes Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to support her take, Crockett wrote: “This must be what Vivek & Elon were talking about the lack of talent in a certain base… due to a lack of education.”
(Crockett also noted that she’d won two elections and that her bona fides as an elected Congresswoman weren’t in doubt.)
Reactions — as usual — were split between praise for Crockett’s retort and accusations that the Congresswoman is herself the beneficiary of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) agendas, a default smear commonly leveled on X against accomplished non-white women.
Crockett has consistently positioned herself as a target of such blowback, especially with her tendency to engage. Throughout the latter part of Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election in 2024, she frequently drew the ire of MAGA as she emphatically supported both Joe Biden and, after the president stepped aside, VP Kamala Harris.
Crockett also had a much-publicized war of words with MAGA Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on the House floor, with the attacks on both sides getting personal.
Crockett has commonly skewered MAGA policies, notably its antipathy toward DEI initiatives intended to promote the ideal of workplaces, communities and campuses that better reflect the gender and ethnic composition of America.
Treating MAGA’s resistance to such programs as cynical and disingenuous, Crockett implies that America already has a major, if unacknowledged, DEI program in place — one that favors white men of dubious merit.
[NOTE: MAGA’s chief objection to DEI is that by encouraging agendas focused on a long-term goal of diversity — and as a corrective to longstanding prejudices — DEI devalues merit in the short-term and illegally discriminates against qualified, capable white men.]
Crockett, who continually invites criticism and a fight from the Right, knocked MAGA’s DEI stance this summer — referencing the Trump v Harris battle — and saying that “this election is the best example of why you all are so afraid of diversity, equity, and inclusion — because then you can’t have a simple-minded under-qualified white man somehow end up ascending. Instead you got to pay attention to the qualified Black woman that is on the other side.”
