Actor James Cromwell said his warning of "blood in the streets" if President Donald Trump isn't stopped "now" was taken out of context and that he "was not calling for the left to violently attack."
On the red carpet before Sunday's Carney Awards, Cromwell told Variety that “if we don’t stop [Trump] now, then we will have a revolution for real. Then there will be blood in the streets.” He prefaced the statement by describing the state of American politics as "nascent fascism. We always had a turnkey, totalitarian state — all we needed was an excuse, and all the institutions were in place to turn this into pure fascism," the outlet said.
Later during an acceptance speech for an award he received, Cromwell, 78, talked more politics and "revolution."
“We’re living in very curious times, and something is coming up which is desperately important to this country and to this planet, and that is an election, in which hopefully in some measure we are going to take back our democracy,” Cromwell said, according to Variety. “We will have a government that represents us and not the donor class. We will cut through the corruption, [and] we won’t have to do what comes next, which is either a nonviolent revolution or a violent one, because this has got to end.”
After Cromwell's words lit up the internet this week, he hit Twitter with a series of tweets clarifying his "blood in the streets" quote.
Reason's editor at large Nick Gillespie questioned Cromwell's words as reported in Variety, and the actor tweeted back a similar response:
(H/T: Washington Times)
