Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude: Trump's Anti-Immigration Rhetoric Has Led America Into "Cold Civil War"

Princeton professor Eddie Glaude responded to the two mass shootings this weekend in Dayton and El Paso by declaring that the presidents inflammatory rhetoric about illegal immigration had led the United States into a "Cold Civil War."

"What happens when we use language like ‘infestation’?” Glaude said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press." "You set the stage for people who are even more on the extreme to act violently."

"We are in a cold civil war. And there are some people who bear the burden of it," Glaude concluded.

"We have children in El Paso right now who just witnessed their friends and family members shot down because someone thinks there’s a Hispanic invasion of the country, which is almost the exact same language of the president of the United States," he added.

EDDIE GLAUDE, JR.: We weren't there a couple of months ago. So this is important. But it's also important for us to understand the kind of continuity, the line, the connection. What does it mean to have a discourse in which people are dehumanized, where you use a phrase like illegal immigrant, where the phrase, itself, places that person outside of a certain kind of empathy and decency? What happens--

CHUCK TODD: Otherizing.

EDDIE GLAUDE, JR.: Otherizing-- What happens, when we use language, like infestation, children, you used this, Governor, children carrying, perhaps, disease across the border? What happens? You set the stage for people who are even more on the extreme to act violently. We are in a cold civil war. We are in a cold civil war. And there are some people who bear the burden of it, Chuck. There are some of us who bear the burden. You could not blame anyone other than Oswald. My parents had to worry about other folk, because we grew up in Mississippi. You had the luxury not to worry about the context. But we had to live, we had to grow up in it. So here, we have children. I'm sorry to go on and on. We have children in El Paso, right now, right, who just witnessed their family members, their friends, shot down, because somebody thinks there's a Hispanic invasion of the country, which is almost the exact same language of the president of the United States. Governor, if you can't condemn that without making the equivalency move.

PAT MCCRORY: Well, I'm not going to condemn people who use the illegal immigrant term, including me.

EDDIE GLAUDE, JR.: Of course! Why not?

PAT MCCRORY: No, in this free--

EDDIE GLAUDE, JR.: Why not?

PAT MCCRORY: Let me speak. We have a series-- laws on the book against illegal immigration. If we get rid of those laws, why don't we just open up--

EDDIE GLAUDE, JR.: No human being is illegal.