NEW YORK CITY — Hillary Clinton, in an event discussing her faith at a Manhattan Church Thursday night, partly blamed angry voters for her defeat and called for “sacred resistance” against President Trump.
The event, “An Evening with Hillary Clinton to Benefit Camp Olmsted,” was a fundraiser for the children’s camp, during which Clinton was going to discuss her faith with her pastor, Bill Shillady, who in turn was supposed to discuss his new book, Strong for a Moment Like This: The Daily Devotions of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
However, days before the event, the publisher yanked the book and destroyed remaining copies after it found multiple examples of plagiarism.
Each ticket was to include a copy of the book, but ticket holders received refunds for that part of the ticket for the event at Riverside Church. Shillady was not in attendance and was replaced by Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli.
But while Clinton was not promoting Shillady’s book and spent much of the roughly 35-minute discussion talking about her faith and how it affected her post-election demeanor, she did promote her own upcoming campaign post-mortem book, What Happened, and mentioned it multiple times.
The packed crowd was treated to Clinton’s blaming angry voters for why she lost in November.
“I knew there were people who were angry and people who had resentments. I understood that and could see that. But I couldn’t believe – and I’m just not wired to think – that the best way for a leader to bring people together and solve problems is to stoke that anger and to feed that resentment,” she said to wild applause.
She went on to say that while that anger is often justified, the leadership she was offering was not enough for the angry people – perhaps referring to those voters she once called a “basket of deplorables”:
I think the kind of leadership I was offering was not satisfying enough for certain people, and it wasn’t enough for me to say, ‘Look, I understand, and here’s what I want to do to help’ if I didn’t display more anger so that they could feel I got their anger. And I feel that is a legitimate question about what happened in that campaign in 2016 and something I struggled with because I don’t think anger is a strategy. It is certainly justified in the face of what we see oftentimes in our society, but I think leaders, whether it’s in church or in politics, should be looking for ways to find common ground, or even higher ground, and not to create scapegoats and stoke hatred, bigotry, and prejudice, and the like.
Asked what she would recommend to “people of faith” who want to resist Trump, she pointed to the Gaines-Cirelli strategy of engaging in “sacred resistance” — a form of church-based organizing to push back against Trump’s policies.
“For people of faith, that is one way to conceptualize how you can be active on behalf of causes, on behalf of people who need your voice and your support,” Clinton said.
She said her new PAC, Onward Together, is a part of that:
Through Onward Together … [we want to help] find the next generation of concerned citizens, activists, organizers, to give them funding, to give them guidance, because we need a lot of activity at the grassroots level. We need people in every community standing up and speaking out. There is so much to be concerned about. Yes, I am okay, but I am worried. I am worried that we face a continuing deliberate effort to undermine our values and our institutions as Americans, and it is something we cannot stay silent about or be on the sidelines about.
Clinton went on to call on people to “resist, insist, persist, and enlist.”
Clinton’s book What Happened is out September 12, and teasers have hinted at an angry book that blames a wide range of people for her defeat in November.
Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.
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