Republican Rep.-elect Dan Crenshaw said Monday that he had appeared on “Saturday Night Live” on Saturday in order to “start on a path … out of that conflict that we’re always seeing” in political discourse.
Crenshaw appeared on the show to accept an apology from comedian Pete Davidson, who had made fun of Crenshaw’s missing eye — lost on his third tour in Afghanistan, where he served as a Navy SEAL — on the show earlier this month, prompting national backlash.
“We could have lashed out, right. We could have given in to the outrage culture as we’ve all come to know it. But it’s not who I am,” Crenshaw told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on “Full Circle,” which airs on Facebook Live.
“Like I say, I’ve been shot at, I’ve been blown up. It didn’t outrage me. I don’t see why I would start getting outraged now.”
The Texas Republican said that while he had been justified in voicing his disagreement with Davidson, his main goal was to overcome the rhetoric.
“Let’s allow ourselves to then move past it,” he told Cooper. “And that’s what we wanted to do — try and be part of the solution, not be part of the problem in this back and forth that we constantly see … whether it’s comedic discourse, political discourse.”
“Unfortunately, those two things have become intertwined, maybe too much,” he added. “But let’s start on a path out of that … conflict that we’re always seeing.”
In addition to cracking some of his own jokes on the show, Crenshaw urged Americans to learn from Davidson and him burying the hatchet.
“There’s a lot of lessons to learn here,” he told viewers Saturday night. “Not just that the left and right can still agree on some things. But also, this: Americans can forgive one another.”
