By Harold Hutchison

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday that rhetoric aimed at conservatives was “playing with fire” in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and was encouraging violence.

“We are playing with fire,” Rubio said. “I’m not saying this guy wouldn’t have done this anyway if he’s truly as deranged as he appears to be. My point is that when you’re encouraging this, when you call your political opponents people have blood on their hands, people that are the same as the Ku Klux Klan, coming to rip your rights from you, you’re going to have some people take some violent, dramatic, and dangerous action.”

Police arrested a man armed with a Glock handgun, a knife and zip ties who said he wanted to kill Kavanaugh over upcoming Supreme Court rulings on guns and abortion early Wednesday morning. He was charged with attempting to kill a federal judge, Fox News reported.

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“You have people out there basically saying these members of the Supreme Court are equivalent to the Ku Klux Klan, to Nazis, some saying burn the place down,” Rubio said. “331 million people. It only takes a couple of them to look at that and say if these people are that evil, the next step is to just take them out, and that is just the Supreme Court justices.”

Since the leak of a draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, protests have taken place outside the home of six conservative Supreme Court justices and multiple crisis pregnancy centers and pro-life groups were attacked.

“I don’t think we have seen the last of this, unfortunately,” Rubio said.

The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment from The Daily Caller News Foundation.

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