Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said that members of violent riots that have ravaged U.S. cities recently are products of “Democrat Party policies.”
Limbaugh offered the explanation on his radio show on Wednesday. He urged listeners to read the autobiographies of former First Lady Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor for examples of “rage” used to intimidate others and push an agenda.
For about a week, police officers and other law enforcement officers have been targeted by violent mobs and rioters. Numerous police officers have been shot, beaten, and run over by cars as they attempt to contain the riots and restore order. In other instances, heavy-handed tactics used by police and law enforcement have sparked more accusations of police brutality.
Rioters have burned and looted hundreds of businesses, costing millions of dollars in property damage and destroying the livelihoods of business owners already struggling to recover from state-mandated coronavirus lockdowns. In some cases, rioters have mauled business owners for trying to protect their shops.
Limbaugh said that the Black Lives Matter protest movement against police brutality and racism has been “hijacked” by members of the violent far-left group Antifa.
“Antifa is simply a new name for all of these left-wing, Democrat Party aligned and sponsored protest groups going back to the sixties. You had the Weathermen. He had the SDS, Students for Democrat Society. I can’t even think of all the names. Antifa is Occupy Wall Street. It’s Black Lives Matter. They’re all the same people and thinking under different names,” Limbaugh said.
Protests began last week over the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died while in police custody on May 25. Derek Chauvin was fired from the Minneapolis Police Department and is facing murder charges after video shows that he held his knee on Floyd’s neck, pinning him to the ground for nearly nine minutes. Protests over Floyd’s death quickly devolved into violent riots and spread to the United States’ largest cities.
See the relevant portion of Limbaugh’s comments below (transcript via RushLimbaugh.com):
Well, you know — okay. You know what? I — because I don’t want to be unnecessarily argumentative or provocative, I will go ahead and let it stand that Black Lives Matter has been hijacked. Ahem. I’m just gonna tell you. Antifa is simply a new name for all of these left-wing, Democrat Party aligned and sponsored protest groups going back to the sixties. You had the Weathermen. He had the SDS, Students for Democrat Society. I can’t even think of all the names. Antifa is Occupy Wall Street. It’s Black Lives Matter. They’re all the same people and thinking under different names. They have different organizations for the purposes of fundraising.
Membership is actively recruited. But it is the Democrat Party. They are the Democrat Party. What you see on the streets of New York and all these other blue states, this is — what’s the term, the outgrowth? This is what you get. This is the Democrat Party. This is what they sponsor. This is what they inspire. This is what their policies lead to. Democrat Party policies are conceived and created in rage and anger. And it’s not just me saying this. You go back and read the biographies, autobiographies of say — go ahead and read Michelle Obama’s or Sotomayor, the Supreme Court associate justice, and you’ll find that rage, in Sotomayor’s case at Princeton, rage was the order of the day.
Rage was used to intimidate, that they arrived on campus enraged in anger. It was their daily existence. It was the way they got their way. It was the way they intimidated. And they showed up angry. And the rage was due to being mistreated, being discriminated against because of being a minority, female, Hispanic minority, what have you. Much of it’s out of the Alinsky handbook, actually. But it’s all Marxist, folks, and it is all studied. It’s all practically applied. None of this is random. None of this is something happens and these people see it and they get mad and take to the streets. They are waiting. They are programmed. They are waiting for the call to action.
It’s not that George Floyd was murdered; it’s that somebody was at the hands of a cop, and that’s the go signal. They are paid, and they are laying in wait. They’re in homes, wherever they are, wherever they’re holed up, and they’re giving the go signal, and this stuff is then, with the aid of the media, it’s made to look spontaneous. That’s key. It’s made to look like these people were happy and fine and minding their own business until America became America again one day, when in fact this stuff is in the playbook, it is organized, it is programmed, it is paid for, and it’s very mobile.
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