Former President Barack Obama took to Twitter on Friday to echo Joe Biden in claiming that the police response to the Capitol riots would have been harsher had the protesters been with Black Lives Matter.
Obama posted three articles to his page that each looked at why both law enforcement and federal authorities were not prepared for the Capitol to be raided for the first time in over two hundred years.
FiveThirtyEight [1] published a study that concluded that between May and November of last year, authorities were “more than twice as likely to attempt to break up” a left-leaning protest than a right-leaning protest. The study was carried out by the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project [2], and it found that when law enforcement did choose to take action, they were more likely to use force “34 percent of the time with right-wing protests compared with 51 percent with left-wing protests.”
For those who are wondering why so much attention has been focused on the response of the Capitol Police to the Trump-inspired riots, here’s a data-driven article that provides some useful frame of reference. https://t.co/MAdlWGRd23 [3]
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) January 8, 2021 [4]
This came after Biden claimed that if the protesters storming the Capitol had been with Black Lives Matter, law enforcement would have responded differently.
“No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol. We all know that’s true, and it is unacceptable,” Biden said on Thursday, according to Fox News [5]. “Totally unacceptable.”
Freshmen Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), a member of the radically liberal “Squad,” agreed with this sentiment.
“We would have been shot, had we tried to do all of that,” she said Wednesday night.
Bush got her start as a Black Lives Matter activist protesting in Ferguson after the police-related death of Michael Brown Jr.
Obama also posted an article published by The New Yorker [6] that claimed that Capitol police did not take the Trump supporting rioters seriously, saying that the protesters were “familiar enough to be dismissed as clowns.”
“The invaders may be full of contempt for a system that they think doesn’t represent them, but on Wednesday they managed to prove that it does,” read the article written by Masha Gessen.
Kamala Harris feels similarly, saying, “We have witnessed two systems of justice.”
“One that let extremists storm the U.S. Capitol yesterday, and another that released tear gas on peaceful protestors last summer,” she continued.
We have witnessed two systems of justice: one that let extremists storm the U.S. Capitol yesterday, and another that released tear gas on peaceful protestors last summer. It’s simply unacceptable.
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) January 7, 2021 [7]
Obama posted a CNN [8] article that echoed Harris’ frustration, and highlighted the strategic differences law enforcement allegedly took between Wednesday and last summer.
This piece was written by James Samson on January 9, 2021. It originally appeared in LifeZette [9] and is used by permission.
Read more at LifeZette:
GOP Rep. Kat Cammack Announces Plans To Fly Israeli Flag Next To Tlaib’s Office [10]
The Possibility Of A Patriot Party [11]
Chaos On Capitol Hill [12]