Thursday on CNN’s “New Day,” network political commentator Van Jones reacted to the previous day’s storming of Capitol Hill by President Donald Trump’s supporters.
Jones highlighted the “double standard” from law enforcement over how it handled black people at Black Lives Matter protests last summer as opposed to the “white traitors” who breached the Capitol Building. According to Jones, black people and progressives “go to jail” for protesting and civil disobedience, whereas white people were just escorted out of the building.
“Every young person I have spoken to, especially young people of color, got the message loud and clear that they can be beaten, arrested and worse for jaywalking, for just being an African-American in a store, and yet you can have a band of white traitors go and tear up the Capitol Building and walk out and were escorted out,” Jones lamented. “They basically were escorted in and escorted out. … They should all be in jail right now. If I right now or anybody that I know were to go and just literally push their way past a Capitol guard today or a week ago, we would be in jail.”
“If you’re black, if you’re a progressive, the price of protesting, and I don’t mean a riot. I just mean civil disobedience. Just sitting down on the steps and they tell you to get up and you don’t get up, the price of that is you go to jail for a night. Everybody knows that in D.C.,” he added. “And so, to watch a completely lawless band of traitors and insurrectionists go and tear up the Capitol, bring guns to the Capitol, put their feet up on people’s stuff, take pictures of emails, walk out possibly with all kind — we don’t know what they walked out with. We don’t know if they took sensitive documents. We have no idea. They were walking past cops. Nobody knew if they had guns in their pockets, if they had sensitive information, and now those people are eating pancakes someplace. It is an unbelievable statement about race in this country.”
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