Wednesday on MSNBC, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) said Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R-TX) response to the coronavirus pandemic were part of the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers “death cult mentality.”
Host Joy Reid said, “I’m going to read it to you. This is Betsy DeVos about accept accepting the risk to going back to schools in a call to governors, ‘Risk is involved in everything we do from riding a bike to riding a rocket into space and everything in-between.’ What do you make of the secretary of education likening little kids like yours, that they should take the same kind of risk that astronauts take, who risk death to go to the moon?”
O’Rourke said, “These are the same people who want us to accept that more people, including more children, will die of gun violence this year in America than in any other developed country bar none. It’s just the price of quote-unquote freedom in this country. And in some ways, they’ve almost won that fight. If you look at the gun laws that are on the books and the gun laws that should be on the books and aren’t in this country, in some ways, we have tacitly accepted this historic, tragic level of gun violence in America. That continues to rise. We saw that just over the weekend in many American cities. It’s that same kind of death cult mentality that asks us to accept one quarter, 25% of the world’s COVID cases, one quarter, 25% of the world’s COVID deaths, though we represent only 4% of the globe’s population. That is absolutely unacceptable, and everything you just read from her is absolutely ridiculous and on its face, stupid.”
He continued, “We should be outraged and angered and demanding more from our leaders. That’s why I took the step of asking Governor Abbott to resign. He’s clearly not up to this moment and does not have the well-being and the safety of our families and our kids. 2900 of our fellow Texans are now dead because of his incompetence. This was preventable, but when he denied the science, the truth, the facts, the CDC guidelines that you’ve been pointing to, it was totally predictable. Yet he has still failed to reverse course and begin to shut some parts of the state down to save lives. Betsy DeVos is in that same vein.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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