CNN’s Van Jones: ‘We Need a National Moratorium on These Nighttime Marches’

Wednesday on CNN’s “New Day,” network political analyst Van Jones called for a “national moratorium” of the nighttime Black Lives Matter protests and riots that have been taking place across the country in the name of social justice.

Jones reasoned that the ongoing discussion about the violence and unrest is playing to President Donald Trump’s “advantage” in the upcoming presidential election by distracting Americans from talking about the “Trump economy and the mishandling of the virus.”

“This campaign is going well for Donald Trump because we’re not talking about the economic devastation that people are experiencing or the virus really,” Jones explained. “I think it’s time for us to recognize we are in a very perilous situation if you want to see a change in November. We have two social movements — both have edges of violence to them, one on the left, one on the right. I think it’s baked in that Donald Trump is not going to challenge very strongly the police violence or the vigilante violence, and people, frankly, are comfortable with that. The question is, how are Democrats and progressives going to deal with the violence in our own movement?”

“I think that Joe Biden can reach, can actually begin to move his own movement in a better direction, we need a national moratorium on these nighttime marches,” he added. “That would separate the responsible, productive demonstrations that have united the whole world from some of these other demonstrations that are just not as useful. There are things that Joe Biden and other progressives can do. They can begin to push down on the violence in our movement and then turn it back toward the people who are actually suffering. … There have been a couple of hundred businesses that have been hurt by arsonists. There have been thousands that have been destroyed by mishandling this virus. We’ve got to get off of this conversation around unrest and back to the conversation around that literally millions of people who are suffering from the Trump economy and the mishandling of the virus.”

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