Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said ongoing violence and looting are being perpetrated by “domestic terror groups” of both left-wing and right-wing political orientations. He took to Twitter on Sunday to share his comments.
The death of George Floyd at the hands of a local police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, reveals a broader “social injustice” in America, assessed Rubio.
Rubio said:
The murder of George Floyd is both a tragedy and a travesty, and the anger we’ve seen built around it isn’t just justified, but is also more than just about Mr. Floyd’s murder. It is about the fact that a substantial percentage of the American family believes and feels that their issues receive less attention, and their lives are held with less value because of their race, because of the color of their skin.
This is an ongoing problem that has haunted us for far too long, and it must be addressed. And the anger you saw spill over and these protests across the country, well, that’s where it comes from as much as anything else. Unfortunately, however, while these protesters that are out there to talk about these issues and to point to Mr. Floyd’s murder, these protesters have been largely peaceful. They are not the ones looting and burning and hurting people. But something happens at these protests right around sundown. Suddenly, they start to turn violent, and you start to turn violent because some people show up, and they show up with backpacks, and in them they have batons and incendiary devices. We’ve heard reports of people showing up in trucks to begin to take things out, and that’s when the looting starts. That’s when the violence starts.
Who are these people? Because the real protesters on the ground will tell you they don’t know who they are. They’ve never seen them before. These people are violent domestic extremists and they range from Antifa groups who are radical to the left, to some other groups radical to the right. In fact, groups that I would argue don’t even belong on the political spectrum as we know it, and their goal — while they are ideologically opposed to each other and in fact have gotten into fights against each other at some of these protests — they share a common goal. They share some common objectives. They hate the police. They hate the government. That’s why they target police and government symbols and they want this country to fall apart. They want to trigger some of them openly call for a second civil war.
We must also pay attention to what these groups are doing, being cheered on, by the way, by foreign adversaries online.
Because they pose a threat to our security, but they are also unfairly defaming these protesters who have nothing to do with the violence and the looting that they are encouraging and carrying out, and they are taking away from an important discussion about social injustice which this nation must have once and for all.
Various verified Twitter users rejected Rubio’s claim of right-wing groups being involved in ongoing violence and looting.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.
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