After Chastising Trump For Calling BLM Rioters ‘Thugs,’ Democrats Embrace The Term To Smear ICE Agents
If Democrats didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.
Such was the case during a Thursday House committee hearing, in which Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., went out of his way to grossly compare Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arresting illegal aliens to the Gestapo — Nazi Germany’s secret police force. Grossly labeling these federal agents as “thugs,” the Massachusetts rep. claimed that the Trump administration has “tried to sweep aside the fact that this pattern of mass deportation operation is letting dangerous criminals roam free, while it picks off peaceful contributing members of our community.”
“When you compare the old films of the Gestapo grabbing people off the streets of Poland, and you compare them to those nondescript thugs … it does look like a Gestapo operation,” Lynch said.
While smearing anyone who declines to accept their warped worldview and open borders agenda as Nazis isn’t exactly a new tactic among Democrats, Lynch’s embrace of “thugs” is a curious one — especially given the complete meltdown leftists had when President Trump previously used the same term to describe Black Lives Matter rioters.
During the destructive 2020 “summer of love” demonstrations, Trump, on several occasions, characterized violent and aggressive BLM agitators as “thugs.” In one September 2020 tweet referencing these demonstrators, the president wrote, “They are not ‘peaceful protesters’, as Sleepy Joe and the Democrats call them, they are THUGS — And it is all taking place in Democrat run cities. Call me and request Federal HELP. We will solve your problems in a matter of minutes — And thanks to the U.S. Marshalls in Portland!”
Like clockwork, leftists went ballistic.
In late September 2020, NBC News’ Safia Samee Ali penned a column titled, “‘Not by accident’: False ‘thug’ narratives have long been used to discredit civil rights movements.” The so-called “reporter” cited predictably pro-BLM remarks from “experts,” who claimed the “narrative of violence has been used to delegitimize racial protest movements throughout the nation’s civil rights history.”
The Associated Press characterized a late May 2020 tweet by Trump classifying BLM rioters as “thugs” as “incendiary.” In the post, the president warned that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
That post also generated manufactured outrage from Democrats such as future President Joe Biden, who claimed Trump was “calling for violence against American citizens during a moment of pain for so many.” Meanwhile, Biden’s future running mate, Kamala Harris, tweeted, “Trump’s tweets yet again show what racism looks like. This is why we need new leadership. Vote.”
Several Democrat representatives, including terrorist sympathizer and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., called Trump a “white supremacist” and/or a “racist” in response to the post.
Lynch’s Thursday outburst is hardly the first time Democrats have used “thug” to smear members of law enforcement for — wait for it — enforcing the law.
Years before his 2020 Senate campaign, for instance, Georgia Democrat Raphael Warnock effectively called police officers “gangsters and thugs” during a March 2015 sermon.
“So, in Ferguson, police power showing up in a kind of gangster and thug mentality — you know you can wear all kinds of colors and be a thug. You can sometimes wear the colors of the state and behave like a thug,” Warnock said.
The Peach State’s now-junior senator used similar rhetoric later that year, describing members of law enforcement as “bullies.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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