An angry and defiant Dan Patrick, Republican Lt. Governor of Texas, took to the Fox airwaves to blast the Black Lives Matter movement, President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch in the wake of the police shootings that took place in Dallas on Thursday night.
“I was a little disappointed with Loretta Lynch’s comments blending in too many issues. Can we talk about five people who were killed last night and just focus on their lives and their families?” said Patrick. “We need a president who will stand up and focus on the police the law enforcement, the men and women, black white brown and Asian officers all together who are protecting us. Let’s focus on them.”
In a verbal assault on the protesters, at marches and online, he blamed critics of the police for the shooting that left five law enforcement officers dead.
“I do blame people on social media with their hatred of police…I do blame former Black Lives Matter protests, last night’s was peaceful but others have not been…this has to stop Harris, these are real people.”
His voice rising in anger and his hands jabbing the air, Patrick continued:
“All of these officers lost their lives protecting people who were protesting against them. We’ve always had bad people, but the general public respected the police. Too many in the general public who aren’t criminals, but who have a big mouth, are creating situations like what we saw last night.”
He then leveled the most incredulous charge against the protesters.
“All those protesters last night, they ran the other way expecting the men and women in blue to turn around and protect them. What hypocrites!”
Patrick acknowledged that the protesters gathered Thursday night, did so peacefully. He seemed to know that he was dangerously close to advocating for people to not protest, which is a constitutional right.
“And I understand the First Amendment, I understand freedom of speech, and I defend it,” Patrick said. “It is in our Constitution, it is in our soul, but you can’t go out on social media and mainstream media and everywhere else and say that the police are racist, that the police are hateful, the police are killers.”
He seemed to willfully misunderstand the whole purpose of Black Lives Matter and the criticism of the police in general. People are not protesting police, they are protesting police brutality. They are protesting the lack of accountability for rogue officers. But he doesn’t want to understand that.
Featured image by Tina Leggio, Flickr, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
