Sunday on CNN Newsroom, Rep. Ilhan Omar commented on the guilty verdict last week for former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd, calling it a “lynching.”
“[T]here has been, you know, so many people who have been spinning what happened to George Floyd and what the ultimate cause of his death was. We now know that it was murder,” Omar stated. “And you know, we didn’t need to be told by the jury with that guilty verdict. Many of us saw that video and witnessed a lynching take place.”
Fact check: the guilty verdict was clearly the result of jury intimidation and the threat of political violence. In fact, the evidence presented at trial — including video angles of the incident that were different from the one everyone saw — showed that Chauvin’s knee was not on Floyd’s neck as everyone assumed, and the ultimate cause of Floyd’s death was a drug overdose. The notion that this was a lynching is an insult to blacks who actually have been lynched.
“It shouldn’t be that surprising that there are still segments in our society that believe it is justifiable for a black man to be lynched,” she added. “But it’s going to be important for us to confront that reality, to confront our past history, and to find ways to move forward as a society.”
This is pure race-baiting demagoguery. The only people who believe it’s justifiable for anyone to be “lynched” are Democrats like Omar, who believe Chauvin should have been lynched without a trial.