Jeffries: GA State Rep. Arrest Evidence of ‘Systemic Racism’

Tuesday on MSNBC’s The Beat, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries said that the arrest of Georgia State Rep. Park Cannon, a Democrat, on Thursday after she knocked on Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s statehouse office door showed “systemic racism” in policing when compared to the treatment of the Capitol Hill rioters and Michigan protesters.

“This is a great country. We have come a long way,” Jeffries said. “We still have a long way to go. But the reality is systemic racism has been in the soil of this country for 401 years, and it manifests itself in different ways.”

Fact checks: America didn’t exist 401 years ago, and no form of systemic racism exists in America today.

“In terms of differential law enforcement treatment, we see how an African American lawmaker is treated on the Capitol grounds of Georgia. And then you actually have an angry mob of whites show up uninvited to the Capitol of Michigan several months ago, armed to the tee, acting in a hostile fashion, and they were given the red carpet treatment.”

Jeffries went on to claim falsely that “this type of differential behavior is embedded in our culture, and that’s why we need to act decisively to crush it.”

His description of the Capitol Hill chaos on January 6 is false (the “mob” was not armed, for example, and the female protester shot and killed by White House security was hardly given the “red carpet treatment”), but facts don’t matter when bashing white people and alleging systemic racism.

The Democrats’ charge that law enforcement treats black protesters differently is demonstrably false. The most blatant example: police by and large allowed Black Lives Matter rioters and looters to rampage unrestrained across American cities all through 2020. But that doesn’t fit Jeffries’ race-mongering narrative.