Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) blamed the civil unrest across the U.S. in 2020 on former President Joe Biden, who was a private citizen at the time.
After a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd on camera in May 2020, mass demonstrations broke out across the country. Some of those protests, which occurred in the last year of the first Trump administration, turned violent.
House Republicans held a press conference on Monday, where several members spoke on the eve of the first anniversary of the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump. The motive of his shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, a registered Republican, remains murky. In the lead-up to the shooting, he conducted internet searches of where Trump, Biden, and then-Attorney General Merrick Garland were scheduled to make public appearances.
During Monday’s presser, Collins repeated a Republican talking point in which a mysterious “they” tried to assassinate Trump. Afterward, he blamed the 2020 unrest on Biden:
It has been one year since they tried to kill our president. And I want to take just a quick moment to focus on what I call consequences and make two quick points. You know, the culture of lawlessness and violence, this didn’t just start last year. This started under the Obama administration when they decided to illegally investigate conservative groups, when they were out there demonizing Republicans, who just simply wanted to follow the Constitution and make our country better.Then you
fast-forward to the Biden administration, who, they put this on steroids and actually allowed the public to take part in this game. Example? Summer of love, where rioters were out there burning police stations, assaulting officers, taking over our cities, where they were advocating to defund the men and women in blue who protect us. And they didn’t just encourage it, y’all. They promoted it. They even paid for their bail.
Collins went on to say that the country places “no value to the sanctity of life anymore,” and he blamed “socialist woke politicians” for the state of the nation.
Watch above via C-SPAN.