Rush Limbaugh Compares Capitol Hill Riot to American Revolution
On his Thursday radio program, right-wing political personality Rush Limbaugh compared the insurrectionists who raided the U.S. Capitol to overturn the election with heroes in the American Revolution.
"There's a lot of people calling for the end of violence," Limbaugh said. "There's a lot of conservatives, social media, who say that any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable. Regardless of the circumstances. I'm glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual tea party guys, the men at Lexington and Concord didn't feel that way."
In his statement, Limbaugh compared Wednesday's insurrectionists who broke into the U.S. Capitol and ransacked senators' offices to overturn the election in favor of President Donald Trump with the people who helped start the American Revolutionary War and participated in the first military battle against British forces at Lexington and Concord.
Limbaugh served as an apologist for the rioters, calling them "Americans who have gotten tired of being ignored and lied about and smeared as racists by these very Democrats in the media and the popular culture."
He also called the mob, "Americans who have gotten fed up with having the election stolen from them by the Democrats," even though nearly 60 lawsuits claiming that Democrats stole the election, filed by the Trump campaign and other Republican officials, have been thrown out or withdrawn from courts for lack of evidence.
Limbaugh then repeated a right-wing claim that the rioters were "undoubtedly ... some Antifa Democrat-sponsored instigators," a claim repeated by Republican Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican Alabama Representative Mo Brooks and pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood which has also spread on social media.
Fact-checkers have debunked the claim that left-wing Antifa instigators raided the capital.
During his show, Limbaugh also expressed frustration with the arrests of 52 insurrectionists, falsely claiming that no members of the Black Lives Matter movement had been arrested during the racial justice uprisings of 2020.
Nearly 130 people were arrested in protests following the announcement of the verdict of the Breonna Taylor shooting case, more than double the 52 arrests made in the wake of violent riots at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.
Limbaugh compared Wednesday's protests to previous anti-Trump protests that had happened at the capitol, asking why one was "being called the end of the world" and "the worst crime against democracy in our nation's history," while the other wasn't.
Newsweek contacted The Rush Limbaugh Show for comment.
