Abby Phillip: Don’t You Think There’s a ‘Substantive Difference’ Between Overthrowing Election and Violent Social Justice Protests?

VAN DER VEEN: “And the way that the prosecution was handled between those two groups are starkly different.”
PHILLIP: “Don’t you think that there is a substantive difference between what happened on January 6th, what they were trying to do and why the federal government has a desire and, in fact, a necessity to prevent that from ever happening again? Don’t you think there’s a substantive difference between those two things? One of them was trying to overturn an election.”
JENNINGS: “No. I’ll answer.”
PHILLIP: “You don’t think there’s a difference between trying to overturn an election and violent social justice protests?”
JENNINGS: “Well, social justice, okay.”
PHILLIP: “I’ll give it to you, Scott. Let’s say that they’re violent. You don’t think there’s a difference between trying to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power and violent riots in the street of any kind, the ones in 1968, the ones in 2020?”
VAN DER VEEN: “What were the objective of those riots?”
JENNINGS: “I think both groups of people were mad about something going on. They wanted to change it. They took matters into their own hands that they should not have done. In both cases, you had people engaging in activities that they should not have engaged in. Now, our culture and our public discourse decided one group of people, social justice is good and these people were bad, but the reality is, they had the same motivations.”
[Cross-talk]
PHILLIP: “Wait a second.”
Allison: “They have the same motivation?”
PHILLIP: “They did not have the same motivation, Scott.”
JENNINGS: “Sure they did. They wanted to change something they didn’t like.”