At the end of last week, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., released a video statement discussing the events this week at the U.S. Capitol and how the nation moves forward.
A transcript from Rubio’s office is below:
“The events that we saw this week should sicken every single one of us. The mob violence like the kind you see in third world countries happened, not just in America, but in your Capitol building. I don’t care what hat they wear or what banner they’re carrying, riots should be rejected by everyone every single time.
“Now, are the Left hypocrites? Absolutely. I remember, what they now are calling insurrection, they were justifying just this summer. They were called it the ‘language of the unheard’ when rioters were burning cities. Is the mainstream media — especially places like CNN and MSNBC — outrageously biased? Of course. 100 percent. I remember one of the CNN hosts last summer on the air saying something like ‘tell me where it says protests need to be polite and peaceful.’
“And by the way, this kind of blatant bias and double standard is one of the reasons that so many Americans have sought political shelter in divisive political movements and in conspiracy theories that offer the promise of fighting back against it.
“But here is what I want you to hear right now: we can’t allow our anger about all that stuff to turn ourselves into them.
“Remember what President Nixon said at the White House as he was leaving, after his downfall, one of his lessons. He said, ‘Others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.’ We can’t destroy ourselves.
“Now, how do we explain what we said? How could this happen here in America?
“It kind of begins with millions of Americans who voted for President Trump. They saw the non-stop bias and double standard in the legacy media, they saw how social media companies covered up stories negative to Joe Biden, they saw how state officials mutilated election integrity laws to help the Democrats. And the result is that you had millions of people who are convinced that the election wasn’t fair and the outcome wasn’t legitimate. Millions of people. And they wanted something done about it.
“And of those millions of people, tens of thousands of them came to Washington, D.C. this week demanding that action be taken, that we do something. Ninety-nine percent of the people who came here had nothing to do with that mob. Nothing. But one percent of tens of thousands of people is a lot of people. It’s enough to inflict damage on buildings, and it’s enough to do even more damage to our country.
“Now that we’re looking at what’s going on and learning more about it, there are growing signs that many of those in that mob were believers in a ridiculous conspiracy theory, and others were lied to — lied to by politicians who were telling them that the vice president had the power to change the election results. And the result is that now, four people have died, police officers were seriously injured, and our country was embarrassed before the entire world.
“For those of us on the center right of American politics, now is the time that calls for honest reflection.
“It wasn’t long ago that we controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House. And, four years later, we’ve lost all three. We need to reflect on why this has happened, because this country needs a viable, attractive alternative to the agenda of the radical left.
“We shouldn’t, and we can’t, go back to the party of 2012 — a party that was frankly out of touch with the unheard voices of millions of working Americans.
“We must continue to fight for working Americans, not for corporations.
“We welcome legal immigrants, but we have to enforce our laws.
“We have to take the threat of China seriously.
“We have to investigate what went wrong in the last election and fix our elections laws, so people can have faith and confidence in them.
“We must continue to call out the media bias instead of being bullied by it. And we must oppose political correctness, social media censorship, identity politics, and this cult of wokeness.
“And we can do all these things without indulging the darkest instincts or inciting the most destructive impulses — and without the rhetoric or behavior that keep the millions of Americans who agree with us from joining us in this fight.”
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