Culture

Bill Clinton Got Into A Heated Exchange With A Black Lives Matter Protester

There are many Hillary Clinton supporters, as well as many who have critiques of her opinions and policies. Some of these people overlap in the country’s overall political Venn Diagram. Regardless of which side you are on in the race to the White House this fall — Bernie, Hillary, Cruz, Trump, or otherwise — one of the major issues that continues to come up at campaign events all across the country is the “Black Lives Matter” movement. One of the major critiques against Hillary, and by extension her husband, former President Bill Clinton, is that their 1994 crime bill made things worse for the lower class and minorities in America rather than better. At a campaign event for his wife on Thursday, Bill Clinton got into a heated back and forth with a Black Lives Matter protester about the crime bill and its ramifications.

In the exchange, Clinton all but ignores his wife and her campaign for minutes on end and focuses on defending the bill’s intent and details. According to NPR and ABC News , Clinton zeroed in on one protester at one point and exclaimed:

“She [the protester] doesn’t wanna hear any of that, You know what else she doesn’t want to hear? Because of that bill, we have a 25-year low in crime, a 33-year low in murder rate. And because of that and the background check law, we had a 46-year low in the deaths of people by gun violence, and who do you think those lives were? That mattered? Whose lives were saved that mattered?”

Clinton also defended the circumstances of the bill being voted for and put into law, which involved heavy partisan opposition and (apparent) extensive edits to the original draft. He also accused the protester of not seeing the bigger picture and all of the facets of the bill’s impact and purpose. Finally, after the conversation had gone on long enough without once mentioning the current election, Bill finally brought the discussion back around to his wife and her campaign by pivoting directly into curing AIDS in Africa. Still a strategic smooth talker after all these years, that Bill. Anything to get back into the cozy confines of the White House!

(Via NPR)

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