During the first presidential debate, President Trump refused to condemn the Proud Boys, and said most political violence comes from the left.
At one point during the first presidential debate, debate moderator Chris Wallace asked President Trump to condemn white supremacists and right wing militias. This was despite the fact that the President has condemned white supremacists many times on record.
“They need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland,” Wallace asked Trump, likely referencing the self-defence shooting of three antifa members by Kyle Rittenhouse last month.
“I’m willing to do that, but almost everything I see is from the left wing, and not the right wing,” President Trump replied. I want to see peace.” Joe Biden shot in and shouted at Trump, telling him to “say it, do it, say it.”
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“What do you want to call them? Give me a name?” President Trump asked. Chris Wallace and Joe Biden both replied at the same time, with Wallace saying that Trump should condemn “white supremacists” as a whole, but Joe Biden picked out that he should condemn the Proud Boys, founded by Gavin McInnes and currently run by Enrique Tarrio.
“Proud Boys?” President Trump replied. “Stand back and stand by, but I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right wing problem,” refusing to condemn the Proud Boys as a whole.
PROUD BOYS – STAND BY
– President Trump pic.twitter.com/sXdLru2xPq— Harrison Hill Smith (@Harrison_of_TX) September 30, 2020
Earlier in the debate, President Trump slammed racial sensitivity training as “very sick ideas” that “teach people to hate our country”:
“I ended it because it’s racist,” President Trump said. “I ended it because a lot of people were asked to do things that were absolutely insane, that it was a radical revolution that was taking place in our military, in our schools, all over the place”…
If you were a certain person, you had no status in life. It was sort of a reversal. And if you look at the people, we were paying people hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach bad ideas, and frankly very sick ideas. They were teaching people to hate our country, and I’m not going to do that. I’m not allowing that to happen. We have to go back to the core values of this country.
