Former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions learned the hard way this past week how the stench of the Trump administration follows one long after they left it. Delivering a talk at Amherst College in Massachusetts that had been organized by campus Republicans, he faced a walkout protest of hundreds of students that unfolded shortly into his remarks and left the venue at which he was speaking almost completely empty. According to a student speaking to CBS News, the protest had been planned and “widely publicized” ahead of the event. It’s like Republicans were just asking for that to happen considering they brought the longtime racist to the college in the first place. What are concerned people supposed to do when someone responsible for ostracizing them on a formal national level shows up?
Watch what happened:
Students walked out of a talk by former AG Jeff Sessions, leaving nearly half the venue empty.
— STAY WOKE! (@InactionNever) April 25, 2019
Sessions didn’t seem too fazed by the demonstrators, apparently accepting that it’s his lot in life to face protest although there’s certainly little indication that his situation has prompted any sort of self-reflection. CBS reports that members of the campus activism group known as the Direct-Action Coordinating Committee participated in chanted protest against Sessions, asserting:
‘No justice, no peace, no racist police!’
Some such chants delivered outside the building were audible inside.
The situation is similar to one that unfolded recently at the University of Minnesota, where student protesters also gathered inside and outside of a venue where Sessions was slated to talk shortly before the release of a redacted version of the final report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. There were likely more protesters than actual speech attendees interested in what the former Senator had to say, considering a local news report says only about 75 people showed up inside that auditorium, which could have held up to 300. Inside that same place, there were almost two dozen local police officers, according to that same report, who “escorted all protesters out.” One shouted at Sessions at one point:
‘People die at the border because of your policies. How do you sleep at night?’
Unsurprisingly, in line with past conservatives who faced such steep protests, Sessions took the opportunity to stump for “free speech,” besides offering attempts at rebuttals of the protesters’ arguments. As he put his take:
‘This country cannot accept everybody in the world.’
To suggest that line is utterly disconnected from the reality of the situation and does nothing to tangibly address issues people actually have would be an understatement. Concerned interests don’t want the United States to “accept everybody in the world.” They want the country to, for starters, not take into custody those who do arrive at the border seeking refuge and leave them languishing for indefinite periods of time and sometimes separate families for no reason other than “sending a message.”
In Massachusetts, CBS reports that Sessions pushed for the acceptance of the final results from the Mueller probe, which concluded without any criminal charges for President Donald Trump — although without the conclusion that he had not broken the law. While House Democrats are continuing wide-ranging investigations of the president’s team, Sessions thinks it’s time to “get on with the business of America” — although he’s not in much of a position to speak with authority considering he fell out with Trump, who kicked him out of the Justice Department.
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