Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said while he’s “not a big fan” of the Black Lives Matter movement, he said stifling free speech shuts down important conversations about the need to reform the criminal justice system.
“Well, I’m not a big fan of, sort of, ‘Black Lives Matter’ because I think it sounds like only black lives matter,” Paul said Friday on the Fox News show “Outnumbered.” “But I have learned a lot about the anger in our cities, and that there’s no justification for violence, but there is anger, and we need to understand it.”
Paul went on to tell to story of Kalief Browder, a 16-year-old who was arrested and imprisoned in Rikers Island for three years without being convicted of a crime, as a turning point for his understanding the tensions between communities of color and the police.
“When I think of his classmates in high school or his family, I think, ‘Gosh, if I was his friend, I’d be really unhappy and angry at the system, at ‘the man.’ I am starting to understand where the anger comes from, and that we need to fix things as far as the law and criminal justice in our system, because it isn’t being meted out fairly,” Paul said.
The Fox panel was discussing a recent move at Wesleyan University, where the student government slashed funding to the student newspaper after it published an op-ed critical of Black Lives Matter.
Watch the full exchange, captured by TPM:
