Al Sharpton Likens Student Protests to Jan. 6 Capitol Riots: ‘They’ve Lost the Message’

Civil rights activist Al Sharpton compared the ongoing pro-Palestine student protests across the United States to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot on Thursday and argued Democrats had lost the moral high ground.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Sharpton argued, “Anytime what you are protesting for becomes secondary to what you are doing, then you’re really not protesting for it, and you, in many ways, dramatize.”

He continued:

What I did in other situations was to bring attention to a cause, not become the cause, and what is troubling me about lot of this is they’ve become the cause. It’s about them. It is not about pushing the cause. They need to ask themselves, if they were sincere, are you really focusing on what’s going on in Gaza, about the children, about the women, about the innocent people? And in Israel, are you focusing on whether or not you are violent or whether or not you can say the most incendiary statement? How are you guiding this? It’s about them and I think they’ve lost the message, and I think that’s because they’ve been infiltrated by people that are not them.

Later on in the show, Sharpton said, “How do the Democrats, how do all of us on that side say January 6 was wrong if you can have the same pictures going on on college campuses? You lose the moral high ground.”

Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski interrupted and sarcastically said, “Good lord, don’t make a parallel to January 6th.”

Brzezinski herself received backlash this week after she also compared the student protests to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.

“I’ll echo the horror that this does look like January 6th,” she said on Tuesday. “What a terrible example for our students.”

Watch above via MSNBC.