Blackburn rips BLM’s ‘trained Marxists’ as threat to US – day after calling on Omar to resign

U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., communicated in no uncertain terms on Wednesday regarding “trained Marxists” threatening America.
“The founders of the political arm of the Black Lives Matter organization are self-proclaimed ‘trained Marxists,’” Blackburn wrote on Twitter.
“We are witnessing a movement to wipe out our history, destroy our families and burn our country to the ground.”
Blackburn was referring to a recently resurfaced 2015 video clip in which Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors referred to her BLM colleagues as “trained Marxists” – referring to Karl Marx, the 19th century author of “The Communist Manifesto.”
“We are trained Marxists,” Cullors says in the clip. “We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many Black folk.”
Cullors, 36, was a protégé of Eric Mann, a former member of the Weather Underground terror organization, the New York Post reported.
Blackburn’s warning about BLM came one day after she tore into controversial U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. – demanding that the congresswoman step down from office.
“Ilhan Omar took an oath to defend and protect the Constitution, not shred it,” Blackburn wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “Omar and her Marxist comrades are a threat to our Democracy. Omar should resign.”
Blackburn was responding to remarks Omar had made at a news conference Tuesday in Minneapolis, in which Omar called on her supporters to go beyond the left’s “defund the police” effort and instead seek to “tear down the systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in health care, in employment, [and] in the air we breathe.”

U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.

“As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality,” Omar continued. “So we cannot stop at [the] criminal justice system. We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.”
In a separate Twitter message Tuesday, Blackburn took aim at two of Omar’s “Squad” allies – U.S. Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.
“Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley want to pay states to allow convicted criminals to roam our streets and let MS-13 gangs take over our cities,” Blackburn wrote.
In that tweet, Blackburn was referring to a Fox News report about a bill that Tlaib and Pressley unveiled Tuesday, calling for the defunding of local police departments and the establishment of a reparations program for African-Americans and people harmed by police misconduct or errors in the criminal justice system.
“We must invest in a new vision of public safety,” Tlaib wrote on Twitter.
Their proposal would abolish some surveillance tactics used by law enforcement and also offer cash incentives to states that shut down detention facilities and prisons and eliminate gang databases.
The bill was considered unlikely to advance in the House because many Democrats do not support defunding police departments.