Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow is back at the team facility and recovering from a torn ACL that cut short his rookie season. He met with reporters on Tuesday and faced questions about several topics, including Wednesday’s attack on the Capitol building by a pro-Trump riot. Burrow referred to it as a “very dark day.”
“Things are just crazy in the country right now,” Burrow told reporters. “I can’t believe that happened. It was a very dark day in the history of the United States.” The former number one overall pick continued and said that he doesn’t know all of the attack’s intricacies other than that a group of people broke into the Capitol.
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Here’s Joe Burrow’s full response when asked about the attack on the U.S. Capitol building last week. pic.twitter.com/aKTdvareB9
— Ben Baby (@Ben_Baby) January 12, 2021
Burrow also told reporters during the virtual session that “it didn’t seem” like there was very much security or “riot busters” like there were over the summer. This comment referenced the protests and riots in response to George Floyd’s murder. “That’s very telling to me,” he said.
Tuesday is not the first time Burrow has commented about the response to Black Lives Matter and the Floyd protests. He previously addressed the situation on social media. “How can you hear the pain Black people are going through and dismiss it as nothing. How can you hear the pain and respond with anything other than ‘I stand with you,’” the quarterback asked in August.
There have been many public figures speaking out since Wednesday’s attack on the Capitol. Actors Kevin Sorbo and Lucy Lawless expressed vastly different opinions about the incident and the people involved. Arnold Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, called for the country to heal as a unified people.
“We need to heal, together, from the drama of what has just happened,” Schwarzenegger said in a nearly eight-minute video. “We need to heal, not as Republicans or as Democrats, but as Americans.” The actor-turned-governor compared the Capitol attack to the Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when Nazi troopers smashed Jewish-owned businesses and killed an estimated 91 Jews.
Trump is a “failed leader,” Schwarzenegger also said during his video. “He will go down in history as the worst President ever. The good thing is he will soon be as irrelevant as an old tweet.” Schwarzenegger then said that those who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election were “spineless” and “complicit” with the pro-Trump rioters who stormed the Capitol.
