Former Rep. Joe Walsh is under fire after deleting a tweet saying “This is now war” against President Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter protesters following the killing of Dallas police officers.
“3 Dallas Cops killed, 7 wounded. This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you,” tweeted Walsh, a former tea party congressman from Illinois and now a conservative talk radio host.
New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg spotted the deletion early Friday morning and urged people to retweet it.
“Joe Walsh decided to delete this tweet. So let’s all retweet it,” Rosenberg tweeted. By 8 a.m. ET Friday morning, it had been retweeted more than 20,000 times.
Walsh later explained on Twitter, early Friday morning, that, “I wasn’t calling for violence, against Obama or anyone. Obama’s words & BLM’s deeds have gotten cops killed. Time for us to defend our cops.”
Friday afternoon, Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King also criticized Obama over the shootings, tweeting that the Dallas incident “has roots in first of anti-white/cop events illuminated by Obama…Officer Crowley. There were others.”
King was apparently referring to Cambridge, Massachusetts, police Sgt. James Crowley, who arrested prominent black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2009 following a report of a break-in at Gates’ home. Obama attracted controversy at the time when he said police “acted stupidly” during the episode.
Five Dallas law enforcement officers were shot and killed by snipers at a protest over police violence in the deadliest attack on law enforcement since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The protest was part of a national wave spurred by back-to-back police shooting deaths of two African-American men.