I condemn what happened at the Capitol Wednesday, but I wonder where all this outrage was among the chattering classes when the orgy of rioting, looting, arson and murder was gripping the nation last summer.
As Chris “Fredo” Cuomo of CNN put it during one of those undocumented shopping sprees, “Please, show me where it says protests have to be polite and peaceful.”
Let’s start with Gov. Charlie Baker. Never stand between Baker and a television camera (or the internet) when there’s an opportunity to virtue-signal.
Here was his press release Wednesday afternoon:
“I join with Americans from every corner of the country to condemn the violence unfolding at the Capitol, and President Trump and his supporters must do the same immediately.”
Now let’s go back to the riots of late May — remember those lawless mobs rampaging through downtown Boston on that Sunday night on live TV.
The thugs foraged from Newbury Street all the way to Downtown Crossing, looting jewelry and clothing stores, vandalizing buildings, and, in at least one case, shooting at Boston cops from a moving vehicle on Tremont Street across from the Common.
Millions of dollars in damages, at least 55 arrests.
Here was Charlie Parker’s verbatim play-by-play on the worst mass violence in Boston since busing:
“The vast majority, and I mean the vast majority of the people who were part of these protests are there to make a point and to make it peacefully. That is so obvious I’m amazed that anyone could say anything other than that, at least in Massachusetts.”
In other words, who are you gonna believe, Charlie Baker or your lyin’ eyes?
After that nonsense Charlie did mumble a few words about “bad actors,” but he quickly returned to his original theme: “These demonstrators … go there peacefully to engage in a peaceful demonstration.”
To paraphrase George Orwell, some riots are more peaceful than others.
During the “summer of love,” as the mayor of Seattle described the rampant crime and lawlessness, Kamala Harris’ staffers sent hundreds of dollars to the “bail project” in Minneapolis to set the violent criminals free.
Will the Social Justice Warriors now be setting up a bail fund for the arrested Trump supporters?
The media hacks denouncing the Trump protesters even feel free to engage in snobbish class attacks on the deplorables. This was Anderson Cooper of CNN on the Trump crowd in DC:
“They’re gonna go back you know to the Olive Garden and to the Holiday Inn that they’re staying at and the Garden Marriott and they’re gonna have some drinks.”
I guess Vanderbilts don’t appreciate unlimited breadsticks and soup. How gauche! Garcon, Mr. Cooper would like another brandy Alexander.
Last summer, these same people were very, very disturbed about police shooting unarmed civilians. The U.S. death toll for 2020, incidentally, was 41 — the same number of Americans as were killed by lightning.
Now a 14-year female Navy veteran is dead, a Trump supporter, apparently shot by the Capitol Police. I hear no chants of “Defund the Police!”
Now the police are the good guys again.
Again, it was wrong for anyone, whoever they were (and at least some of them don’t look much like standard Trump supporters) to breach the Capitol security and run amok.
But of the hundreds of thousands who went to D.C., weren’t the “vast majority,” to coin a phrase, engaged in “peaceful protest,” to coin another one?
Instead, it’s being compared to the Civil War, the burning of Washington by the British in 1814, the darkest day in American history, etc. It’s generated even more apocalyptic headlines than the alt-left media’s previous assessment of the worst day in American history — Trump’s conference call with the Georgia secretary of state last weekend.
It’s not like this is the only recent political rioting — 128 hysterical trust-funders were arrested in the takeover of a Senate office building during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings in 2018. Those snowflakes were lionized on social media for speaking truth to power, or something.
Ten years ago, union thugs trashed the State Capitol in Madison, Wis. If there were any headlines back then saying “Union Mobs Riot, Loot,” I must have missed them. Vandalizing the white marble in the halls was not described, endlessly, as an “insurrection.”
Here is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s take on protests last month:
“The thing that critics of activists don’t get is that they tried playing the ‘polite language’ policy game and all it did was make them easier to ignore. It wasn’t until they made folks uncomfortable that there was traction to do ANYTHING … The whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable … To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable … that’s the point.”
To repeat, some riots are more equal than others.
As my friend Kurt Schlichter put it in a tweet Wednesday:
“I’d suggest that the people who committed crimes today at the Capitol should be treated exactly like the BLM/Antifa rioters, except that won’t work because I think the criminals today should be prosecuted and punished.”