Biden Awakens to the Threat of Urban Riots With polls tightening, he and his media allies give up on denial and look for a way to blame Trump. By Gerard Baker
In a moment surely worthy of inclusion in some future edition of “Profiles in Courage,” Democrats seem to have decided it’s time to take a stand against the violence in American cities.
It has been a while coming. It’s true that Joe Biden has issued the occasional gentle bromide about the importance of nonviolent expression, but the louder message from him and Democratic leaders throughout the summer has been vocal support for the protests, even as they rained mayhem on America’s cities.
Following the latest escalations in Kenosha, Wis., and Portland, Ore., in the past week, Mr. Biden has called on all sides to desist—though it’s notable that he has decided that blame lies with President Trump and not the Democratic officials who have connived at the lawlessness in their cities.
The reason for this sudden assertion of the moral law seems not to be the casualty count or the misery into which so many lives have been plunged, but the verdict from opinion polls and focus groups. The lives of police officers and the hopes and dreams of small-business proprietors are a small matter to the ambitious pol, but nothing pierces his conscience more sharply than an unsettling conversation with a pollster.
To be fair, you can understand the sudden alarm of these Democrats. For most of the past three months a complicit media has done its best to tell the public there was nothing to see here. Over the summer most news coverage of the rioting has evolved through various phases: denial, distraction, misdirection and, finally, justification.
The first phase was essentially a refusal even to acknowledge there was anything wrong. As Minneapolis, St. Louis and other cities devolved into chaos in June, we were told it was all a fiction. Perhaps a building or two had spontaneously combusted, but that was it. Maybe it was all that warmth generated by the “summer of love”—Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s term.
This proved hard to sustain even for the most dedicated of editorial airbrushers, so next up was what we might call the Reichstag Fire explanation. Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters were all blameless; it had to be the alt-right and various other categories of white supremacists who were committing the real crimes, defaming those good, decent, peaceful anarchists. Like O.J. Simpson’s search for the real killer, the media’s hunt for the true agents provocateurs turned up next to nothing, so it moved on to the next defense.
It was the police, and especially unidentified paramilitary fascist storm troopers of President Trump’s Praetorian Guard, who were responsible for the violence. This line of argument reached its nadir in Portland in July. You may recall that when federal law-enforcement agents were pulled back later that month after defending against repeated attacks on federal property, news organizations rushed to tell us that the violence was now over. With the federal jackboots gone, Portland would become an idyll of urban tranquility.
Alas, it was not to be. Some of Portland’s worst violence has occurred in the month since the feds left town, as BLM and antifa have intensified their assaults.
Unable to ignore, deny or misdirect any longer, the media turned to acknowledging the violence but explaining that, in fact, it’s all fine because it’s justified. This is a tricky thing to do. Ignorance of the law can help make the case, however, such as when Chris Cuomo of CNN demanded on live television: “Please, show me where it says protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.” Evidently his expensive education didn’t get him to the First Amendment to the Constitution, with all that “right of the people peaceably to assemble” language.
Since the legal case for lawlessness is a tough one, our taxpayer-funded media have had another go. On National Public Radio last week, a reporter listened reverently as writer Vicky Osterweil explained the thinking behind her new book: “In Defense of Looting.” Up next on “All Things Considered”: Premeditated murder—is it really so bad?
It’s easy to mock, but this is the point to which so much of our culture has descended. Ideologically driven reporters and editors are bent on using their positions to signal to friends and colleagues that they are fully enrolled in the modern crusade against the country’s traditional institutions and values, the ones that protesters are intent on tearing down.
This journey through denial to obfuscation and eventually rationalization of evil, is the noise that fills the echo chamber occupied by the media and its Democratic Party friends. And yet the evidence of the past week or so suggests there is still room for hope. A thin, barely audible bat’s squeak of truth can still be heard above the din. Not much, but enough so that ordinary Americans can take on the task of educating their political leaders through focus groups and opinion polls.
Comments are closed.
