The New York Times reported over the weekend that major cities are reacting to surging violence by reinvesting in their depleted police departments. That’s great news, but let’s not forget how we got here and who’s to blame for the horrific crime waves we’re experiencing to begin with.
All of the rioting, the looting, the vandalism, and, most devastating, the 30 percent nationwide increase in homicides of 2020, were the direct result of Democrats and leftists in the media instigating, justifying, and excusing violent crime in the wake of the death of George Floyd. This, as Mollie Hemingway reminds us in her new book, “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” was solely done for the purpose of winning the most disgusting political war they’ve ever waged: the fight to deny Donald Trump a second term.
“Rigged” is an expansive look at the overt and covert coordination among the Democrat Party, the corrupted national media, behemoth internet companies, and other major institutions to tip 2020 in their favor, even as it meant lying to and manipulating voters, and, yes, violence.
“Despite its radical extremism, Black Lives Matter received a tremendous amount of support from corporations and other elite groups,” writes Hemingway. “Its website even proclaimed the movement wanted to ‘disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure’ and sought to ‘defund the police.’”
As far as policing goes, that’s exactly what happened. Across the country, governments at the local level began slashing budgets for law enforcement, Democrat mayors ordered police to dramatically reduce arrests related to looting and vandalism, and leftist prosecutors declined to pursue major offenses. All of this was done with the nodding approval of CNN, MSNBC, the major networks, and national papers.
“The scenes that came out of the riots around the country the first weekend in June were apocalyptic, although the media did their best to downplay the carnage,” writes Hemingway. “In one memorable image, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi stood in front of a massive burning building in Minneapolis one night and said, ‘I want to be clear on how I characterize this. This is mostly a protest. It is not, generally speaking, unruly.’ At a protest a couple of months later, CNN was mocked for describing a Kenosha riot as a ‘fiery but mostly peaceful protest’ as fires and chaos raged in the background.”
The carnage and chaos resulted in dozens of deaths and the most expensive insurance claims tab for rioting ever (which could be as high as $2 billion and maybe more). Hemingway counts at least 25 people who died in the horror.
The left romanticized it the entire time. In June of 2020, now-Vice President Kamala Harris warned that “everyone beware” because the protests are “not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.”
Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts said in an interview on MSNBC two months later, “There needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as there’s unrest in our lives, and unfortunately, there’s plenty to go around.”
Yeah, they were sure to offer the obligatory “peaceful” qualifier so as to give the sacred “fact-checkers” in the media a reason to rebut every accurate and legitimate charge from critics who could see with their own eyes what was happening — that Democrats and their friends in the press were tacitly approving of the havoc taking place around the nation.
It was in every sense a hostage situation. All major cities were boarded up as the mayhem continued, and just as soon as things seemed to calm down heading into the fall, the plywood was reinforced in anticipation of an election outcome that might not go the way Democrats wanted. A Trump victory would be another excuse to continue the rioting over a media-generated narrative that such an outcome was yet more proof that this is a racist country and black people are perpetually in life-threatening danger.
We’re only just now recovering from the strain of it all. And if we don’t want a repeat in 2022 or 2024, we can’t forget who caused it.
