Op-Ed: The Chauvin Trial Proves Americans Can Now Be Jailed if Enough Rioters Threaten to Show Up
The city of Minneapolis had prepared for hellish conditions. National Guard troops presided over street corners. Businesses and homes were boarded up and barricaded. The city’s public schools shifted to online learning until Friday because sending children out would have been too dangerous. The NBA prepared to postpone games.
If the jury had turned in the “wrong” verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial, destruction would be playing out on the national stage.
This is the country we inhabit now. Our establishment media and Democratic Party and universities and corporations are possessed by an ideology that holds that America’s systems and institutions are irredeemably evil and cannot be reformed. They must be torn out at the root.
Every time this group of people doesn’t get what it wants, whether a particular verdict, a politically useful corporate statement or an electoral outcome, there is the expectation of violence across the country.
The media and Democrats actively foment the chaos. When Daunte Wright was mistakenly shot by an officer in Brooklyn Center earlier this month while resisting arrest, Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib called policing “government funded murder” and pushed to abolish incarceration altogether because the system “can’t be reformed.”
California Rep. Maxine Waters, who called the LA riots the LA “uprisings” and once told activists to confront Trump administration officials in public, again encouraged a crowd of protesters in Minneapolis to “get more confrontational” if the jury acquitted Chauvin.
But the remarkable thing is how Democrats and the media see the radicals — not as bad people doing evil things but as overly passionate allies with justified outrage.
Asked by Don Lemon whether Tlaib’s comments hurt the police-reform movement, Democratic Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina responded in the negative while noting that her frustration was understandable.
After being assaulted during a violent protest, CNN reporter Miguel Marquez faulted himself, saying that he — a journalist covering a national news event — was simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
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It’s not the rioters’ fault, you see. They’re just a bit too committed to the cause — a little too passionate. But their hearts are in the right place. So long as the violence is being done by anti-system demonstrators for anti-America reasons, our ruling class won’t stand in the way.
For months, they’ve instructed Americans that the greatest threat to democracy came from the Trump administration, its supporters and the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters.
But aside from the ugly optics of the day, this was never the case. Trump didn’t call for the violence, the vast majority of the assembled crowd didn’t raid the Capitol building and Congress resumed its business as soon as the soon-to-be-prosecuted morons were cleared out.
If it had been a BLM riot, by the media’s standard, this would’ve been a “mostly peaceful” protest.
But what’s happening now is an actual threat to the country and its values. A group of people has infiltrated our institutions and made peace with violence as a legitimate political tactic. And the mob is ruling as a result.
A man stood accused of murder, and regardless of the evidence or the complicated circumstances of the trial, if he wasn’t convicted, cities would have burned.
After the Wright shooting, with the mob assembling in the streets, Brooklyn Center mayor Mike Elliott pushed to fire the city manager because he dared call for due process for the involved officer. When the city council voted on it, a member explained that she voted for the firing because she feared street violence if she didn’t.
Whether violence lurks around the corner is what determines whether American citizens go to prison or keep their jobs, not the law. This expectation of violence allows the government to sidestep protection of the individual rights that Democrats don’t believe Americans should have anyway.
What these people want is nothing less than the destruction of American values. Due process. The presumption of innocence. The right to property. The rule of law. The expectation that national controversy won’t devolve into national chaos.
One of the only responsibilities of government is to protect citizens from domestic threats. This mob is a domestic threat, ever-present and ever-destructive.
But our politicians aren’t cleaning it off the streets. Instead, they’re surrendering the country to it. Rather than police the violence, they’ll lock down cities, close down businesses, shut down schools, and crack down on law enforcement.
If this is the country we want to live in, lending power to Democrats and trust to the media is the proper way to do it.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
