Michelle Obama’s fact-free defense of violent ‘Black Lives Matter’ riots

Obama released a video message encouraging people to vote for Joe Biden. During her endorsement, she accused those who criticized the violent riots of engaging in racism.

“President Trump is lying about how minorities will destroy the suburbs,” she said, “And pinning it all on what’s been an overwhelmingly peaceful movement for racial solidarity.”

“It’s true,” she said. “Research backs it up: Only a tiny fraction of demonstrations have had any violence at all. So, what the president is doing, is, once again, patently false, morally wrong, and yes, it is racist.”

“When people hear these lies and crazy conspiracies repeated over and over again, they don’t know what to think,” Obama concluded. “The one thing this president is really, really good at is using fear and spreading lies to win.”

Setting aside Obama’s underlying criticisms of President Trump, let’s examine her claim that the unrest was “overwhelmingly peaceful.” She is right that after the death of George Floyd in May, peaceful protests and calls for criminal justice reform broke out across the country.

But she sweeps past the fact that from Chicago to Seattle to Minneapolis to New York City and more, open riots broke out in the streets, as well as peaceful protests. In Minneapolis alone, at least 1,500 properties were destroyed, vandalized, or damaged, many of them minority-owned. In New York City, at least 450 properties were looted or damaged.

To justify their narrative in light of such tangible destruction, Democrats like Obama often cite a study that found “In more than 93 percent of all demonstrations connected to the [Black Lives Matter] movement, demonstrators have not engaged in violence or destructive activity.” But as National Review’s Isaac Shorr noted, that still means there were more than 220 riots across the country. That’s objectively an enormous amount of violent unrest.

New reporting shows that what Obama describes as “mostly peaceful demonstrations” will set a new record for the most incurred in insured damages of any period of rioting in American history. Total insured damages will reach $1-2 billion, exceeding the previous record set in 1992 in the Los Angeles Rodney King riots.

Oh, and don’t forget that in this period of “overwhelmingly peaceful” unrest, at least 21 people were killed, including security guards, business owners, and rioters themselves.

To downplay hundreds of riots in cities across the country as “mostly peaceful” is to turn a blind eye to the thousands of businesses destroyed and countless lives that were ruined. All born out of an apparent unwillingness to denounce left-wing radicalism.

This downplaying of violence is like saying Sept. 11 was an “overwhelmingly peaceful” day because only a few buildings out of the entire country were destroyed. It’s like saying that the day someone died was “mostly uneventful.” It’s like saying the coronavirus is “mostly harmless” because the vast majority of people infected survive the disease.

In all the above cases, we would rightly decry such comparisons as tone-deaf and misleading. Obama’s narrative is no different.

The right thing for the former first lady to do would have been to explicitly denounce violence and looting, but align herself with peaceful protest and the criminal justice reform movement. She could even reasonably argue that the Biden-Harris ticket would better advance those goals.

But Michelle Obama’s choice to downplay and dismiss the very real left-wing violence that swept the country after George Floyd’s death makes her guilty of the very charge she levied against Trump: “spreading lies to win.”

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a Washington Examiner contributor and host of the Breaking Boundaries podcast.