You don’t have to excuse the aggressive storming of the Capitol building that took place by Trump supporters on Wednesday in order to point out the brazen hypocrisy of the news media and Democrats who have nothing but good things to say about the months of rioting we went through in 2020.
A normal person can be repulsed by both things, but, of course, the media would be defensive. Journalists actually believe the violent rioting, looting, arson, and vandalism by Black Lives Matter activists and anti-police thugs was justified and moral. That’s why they downplayed it, ever sure to remind their audiences that the protests were otherwise “mostly peaceful.”
Jeremy Peters of the New York Times on Thursday said that any comparison between what happened Wednesday and the riots of last year amounted to “whataboutism,” the dumbest term to have ever popped up in politics (other than “Kamala”). President Trump’s defenders, wrote Peters, have “deflected” criticism of his supporters who infiltrated the Capitol “with false equivalencies about the Democratic Party’s embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Why, you might ask, are those comparisons “false equivalencies”? Peters didn’t say. He just expected readers to take his word for it.
It’s laughable. A total of four people died at the protest this week in Washington, D.C. One of them was a woman who was reportedly shot by a police officer inside the Capitol. Scant information is known about the other three deaths, other than that they were outside the building when they died. Activity at the scene otherwise was mostly limited to Trump supporters walking around the Capitol making a bunch of noise and making a relatively minor mess.
That’s not to excuse any of it. All of it was wrong, and everyone involved should be prosecuted. But let’s compare that episode to just some of what took place during the riots of last year.
In late May, during riots in New York over the death of George Floyd, entire neighborhoods were overrun by looters who “filled garbage bags with shoes, clothes and other goods, and shouted to each other which store would be next,” according to the New York Times. Rioters “started hurling trash cans into the street and dragging plastic barriers across roads to block police vehicles.” They lit dumpsters on fire, smashed storefront windows, and vandalized bus stop kiosks. Protesters were seen on video throwing bottles and other debris at police officers, shoving cops, and torching sidewalk corners.
In late August, during protests in Portland, Trump supporter Aaron Danielson, 39, was shot dead by a member of antifa. For months, thousands of rioters in the city “turned out nightly, with some hurling fireworks, rocks, ball bearings and bottles” at law enforcement, the Associated Press reported. They threw rocks, hurled water bottles that were frozen to inflict more harm, and slashed the tires of police cars with spikes.
In September, as Black Lives Matter riots continued raging throughout the country, 36-year-old Deonte Murray snuck up on two police officers in Los Angeles, shooting the female officer in the jaw and arm and the other, a male, in his forehead and hand. Murray then fled the scene.
This doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of all the violence that occurred last summer in the name of social justice. It was invariably explained away, excused, and outright encouraged by the media. Following Wednesday’s riot in Washington, CNN and MSNBC were airing close-up images of the faces of Trump supporters who had barged into the Capitol, demanding that they be arrested. Does anyone recall them doing that for any one of the rioters last year? Let me know!
All forms of violent rioting are bad, and so is the media’s selective outrage.
