Kyle Smith of National Review Online explains why it should be easy to take a stance against recent riots.
Why do they keep doing it? Decade after decade, generation after generation, progressives keep making the same, elemental mistake: They downplay, excuse, and in extreme cases even encourage urban rioters.
We’ve been down this road before, and it’s a straight stretch of highway with no twists whatsoever. It would take a moral moron to get lost on it, and yet somehow progressives keep managing to do so. This isn’t hard. The people of Minneapolis are right to be angry about the savage death of George Floyd, but rioting will not bring him back or honor his memory, and the riots will make everything even worse. The Democrats and the media should be shouting as loudly as they can: Stop what you’re doing, you’re hurting your cause.
The person closest to Floyd — the deceased man’s girlfriend, Courteney Ross — made exactly this point: “Waking up this morning to see Minneapolis on fire would be something that would devastate” Floyd, Ross told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “He loved the city. He came here [from Houston] and stayed here for the people and the opportunities.” She added that people should “know that I understand their frustration” but “I want people to protest in a peaceful way.”
Yet all over the media, progressives are in effect rubbishing these wishes. They support the riots, starting by downplaying the nightmare in Minneapolis as a series of mere “protests” (no, those are what Martin Luther King Jr. engineered — and they worked). …
… Those who look at the Minneapolis riots from the perspective of black Americans simply aren’t grasping the information, more than 50 years after the black-separatist movement got started, that black America and white America are not opponents and are tied together in all sorts of ways.
