Massive downtown looting in Chicago? You can bet that Fox News filmed every second of it and will be replaying that footage from now until election day and beyond. I don’t know if Chicago police “stood aside”, as they certainly did in the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992,1 but I do know that this is the sort of thing that got Donald Trump into the White House.
The leaders of Black Lives Matter, and leading Democratic politicians as well, had better not let the right get a new tool to inflame the right’s base and frighten “moderates”. Demands to literally defund the police, rather than reorganize them and reduce the galaxy of special privileges they have arrogated to themselves over the years, along with demands to empty the jails, etc., are massively self-defeating.
And, of course, the white rioters in Portland are doing their best to wreck things as well—hoping, one assumes, to get their student loans canceled. Don’t let black looters and white anarchists give us four more years of the American Vladimir Putin.
1. Despite advance notice that a verdict would be handed down on the afternoon of April 29, 1992, Gates sent the LA department’s day force home at 3 PM. He told reporters that there was little chance of violence and went to a fundraiser that was raising money to fight a proposed amendment to the LA city charter that would limit his power and term in office. Furthermore, two thirds of the LAPD’s patrol captains were out of town at a three-day seminar. Mayor Tom Bradley did not help matters by publicly questioning the verdict exonerating the officers who beat King. (All information courtesy of Wikipedia.)
