Commentary: Looting for Walter Wallace? Enough Is Enough

by Harlan Hill

 

“There’s no excuse for looting,” Joe Biden says, as Philadelphia suffers wanton lawlessness, destruction, and violence at the hands of people who pretend they are “peaceful protesters” standing against “racial injustice.”

Let’s hope that Biden has, at long last, learned that it’s not a good idea to whitewash, condone, or otherwise excuse riots. It’s still a shame that it took internal polling to convince Biden that literally getting down on his knees and bowing is never an appropriate response when people are being robbed, beaten, and killed.

It’s an even bigger shame that he remains unwilling to directly condemn those responsible for rioting over what can only be seen as a justified police shooting.

Walter Wallace, Jr. charged at police with a knife after ignoring repeated warnings to drop his weapon. He was out on bail, awaiting trial for threatening to shoot a woman in an unrelated incident. He was convicted three years ago of actually putting a pistol to a woman’s head and robbing her. Before that, he had convictions for resisting arrests and punching a police officer in the face.

A responsible Democratic nominee would do more than gently chide the lawbreakers by saying that Walter Wallace, Jr.’s death is not an excuse to loot CVS. A responsible nominee would state the obvious: the underlying incident, while tragic, has nothing to do with racial injustice and all protests in response to it are based on lies.

Joe Biden, however, is not a responsible nominee. He has repeatedly abandoned police, thrown his lot in with the mob, and declared our justice system and our society more broadly as “systemically racist” — all in an apparent effort to placate the most unreasonable part of his political base.

Even before Philadelphia, this summer has seen the most violent riots in a generation and the most costly looting in modern American history. Major cities all over the country are seeing the biggest spike in murder in decades. Now is not the time to provide moral sanction for rioters, or to side with “peaceful protests” over police when the “protesters” are looting to mark the passing of a violent felon who threatened police and citizens’ lives alike.

It is already clear to experts that propagating the narrative of “systemic police racism” and excusing the excesses of the anti-police left produces the opposite of what “Black Lives Matter” claims to stand for: hundreds of additional dead black men.

The latest weak response from Joe Biden ought to be the final straw for Michiganders. What we need in a president is the same thing that the Police Officers Association of Michigan saw when they endorsed Donald Trump for a second term: an unwavering commitment to law and order.

The alternative — a White House beholden to a movement that is intent on rioting even when the facts of an incident so categorically rule out their narrative — is simply unacceptable. It is no longer May. These riots are no longer even ostensibly related to George Floyd, but are explicitly in response to a man who brandished a knife at police five full months later.

Someone must say “enough,” and Joe Biden has proven himself once again incapable of doing so.

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Harlan Hill is a political advisor, media commentator, an advisory board member of the Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., and the author of They’re Not Listening: How The Elites Created the National Populist Revolution.
Photo “Philadelphia Protests” by Ninian Reid. CC BY 2.0.