To a certain brand of leftist, some riots are more equal than others.
Americans who watched the nation’s cities torn apart over the summer by “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter riots already knew the country’s liberal politicians and mainstream media took a distorted view of violence for political ends.
But on the eve of an unprecedented impeachment trial for a no-longer-sitting president, one Democratic lawmaker has taken that distortion to new depths.
Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, the newly elected leftist who’s clearly gunning for a place of prominence in the Congressional Squad Caucus, reacted to a riot over the weekend in a St. Louis jail by invoking the name of the nation’s most revered civil rights leader.
“A riot is the language of the unheard,” Bush tweeted, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. while retweeting images from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch showing Saturday’s disturbance at the St. Louis City Justice Center.
“A riot is the language of the unheard.” – Dr. MLK Jr.
I want to talk to my constituents in the window. Their lives and their rights must be protected.
My team and I are working to ensure that the urgent needs of people who are incarcerated are not ignored. https://t.co/wMq8ecyLQ2
— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) February 7, 2021
This is the kind of thing that would normally be just par for the delusional-liberal course, but it’s coming at a time when the United States Senate is preparing to sit in judgment on former President Donald Trump for allegedly inciting the Jan. 6 incursion in the Capitol that disrupted the certification of the Electoral College vote that made Joe Biden the 46th president.
For Democrats, that incursion wasn’t the “language of the unheard,” though. It was an “insurrection,” an attempt to overthrow the United States government comparable to the time their party predecessors tried to do the same thing, from Fort Sumter to Appomatox.
And it was only a month ago that this selfsame Cori Bush was calling publicly for the expulsion of members of Congress who sympathized with the Jan. 6 rioters.
Expel the Republican members of Congress who incited the white supremacist attempted coup.
— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) January 8, 2021
So for Bush, it mattered nothing that Republicans watched for a year while Democratic state election officials and Democratic state courts essentially greased the skids for a Democratic victory in November. It mattered nothing that conservatives could on a daily basis see that the mainstream media was attacking the incumbent president, and social media giants had imposed a news blackout on information that could very likely have turned the election away from the Biden campaign.
What mattered was that laws had been broken by Trump supporters outraged at an election result they considered fraudulent, and that Republicans in federal office had also challenged the Biden victory.
On Jan. 11, Bush actually introduced a resolution that would establish a process for the investigation and expulsion of any lawmaker found to have committed “sedition” in the wake of the election.
It needs to be clear that no member of Congress took to social media to post images of the Capitol rioters and declared them “my constituents,” just as no Republican member of Congress publicly endorsed the rioters who wreaked havoc in American cities last summer.
Many Democrats, on the other hand, had no problem with the violence. In fact, then-Sen. Kamala Harris, the woman who is now the vice president, actively campaigned to raise bail money for Minnesota rioters to get back on the street.
In the shock of the Capitol incursion, that tolerance for violence seemed to disappear among Democrats, as though realization was sinking in that maybe the months of destruction in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland and other cities were setting an example they didn’t want the country to follow.
If so, it didn’t last long.
Cori Bush, the same lawmaker who wants her colleagues expelled from Congress for having the same suspicions about the election as the Capitol rioters, had no problem going on Twitter to express her determination that the “that the urgent needs of people who are incarcerated are not ignored.”
With Twitter being the intellectual cesspool it is, Bush has plenty of supporters. But there are still sane people on social media, and they weren’t all silent.
“A riot is the language of the unheard.” – Dr. MLK Jr.
I want to talk to my constituents in the window. Their lives and their rights must be protected.
My team and I are working to ensure that the urgent needs of people who are incarcerated are not ignored. https://t.co/wMq8ecyLQ2
— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) February 7, 2021
Riots are back in fash again. https://t.co/aXqzpddWn8
— James Lindsay, won't fit in your box (@ConceptualJames) February 7, 2021
So riots are back on the menu?
— Faye Hausendorff (@FayeH321) February 7, 2021
So does this quote by MLK apply to the January 6 riot?
— travis (@UGADAWG2121) February 7, 2021
But this one puts it perfectly.
“A riot is the language of the unheard, as long as it goes with my narrative” -Cori Bush
— Billy Bolton (@BillyGBolton) February 7, 2021
For American progressives, the looting, arson and murder that stalked American cities in 2020 (very much including St. Louis) was a howl of pent-up rage, not just a revolting spree of violent crime that was cynically sugarcoated by the mainstream media as “mostly peaceful” expressions of outrage.
For liberals like Cori Bush, the outbreak of violence at a local jail, by inmates described by a jail official as “very angry, defiant, very violent people” according to the Post-Dispatch, was simply another manifestation of King’s famed “language of the unheard.”
But the violence of the Capitol incursion was inexcusable, and the fact that it was perpetrated by a minuscule minority of the 75 million Americans who voted for Trump in November was no reason not to attack a huge percentage of the country’s population as irredeemably racist and “white supremacist,” deserving of being deprived of their representation in the walls of government.
For liberals, some riots really are more equal than others. And when violence fits the politically correct narrative, for a certain brand of leftist, it’s as American as cherry pie.
Story cited here.
