Rioting and looting damage society and harm people. The recent protests on behalf of fighting institutional racism wreak with unlawful violence and hypocrisy. Of course there are plenty of peaceful protesters who have caused no physical harm to property or other individuals. These are not at issue. Rather, the focus should be on the 15 people who lost their lives from the initial George Floyd protests, the countless businesses suffering stark physical damage to their properties (and despite ignorant assertions to the contrary, never fully covered by insurance), and the many families who had their livelihoods ripped to shreds because of looting.
The violence that tore through Minneapolis and other cities in recent months is simply never justifiable. The argument made by NPR’s interviewee, Vicky Osterweil, who takes on the Marxist theory that damage to property is neither violent nor unlawful is clearly nonsense. We live in the United States of America, where property and the endangerment of the security of our citizens are imbedded into every page of our Constitution. In fact the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments delineate this protection of property rights explicitly. Violence to another person’s property is unlawful.
Not only has the recent rioting and looting been unlawful but it has been hypocritical to the highest degree. One mob even attempted to assault Rand Paul and his wife in the name of “social justice.” Disgusting hypocrisy as Rand Paul is the very one who introduced the “Justice for Breonna Taylor Act.” Multiple Americans who died in the Minneapolis riots were minorities. The very Americans – including many of those in racial minorities – whom the violent protestors claim to be protecting were harmed by sky-high property recovery payments and most likely will be faced with spiked insurance premiums in the future. The emotional, physical, and economic freedoms that the rioters and looters claim as their banner are precisely what they themselves are destroying.
If you want to go out and use your freedom of speech in a peaceful way, be my guest– it is your absolute right. If you intend on gathering together a mob full of hatred and hypocrisy, be ready for the consequences. We all ought to be raising our voices against the violent protestors as much as we are trying to solve the civil rights problems of our day. Shame on those who are hypocritically or ignorantly harming the well-being of our own American people.