by Christopher Paslay, American Thinker:

In 1989, District of Columbia Mayor Marion Barry, Jr. insisted that his city was basically crime-free except for all the murder.  “Except for the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country,” he told a luncheon audience at the National Press Club.

On May 28, MSNBC reporter Ali Velshi said something just as mind-bogglingly absurd.  As violent riots erupted in sections of Minneapolis over the death of George Floyd, Velshi insisted that the protests were basically peaceful.

“I wanna be clear on how I characterize this,” Velshi said, as buildings literally burned to the ground in the background of the broadcast.  “This is mostly a protest.  It is not, it is not, generally speaking, unruly.”

It’s interesting to watch Velshi struggle to find the words to shape the narrative he’s trying so desperately to tell: that the violence and upheaval unfolding around him aren’t really happening.  That the burning buildings are somehow not indicative of what is really taking place on the ground.  That the whole scene is really just a peaceful protest, so please don’t misinterpret the fires, the destruction and evacuation of Minneapolis’s 3rd police precinct, the vandalism of police vehicles, and the looting of the Target and arson of the AutoZone as “unruly.”

According to the Saint Paul Police Department, more than 170 businesses were damaged or looted that night, and there were dozens of fires.

Liberals are so obsessed with controlling the narrative on race, so immersed in their own self-serving propaganda, that they actually believe that society is going to accept their bald-faced lies over reality itself — over the television footage of the destruction, over the police reports documenting the property damage, over the cries from governors and mayors urging citizens to please stop the looting and rioting.

Vox recently published an article by Morgan State University professor Jason Johnson titled “What we’re missing when we condemn ‘violence’ at protests,” which attempted to discount reality and explain away what our own eyeballs are seeing when we view the footage of the George Floyd protests unfolding across the country.  Johnson insisted that these seemingly violent events are simply the result of a sensational news media establishment.  “In reality, these protests are usually not completely consumed with chaos,” he wrote.  “Nighttime coverage will seldom show a full city map demonstrating that, two blocks over from a street that looks like a ‘city engulfed in flames,’ there’s a CVS still open for business.”

And who is responsible for these fires?  The police, of course.  “[M]uch of the property damage attributed to protesters is often the result of police action or inaction in the face of lawful public behavior,” Johnson stated, explaining that “police munitions often start fires at protests.”

Johnson also pointed out how the media fail to separate peaceful protesters from rioters, who really can’t help binging on stolen goods.  Because the police “are so occupied harassing and corralling peaceful protesters and the streets are filled with smoke, it’s pretty easy to break into a Verizon store, a beauty shop, or a grocery store and take what you want.”

The authentic protester, on the other hand, has a legitimate reason to destroy property.  “For protesters who are angry about violent, unaccountable police in Minneapolis, overtaking and burning down the Third Police Precinct is a specific act of revolt,” Johnson stated.  “This is a fundamentally different action than using the chaos from two blocks over to raid a liquor store.”

Johnson concluded his Vox article by forwarding the latest dose of racial grievance propaganda, which is the notion that police have been responding to black protesters with an unwarranted use of force while dealing ever-so-kindly with armed white protesters speaking out against the lockdowns.

CNN peddled this same nonsense with a recent article headlined “The protest pictures alone tell the story of America’s racial hierarchy,” which used selectively edited pictures to suggest that callous white cops were needlessly throwing tear gas at innocent black teens for protesting peacefully, while dangerous white protesters were left alone by police at the Michigan State Capitol, despite the fact they were putting everyone in danger by carrying long guns and refusing to social distance and wear masks.

This narrative is a lie — and the captions under the CNN pictures revealed the truth for anyone who wanted to look past the misleading headline to the fine print.  Cops were throwing tear gas not at innocent black teens peacefully protesting the death of George Floyd on a quiet Minneapolis street, but because rioters had first vandalized, and then burned down, the Third Police Precinct.  Likewise, police stood down at the Michigan Capitol not because the protesters were white or conservative, but because they weren’t breaking any laws.  In fact, the contrast between the George Floyd protests erupting in big cities across America and those protests against the lockdowns happening at state capitols couldn’t be more stark.

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