Democrat-Run Baltimore is a Gangsters' Paradise
By Matthew Vadum in American Thinker
Democrats in riot-torn Baltimore
really like gangsters.
As radicals and other criminals
reduce their once-great city to ashes, left-wing politicians are defining
deviancy down. They just can't stop saying nice things about gangsters and
when they occasionally slip up and say accurate things about them, they
promptly apologize for speaking the truth. That's the way Democrats in
Baltimore roll.
As the rule of law is dynamited,
they genuflect before them, salute them, and pose for photographs with
them.
Gangsters have become the de
facto government in the city of Baltimore. Rioting has empowered
them.
The current civil unrest was sparked
by the mysterious death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man. Gray, a
habitual criminal offender, was arrested by Baltimore police for possession of a switchblade, according to a late-breaking news report. While in police
custody he apparently suffered severe injuries that led to his death. Unlike
the endlessly hyped demise of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., police
malfeasance or negligence may have played a role in Gray's death. Time will
tell.
At a surreal press conference Tuesday, career criminals that Baltimore Democrats consider
to be upstanding members of the community stood side by side with elected
officials to plead for an end to the violence.
In a 2015 update of Rodney King's
famous 1992 quotation, "Can we all get along?" a self-identified gang
member named "Trey" said they were "against the violence."
"If we can stick together doing
something negative, then we can stick together doing something positive,"
the Baltimore Sun quoted Trey saying. "I need a job. Most of the
youths need a job. We need help. It ain't right what people was [sic] doing,
but you've got to understand. Some people are struggling."
Because Trey was dressed in red,
presumably he is a member of the Bloods, which
started as a street gang in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Flush with profits from
crack cocaine-trafficking, it expanded across the nation in the 1980s.
For reasons that are unclear, the
Bloods are not members of the Baltimore City Chamber of Commerce. Following the
example of their fellow criminals at the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton
Foundation, perhaps it's time for the Bloods to become a tax-exempt 501(c)(3)
public charity. They could hire former IRS official Lois Lerner, who shares
their worldview, as an advisor.
Gang-bangers are legitimate
stakeholders entitled to respect, according to Baltimore Democrats.
At the press conference Baltimore
City Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young (Democrat) praised
these fine young men from the city's underappreciated organized crime sector.
Politicians, church leaders, and
gangs must unite to shut down the violence plaguing the city, he said.
"These men have been out on the street quelling the senseless violence
that has consumed our society."
Why gangs, whose reason for being is
the facilitation of criminal activity, would take an interest in ending civil
disorder is unclear. A law-abiding gang is a contradiction in terms.
Perhaps the wrong businesses were being looted.
Young showed the gangs unconditional
love on Tuesday even after Baltimore Police warned of a "credible threat" that the Bloods, Crips,
and Black Guerrilla Family had entered into an temporary alliance to "take
out" law enforcement officers.
The cops must be wrong, Young
reasoned, because after he met with gangbangers Tuesday "it is clear that
the notion they were planning on harming our police officers is false and
simply deterred [sic] the resources we need to focus on the individuals who instigated
these riots."
Young felt really bad about calling
out the property-destroying criminals running wild in the city. He apologized
to the rioting thugs that he called "thugs" the day before.
"What we're seeing today is not
about Freddie Gray," he said.
It is about the pain, the hurt and
the suffering of these young people. There's no excuse for them to loot, riot,
and destroy our city. I made a comment out of frustration and anger when I
called our children thugs. They're not thugs. They're just misdirected. We need
to direct them on a different path by creating opportunities for them.
To left-wingers like Young, spending
more taxpayer money is always the solution.
And
Young is not the only cognitively dissonant left-winger out there saying first,
that there is no excuse for rioting and then, second, saying actually, there
really is an excuse for rioting.
President Barack Obama (Democrat)
said "there's no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw" in
Baltimore. "It is counterproductive."
Obama blamed the police, not the
rioters. "This is a slow-rolling crisis," he said. "This has
been going on for a long time. This is not new and we shouldn't pretend it's
new."
Obama also blamed stereotypical
Republicans who refuse to spend as much taxpayer money as he would prefer. The
government needs to flush more money down the toilet, lavishing poor minority
communities with free early childhood education and job training, he
said.
"I'm under no illusion that out
of this Congress we're going to get massive investments in urban
communities," the president said. "It's too easy to ignore those
problems or to treat them just as a law-and-order issue as opposed to a broader
social issue."
Of course the Obama White House sent
a delegation worthy of a head of state to Baltimore for Freddie Gray's funeral,
even though it's far from clear what happened to the career criminal. They
were: Baltimore native Broderick Johnson, who chairs the racist My Brother's
Keeper Task Force; White House spin doctor Heather Foster; and Elias Alcantara,
associate director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.
And Obama is using government resources to keep the social justice-fueled fires burning in the
streets of Baltimore. Left-wing community organizers from the Department of
Justice's infamous Community Relations Service (CRS) are on the ground in
Baltimore, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said hours after being sworn
in. CRS agitators swarmed Sanford, Fla., in 2012 and organized political
theater that was ultimately successful in getting the innocent George Zimmerman
charged with the murder of his attacker, Trayvon Martin.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid
(Democrat), the lawmaker from Nevada who claims his home workout regime
assaulted him making him blind in one eye, condemned the violence and then
excused the rioters.
But let's not ignore the underlying
problem. Let's not pretend the system is fair. Let's not pretend
everything is okay. Let's not pretend the path from poverty like the one I
traveled is still available to everyone out there as long as they work hard.
Rep. Elijah Cummings (Democrat), who
represents part of Baltimore City in Congress, told NBC News that watching the
riots unfold is "very, very painful... I have not seen anything like this
since 1968."
Cummings, who conspired with the IRS
to persecute Tea Party groups, blamed the riots on police whom he said have
been killing unarmed black men all over the country.
"We've got a series of events
that has caused people to just say, well we're not taking it anymore. People
are literally very, very upset." (Note to the congressman: Freddie
Gray was not unarmed. He had a switchblade on his person when he was
arrested.)
Carl Stokes (Democrat), a member of
Baltimore City Council, said calling rioting thugs "thugs" is the
same as calling them the N-word. "These are children who have been set
aside, marginalized, who have not been engaged by us. No, we don't have to call
them thugs."
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie
Rawlings-Blake (Democrat) apologized Tuesday to the rioting thugs for calling
them "thugs" the day before as they destroyed property with her
blessing.
"I wanted to say something that
was on my heart ... We don't have thugs in Baltimore. Sometimes my little
anger interpreter gets the best of me," she said. "We have a lot
of kids that are acting out, a lot of people in our community that are acting
out."
Throughout the current crisis, Rawlings-Blake
has represented her constituency, rioters, with great zeal.
On the weekend, instead of waiting
for the justice system to work, the Baltimore mayor became the enabler of an
unfocused, scatter-gun approach to social justice vigilantism. She gave the
angry mob permission to run wild. (I thought left-wingers believed it was
better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission. But I digress.)
After the first wave of rioting
started on Saturday, the strenuously non-judgmental mayor consoled the rabble, implying that their activities constituted legitimate
contributions to public discourse.
"I made it very clear that I
work with the police and instructed them to do everything that they could to
make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free
speech," she said.
The property rights of victims were
much further down on the mayor's hierarchy of values because in the leftist
worldview the right to agitate trumps all other rights. She continued:
It’s a very delicate balancing act.
Because while we tried to make sure that they were protected from the cars and
other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy,
space to do that as well. And we worked very hard to keep that balance and to
put ourselves in the best position to de-escalate. [emphasis added]
Rawlings-Blake has been backpedaling
furiously, claiming that her words were twisted and taken out of context. But
it's obvious she meant what she said. In politics when someone inadvertently
speaks the truth it's called a gaffe. The mayor, who is also secretary of the
Democratic National Committee, committed a major-league gaffe.
Left-wingers believe that rioting
and looting for the right reasons are legitimate forms of political protest
that are protected by the First Amendment. Ditto for physical force and
intimidation so long as they are in pursuit of leftist goals.
This depravity is part and parcel of
the Left. Radicals like the late Saul Alinsky (admired by Barack Obama and
Hillary Clinton) and the Trotskyist dowager Frances Fox Piven (admired by Bill
Clinton) favored using violence for progressive ends.
Alinsky was a gangster groupie. He became
friends with Frank Nitti of the Al Capone crime gang and tried to help the gang
by advising on best business practices.
Alinsky biographer Nicholas von
Hoffman wrote that his subject favored "conking" picket line crossers on the
head. Alinsky shied away from praising violence in public but in private
"he would say that violence has its uses."
In his first organizing opus, Reveille
for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that the radical “hits, he hurts, he is
dangerous.” Radicals “are most adept at breaking the necks of conservatives.”
Violence is seen as inevitable in
the revolutionary struggle. “The radical may resort to the sword but when he
does he is not filled with hatred against those individuals whom he attacks,”
the community organizing guru writes.
Objectifying and depersonalizing his
opponents, Alinsky writes that the radical "hates these individuals not as
persons but as symbols representing ideas or interests which he believes to be
inimical to the welfare of the people.”
A pragmatic warrior for radicalism
must accept, Alinsky adds in his other opus, Rules for Radicals, that “in
action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent
both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind.”
Like Rawlings-Blake,
academic-activist Frances Fox Piven goofed by offering an amoral endorsement of the use of violence by
community organizers. During a book talk Piven said:
It's partly a problem of, almost,
strategy and propaganda. It's a violent country. It's a violent
government. It's killing people. And they're going to call us
violent if we break a window, but they will do that, so probably unless you
have good reason for breaking the window, probably you shouldn't do
that. Unless it's, you know, a big part of your strategy.
Because of Rawlings-Blake and her
ilk, Baltimore has become like the dystopian horror movie The Purge in
which for one night every year all laws -- including those forbidding murder--
are suspended.
Many Twitter users following the
riots likened the real-life scenes unfolding in Baltimore to the film. There were also reports
that Baltimore schoolchildren were urged to begin a "purge" on
Monday.
"The 2013 movie," USA
Today explained, "is set in 2022 and chronicles one night a year
called 'the purge,' when for 12 hours, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., police and
medical emergency services are unavailable and people, loot, steal, and kill
undeterred."
In an attempt to reassure frightened
children, Ethan Hawke's character explains, "Tonight allows people a
release for all the hatred and violence that they keep up inside them."
That justification seems eerily
similar to the one offered by Rawlings-Blake when she explained why she gave
space to rioters to destroy.
As members of the Democratic Party
that birthed Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan embrace the Thug Life, gangsters are
now officially cool.
Matthew Vadum (website)
is an investigative journalist in Washington, D.C., and author of the
ACORN/Obama expose, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are
Still Ripping Off and Terrorizing American Taxpayers.
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