Slandering the Capitol Police

There's a theme developing among the progressive left that the police treated the rioters at the Capitol last Wednesday more gently than they would've treated them had they been black. There's absolutely no evidence that this is so, but it's being asserted apodictically as if there could not possibly be any doubt.

David Brooks makes this claim in a New York Times op-ed:

The rampage reminded us that if Black people had done this, the hallways would be red with their blood.

President-elect Joe Biden said much the same:

If it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting they would have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol.

So did his Vice-president elect Kamala Harris:

We witnessed two systems of justice when we saw one that let extremists storm the United States Capitol, and another that released tear gas on peaceful protesters last summer.

The claim that the Capitol police were much more passive than they would've been had the protestors been black not only lacks any substantiation, it accomplishes nothing but boost racial discord and drive the wedge between the races even deeper.

Even more, it's an awful slander on the men and women who serve at the Capitol because it imputes to them a racism that's wholly undemonstrated.

A National Review Online article by Tobias Hoonhout is critical of a Washington Post article for pounding that theme.

Hoonhout writes that,

Multiple Washington Post articles published in the days following the pro-Trump riot on Capitol Hill ignored key details in an effort to cast the day’s events as the inevitable consequence of racially disparate policing.

One such article — titled “Kid glove treatment of pro-Trump mob contrasts with strong-arm police tactics against Black Lives Matter, activists say” — was published Wednesday evening, just hours after the chaos subsided. It quotes a number of Black Lives Matter activists who misrepresent the day’s events to suggest that the police went easy on the pro-Trump rioters because they were predominantly white.

The four reporters whose bylines are listed on the article didn’t bother to fact-check any of the false claims.

The implication in the WaPo article as well as the Biden, Harris and Brooks statements, of course, is that the Capitol police are a bunch of racists.

As Hoonhout points out, though, the WaPo article fails to mention that a white female Trump supporter was shot in the neck and died and that the reason the National Guard was not in evidence was because D.C.'s mayor Muriel Bowser, a black woman, had requested only a small contingent of guardsmen, primarily to control traffic and monitor metro stations.

The WaPo article declares that the vandalism and violence of the rioters had no obvious consequence, but there was one dead woman and at least 82 arrests by Thursday night, facts which belie the WaPo's reporting, as does the fact that, in addition to deadly force, the police also used tear gas and flash bang grenades in an attempt to defend the Capitol from the mob.

It should also be pointed out that the Capitol police are not trained in riot control and were not wearing riot gear.

Hoonhout quotes a BLM spokesperson who's not going to let a few measly facts get in the way of his narrative:

DeRay Mckesson, described in the Post as “a leading voice of the Black Lives Matter movement” told the paper that “Black and Brown people have been shot and arrested for far less.”

“Black people would not have even gotten into the building. They would have started shooting at them the minute they started to rush at the police,” he said.

How Mckesson, Biden, Harris or Brooks know any of this none of them tell us, but their lack of any warrant for their inflammatory claims doesn't diminish their certainty. They just know it's true because they know that the Capitol police, many of whom are black themselves, are eager for the chance to shoot black rioters.

It's as incredible as it is disgusting that Biden, et al. would so shamelessly slander the men and women of the Capitol police force while the corpses of their fellow officers were yet warm simply to score political points.

The left, it seems, has no desire to promote racial harmony. Rather they have a deep ideological and political interest in generating as much friction between blacks and whites as they can.

The actor Morgan Freeman was once interviewed by Mike Wallace and gave what I think to be the best advice on how we should handle race in this country. Wallace asked Freeman, "How are we going to get rid of it (racism)?" To which Freeman responded, "Stop talking about it, I'm going to stop calling you a white man, and you're going to stop calling me a black man. I'll know you as Mike Wallace, and you will know me as Morgan Freeman."

Such simple advice. Why don't more people heed it?