The Patriot Post® · The Democrats' Urban Violence Strategy: Blame Trump

In congressional testimony before New York Democrat Jerry Nadler’s House Judiciary Committee this week, Democrats attempted to “cancel” Attorney General William Barr. The absurd exercise came off as a brilliant and steadfast witness being cross-examined by a gang of petulant adolescents. Barr’s opening statement gave those adolescents fair warning about how the day was going to play out. And by day’s end, as columnist Michael Goodwin quipped, “He came, he saw, he ate their lunch.”

Among the highlights of Barr’s testimony, he gave Democrats (and everyone else who tuned in) a brutal reality check on their manufactured claims of “systemic racism” and the absurdity of their deadly “defund the police” charade.

Moreover, he exposed the Left’s lie that the violent urban riots in Democrat-controlled cities across the nation are merely “peaceful protests,” declaring: “To state what should be obvious, peaceful protesters do not throw explosives into federal courthouses, tear down plywood with crowbars, or launch fecal matter at federal officers. Such acts are in fact federal crimes under statutes enacted by this Congress.”

Barr noted further: “As elected officials of the federal government, every Member of this Committee — regardless of your political views or your feelings about the Trump Administration — should condemn violence against federal officers and destruction of federal property. So should state and local leaders who have a responsibility to keep their communities safe. To tacitly condone destruction and anarchy is to abandon the basic rule-of-law principles that should unite us even in a politically divisive time. At the very least, we should all be able to agree that there is no place in this country for armed mobs that seek to establish autonomous zones beyond government control, or tear down statues and monuments that law-abiding communities chose to erect, or to destroy the property and livelihoods of innocent business owners. The most basic responsibility of government is to ensure the rule of law, so that people can live their lives safely and without fear. The Justice Department will continue working to meet that solemn responsibility.”

We note that earlier this week, Nadler, when asked, “Do you disavow the violence from antifa?” responded, “That’s, that’s, that’s a myth that’s being spread only in Washington D.C.”

Predictably, the Democrat-enabled riots, particularly those in Left Coast urban centers, have escalated. The racist leaders of the Marxist “Black Lives Matter” movement, and their fascist “antifa blackout” allies, are leading the violent assaults.

The seditionist insurrections are fueled by the deliberate inaction of local and state Democrats, who have withdrawn their law enforcement officers (LEOs) and implied that they are the problem — thus enabling the riots to metastasize unabated. The model for inaction was Minneapolis, the epicenter of the BLM/antifa riots.

The objective of the Demo inaction strategy is to force President Donald Trump to send in federal LEOs with the objective of defending critical federal infrastructure, making those officers and locations high-profile targets for the Left’s hate mobs. The Demos and their Leftmedia outlets have characterized those federal LEOs as “Trump troops,” thereby giving mayors an opening to blame-shift the urban violence they are fomenting to Trump.

Witness this week the gaggle of Demo mayors demanding congressional action to prohibit Trump from sending federal LEOs to their cities. This is political theater, and it’s meant to keep the deployment of federal LEOs front and center in the nightly MSM riot coverage. Demos are feigning displeasure, but the more LEOs Trump sends, the more likely they’ll be targeted, and the greater the Demos’ ability to blame-shift the violence to Trump.

Joe Biden even popped up to play, insisting Trump is “trying to come up with a bizarre ‘law and order’ 2020 campaign thing to try to scare the devil out of the American people.”

For some, however, the blame-shifting strategy isn’t going well. In Seattle and Portland, some “peaceful protesters” didn’t get the Demo memo and turned their anger toward the cities’ mayors. Consequently, in Oregon, that state’s inept Governor Kate Brown had to step in and bail out Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler by announcing that most federal LEOs will depart the city and be replaced by state troopers, saving Wheeler from the responsibility of redeploying his own police.

Meanwhile, Operation Legend is expanding to other overrun cities. And the Demos will continue trying to hang the riots around the president’s neck, just as they have with the fear and misery of the CV19 pandemic.

Update: In Portland, Oregon, where the mayor and city council are defunding police and refusing to prosecute rioters, the Oregon State Police, who were called in by the governor and mayor to relieve federal law enforcement officials, fired a strong shot over the bow of that state’s politicians. In an official statement announcing they were pulling out of Portland, the OSP declared: “The Oregon State Police is continually reassessing our resources and the needs of our partner agencies and at this time we are inclined to move those resources back to counties where prosecution of criminal conduct is still a priority.” And, read this response from a police officer.