The Patriot Post® · Rioting: Great 'Work' if You Can Get It

News out of Philly yesterday bodes well for the January 6 rioters — especially those who were injured that day during confrontations with Capitol Police and other law enforcement officers.

As Fox 29 Philadelphia reports, “The city of Philadelphia has reached a record-breaking settlement with protesters who were hit with tear gas and pepper spray during protests against police brutality in the summer of 2020.”

Some of those rioters complained that the aforementioned exposure to riot-quelling chemicals required hospitalization and inflicted mental trauma. The poor babies.

“While this is just one step in the direction toward reconciliation,” said Philly Mayor Jim Kenney, “we hope this settlement will provide some healing from the harm experienced by people in their neighborhoods in West Philadelphia and during demonstrations on I-676 in 2020.”

Welp, so much for law and order in the City of Brotherly Thuggery. But, hey, it’s not like the deep-blue burg is blood-red with crime. Not like Larry Krasner, the city’s soft-on-crime Soros DA, has presided over an explosion of violent crime in recent years. It’s not like that at all.

Oh, wait.

“The record-breaking settlement was announced Monday by law firm Mincey Fitzpatrick Ross, LLC, which represented 237 people who were injured during protests held in Philadelphia on May 31 and June 1, 2020,” Fox News reports.

Adding insult to injury, Fox says, “The city will also stop participating in a federal program that provides extra military equipment to local police departments.”

If we didn’t know better, we’d swear this seemed like some sort of twisted legal lotto — like the kind that enriched handsupdontshoot Michael Brown’s parents to the tune of $1.5 million, or the kind that enriched Freddie Gray’s family by $6.4 million.

We don’t mean to imply that Brown’s and Gray’s lives were meaningless — not at all. But the cash payout in such cases seems sleazy and unbecoming.

Here’s a grim but telling stat to chew on, courtesy of a new paper published by the Crime Prevention Research Center’s John Lott: There are 3,007 counties in these United States, but a stunning 56% of our nation’s murders occur in just 2% of those counties — counties that contain cities like Philly, New York City, LA, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, DC, Dallas, Memphis, Miami, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Houston, and the like.

Care to guess which political party runs each of those cities?

Sadly, though, the electoral idiocy of The Mob isn’t a new thing. Indeed, it’s nearly as old as criminal behavior itself. As 17th-century French diplomat Joseph de Maistre rather undiplomatically put it, every people gets the government they deserve. Perhaps nowhere is this maxim more true than in Philly, where the city’s residents, courtesy of their self-described “progressive prosecutor,” continue to get it good and hard.

And what’s that you say about the J6 rioters? That perhaps they’re not in for the same sort of lucrative settlement as Philly’s BLM rioters? Really?

All sarcasm aside, everyone who’s read our regular rumination knows that there are two tiers of justice in this country — a kid-gloved one for those on the Left and an iron-fisted one for those on the Right.

Two tiers. Separate and unequal. There oughta be a law.