Baltimore ‘Protesters,’ You Are Not Fighting Injustice. You Are The Injustice.

Matt Walsh:

It bears repeating: the “protesters” in Baltimore aren’t fighting injustice — they are the injustice.

They are violence and destruction. There is no message. There is no voice to be heard. There is no consideration we should give these people. Their actions deserve only condemnation, and that’s all.

A Baltimore council member appeared on Fox News last night and lightly chastised the rioters for “speaking out in a very wrong way.” But, no, they’re not. They’re not speaking out in a wrong way. They’re not speaking out at all. These people are communicating nothing but chaos and greed. That’s what happens when you destroy your own community to make a point. Immediately and completely, your point is moot. Nobody cares what you have to say, nor should they. You are now the problem.

You lose the right to be taken seriously the moment you start demolishing drug stores and chucking rocks. I think that’s a reasonable rule, isn’t it? I don’t have to listen to you if your method of communication involves burning a city to the ground. That’s fair, right?

Let’s make another thing clear: apologists will argue that only a small group of “agitators” are responsible for the riots while everyone else was peaceful, but that’s bull crap.

There were no peaceful protestors in Baltimore last night. You don’t end up with 144 vehicles on fire, 15 buildings torched, and 200 arrests from just a small group of agitators. This was an entire inner city erupting in violence. This was dozens of square miles plagued by riots and looting.

This is a war zone, and there have already been 15 officer seriously maimed in the melee.

There were no peaceful protests. This was a citywide riot. Period.

To be honest, I’m taking this one personally because I’ve lived in the Baltimore area for most of my life. I know the town very well. Those places you see on the news are familiar to me, except this is the first time I’ve had the chance to see them all in flames.

My family lives there. My parents aren’t far from where this violence is beginning to spill into.

I’m in Utah as I write this, but my wife and kids are still in Maryland, and she and my parents and my sister were planning a trip to the Baltimore Zoo yesterday. Fortunately, they decided to cancel. If they hadn’t, they would have been a half a mile from where swarms of black teens were tearing the Mondawmin Mall to shreds.

But then, the zoo hasn’t been the safest destination for a while now.

People who’ve lived around Baltimore know that it’s all been slowly consumed and destroyed by inner city elements, and now perhaps that process will be completed in dramatic fashion.

When I was a kid, I used to hang out at the Owings Mills Mall, just four miles from my house and not far from downtown. But then you started hearing about the shootings in the parking lot, and the gangs, and then one night my parents walked right into a drug bust outside the food court, and that was it. Another thing taken from us.

It’s politically incorrect but it’s true: they built a subway stop next to the mall, allowing people from the city to come, and next thing you know the mall is a dangerous, crime-infested ghost town. This is how it always worked. I’ve seen it play out around here dozens of times.

I’m angry about that. I’m allowed to be angry about that.

Maybe this is my way of venting. I think I should be allowed to vent with the written word if these thugs can vent by attacking police officers, lighting senior centers on fire, and looting liquor stores — and still have the media rush to their defense to insist that we should appreciate their anger.

They’re looting for a purpose, we’re told. It’s a movement.

Nonsense.

This is not a movement, it’s just crime. Cops are in hospital beds today. Businesses are destroyed. Homes are in ashes. This town — my town, our town — is reeling because of what these vicious sociopaths have done, and are continuing to do. The place that gave birth to the National Anthem has been turned into a national disgrace.

So, you know what? Screw their anger. Their anger is irrelevant. Their plight, their experience, their background, none of it justifies anything we’ve witnessed. None of it entitles them to act like animals. None of it provides “context” when you ignite buildings then cut the hose as firefighters try to put it out.

Anger. Hey, we’re all angry. Life is difficult and it makes you angry sometimes. Most of us can deal with it in ways that don’t involve firebombing cop cars. Why can’t they? And the rest of us have an extra reason to be angry this morning, after we watched a community turn this country into Beirut.

Yeah, I’m angry about that. And I’m angry that many parts of Baltimore have been a crime ridden cesspool for decades. I’m angry that Baltimore has had one of the highest murder rates in the nation for years, and not due to cops shooting black people, but due to black people shooting black people.

I’m angry that even before these riots, I had to be nervous about bringing my family to the Inner Harbor because of the roving bands of black teens who’d decided to start assaulting and robbing white visitors.

I’m angry that this is the town where a group of black people attacked, robbed, and stripped a white guy naked in the middle of the street for no reason at all, and were never charged with a hate crime.

I’m angry because there are clearly deeply ingrained problems in the inner city black community, but we never talk about them. No matter what happens, they can raze the whole city to rubble, and still we meekly stand to the sidelines and lecture about oppression and racism.

More nonsense.

They’re not oppressed. I mean, good Lord, they were essentially allowed to loot and riot at will last night. I think an oppressive system would have dealt a bit more harshly with them. Indeed, the system should have been more oppressive against this chaos. Rubber bullets, tear gas, fire hose, whatever it takes. Bring out the bus and start arresting people by the dozens.

Yeah, I’m angry.

And I’m especially angry at the narrative.

We’re constantly informed that black people are under attack, yet every symbolic case they choose involves the death of a black person who happened to also be a known criminal.

We still don’t know the circumstances surrounding Freddie Gray’s death (but obviously we should assume, because our assumptions have always been proven correct in the past). We only know that he was arrested and while in custody he was fatally injured.

It certainly seems possible, even likely, that something illegal happened on the part of one or two or several officers. If that is the case, the perpetrators should be brought to justice.

But either way, the fact remains that Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray were not law abiding, helpful, constructive members of society. That doesn’t mean they deserved to die, but it does mean they put themselves in a category of people who are more likely to be involved in violent interactions with cops. And that category isn’t “black people” — it’s “criminals.”

Freddie Gray was a known drug dealer with 18 arrests on his record, yet people have the nerve to complain that we was profiled. Of course he was profiled. He was a thug. A perpetual problem. Is it unreasonable that police officers, somewhere around maybe the 12th or 13th time they arrest you in the span of a couple of years, might start to be suspicious?

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