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Interestingly, the Black Lives Matter movement managed to cook up a new cause célèbre less than two months prior to a presidential election where polls indicate Donald Trump might be sliding past the nation’s anointed Dowager Empress of Chappaqua (with proper hullabaloo due to my friend Michael Walsh of PJ Media fame). We now have — in a battleground state! — nonstop rioting in North Carolina following one of those awful white-cop-shoots-peaceful-and-unarmed-black-saint occurrences, and so the entire nation must be engaged in paroxysms of self-doubt and introspection.

Interestingly, the tragedy in Charlotte is a bit less than the boilerplate standard. The white police officer firing the fatal bullet fails to measure up to the canon; as it happens, he suffers from a surfeit of melanin and can, it is inconvenient to say, be termed “black.” And the unarmed black victim, who we are reliably informed by the local hoi polloi was actually ensconced in the consumption of literature before so rudely interrupted by murderous violence, had not a book in his hand but actually a firearm.

And a criminal record Al Capone would not disparage.

That the white-cop-shoots-unarmed-black-man narrative happens to be wrong in every particular in Charlotte is hardly an impediment to the usual street theatre. In fact, we are told by one of the Usual Suspects Deray McKesson that the police “must be held accountable” — as though police shootings don’t generate public review everywhere in America.

As a digression of sorts, does one not notice two incontrovertible truths surrounding these increasingly tiresome events? First, there is the fact that the initial report of these shootings invariably contains details which are not just substantially, but in most cases existentially, inaccurate. And second, the correction of those inaccuracies almost always moves the fact pattern toward the reasonability of the “dastardly” police action in question. Why, one might be excused for believing there to be something akin to a “narrative war” in effect against American law enforcement.

And then, of course, there are the riots and looting which ensued immediately in Charlotte. Family members of the victim, one Keith Lamont Scott, took time out from decrying the “white devils” in the Charlotte-Mecklenberg Police Department — headed by a black man — to misrepresent in totality the circumstances of his death. They cast him as a “family man,” which in a sense is true, but for the fact that he had a criminal record a mile long and faced a lengthy stint in jail in his next encounter with police because of that past.

But Scott’s family cared little about the consequences of the post-shooting propaganda they laid down — it hardly mattered to them that the firestorm they touched off led to a dozen injuries and hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage just on the first night of the “demonstrations.” They were “angry,” and they would tell “their truth,” regardless of how palpably at odds with objective reality it was.

In the aftermath of this somewhat specious testimony, Charlotte descended into a helter-skelter Mardi Gras. “Protesters” decided their anger at injustice could only be served by plundering the local Wal-Mart, and the usual Black Lives Matter imperative — to find and block the nearest interstate highway — was met by occupying I-85 and looting and burning a number of tractor trailers thereupon. There was also the obligatory black racist violence, including the multiple violent attacks on police officers, an attempt to throw a CNN reporter on top of an impromptu bonfire thanks to his surfeit of pallor, and a widely publicized video segment of several black toughs beating a white man and stripping off his clothes in a parking garage as he pleaded for his life.

Finally, North Carolina’s governor Pat McCrory, a Republican who has accumulated a fine record of conservative governance amid a cacophony of leftist wailing — regarding his reactionary views about keeping biological males out of ladies’ bathrooms, his favor of a flat state income tax and his support of hydraulic fracturing — had enough. McCrory called in the National Guard to quell the unrest in the state’s largest city.

But of course when the National Guard came, they were faced with a question — how far should they go in quieting the streets?

After all, there were “peaceful” protesters therein. The ones who didn’t pillage a Wal-Mart or tractor-trailers on the highway, or locally-owned small businesses who made the mistake of leaving cash in their cash registers.

Shouldn’t those righteously indignant folks have a By-God constitutional right to offer up their indignation for CNN?

Actually, no — not in the practical sense.

Here’s where reality intrudes. Yeah, sure — you can call the local shyster from ACLU and make the case that you have the right to protest on the streets, no matter how stupid you look when you’re captured on video. You even have the right to make yourself look like an assclown when someone shows up and attempts to bridge the gap between the police and the protesters.

But when you do these things, you soak up resources that — in the case of Charlotte and so many others this year — need to be used to safeguard life and property while the worst people on earth are busy destroying life and property on the basis of a lie.

If you’re “protesting” while rioting is taking place, then you’re rioting. Once the looting, burning and beating begins your high-minded demonstration, if that’s what it is, is gone. You are now either on the side of law and order, or you are not. You are either willing to assist the local law enforcement in keeping the streets you live on free of mayhem, or you are not. Insisting that the police expend resources to keep your protest safe while local businesses are looted and burned and your fellow citizens are attacked for their skin color doesn’t make you righteous; it makes you selfish and wicked.

Which in this country no longer appears to carry much social opprobrium.

Maybe we should bring that back. Maybe it’s time to recognize that while you have rights designated to you from a God you likely don’t even credit, your responsibility to exercise those rights in a virtuous manner is what makes of you a citizen rather than merely a warm body pledged to the Democrats on Election Day. Maybe it’s time to call out those who do more harm than good.

If we decide to go there, we have more than enough examples in Charlotte to point to. Those aren’t protests for a worthy cause, they’re riots based on lies and post-adolescent rage. The people involved don’t have anything valuable to say; no one with a legitimate grievance against the police expresses such by looting tractor trailers on the interstate.

But you won’t hear this from the apologists for Black Lives Matter, which is no grassroots movement but rather a George Soros subsidiary aimed at mobilizing the captive African-American electorate. McKesson offers himself as a recreant revolutionary who, when arrested earlier this year in Baton Rouge for trying to lead others in blocking an interstate like the Charlotte demonstrators successfully managed, whined like a child about grainy prison orange juice; he makes a six-figure public sector salary courtesy of the Baltimore schools.

But there they are in Charlotte, clapping each other on the back for their “activism” while serving to enable the worst elements of society in looting and violence.

The day is coming when this cute charade comes to an end. The “peaceful protest” organized by the out-of-town radical chic set which miraculously coincides with mayhem won’t much longer be credited as such. The crackdown is coming — either this year, or, should the American people exhaust their patience and opt for a new political status quo, certainly in the next.

Scott McKay
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator  and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It's All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
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