“You’re not stealing that TV to honor George Floyd or protest police brutality. You’re stealing that TV because you’re a POS,” conservative commentator Ben Shapiro tweeted when looting began following the death of George Floyd during an arrest by Minneapolis police on Monday.
Perhaps a powerful illustration of the truth of Shapiro’s blunt remarks was the attack on a wheelchair-bound woman in the entryway to a Target store in Minneapolis on Wednesday. The woman, identified as Jennifer, attempted to use her wheelchair to block looters from leaving the chain store with all sorts of merchandise.
After the attack on her with a fire extinguisher, Jennifer told a bystander, “I was peacefully protesting and trying to block the way so they couldn’t leave with carfuls of stuff. They attacked me from front and back, they punched me in my mouth and my head. I got punched in the head several times. I got grabbed from behind, people grabbed my wheelchair, they stole my keys, everything they could off me.”
Jennifer added, “I got maced in the face, I got covered in fire extinguisher stuff.”
Incredibly, the looters claimed they were acting in self-defense! Even The Daily Mail seemed to mitigate the seriousness of the attack upon Jennifer by saying, “While some deplored the video as a brutal attack on a disabled woman, others saw Jennifer as the aggressor and the fire extinguisher as an act of self-defense.”
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This would be much like Jesse James arguing that one of the victims of his years of robbing banks, trains, and stagecoaches trying to block the path of Jesse, his brother Frank, the Younger brothers, and other members of his gang from leaving the bank with a pile of cash was the real aggressor. Much like today’s criminal looters, the James gang justified their robberies and murders as simply continuing the “cause of the South” in the years following the Civil War.
Some in the modern gang of criminal looters argued that Jennifer had a knife (as though law-abiding citizens are the aggressors if they are armed and can defend themselves), which therefore somehow justified one of the looters covering her in foam from a fire extinguisher.
Conservative writer Andy Ngo shared footage of the brutal attack upon the wheelchair-bound woman on social media.
While foam shot from the fire extinguisher covered the disabled Jennifer, many in the crowed of looters cheered, and some threw objects at her. Others fled the scene.
Some have argued that stealing from stores such as Target and small businesses is a way to “increase the cost” of police brutality, and thus make it less likely in the future. Regardless of the merits of that argument, the people being hurt in such a scenario had nothing to do with the death of George Floyd.
Violent protests have rocked Minneapolis since Monday, when Floyd, a black man, was being arrested by local police. Officer Derek Chauvin, a 19-year veteran of the department, and three other officers involved in arresting Floyd, all white, were fired Tuesday. Chauvin was recorded on a mobile phone with his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than seven minutes, all while spectators could be heard for the officer to get off Floyd’s neck, with one shouting, “You’re f*****g stopping his breathing there, bro.”
Floyd pleaded with the officer that he could not breathe until he eventually passed out, and his listless body was placed in an ambulance. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Predictably, many attempted to make the tragic death of Floyd a racial incident, although there is absolutely no evidence that the police officers did what they did to Floyd simply because he was black. Presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden lost little time interjecting race into the incident, arguing that it was “part of an ingrained, systemic cycle of injustice that still exists in this country,” and that it “sends a very clear message to the black community and black lives that are under threat every single day.” It is certainly part of Biden’s message to stoke understandable black outrage for his own political gain, even while violent riots rock the city. Only a few days earlier, Biden had insisted that a black person even thinking about voting for President Donald Trump “ain’t black.”
Such incendiary rhetoric only throws gasoline on the fire of the situation in Minneapolis and is highly irresponsible coming from a man who wants to be president of the United States. Rather than attempting to calm the situation, Biden and others on the Left would prefer to use the unfortunate events in Minnesota for their own political advantage.
It is highly unlikely that Biden or any other liberal political figure or news reporters will condemn the actions taken against the courageous Jennifer.
Image: screenshot from YouTube video
Steve Byas is a university instructor of government and history and is the author of History’s Greatest Libels. He can be contacted at [email protected].
