Here’s How We Know Biden Isn’t Sincere About ‘Condemning’ Violence

I&I Editorial

Joe Biden wants the public to believe that he’s always deemed violence “unacceptable,” even when it’s perpetrated by leftists. But when he and his party held the national spotlight just two weeks ago, they were cheering on the same thugs as “peaceful protesters.”

“I condemn violence of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right,” Biden said on Monday.

That’s certainly news to anyone of the millions who watched his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Biden had absolutely nothing whatsoever to say about the ongoing violence around the country. Zip. Zero. Nada.

By the time he made his acceptance speech, more than two dozen people had died in “protests.” Dozens of police officers had been injured and at least one lost his life. Many dead are “African Americans, compounding the tragedy for black families,” the Associated Press reported well before Biden’s speech.

As we reported here Tuesday, the financial toll of the riots is measured in billions of dollars.

Yet the only time the word “violence” appeared in Biden’s convention address was when he brought up the 2017 mayhem of Charlottesville, Virginia, which he used only to set up his Big Lie that President Donald Trump had praised white supremacists by saying there were “very fine people on both sides.”

What is it that the left says these days? Oh, yeah: “Silence is violence.”

During the entire four days, with tens of millions of people tuning in and the chance to “condemn violence of every kind,” not a single speaker at the Democrats’ convention did so. Every one of them was silent.

We searched through the transcripts of the four days, and the only time the word “protesters” was uttered was after the adjective “peaceful” — seven times on day one of the convention, in fact.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, in one invocation of the term, complained that Trump had “deployed the military and federal agents against peaceful protesters.”

There was no mention of violence in the streets, or burning or looting, or deaths and injuries. No one defended the police who were being targeted by rioters. In fact, any mention of police was almost always in the context of police brutality or negligence.

Biden’s vice presidential pick, Sen. Kamala Harris, blamed “the excessive use of force by police” on “structural racism.”

The word “riot” was never uttered.

Democrats did talk about “gun violence” a lot (more than a dozen times, to support Biden’s gun control measures), as well as “violence against women” (to praise Biden for his role in the 1994 Violence Against Women Act).

Outside the convention, Democrats at the federal, state, and local levels were bending over backward to make excuses for rioters and defend looters. They kept them out of jail, let them run roughshod over the police, and refused offers by the Trump administration to help restore law and order.

As The Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano put it, “organized crime of all kinds thrives when it can exploit weak enforcement and gaps between local, state, and federal law enforcement.”

So when Democrats suddenly tell you that they “condemn” the violence that has been going on for months, ask them why they ignored it during their carefully staged convention.

Ask them why they didn’t use that massive bully pulpit to attack the violent mobs who were terrorizing people across the country.

Ask them why they didn’t aggressively denounce left-wing groups for organizing and planning violent actions.

Ask them why, when they had the nation’s attention, they didn’t stand up for the innocent people – many of them black – who have suffered physically, emotionally and economically from “racial justice” mobs.

If Democrats were being honest, they would answer by saying that they couldn’t condemn the riots — sorry, mostly peaceful protests — for fear of alienating their far-left base. So instead they spent four days blaming Trump for COVID-19 and spinning dark conspiracies about the postal service.

It was only after Democratic pollsters started to notice that the lawlessness was hurting their electoral chances that they decided to acknowledge it at all. And every supposed denunciation of the murderous leftists is merely an excuse to blame Trump.

Biden even had the audacity to demand Trump “join me” in calling for an end to the violence.

Silence equals violence, all right. And up until now, the Democrats’ silence on the left-wing riots has been deafening.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board