I have been in broadcast TV news for decades. I can tell you that a conservative walks a lonely road in a newsroom, even more so in markets of any appreciable size. They are all about the leftist agenda, so in a city like Chicago with a mayor such as the leftist apologist they have (which replaced the leftist apologist that was thrown out of office last year), they will tout the liberal line. So it wasn’t a “mob”, it was a group of teenagers. It wasn’t theft, it was mischief. It wasn’t tend of thousands of dollars in property damage, it was expressing themselves. Like Ilhan Omar couching the 9/11/2001 attacks as “some people did something”. While a true statement, it fails to accurately describe it.
Words mean things. The right words are important. You can sell a rape an “undocumented date” and a drug deal as an “undocumented prescription” or car theft as ass “undocumented test drive” just like the left takes illegal aliens and euphemises them as “undocumented migrants”, or the new term that started last week, “newcomers”.
“A rose by any other name”, said Shakespeare, “would smell just as sweet.” The same applies to the stench of aberrant and unacceptable behavior that liberals always want to make smell, well, rosy. It wasn’t an urban mob, you see, it was just a bunch of teenagers, who if you read the copy that local news uses, “were just starting to turn their lives around”.
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Their constant attempts to make this kind of behavior normal, even good (what’ wrong with a bunch of teenagers??”) but if it’d YOUR store and YOUR merchandise getting plundered, it’d a different story entirely. “oh, but they’re insulted, let the insurance pay for it”. Right. The deductible comes out of whose pocket? The time and cost of clean up, the lack of stuff to sell while it gets replaced, the immeasurable but very real toll on employees that are stuck there while the wandering hordes commit their destruction, that doesn’t get paid for by insurance. And businesses pay higher premiums as a result. “They own a store, they are rich, they can afford it”. The people who say this (we the former mayor did) have never had to actually run a business.
As long as we allow liberals to downplay the actions of what we call criminals but they call constituents, it’s only gonna get worse.
I was faculty at a university. Were there conservatives? Yes. Do they speak out? No. Many were like me. To the other people in the building, I was a liberal. I knew how to play the game for my enjoyment. I was good at out-virtue signaling a liberal. Quick to describe Joe Biden as “too conservative”(liberals usually nodded their head).
I don’t have to worry about mobs of teens in Appalachia.