Eddie Scarry of the Washington Examiner looks into the cities where residents fear unrest on Election Day.
The next time a cable news anchor mentions the perpetual “growing threat of right-wing violence in America” (which, for some reason, never becomes much more than a “threat”), I’d like them to also name the list of cities preparing for mass rioting on Election Day.
Here’s a hint: None of them voted for President Trump in 2016.
CNN earlier this month reported that “police department leaders in cities from Baltimore to Seattle and Portland … have prohibited officers from taking days off around the election.”
Bloomberg reported likewise that “Chicago, Philadelphia and New York are among cities that have revealed plans to prevent violence on Nov. 3, when election observers worry polling sites could be targeted, or in the weeks that follow if historic levels of mail-in ballots preclude the declaration of an immediate winner.”
In Washington, D.C., where I live, office and apartment buildings in and around downtown have spent the past week boarding up their doors and windows for the exact same thing. Students at George Washington University are being advised by administrators to have “at least one week of food, supplies and medicine” stored up, just as they would “for a hurricane or snowstorm that would prevent you from going outside for several days.” (The district is ranked by Forbes as the second-most liberal city in the United States.)
I’d like for a very smart person somewhere to name just one Republican-led city where this is happening.
It’s not happening. That’s because, just as we saw over the summer with the Black Lives Matter riots, violence and looting in response to political events is an exclusively liberal phenomenon.
But the media talk about this as if they’re oblivious to the pattern. It’s simply one more sign, they say, of our “divisive” politics.
