Pat Buchanan: Baltimore needs ‘decisive force’

The mainstream media is filled with quotes from officials and others offering excuses for lawlessness and violence in the city of Baltimore. But conservative activist, television pundit and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has a simple response.

No excuses.

In an exclusive interview with WND, the author of numerous bestsellers including “The Death of the West” and “Suicide of a Superpower” took aim at journalists trying to explain away the savagery.

“The arson, looting, vandalism and violence that have ravaged Baltimore should have been met days ago with superior and decisive force. There is no justification, no rationale, no excuse for what has been going on in the streets of Baltimore. None,” he said.

In contrast to Buchanan’s views, Salon published an article headline “Baltimore’s violent protesters are right: Smashing police cars is a legitimate political strategy.” The website also promoted the article with a Tweet endorsing the destruction of private property, featuring a burning police car.

Burning police cars and destroying private property is a legitimate political strategy http://t.co/Rx7RxQzLwr http://ift.tt/1Fux35o

— Salon.com (@Salon) April 28, 2015

The article is a reprint from a blog entitled “Radical Faggot.”

Get Pat Buchanan’s “The Death of the West.”

Thus far, 15 police officers have been injured in the protests, with one remaining unresponsive and in critical condition.

Yet despite the human cost of such rationalizations, Salon is not alone.

CNN’s Sally Kohn says that looting is a shame, but “police violence” against the black community is worse.

Looting a real shame. But FAR MORE shameful is pattern of police violence against black community! Perspective, people. #BaltimoreRising

— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) April 27, 2015

Marc Lamont Hill of CNN, BET, and the Huffington Post called the riots in Baltimore an “uprising.” #BaltimoreUprising was also trending on Twitter for most of the day.

Riots are what happened in Kentucky after the basketball team lost the championship.What we’re seeing is an international wave of UPRISINGS.

— Marc Lamont Hill (@marclamonthill) April 28, 2015

Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic wrote an article entitled “Nonviolence as Compliance” arguing police are aggressors and calls for order are a trick.

As he put it, “When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.”

The website VOX, which claims it “explains the news” and recently published an extensive interview with President Barack Obama, called Coates’ description of the “war” in Baltimore “the perfect response to anyone calling for nonviolence.”

Lest anyone miss the implication, the picture accompanying the Tweet was a young rioter in a hoodie throwing a rock.

This is the perfect response to anyone calling for nonviolence in Baltimore http://t.co/XRZjjSLCfN http://ift.tt/1GrkGTC

— Vox (@voxdotcom) April 28, 2015

Elected officials are also cautious about forthrightly condemning the violence. Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has been accused of enabling further disorder because of her statement the city would provide “space” to protesters who wanted to “destroy stuff.”

And Obama seemingly faulted the Baltimore police for the riots by saying there were “troubling questions”about police officers interacting with African-Americans.

Buchanan says this is not the first time the United States has experienced the collapse of its institutions because of the irresponsibility of national leaders.

“What we are witnessing today is the same moral cowardice and moral paralysis we saw in too many cities and on too many campuses in the 1960s, when urban rioters and student anarchists ran wild, until America rose up and threw out a hand-wringing establishment that had temporized in the face of it,” he said.

Buchanan was one of the leading advisers to Richard Nixon when, as a candidate, Nixon embraced “law and order” as a key theme of his 1968 campaign.

In Buchanan’s “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority,” Buchanan quotes Nixon’s piece warning against mob rule, which asserted there had been a “deterioration of respect for the rule of law all across America…[that] can be traced directly to the spread of the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to disobey and when to disobey them.”

As a candidate in his own right, Buchanan also made a memorable statement on urban disorder by referring to the 1992 Los Angeles Riots during his keynote address at the Republican National Convention.

Recalling how the arrival of National Guard troops forced rioters away from a senior citizens home, Buchanan intoned, “When the troopers arrived, M16s at the ready, the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated. It had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, and backed by moral courage.”

Meanwhile, in Baltimore, a housing complex under construction that was to be used for the benefit of senior citizens was destroyed during the riots. The Associated Press has reported the cause of the blaze was linked to the unrest.

In response to such violence, Buchanan had simple advice for Obama and presidential candidates of both parties.

“The root cause of riots is rioters, and the answer is ever the same if we are to remain a free society – the swift and unapologetic restoration of law and order.

“What is needed today is not solicitude or empathy for the lawbreakers and rioters, but unequivocal condemnation of them, by the president and those in both parties who aspire to succeed him.”

 

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