Rudy Giuliani, known for his offensive racist remarks every time there is a police-involved shooting, went on Fox News’ Fox & Friends Monday morning to claim that protests turned violent in Milwaukee “makes Donald Trump’s point that law and order is out of control in America.”
The source of Giuliani’s outrage this time is the police shooting of an armed suspect in Milwaukee, which has led to demonstrations which have turned violent. The officer and suspect in this case are both African-Americans.
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported Monday morning that,
For a second night, disorder hit Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood late Sunday, with protesters throwing rocks, bricks and glass bottles at police, shots ringing out and a shooting victim rescued by officers and whisked to a hospital in an armored vehicle.
The disturbances came as the city coped with the aftermath of Saturday night’s violence that followed a police shooting of an armed suspect.To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
Naturally, Fox News’ Steve Doocy was eager to politicize the incident and resultant protests in order to make the oft-repeated conservative talking point that law and order is breaking down in America, and that this requires Donald Trump’s very-small-but-apparently-very-strong-though-unable-to-serve-in-Vietnam hands:
STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): Rudy, what do you make of the sheriff and the governor activating the National Guard just in case?
RUDY GIULIANI: What I make of this is how bad things have become in America. When we have a riot in a police situation in which we don’t know all the facts yet. First of all, you should never have a riot. Number two, you should never — even if the facts were bad, you should never presume anyone guilty. Criminals aren’t presumed guilty, police officers are. Here, the police chief has told us, and there seem to be some witnesses, that this guy had a gun, he was running away, turned around, and pointed the gun at the police officer.
DOOCY: Right.
GIULIANI: So now we have two black men. The black perpetrator running away and a black police officer. What was the black police officer supposed to do? Wait and get shot and then shoot back? And doesn’t his life matter? Doesn’t the fact that he had to take action in self-defense matter? Because, otherwise, instead of talking about this man being — this other man being dead, we’d be talking about a black man being dead, namely a black police officer. And where’s Black Lives Matter defending him? He took action in self-defense. I’m sorry, if a guy runs away from a police officer, and the guy turns around and points a gun at him —
DOOCY: You’re in trouble.
GIULIANI: Is the new rule, I have to get shot first before I shoot back? Of course it isn’t. So, if they can riot over something like this, it makes Donald Trump’s point that law and order is out of control in America. And it’s out of control not because we’ve having bad weather. It’s out of control, from the very top, we’ve had two years of anti-police rhetoric. Anti-police, disgusting comments. Hillary Clinton, right at the beginning of her announcement, proclaimed all the police officers in Baltimore guilty. They turned out all to be not to be guilty. Three found not guilty by an African American judge. And she’s never apologized for that. In other words, she found them guilty before they were found innocent. It’s supposed to, in America, work the other way around, Ms. Clinton. I’m sorry. And that atmosphere created by the president, Mrs. Clinton, first [former Attorney General Eric] Holder, now the Justice Department. The four police officers get cleared and the Justice Department puts Baltimore police under arrest. Ferguson situation, the guy had his hands up. Never happened. Seven witnesses, I’ve read the testimony of some of those witnesses, some of whom were African American, said that he never had his hands up, he was charging the police officer. That officer is found not-indictable, and Obama’s own Justice Department, which we know is extensively anti-police officer —
DOOCY: Very political.
GIULIANI: And they’ve brought a lot of cases that never should have been brought against police officers, found no charges. Yet no one apologizes for going around saying “hands up.” So, what they’ve done is, it is absolutely fair to say they’ve created an atmosphere in which this kind of rioting can happen when a perfectly justifiable shooting happens between men of the same race.
Rudy Giuliani has been rightly condemned by The New York Times Editorial Board for his peddling of poisonous disinformation, and unsurprisingly he is the Fox News go-to guy when its time to condemn all blacks for any violence that takes place anywhere involving a young black man and police officers.
Unfortunately, Giuliani has not taken Seth Meyers’ well-intentioned advice that he “should probably just shut the f*ck up,†and continues instead to spread his poisonous disinformation: blacks are guilty, President Obama is guilty, Hillary Clinton is guilty.
All without benefit of a trial, and all on Giuliani’s say-so, despite his insistence here that “you should never presume anyone guilty.” Obviously, there is an unspoken disclaimer that this presumption of innocence applies to you only if you’re not black.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
