Ben Shapiro complains about “mostly peaceful” label for Black Lives Matter protests: “O.J. Simpson was mostly peaceful that night”
Published
Citation From the July 22, 2020, edition of The Joe Rogan Experience
JOE ROGAN (HOST): Well, people are panicking, you know, they're getting scared. And then the economy's collapsing. So the economy collapsing, at the same time as the George Floyd protests, led people to start looting. And then people that didn't give a fuck about George Floyd or Black Lives Matter were just stealing shit. And then this police was letting them steal shit. They were standing down in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, literally cops standing there while people were smashing doors.
BEN SHAPIRO (CONSERVATIVE COMMENTATOR): And the media, I've got to say, the media coverage of this stuff is just awful. The media were cheering this stuff on. They were simultaneously making two arguments that conflict with each other. One was, “These are mostly peaceful protests.” First of all, “mostly peaceful” is the most — it's the loosest, most loosely defined, arbitrarily applied term in history.
ROGAN: Well if you get fifty thousand people --
SHAPIRO: O.J. Simpson was mostly peaceful that night. O.J. Simpson was mostly peaceful that night — for like an hour and 15, he was really not peaceful — but for the other hours between sunset and sunrise, he was unbelievably peaceful.
Like, I've never heard this term before, where a protest turns into a vast riot — you know, wrecking all of Melrose — and everybody's like, “Well, it was mostly peaceful.” Well, what the — what is that?
ROGAN: That's so true.
SHAPIRO: What is that? So, how about this? How about you either say that the protesters and looters are two different groups of people, and we treat them differently? If you're protesting, that's First Amendment activity. The minute you shatter a store window, you go to jail. Right? That's the way this should run.
ROGAN: Yes, agreed.
SHAPIRO: Or, alternatively, if you're saying they're the same group, then they need to be treated as lawbreakers.
So, I believe the first — I believe if you're a protester, you should be protesting. If you're a looter and a rioter, then you should go to jail. But the media refuse to make that distinction, and then they act like the cops are the bad guys when they come in to arrest people who are violating the law.