OPINION:
According to the Bible, God instructed the ancient Hebrews about how to make sacrifices in his honor and to atone for sin at the Temple in Jerusalem.
They offered up drink, grain and animals. History has borne out that if people do not worship their creator, they will worship false gods, including themselves.
Pagan societies, on the other hand, such as the Aztecs, Toltecs, druids and others sacrificed human beings. We need not recount the details. It’s enough to know how little they valued human life, or at least human lives not their own.
I thought about this while reading about the progressive left’s latest cancel culture sacrifice. The mob regularly serves up a victim to signal its own virtue. It follows the advice of Marxist strategist Saul Alinsky to “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
Former President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, was hauled off an airplane on June 3 and treated like a dangerous felon by FBI agents at Reagan Airport on his way to a TV show in Nashville. He had sued the Democrats’ Jan. 6 committee three days earlier over its subpoenaing him to testify about what he contends are constitutionally protected, confidential discussions in the Oval Office.
Colleges regularly demonize conservatives and cancel appearances, thus “purifying” the campuses. And the mob is still trying to destroy Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Mr. Trump.
This week’s sacrificial victim is Washington Commanders Defensive Coordinator Jack Del Rio. Mr. Del Rio did two things to incite the mob.
First, he recounted in a tweet how serious the 2020 BLM/Antifa race riots were in 2020 and asked why we are not talking about them. His comment came in reaction to media hysteria surrounding the Jan. 6 committee hearings, which kicked off Thursday night.
In the “peaceful protests” of 2020, rioters torched cities, murdered scores of people, beat and wounded hundreds, and caused more than $2 billion in property damage. Few were charged with any crime.
What’s more, lawlessness continues in cities where Democrats have demonized police, defunded them and, as in San Francisco, “decriminalized” offenses, making that city unlivable. (Frisco voters just ousted leftwing District Attorney Chesa Boudin in a recall, so there’s hope for the City by the Bay.)
The more grievous sin that Mr. Del Rio committed was his contrasting the BLM/Antifa riots with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot:
“I can look at images on the TV [of the George Floyd protests] — people’s livelihoods are being destroyed. Businesses are being burned down. No problem. And then we have a dust-up at the Capitol, nothing burned down, and we’re going to make that a major deal. I just think it’s kind of two standards, and if we apply the same standard and we’re going to be reasonable with each other, let’s have a discussion. That’s all it was. Let’s have a discussion.”
He later apologized for using the term “dustup,” but didn’t back away from his point that the 2020 riots should get far more attention. He spoke for millions of Americans, appalled at the city-by-city destruction while Washington gazed at its navel and made Jan. 6 out to be an “insurrection” up there with Pearl Harbor as a “threat to our democracy.”
Washington Post sports columnist (no section is safe anymore) Barry Svrluga wrote that Mr. Del Rio is “unfit” to lead a football unit. He falsely accused Mr. Del Rio of floating the “offensive idea that the violence in these two cases are similar in origin.” Mr. Del Rio did no such thing.
Mr. Del Rio also noted, “I love being an American, and that means I’m free to express myself.” Well, we shall see about that in this time of cancel culture and spineless corporatism.
Mr. Svrluga spent several paragraphs justifying the 2020 riots as understandable because America is so racist. He misdescribed the Jan. 6 protesters as “an armed mob” (with no guns). Then, he burped up this:
“Condemn violence in all of its forms. But differentiate between fact and fiction, between systemic failures and vast conspiracies.”
You mean like the way his paper and The New York Times won Pulitzers for aiding and abetting the Russian collusion hoax while covering up Hillary Clinton’s weaponization of the FBI, CIA and Justice Department? They also ignored Hunter Biden’s laptop until the fix was in.
Mr. Svrluga takes the obligatory swipe at “the false notion that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump.”
I just finished reading Molly Hemingway’s book “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” She precisely documents election manipulation and media complicity that produced the Biden win.
Dinesh D’Souza’s film “2000 Mules” irrefutably reveals evidence of systemic vote fraud in several battleground state cities in the wee hours of Election Night. “False” and “baseless,” right?
I hope Mr. Del Rio survives to coach another day. It’s time the sacrificing “woke” mob went home empty-handed.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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