Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon: BLM Riots Were Better Than Capitol Riots

Apparently determined to squander the last remaining shreds of their credibility, CNN hosts Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon engaged in a conversation Tuesday night in which they compared to BLM/Antifa riots of last summer with the Capitol siege of last week. We know you’ll be shocked to hear this, but the hosts determined that there actually is no comparison between the two. Why?

Well, maybe we should let them explain.

The two got going based on an interview Cuomo did with the Department of Homeland Security’s Ken Cuccinelli, in which the latter talked about the destruction of many American cities over the past year.

“Nobody has ever done anything like we saw last week. And it happened for a reason. And the reason is his mouth,” Cuomo said, referencing Trump.

“They most certainly have,” Cuccinelli replied. “They just haven’t done it at the Capitol. They’ve been doing it all over the country for seven months.”

“That matters. That matters. Overturning the election is different than being pissed off about being shot by cops,” Cuomo huffed.

So there you have the premise: Sometimes it’s okay to wreak havoc and lash out with violence, and sometimes it isn’t.

Lemon approved. “I’m glad you mentioned about being shot by cops because you cannot compare. And I’m sick of people comparing. You can’t compare what happened this summer to what happened at the Capitol. It’s two different things,” he said.

Well, it is factually two different things. And we’ll even allow that you can examine the motivations for each and draw comparisons and contrasts. But to just dismiss the comparison altogether as if we’re talking about sewing on the one hand and astronomy on the other…well, that doesn’t quite jibe. In both instances, we’re talking about political violence.

“One is built on people, on racial justice, on criminal justice, right, on reform, on police not beating up – or police treating people of color differently than they do whites. Okay? That is not a lie. Those are facts. Go look at them,” Lemon continued. “So, just on that one merit, if you want to call it, it’s not comparable. That things are not comparable. So they should not be doing it. And stop this whataboutism.”

If someone’s saying, “Hey, the thing at the Capitol is fine because the BLM riots were fine,” we’ll acknowledge that is a terrible argument. But it’s certainly not “whataboutism” to notice that people like Lemon and Cuomo were promoting and justifying the violence in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Kenosha, and elsewhere for months and then condemning the Capitol violence as the worst thing they’d ever seen. It’s a relevant insight into how utterly broken our mainstream media outlets have become.

No surprise that CNN’s primetime hosts would want to veer as far away from that conclusion as possible.