Harris and Walz are the Black Lives Matter ticket

Many thought COVID-19 and its lockdowns would be what changed the direction of politics in the United States. While there have been some political shifts, the lockdown reckoning pales in comparison to the shifts brought on by the Black Lives Matter riots, which included total control over the direction of the Democratic Party.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, showcased this perfectly. Harris chose Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) to be her running mate, selecting him over the more sensible political choice, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA). It has turned Harris’s ticket into a referendum on the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 in the general election but, on the Democratic side, the referendum has now reached its conclusion.

Walz was governor when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, kicking off Black Lives Matter riots across the country. The riots were the worst in Minneapolis, and yet Walz was asleep at the wheel. He waited more than a day after Minneapolis Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey and the city’s police chief requested help from the National Guard with the riots before signing off on it. A swift and thorough crackdown on violent riots could have nipped the problem in the bud, but Walz was incapable of providing that level of leadership.

Or perhaps he was unwilling. As Minneapolis burned, Walz waxed poetic about how symbolic it was.

“Minneapolis and St. Paul are on fire,” Walz said . “The fire is still smoldering in our streets. The ashes are symbolic of decades and generations of pain, of anguish unheard. Now generations of pain is manifesting itself in front of the world — and the world is watching.”

How inspiring it must be for the people whose businesses were burned down and whose cars were torched that the ashes are “symbolic” of the oh-so-noble goals of Black Lives Matter rioters. What is $500 million in damages worth against the "anguish" of the "unheard?"

While Walz failed to get a handle on the riots and allowed them to erupt out of control, Harris helped contribute to them. She helped boost the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a relatively unknown organization, during the riots. In her words, this was to “help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”

Harris posted her support six days after the rioting began, meaning that she knew many of the people who were arrested were rioters who were destroying communities in Minneapolis.

Just as Walz was fine with Minneapolis businesses being burned and looted, so too was Harris. There is little other way to interpret her choice to help get rioters out of jail as soon as possible in the midst of riots. Harris’s support even had further knock-on effects, as MFF went from covering an average bail of under $350 to an average of over $13,000. MFF was bailing out people facing more serious charges, including accused murderers and rapists.

All of this occurred before Harris had been selected to be President Joe Biden’s running mate, but Black Lives Matter’s influence over the party was being flexed then, too. Biden had initially announced he would choose a woman to be his running mate, an attempt to flex identity politics cred through affirmative action. After Floyd’s death and the riots that followed, pressure built that the woman Biden chose must be black, a pressure to which he relented .

Those limits made Harris the top choice, and her tagging along with Biden is how she ended up being the presidential nominee now. Add in Walz, and you have the most Black Lives Matter-aligned ticket the Democratic Party could reasonably field.

The influence of Black Lives Matter activists is also notable for those who were not selected to be Harris’s running mate. Shapiro is the popular governor of the biggest swing state in terms of Electoral College votes. Losing Pennsylvania would mean certain defeat for Harris unless she wins both Georgia and North Carolina as well as every other swing state. Shapiro is popular in the most important state for Democrats to win and presents himself as a centrist despite being a reliable liberal. He checks every box.

Shapiro’s problem, though, is that he is Jewish. Democratic pundits and activists made it clear that would be unacceptable on account of the Israel-Gaza war, even if other non-Jewish running mate candidates nominally held the same position as Shapiro. Israel is trying to defend itself from genocidal antisemitic terrorists, and the Democratic Party’s left-wing Palestinian activists are not happy about that.

Those activists have a near-perfect overlap with the Black Lives Matter wing of the party as well. That is how you end up with Black Lives Matter’s Chicago chapter openly cheering the Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 Israeli civilians at the hands of antisemitic terrorists. Activists and politicians cut from the Black Lives Matter cloth of politics also stand hand-in-hand with antisemitic protests against Israel. The two movements are inseparable.

It all ties together, coincidentally, in Chicago. Democrats are desperate to avoid riots from “pro-Palestinian” protesters ahead of the Democratic National Convention. Selecting Shapiro would certainly invite those displays, but Walz is celebrated by all the worst Democrats in the Palestinian/Black Lives Matter orbit, such as Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY). Walz is the "please don’t riot in Chicago and make us look bad" pick for Harris.

If only either Harris or Walz cared equally as much about protecting Minneapolis from riots.

Harris and Walz’s moments on the national stage have been defined by Black Lives Matter and its 2020 riots. The Black Lives Matter vice grip on the Democratic Party was solidified by the devout embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and Harris allowed the activist class behind Black Lives Matter to dictate her running mate decision. Democrats across the country embraced soft-on-crime positions as a form of “equity” and supported defunding police departments, including both Harris and Walz. The lawlessness, the racism, and the antisemitism all come from the same place.

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Harris and Walz are the Black Lives Matter ticket, a culmination of activist efforts going back to 2014 and accelerated in 2020 as Walz watched and Harris assisted. They embody all the worst qualities that bloomed in the Democratic Party thanks to those activists, from the open racism of DEI to the sympathy for violent criminals to a desire to placate antisemitic activists.

The school closure reckoning came and went with little fanfare, but the Black Lives Matter riots were the event from 2020 that has stuck with our politics four years later. It will be up to voters to decide if they want to live another four years under the same activist ideals that led to those riots and to the ticket that the Democratic Party is presenting to them.