Giuliani on Charlotte Riots: “No Excuse”

Outspoken former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, one of Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters among mainstream Republicans, told Fox & Friends on Thursday that he couldn’t abide the Charlotte riots regardless of the reasoning behind them.

“There’s no excuse for it,” Giuliani said. “Why should some person’s store get ruined, who had nothing to do with the shooting, who might be an African-American himself? Why should his store get ruined because a cop did something right, wrong, or ambiguous?”

Giuliani said that he supported the protesters’ right to assemble, but Charlotte’s mayor had a duty to stop the carnage. “You throw a rock, the first one that does it gets arrested,” said Giuliani. “Break a window, first one that does it, gets arrested. I said, ‘If you want to test me, test me.’ They never did.”

Charlotte was preparing for a third night of unrest on Thursday after protesters turned violent in the wake of a police shooting. At issue is the death of 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott, who Charlotte authorities say was armed at the time he was killed. Giuliani said Thursday that there was no evidence that the police officer behaved unprofessionally.

“If in fact the police commissioner is correct, and I have no reason to believe that he isn’t, and he may have come out holding a gun, then the police officer had every right to shoot,” Giuliani said.

The problem is that this is no longer about each individual case, and maybe it never was. The citizens of Baltimore, Tulsa, Chicago, Charlotte, New York City, and Ferguson…they aren’t interested in having a close, thorough look at the facts. They are simply using these questionable scenarios and often-disturbing videos to further a leftist cause that has no grounding in reality.

And they are (wisely) distancing themselves from each individual case because, in most of these situations, it turns out that the scenario played out much differently than everyone thought. In most of these cases, the shooting was justified. And yet, Black Lives Matter keeps using the names of these victims as though they were heroes, shot down while rescuing babies from a burning nursery.

Giuliani and Trump are bringing a much-needed, realistic viewpoint to a subject that has been dominated by leftist groupthink for way too long.