GLENN: Broken glass littered the sidewalk. HEP occurred hours earlier, even HEP chaos. Shop and restaurant owners inside universal -- or, University City, outside of St. Louis woke up to sweep the glass from their broken windows of their businesses again.
They were innocent victims of the violence that erupted after Jason Stockley was acquitted of murder Friday. Stockley, a white former police officer, shot and killed Anthony Lamar Smith, a black man, during a 2011 car chase.
It's a colossal failure of our nation, that one more of our citizens, you know, doesn't understand that this is not the thing to do here.
I don't want to get into the -- the officer or the case because, quite honestly, I haven't been following it. And I wasn't on the jury.
If there's a problem in St. Louis, it needs to be fixed. But rioting and looting and destruction and chaos, that's the way they do things in totalitarian countries and socialist countries and underdeveloped countries. That's not the way we do things here.
It is that -- it is that very chaos that a lot of immigrants came here to get away from. If you want to protest something, you have every right -- and I'll stand for your right to do it.
You want to -- you want to stand up and protest something that, you know, you had nothing to do with, and you don't understand all the details as has been the case in other instances, go ahead. You have a right to do that too.
But you have a responsibility to do it in a peaceful manner. Remember Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King? They would not stand with you. Their protest strategy was never violent. They knew that riots in the end would not work.
And, by the way, Martin Luther King never wore a mask. Never. The bad guys, the enemies of his people, of all people, the Klan, they were the ones that wore the masks.
Let your face be seen. Bad guys wear masks. And certainly something worth protesting for, something worth living for, is something worth going to jail for. You'll be joining great ranks. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Bonhoeffer. But the moment you smash a window of a small business, and you mess up that owner's effort and right to make a living, you forfeit your ability to be heard. You're no longer a protester at that point. You're simply a felon.
