Black legislator skates on conspiracy to damage monument charge

A local Virginia prosecutor has dropped charges against Virginia Sen. L. Louise Lucas, who was caught by the Portsmouth, Virginia police conspiring to topple a Confederate monument last summer. There was evidence from social media that Lucas encouraged people to attend a demonstration and help tear down the statute. And video taken by police showed Lucas telling officers that they could not arrest the demonstrators for what they were about to do.

Lucas wasn’t the only local bigwig charged in connection with this incident. Police also a school board member and the president of the Portsmouth NAACP

But Lucas, who is Black, was the most prominent member of the gang. And her daughter is the vice mayor of Portsmouth.

The prosecutor, Stephanie Morales, had texted Lucas expressing support for the demonstration the day it occurred. Morales also contributed to Lucas’ political campaign fund. Yet, Morales refused to recuse herself from the potential prosecution. A court upheld her refusal.

Lucas clearly has an inflated view of herself. She called the charges against her a “national embarrassment” (emphasis added) for a city whose residents are 55 percent African American. But one of those African-American residents is Angela Greene, the chief of police who brought the charges against Lucas.

The city fired Greene, pretty clearly for daring to bring charges against the head of the its leading political family and for not siding with the BLM mob. I call that an embarrassment.

And while we’re on the subject of embarrassments, how about the Washington Post’s story on this affair? Nowhere in his report does Antonio Olivo mention that Greene is African American. He mentions Lucas’ race twice and the story is full of racial themes.

Perhaps Olivo considers Greene inauthentically Black for trying to enforce the law against BLM protesters. Or maybe it’s just that Greene’s race interferes with the narrative the Post wants to peddle — the race-based persecution of a Black leader.

Greene says she will file a wrongful termination case against the city. She probably has a good claim, although perhaps not as open-and-shut as the case the city had against Lucas and the others who plainly violated the law, first by spray painting public property and then by tearing it down.

Unfortunately, in many American jurisdictions these days it doesn’t matter what the facts are. It doesn’t even matter what your race is. What matters is whether you’re on BLM’s side (or the left’s in general).

If so, you’re probably going to skate. If not, you might well lose your job, as Angela Greene did.

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