(Fox News) The ACLU and activists are slamming a North Carolina anti-rioting bill that would increase penalties for rioting or looting as “racist” and “anti-Black Lives Matter”
“This bill HB805 is racist. It’s an anti-Black Lives Matter bill,” attorney Dawn Blagrove of the activist group Emancipate NC told WNCN.
House Bill 805 was sponsored by Republican North Carolina Speaker of the House Tim Moore after Raleigh saw riots last summer as protests and riots swept the country following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Under the bill, people would be charged with a felony for causing significant property damage, serious bodily harm or assaulting emergency personnel during riots.
“Like so many other North Carolinians, I saw the destruction that happened last year with, what was not protests, but what became riots, looting, assaults,” Moore said of the bill, which is heading to the Senate after passing the state House, WNCN reported.
Critics of the bill are now lambasting it as “racist”…
Some also came to the defense of looting and rioting last summer, including author Vicky Osterweil, who wrote the book “In Defense of Looting” and told NPR last August that looting gives people “an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure.”
…
North Carolina’s bill comes after Republican governors in other states have signed or pushed for anti-rioting legislation, including in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis touted that he enacted the country’s “strongest anti-rioting” law in April.
