Pelosi Praises ‘Non-violence’ at John Lewis Funeral

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) praised non-violence in her eulogy to the late Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) at his funeral in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday after weeks of defending violent demonstrations.

[H]e wanted us to see how important it was, how important it was to understand the spirit of non-violence. … The word “satyagraha,” the word that in Sanskrit means two things, it means non-violence and it means insistence on the truth, and that is what John Lewis is all about. Non-violently insisting on the truth.

Pelosi’s defense of non-violence marks a reversal of her rhetoric from the past several weeks, when she condoned riots by left-wing activists, and when her party covered up violent demonstrations by insisting that they were “peaceful protests.”

Earlier this month, for example, Pelosi shrugged when a mob tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus in her native Baltimore, Maryland. “People will do what they do,” Pelosi told reporters at her weekly Capitol Hill press briefing.

After riots in several American cities last weekend, some Democrats began advising their colleagues to condemn violent protest. At the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Ranking Member Jim Jordan (R-OH) showed an extensive video with footage of violence at protests throughout the nation.

Former President Bill Clinton also praised Lewis’s non-violent approach, saying that Lewis’s approach had proved more successful than the militant approach of Stokely Carmichael, who defeated Lewis in an election for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.