A former ESPN writer is being called a hypocrite for urging rioters to burn down the inner city, then chastising them when they attacked his neighborhood.
On Thursday, the former ESPN basketball reporter, Chris Palmer, was seen gleefully posting about the confrontations occurring in Minneapolis by rioters claiming to be infuriated by the police-involved death of George Floyd. At one point, Palmer posted a tweet featuring a burning building that he captioned, “Burn that sh*t down. Burn it all down.”
But just over two days later, early on Sunday morning, Palmer posted a tweet excoriating the rioters for attacking a “gated community” near where he lived.
“They just attacked our sister community down the street,” Palmer wrote just after midnight on Sunday. “It’s a gated community and they tried to climb the gates. They had to beat them back. Then destroyed a Starbucks and are now in front of my building.”
Then came the hypocrisy: “Get these animals TF out of my neighborhood. Go back to where you live.”
It did not take long for the backlash to hit the former sports reporter. He did try to delete the “burn it down” tweet, but instead of a mea culpa, he jumped back to twitter to defend himself for his odd stance that it is OK to “burn” the inner city, but not his precious gated community.
First, he tried being a martyr by claiming he was “on the front lines.”
“I took rubber bullets and tear gas yesterday standing on the front lines. I risked my life trying to get pictures and video. Don’t talk to me about what you don’t know about little girl,” he icily told one Twitter user.
In another he stubbornly insisted that it was perfectly fine to want other people’s neighborhoods burned down while his is protected. The building was an affordable housing development, according to the Star Tribune.
He also went on to slam the rioters, saying, “Tear up your own shit. Don’t come to where we live at and tear our neighborhood up. We care about our community. If you don’t care about yours, I don’t give a shit.”
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