In other left-wing media follies, the feminist blog Jezebel has assailed Mayor Rawlings-Blake for calling the rioters “thugs” while supposedly failing to condemn police violence or address Gray’s death. (In fact, the mayor has repeatedly spoken out on the issue, demanding answers and denouncing as “unacceptable” the lack of medical aid for Gray.)

But perhaps the starkest example of classic “liberal elitism” that pleads on behalf of riots from a safe distance comes from a now-deleted social media post by noted journalist and New Republic defector Julia Ioffe. On April 27, Ioffe, who has worked extensively as a reporter in Russia, made a public Facebook post (preserved by Google cache) on the “protesters or criminals” debate.

“I’ve seen it on the streets of Moscow and on the streets of Kiev,” wrote Ioffe. “When the courts and the police and every official in the land is set against you, when the media doesn’t think the story is worth a story, the street becomes the only option to force people to pay attention to your grievance. It’s just that, when there are white people in Moscow or Kiev doing this, we say they’re protesters for freedom and democracy. When it’s black people at home, we call them thugs.”