The knee that continues to haunt Chad Bianco — but really shouldn’t

It was June 2020, barely a week after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by police officer Derek Chauvin.

Tensions were high and would only get worse in the weeks and months to come as a racial justice movement swept the country, fueled in part by the ongoing despair and anxiety of the coronavirus pandemic.

During a protest in Riverside, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and a group of his deputies addressed the crowd in a mature and sensible manner.

“We want you all to be here. We want you all to have this. We want your voices to be heard. We want to be heard together,” he said.

Local media outlets were there and even asked Bianco questions as he was on his knee with demonstrators. “The leaders of this have to work with us to make a difference,” he said while kneeling. “If this is what starts it, this is what starts it.”

I don’t often say positive things about Bianco, but he was certainly a leader in that moment. That was just the sort of message law enforcement needed to put forward to both calm the storm and direct what ended up being a lot of destructive energy into constructive solutions.

Fast forward to 2026, and that knee is now being weaponized against him.

“My Republican colleague Chad Bianco is not here tonight to face these Democrats or his record in 2020, during the Black Lives Matter riots,” Republican pundit and gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton said in the recent candidate debate.

Hilton ripped Bianco because he “took a knee when told to by BLM” and “now he says he was praying,” a reference to how Bianco has since tried to reframe what he did.

Hilton’s campaign even put out a website, blmbianco.org, which says, “Chad Bianco Bent the Knee to Black Lives Matter. In 2020, while police were under attack, Chad Bianco knelt to a Black Lives Matter mob in Riverside.”

Far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer has likewise piled onto Bianco, condemning the knee and then pivoting to being mad the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department “maintains an active LGBTQ Liaison Unit focused on building trust, addressing hate crimes, and community outreach.”

Oh, the horror.

Of course, Bianco’s in a tough spot. The sort of people who would get mad at someone for taking a knee at a BLM protest are the sort of people inclined to support him. Bianco’s made a name for himself as a staunch critic of the criminal justice reform movement and (despite his department’s poor crime-solving record) has touted himself as a tough-on-crime sheriff.

Which is why Bianco has since tried to explain away the knee rather than owning it, pointing out that Riverside saw a lot less carnage than other cities and simply saying, as any reasonable lawman would, that engaging with the public comes with the job of being a county sheriff.

You read the quotes.

Did he say anything suggesting he was cowering to activists or whatever? No, which makes Hilton’s line of attack pretty cheap and tacky. But, I guess, politically effective given where the GOP is today.

Now, did Bianco ever really follow up on his gesture of goodwill? No. He has fought against greater public oversight over his department amid ongoing concerns about high death rates in the county’s jail system and a litany of costly scandals.

Alas, this is the current state of right-wing politics in California.

The field of serious and qualified Republican or conservative candidates for state office is quite small.

So we get this: a pundit rips a sheriff for de-escalating a protest at the height of racial tensions between the public and the police. The sheriff then tries to spin out of his rare noble act because he knows his supporters despise the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”

What a mess.

If this is best the California Republican Party can muster, is it any wonder California is a one-party state?

Sal Rodriguez is the opinion editor for the Southern California News Group. You can reach him at salrodriguez@scng.com