Joe Biden’s legal advisor Guy-Uriel Charles authored an op-ed entitled “Stop Calling Quake Victims Looters,” offering justifications for looting, while insisting those who use the term are making an improper “moral judgment.” Written in the weeks after a massive earthquake hit Haiti, Charles’s CNN op-ed begins by asserting that the word “looter” is “void of empathy”: To define someone as a looter is not simply to describe him, or her, through an act, it is to make a moral judgment. It is to characterize the person as lawless and criminal. It connotes someone who is without self-restraint; an animal; wanton
