Soros-funded Black Lives Matter inflicts its terror in a sleepy Southern city.

Black Lives Matter rioters claiming systemic racial discrimination is killing black people have laid siege to largely black Charlotte, North Carolina, after a black cop who reports to a black police chief shot and killed a black suspect who reportedly refused to drop his handgun.

With Election Day only weeks away, it is possible the chaos in the Tarheel State is part of a left-wing get-out-the-vote effort to foment unrest in the state’s black communities. Remember that Democrat Barack Obama narrowly won the vitally important battleground state in 2008 and narrowly lost it in 2012.

It is entirely possible that the whole exercise in civil unrest was engineered or at least exacerbated by professional left-wingers trying to win the state for Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Riots, of course, are the stock in trade of radical speculator George Soros, the preeminent funder of the Left who has given generously to Black Lives Matter. Soros has a long history of underwriting violence and civil unrest not just in America but all over the world.

Black Lives Matter ringleader DeRay Mckesson describes rioting as “a cry for justice.” He told Yale students that “looting for me isn’t violent, it’s an expression of anger,” and that “The act of looting is political. Another way to dissolve consent. Pressing you to no longer keep me out of this space, by destroying it.”

But regardless of what leftists say, there is no right to riot. “Although the right to peacefully protest is enshrined in the Constitution,” law professor John F. Banzhaf III writes, “there is no constitutional or other legal right to commit criminal acts to make a point.”

And obviously, claims by activists that this shooting death in an un-racist city is an example of systemic discrimination against African-Americans are borderline ridiculous.

If the reality on the ground weren’t so grim and serious, it might qualify as a comedy of errors worthy of a “Saturday Night Live” skit. After the shooting Tuesday, Charlotte area Nation of Islam activist B.J. Murphy, a black man, demanded an “economic boycott” to protest the official racism supposedly at work in the city.

Black Americans should “take our money out of Charlotte,” he said of the banking capital of the South. “I don’t want to offend nobody, but we got nothing to lose.”

This kind of rioting has become commonplace in President Obama’s second term of office and it has his personal blessing.

Obama typically tries to have it both ways by denouncing the violence in front of television news cameras and then encouraging it by saying the rioters’ cause is just. After a Black Lives Matter-sympathizing sniper killed five cops in Dallas this summer during an anti-police protest, cold-as-ice Obama even had the audacity to attend their memorial service and lecture the dead men’s widows about police brutality.

Obama, we know from Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden, a former Obama aide, “really doesn’t like people.” A famously intolerant, dogmatic, self-righteous man, he suffers from a special kind of psychopathology, viewing those who disagree with him or oppose him as evil people or “enemies” who need to be confronted by getting “in their faces.”

Obama’s oft-repeated reflexive response to Black Lives Matter violence is a backhanded but unmistakable call to arms in which the president encourages physical attacks on the nation’s police officers, the overwhelming majority of whom are decent hard-working people without a racist bone in their bodies. Many cops are shirking their duties because they are quite justifiably afraid of being called racist. This is called the “Ferguson effect,” because it took hold after a police shooting of a black suspect in the St. Louis, Mo., suburbs led to huge race riots and catapulted the racist Black Lives Matter movement to national and international prominence.

Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has become arguably worse than Obama in recent months, pandering in an even more extreme way to violent mobs and excusing crimes committed by black Americans. The Democratic National Committee, the governing body of the Democratic Party, supports race riots. The DNC officially endorsed Black Lives Matter a year ago.

The rioting in Charlotte followed the police-involved shooting Tuesday afternoon. Keith Lamont Scott, 43, a black career criminal, was fatally shot by officer Brentley Vinson, 26, a former high school football star who also happens to be black.

Scott had a long criminal record. According to the Charlotte Observer:

A public records search shows that Scott was convicted in April 2004 of a misdemeanor assault with a deadly weapon charge in Mecklenburg County [North Carolina]. Other charges stemming from that date were dismissed: felony assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, and misdemeanors assault on a child under 12, assault on a female and communicating threats. In April 2015 in Gaston County Court, Scott was found guilty of driving while intoxicated. In 1992, Scott was charged in Charleston County, S.C., with ​several different crimes on different dates, including carrying ​a concealed weapon​ (not a gun), simple assault and contributing to ​the delinquency of a minor. ​He pleaded guilty to ​all charges. Scott also was charged with aggravated assault in 1992​ and assault with intent to kill in 1995. Both charges were reduced, but the disposition of the case​s​ is unclear. According to Bexar County, Texas, records, Scott was sentenced in March 2005 to 15 months in a state jail for evading arrest. In July of that year, records show, he was sentenced to seven years in prison on a conviction of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. A Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman said Scott completed his sentence and was released from prison in 2011.

About 4 p.m. Tuesday police were trying to serve an outstanding warrant in The Village at College Downs apartment complex, said Charlotte police chief Kerr Putney, a black man.

Scott was not the subject of the warrant but police observed him getting out of his car with a handgun before getting back in the car, the Charlotte Observer reports.

Police approached Scott and demanded he drop his gun. He refused to do so and exited the car while holding the weapon. Police on the scene apparently deemed him an imminent threat and shot him an undisclosed number of times. There is reportedly video footage of the event but police have so far refused to release it because their investigation is still underway.

Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts (D) appealed for calm. “This is a very difficult situation for everyone involved,” she said yesterday at a press conference. “I’d like to ask people to wait until all information is available.”

By 7 p.m. Tuesday, long before the public knew much about the shooting, protests had begun. Putney said about an hour later the assembled masses became “more aggressive agitators who began breaking the law.”

A few hours later rioters shut down Interstate 85, broke into at least one tractor-trailer and set its cargo on fire. At about 3:30 Wednesday morning, a mob broke windows and doors at a local Walmart store and looted its inventory.

Police showed restraint, tear-gassing rioters. “Accountability!” one man yelled several times at officers. “You don’t get to murder us and get away with it!” another person shouted.

Several reporters covering the leftist anarchy were injured and to no one’s surprise, the terrorist front group known as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is calling for an independent investigation of the shooting.

According to the Observer, last night police used tear gas to disperse hundreds of individuals who blocked an intersection. People then took over the EpiCentre entertainment complex. Late Wednesday afternoon, two dozen protesters stood in front of the Bank of America Tower holding signs that read “Black Lives Matter” and “Stop Killing Us.”

Many nervous Charlotte employers sent employees home early yesterday out of concern for their safety. The local chamber of commerce encouraged businesses in parts of the city to “remove or chain down all tables, chairs, signs or planters.”

Late last night Gov. Pat McCrory ®, himself a former mayor of Charlotte, declared a state of emergency and deployed the National Guard and State Highway Patrol troopers to assist local police. One person was shot during the rioting. He was reportedly on life-support at press time.

FrontPage readers know that Black Lives Matter isn’t just a movement: It is a dangerous cult animated by a hatred of normal American values. Its members idolize convicted, unrepentant black militants and cop-killers Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu Jamal and have declared “war” on law enforcement. Its members openly call for police officers to be assassinated.

In legal terms, it functions as a domestic terrorist organization. A Black Lives Matter supporter, Micah X. Johnson, murdered five Dallas area police officers in cold blood at a protest march in July. As I’ve written before, it is well past time for the leaders of Black Lives Matter to be jailed and for the violent organization to be dismantled.

Black Lives Matter has deep roots on the radical, revolutionary Left. As James Simpson writes:

Black Lives Matter began in 2013 with a Twitter hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, after neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, called a “white Hispanic” in the press, was acquitted in the killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin. Radical-left activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi claim credit for the slogan and hashtag. Following the Michael Brown shooting in August 2014, Dream Defenders, an organization co-founded by (the ACORN-affiliated) Working Families Party activist and Occupy Wall Street organizer Nelini Stamp, popularized the phrase “Hands Up – Don’t Shoot!” which has since become BLM’s widely recognized slogan. Not surprisingly, former Communist Party USA vice presidential candidate Angela Davis sits on the Dream Defenders advisory board. Garza, Cullors, and Tometi all work for front groups of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, one of the four largest radical Left organizations in the country. The others are the Communist Party USA, Democratic Socialists of America, and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. Stamp’s ACORN—now rebranded under a variety of different names after its official 2010 bankruptcy—works with all four organizations, and Dream Defenders is backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), ACLU, and Southern Poverty Law Center, among others.

Perhaps if our next president isn’t an America-hating leftist something can finally be done about the scourge of Black Lives Matter.

Residents in Charlotte and in cities across America would be grateful.