Everyone knows that America is now aflame with widespread
riots protesting—or in all too many instances, ostensibly protesting—the death
of George Floyd in police custody. As Floyd was black, the rioting, looting,
vandalism, destruction of property, defacing of historical monuments and
multiple homicides are regarded as a reaction to police violence and
institutional racism.
As Heather Mac Donald correctly points out in National
Review, “There is no epidemic of racist police shootings. It is a
racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the
race of the officer…In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime
rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians.” Her argument is
supported by a new study published
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and by
another 2015 Justice Department study of
the Philadelphia Police Department—legitimate studies which “demolish[ ] the
Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings.”
Such truths are passed over as inconsequential. Indeed,
whites tend to be relatively passive in reacting to violence perpetrated
against them. The fact that Mohamed Noor, a Somali police officer, killed a
white woman without cause in Minneapolis, Ground Zero of the present turmoil,
ignited no riots. As The
Intercept reports, some activists believed that Noor “was unfairly
targeted because he is a black man who killed a white woman…Nekima Levy
Armstrong, a civil rights lawyer and local racial justice leader,
said Noor’s conviction reveals how the court system treats white people
differently compared to everyone else.”
The question is obvious: What is wrong with this picture?
The answer is: everything. I do not give the racist
meme much credence. With African-Americans convincingly represented in the
halls of power, as mayors, governors, members of Congress, including an
American President and two Attorneys General, it should be clear that Jim Crow
is pretty well dead and buried. Race has become a huckster’s source of power
and profit. Let it be said once and for all: The United States is not a
racist nation, but in fact bends over backwards to appease the bearers of
the slander and the advocates of anachronistic reparations.
It needs also to be said that the fires burning across
the country are nothing less than a national insurrection, brewing for years
and exploited by the hawkers of racist dissension and programmatically by
the Democratic Party. What is taking place is an emeute, a war against the
Constitution, a plot to unravel the fabric of the Republic, in short, a coup
against the State and a sitting President. It is a condition of civil war in
everything but name, long simmering and now breaking out into the
open.
This is not the time for breast-beating, for systemic
timidity, for merely defensive measures, for making amends and concessions. As
William Butler Yeats wrote in The
Second Coming, one of the great poems in the language:
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the
worst
Are full of passionate intensity…
Words that were never more pertinent than now. The
political and cultural left, the guerilla cadres wreaking havoc on the streets
and in the public square, their supporters and backers—they are indeed “full of
passionate intensity.” Those who would oppose them, arguing for civility,
reluctant to return fire with fire, relying on toothless or disregarded
legislation, slamming
governors for being weak—they may be “the best” but often seem to lack
“all conviction.”
Newsmax reports,
the former House Speaker Newt Gingrich hopes President Donald Trump’s designation
of Antifa as a terrorist organization will reveal who is funding it. “Who is
paying for these people?” Gingrich is right. What we are witnessing is “war
against America…These are not riots in a traditional sense…You have a
nationwide group, Antifa is part of it, but there are other elements
involved…who is organizing it?…we have to do whatever it takes to put down the
people who would destroy our country.”
These are true words. President Trump has declared Antifa
a terrorist organization, which is a step in the right direction—but only a
step. Antifa and their kindred outfits will simply go underground and continue
a sporadic campaign of inflaming anti-democratic sentiment, creating civil
unrest, pillaging and destroying property and assaulting innocent people.
Two decisive measures are required to quell the insurrection.
As Gingrich advised, Trump “should indicate he is
prepared to declare an emergency for the destruction.” This means, or should
mean, not only that government will rebuild devastated neighborhoods, but that
the American police, National Guard or military should be permitted to use
lethal force when attacked by domestic terrorists of when dispersing hoodlums
and gangsters laying waste businesses, smashing storefronts, assaulting bystanders
and committing arson. That such an initiative, as many will argue, would only
provoke violence, or more violence, is the classic evasion of the temporizers
and fearful propitiators among us.
But even more importantly, the Justice Department must be
immediately tasked with seeking out and identifying those who sponsor and
finance the army of commandos, mercenaries and terrorist groups that have
declared war on the nation. The identities of some of these shadowy bankers are
already well-known and have been known for many years, yet nothing has been
done to investigate or arraign or even extradite these fiscal malefactors.
The head of the snake must be cut off—call it Operation
Ophidian—if the civil venom is to be stanched. If, as in the Greek myth of the Lernean Hydra,
the head keeps growing back, which it surely will, then perpetual vigilance
will be necessary. But the old adage remains apt: follow the money. When the
funds are cut off, the reptile loses its main force.
President Trump should take Winston Churchill’s
observation to heart, made in reference to the 1945 Yalta Conference, “Never
let a good crisis go to waste”—a phrase pilfered by Rahm Emmanuel for malign
rather than constructive purposes. Churchill intended the remark to indicate
the need for a proper post-WW II resolution to disputed territories.
Interestingly, the axiom originates with geriatric psychiatrist M.F.
Weiner, who titled a 1976 article in the journal Medical
Economics “Don’t Waste a Crisis — Your Patient’s or Your Own.”
Weiner meant that a medical crisis can be used to
ameliorate mental health or the lives of both patient and physician. Whether in
Churchill’s or Weiner’s use of the phrase, the intention is genuinely
therapeutic and the acceptation, positive.
The future course of the American Republic hangs in the
balance. This is the real issue. The current state of unrest is an opportunity
for the President to embark upon a surgical operation to excise the tumor of
revolt, orchestrated violence and, to be explicit, national destruction. He
should not let it go to waste.
_______________
RELATED
ARTICLE
Darkness Falls - The collapse of the rule of
law across the country, intensified by Antifa radicals, is terrifying.
Photo
by Mark Makela/Getty Images
Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the
United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians and the
ecstatic annihilation of businesses and symbols of the state. Welcome to a real
civilization-destroying pandemic, one that makes the recent saccharine
exhortations to “stay safe” and the deployment of police officers to enforce
outdoor mask-wearing seem like decadent bagatelles.
This particular form of viral chaos was inevitable, given
the failure of Minneapolis’s leaders to quell the city’s growing mayhem. The
violence began on Tuesday, May 26, the day after the horrifying arrest and
subsequent death of George Floyd. On the night of Thursday, May 28, Minneapolis
mayor Jacob Frey ordered the city’s Third Police Precinct evacuated as the
forces of hatred, distinct from legitimate forms of protest, descended upon it
for a third day in a row. The building was promptly torched, sending a powerful
sign that society would not defend its most fundamental institutions of law and
order.
On Friday, May 29, Minnesota governor Tim Walz explained
his reluctance to mobilize the National Guard as an unwillingness to seem
“oppressive.” Naturally, he apologized for his white privilege—“I will not
patronize you as a white man without living [your] lived experiences”—and explained
the feral violence as an understandable response to racial injustice: “The
ashes are symbolic of decades and generations of pain, of anguish, unheard.”
Few arrests were made after five days of rampant crime.
The media, visibly exhilarated by this latest explosion
of black rage, had its own explanation for the chaos: people were
outraged that the officer who had kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for a
sickening eight-plus minutes had not yet been arrested and charged.
But when that arrest came, along with murder and manslaughter charges after a
lightning-fast investigation by the district attorney, the anarchy
continued—not just in Minneapolis but across the country, intensfied by Antifa
radicals.
Political leaders elsewhere have been just as reluctant
to use the necessary force to quell the violence. New York mayor Bill de Blasio
called on police to use a “light touch” in response. New York governor Andrew
Cuomo coolly predicted on Sunday, May 31, during his now absurdly irrelevant
daily coronavirus press conference, that the violence would continue. “The
explosion we saw last night we’ll probably see again tonight,” he said—obviously
confident in his own physical safety, if not the safety of the rest of the
state’s residents.
The attacks on local law enforcement were already
happening out of sight of TV cameras before the most photogenic scenes of arson
and the stomping of squad cars started showing up on network and cable news. On
Tuesday, May 26, and Wednesday, May 27, Chicago residents surrounded and threw
bottles at Chicago Police Department officers trying to arrest gun suspects.
One suspect was the likely perpetrator of a shooting that had just hit a
five-year-old girl and two teenage boys. The other had just thrown his gun
under a car; the cop-haters tried to free him from the squad car. No surprise
that Saturday night, downtown Chicago was plundered.
This pandemic of civil violence is more widespread than
anything seen during the Black Lives Matter movement of the Obama years, and it
will likely have an even deadlier toll on law enforcement officers than the targeted
assassinations we saw from 2014 onward. It’s worse this time because the
country has absorbed another five years of academically inspired racial
victimology. From Ta-Nehisi Coates to the New York Times’s 1619 project, the constant narrative about America’s
endemic white supremacy and its deliberate destruction of the “black body” has been thoroughly injected into the political
bloodstream.
Facts don’t matter to the academic victimology narrative.
Far from destroying the black body, whites are the overwhelming target of
interracial violence. Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5 percent of
all black-white interracial violent victimizations (excluding interracial
homicide, which is also disproportionately black-on-white). That works out to
540,360 felonious assaults on whites. Whites committed 14.4 percent of all
interracial violent victimization, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks.
Blacks are less than 13 percent of the national population.
If white mobs were rampaging through black business
districts, assaulting passersby and looting stores, we would have heard about
it on the national news every night. But the black flash mob phenomenon is grudgingly covered, if at all, and only
locally.
The national media have been insisting on the theme of
the allegedly brutal Minneapolis police department. They said nothing as
black-on-white robberies rose in downtown Minneapolis late last year, along
with savage assaults on passersby. Why are the Minneapolis police in black
neighborhoods? Because that’s where violent crime is happening, including shootings of two-year-olds and lethal beatings of 75-year-olds. Just as during the Obama
years, the discussion of the allegedly oppressive police is being conducted in
the complete absence of any recognition of street crime and the breakdown of
the black family that drives it.
Once the violence began, any effort to “understand” it
should have stopped, since that understanding is inevitably exculpatory. The
looters are not grieving over the stomach-churning arrest and death of George
Floyd; they are having the time of their lives. You don’t protest or mourn a
victim by stealing oxycontin, electronics, jewelry, and sneakers.
Fittingly, the ideological handmaiden of this
violence—academia—has already sprung into action. The chancellors and
presidents of Harvard, the University of Arizona, the University of
Pennsylvania, and Yale, among others, released statements over the weekend
assuring their black students of their schools’ commitment to racial equity, in
light of the George Floyd death—an event wholly unrelated to the academic. No
college leader denounced the violence.
UCLA’s chancellor Gene Block, as well as the school’s
$400,000 a year Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and a
parade of deans, announced that the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and
the school’s legions of Equity Advisors would be coming up with new programs
for “virtual reflection spaces” in which to “humbly acknowledge the pain.” The
school’s Resources for Racial Trauma would be beefed up. The academic diversity
bureaucracy has now been given a whole new excuse for existence and can be
assured that it will escape the cost-cutting chopping block, even as
universities beg the federal government for more coronavirus bailout money.
The great philosophers and poets of the West—from Aeschylus
and Euripides, to Shakespeare, Hobbes, and the American Founders—understood the
chaos and lust for power that lurk beneath civilization. Thanks to the
magnificent infrastructure of the rule of law, we now take stability and social
trust for granted. We assume that violence, once unleashed in the name of
justice, can easily be put back in the bottle.
It cannot.
It was a signal accomplishment of both politics and
science to banish humanity’s millennia-long fear of darkness. That city
dwellers are now reexperiencing that fear with each fall of night is a measure
of how rapidly we are losing our hard-won progress.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a
contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the
bestseller The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt
the University and Undermine Our Culture.
