Black Lives Matter to Donald Trump The Republican says every child—in Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore—should be able to walk to school safely. For that, he’s called racist. By Heather Mac Donald
http://www.wsj.com/articles/black-lives-matter-to-donald-trump-1472512378
Hillary Clinton tried to tar Donald Trump as a racist last week by associating him with the “alt-right.” Yet it is Mr. Trump who has decried the loss of black life to violent crime—and has promptly been declared biased for doing so. Whether intentionally or not, Mr. Trump has exposed the hypocrisy of the Black Lives Matter movement and its allies.
Speaking in West Bend, Wis., on Aug. 16, only days after the recent riots in Milwaukee, Mr. Trump observed that during “the last 72 hours . . . another nine were killed in Chicago and another 46 were wounded.” The victims, as in other cities with rising crime, were overwhelmingly black.
Bringing safety to inner-city residents should be a top presidential priority, Mr. Trump said: “Our job is to make life more comfortable for the African-American parent who wants their kids to be able to safely walk the streets and walk to school. Or the senior citizen waiting for a bus. Or the young child walking home from school.” Mr. Trump promised to restore law and order “for the sake of all, but most especially for the sake of those living in the affected communities.”
The reaction was swift. The progressive website Crooks and Liars deemed Mr. Trump’s speech a “mashup of Hitler and George Wallace.”On CNN the activist and former Obama adviser Van Jones called it “despicable” and “shocking in its divisiveness.” Historian Josh Zeitz told USA Today that “the term law and order in modern American politics is, ipso facto, a racially tinged term.”
Mr. Trump’s acceptance speech in July at the Republican National Convention provoked similar dismay. “Young Americans in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Ferguson,” he said, have “the same right to live out their dreams as any other child in America.”
This defense of black children was too much for Alicia Garza, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. “The terrifying vision that Donald J. Trump is putting forward casts him alongside some of the worst fascists in history,” Ms. Garza said. The executive director of the Advancement Project, Judith Browne Dianis, complained that “the speech lends itself to be interpreted as isolating and scapegoating of communities of color.” Political commentator Sally Kohn wrote in Time that Mr. Trump “has basically recycled Richard Nixon’s version of dog whistle racism by insisting he is the ‘law and order candidate’—implicitly protecting White America.”
Why this frenzied effort to demonize Mr. Trump for addressing the heightened violence in inner cities? Because the Republican nominee has also correctly identified its cause: the false “narrative of cops as a racist force in our society,” as he put it in Wisconsin.
Ever since the Black Lives Matter movement burst onto the national scene in 2014, following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., violent crime has surged in urban areas. In America’s largest 56 cities, homicides rose 17% last year, the largest one-year increase in more than two decades. In Washington, D.C., homicides jumped 54%; in Milwaukee, 73%; in Cleveland, 90%. CONTINUE AT SITE
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