RUTHFULLY YOURS

Among the more disturbing images to come out of the recent street violence following the killing of George Floyd are those of police officers and white civilians kneeling “in solidarity” with the protesters.

If any of those Americans, black or white, who are protesting the killing of George Floyd are acting in good faith and not in the furtherance of a Leftist agenda, then they are either uninformed or they are being manipulated. Contrary to the narrative being promoted by the Left, the media, and former president Barack Obama, once the respective rates of violent crimes committed by blacks and whites are taken into account, it is clear that police throughout America simply are not killing disproportionately more black men than white men. In other words, the only reason to take to the streets over the Floyd killing is to exploit it to promote Leftist ends.

“You want to burn down buildings? Burn down this f–ing Constitution.”

Before the 1960s, Marxists divided people into capital and labor and posited an unbridgeable gap between the interests of the one and the other. Since then they have divided people into the oppressed (blacks, women, gays, and a host of others) and the oppressors (primarily whites and men), and they have posited the same unbridgeable gap. The viability of the Democratic Party depends on maintaining, and widening, this gap.

This is the context in which the recent George Floyd “protests” need to be understood. According to the Left’s narrative, one echoed today throughout academia and the media, the members of these oppressed groups have been and continue to be the victims of systemic injustice, to such an extent that the legitimacy of the American enterprise itself, including such bedrock elements of that enterprise as individual rights, private property, and capitalism, now stand discredited. So we hear things like this, from former Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters star, Leslie Jones, “You want to burn down buildings? Burn down this f–ing Constitution.”

Essential to the Left’s success in fundamentally changing America, and they have been disturbingly successful to date, has been their code of pseudo-morality. (“Pseudo” because it is a morality designed to serve political ends, rather than vice versa.) They care—for the hurt and the lame and the afflicted, but especially for the members of their coalition of the oppressed. Said California Governor Gavin Newsom this week in comments on the death of George Floyd, “We have a country that predominantly values power, dominance and aggression over care, empathy and collaboration.”  In other words, too many of us benighted souls do not yet share the Left’s affinity for “care, empathy and collaboration.”

One of the Left’s most reliable tools is guilt. It is a powerful de-moralizer

It is this solicitude for those in need that affords the Left their overweening sense of moral superiority, and which makes their message so seductive to the naïve and the uncritical among us. It is this which provides them a patina of benevolence, and which entitles them to stigmatize anyone as a “hater” who does not share their self-abnegating brand of compassion. And it is this which entitles them to impose their pseudo-morality on the rest of us, and they do mean to impose it, by force when necessary and with ruthless consistency. Remember transgendered men in women’s locker rooms? Or ask Grant Napear, for the last 30 plus years the play-by-play announcer for the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, who lost his job this week for tweeting, “All lives matter.”

One of the Left’s most reliable tools is guilt. It is a powerful de-moralizer, as the kneeling policemen and white civilians attest. By pleading guilty, in effect, to their (imaginary) white racism, and by acknowledging their (imaginary) “white privilege,” the kneelers are sanctioning, wittingly or not, the protesters’ assault on the Constitution, and they are emboldening them and their violent co-conspirators to press ever harder to topple that Constitution.

If there are any doubts about the ultimate, destructive aims of the “protesters,” those doubts are dispelled by the protesters’ explicit desire to “defund” or otherwise disempower the police. The fundamental purpose of government is not to run day-care centers or libraries or to dispense welfare checks. The fundamental purpose of government is to keep the peace; government, in essence, is the police (and the military). There can be only one reason to advocate weakening or disbanding the police, and that is to unleash anarchy.

We are in the midst of a genuine insurrection

In city after city for over a week now we have been witnessing what happens when the police fail to do their jobs. Can any honest, rational person really believe that our cities would be safer if the police were hamstrung further than they already are, or if they were disbanded altogether? The crippling of the police can serve only one purpose, to allow anarchy to rise to such a level as to destabilize the government altogether.

Consider, in this regard, the degree to which Democratic leaders in office have been complicit, either overtly or by default, in the recent mayhem. The top-ranking Democratic leader in the Federal Government, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has not had one critical word to say about the violence that has been tearing our cities apart. And the chief law enforcement officer of the State of Massachusetts, Attorney General Elizabeth Vaughn, has opined “Yes, America is burning, but that’s how forests grow.”

We are in the midst of a genuine insurrection. The mainstream media are openly and unabashedly on the side of the insurrectionists, as are many leaders of the Democratic Party. One of Mr. Trump’s strengths is that he has been steadfastly and unreservedly on the side of the Constitution. To his great credit he has refused to sanction the insurrectionists in any way, not even by crediting them with good intentions, as political correctness would require of him. It is clear that he understands this is a struggle between good and evil, and that there no longer exists a middle ground on which the two sides can meet. We are long past that.