Remember 1968, when an unloved Richard Nixon won the presidency against a background of protests and riots? And won a landslide four years later against the same things? Apparently modern day Democrats don’t, as last week Hillary Clinton retweeted notes from two supporters endorsing the protests at the University of Missouri, and Politico ran a story about left wing donors meeting with the group Black Lives Matter to support its activities. According to the story, the donors are “considering ways to funnel support … to scrappier local groups that have utilized confrontational tactics to inject their grievances into the political debate.”
Normally, the phrase “black lives matter” would not be controversial, except for three minor things: Its members have suggested at moments that non-black lives aren’t equivalent. They see no difference between the deaths of Walter Scott, seen by all sides as capital murder; Eric Garner, where most conservatives agree the police acted badly; Freddie Gray, where the facts remain inconclusive; and Michael Brown, a 300-pound thief who had just robbed a store and died while trying to charge a policeman and grab at his gun.
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And they seem to create and give cover to mass riots that destroy the property and livelihoods of countless black businessmen, and anti-cop hatred that has led to the assassination of two (non-white) policemen and made many leery of stepping out of their cars.
As a result, crime rates have soared, nowhere more so than in Baltimore, site of the still unresolved Freddie Gray matter, where the black mayor and district attorney came down very hard on many black officers, creating a climate in which the murder rate has exploded. In fact, due to the “Ferguson effect” the crime rate is going up everywhere, which historically has been bad for the party of Michael Dukakis. Historically, the Republicans, as the party of order, have been able to make these things pay.
Then, there are students whose hunt for ever more miniscule race-gender transgressions has become a full-fledged assault on free speech. Insisting their soft little lives be made even softer, they insist on the right to be free of all friction, demanding trigger warnings on plays such as “Hamlet” and “safe spaces” for when those they don’t like come to town. “Are they snowflakes or fascists?” asks Mona Charen. The fact is that they’re both: Snowflakes as regards their own tender feelings, and fascists as regards other people’s rights, needs and lives.
Thus it makes sense that four of those arrested in New York last winter in protests over the Eric Garner incident turned out to be white academics, among them Baruch College professor Eric Linkser, who, ABC News reported, “resisted arrest after attempting to toss a 50-pound garbage can from the elevated walkway at officers on the roadway below.”
Desperate because she polls poorly among independents, white women among them, Hillary Clinton is trying to court the blacks and young people who turned out for Obama. But in embracing this renegade axis of protest, she risks repelling those more averse to mindless disruption, among them students who may want to learn something, and blacks who don’t like being impoverished by looters, or otherwise frightened by crime.
Why does it come down to force with these delicate flowers? “I need some muscle over here!” shrieked Missouri professor Melissa Click in the timeless thug argot, trying to push a photographer from an open space on the campus. This sort of thing was done often in the 1930s by the British Union of Fascists, which followed the lead of its sponsors in Germany. Does Hillary Clinton stand with them, too?
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
