Race Riot Romance

By Matthew Vadum

The fatal police shooting of a young black suspect in a Midwestern town last weekend has given the Left yet another opportunity to advance its destructive, racially polarizing agenda.

After 18-year-old Michael Brown, a black man was killed by police in Ferguson, a mostly black community in St. Louis County, Mo., the city and region surrounding it have been under siege. Not content to wait for the wheels of the justice system to spin, some view this tragedy as a license to riot.

Cries of “no justice, no peace” pierce the air as demonstrators hurl Molotov cocktails at law enforcement officials. Some say the police have been responding to the protesters and rioters with excessive force and have been mean by discouraging protests. Some blacks are reportedly randomly assaulting non-blacks as collective payback for what happened to Brown.

Looting and property destruction are rampant. Dozens of people have been arrested. The Federal Aviation Administration ordered aircraft to fly at least 3,000 feet over Ferguson airspace after police said their helicopters were fired on from the ground.

Witnesses give conflicting accounts of what happened to Brown. The young man was apparently walking in the street and then stopped by police. There was a scuffle over a policeman’s gun and Brown was shot. Local police are investigating as are federal officials and civil rights bureaucrats. Brown could ultimately be found to be a would-be murderer or a murder victim himself. Time will tell.

The name of the police officer who shot Brown has been withheld for the time being by police who quite justifiably fear for his safety.

All this unrest over the death of Brown seems selective, for lack of a better term.

By contrast, when James Boyd, a mentally disturbed, homeless, white man was fatally shot in the back by Albuquerque, N.M. police recently, there were some protests but no riots. In some circles, white victims are apparently less valuable than black victims.

Regardless of what he may say publicly, all this racially motivated anger and violence is fine by President Obama, an extreme-left community organizer by profession.

The Left tells Americans that racist whites kill black people all the time. Blacks just can’t take it anymore and now it’s time to burn down buildings and convenience stores, the false narrative goes.

Obama has been instrumental in crafting this narrative. The president wants racial communities and everyone else to be at everyone else’s throat because, as the now-familiar leftist adage goes, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

The Obama administration has used taxpayer resources in an effort to generate race riots. Eric Holder’s Department of Justice deployed government-paid community organizers to Sanford, Fla. after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin two years ago in order to foment racial tensions. Race riots benefit the Left, and in particular the Democratic Party, by riling up its staunchest voting bloc.

The Community Relations Service (CRS), an office within DoJ, sent taxpayer-funded political agitators to Sanford after 17-year-old Martin was killed during a physical confrontation with community crime watch volunteer George Zimmerman. CRS expended thousands of dollars to help organize marches in which participants exacerbated racial tensions and loudly demanded that Zimmerman, described by the media as a “white Hispanic,” be prosecuted. The pressure worked. Zimmerman was charged but later acquitted at trial.

Before anyone really has a good grasp of what transpired in the death of Michael Brown, the rabble-rousers of CRS may be on the ground in Ferguson right now demanding that the officer involved be railroaded and lynched.

Sanford wasn’t the first time President Obama used DOJ employees as his personal Alinskyite stormtroopers. Uniformed field representatives of the CRS also assisted the rape-prone activists of Occupy Wall Street and anarchist activists outside the Republican National Convention in Tampa in 2012.

At every turn of his entire political career Obama has been the instigator, promoter, and beneficiary of left-wing race hatred. It helped him move up the political ladder.

Fishing for votes, Obama injected himself and racial politics into the Zimmerman case during the last election cycle when he volunteered, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

In the Martin case, the Left employed more or less the same race-baiting messaging strategy that helped to inflame racial tensions in the aftermath of the tragic 2006 death of Martin Lee Anderson, a 14-year-old black boy. After Anderson died during mandatory physical training at a Florida boot camp for young offenders, racial-grievance mongers and politicians claimed he was killed because of the color of his skin and demanded that criminal charges be laid. A racially diverse group of eight defendants (i.e. seven camp guards and a nurse) was eventually acquitted. The jury deliberated a mere 90 minutes after the three-week manslaughter trial.

To no one’s surprise, the race-baiting ambulance chasers of the fabulously wealthy Southern Poverty Law Center are already making money off the mob violence in Ferguson. The George Soros-funded group that sees as a major threat the nearly-dead remnants of the Ku Klux Klan that can barely afford scissors to cut holes in their bedsheets, doesn’t need the cash. This allegedly nonprofit organization reported a staggering $291.2 million in net assets for the year ended Oct. 31, 2013. The self-styled crusaders for social justice of the SPLC also reported having bank accounts in the tax havens of Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

SPLC President Richard Cohen sent out a typically dishonest mass email to supporters last night with the subject line, “How many more innocents must die?”

“Our entire criminal justice system has mushroomed, in large part because certain politicians have made it a strategy to stoke fear among white people — fear about young black men,” Cohen writes. 

“Young men like Michael Brown — and their families — are paying the price.”

Setting aside for a moment the question of what Brown did or did not do that fateful night, Cohen ignores the fact that Americans in general, and not just “white people” in particular, have good reason to be afraid of young black males, unfortunately.

“[Y]oung black men do commit about 50% of the murders in the U.S.,” African-American John McWhorter, an English professor and linguist at Columbia University, noted last year.

He continued:

McWhorter, by the way, is no conservative. He describes himself as “a cranky liberal Democrat … who supports Barack Obama, reviles the War on Drugs, supports gay marriage, never voted for George Bush and writes of Black English as coherent speech … ”

The Left must accept much of the blame for the growing epidemic of “knockout game” attacks by blacks on whites and for black violence generally. To leftists, violence committed by blacks is at best a political statement, and at worst a cry for help from the oppressed. The victims are irrelevant and if blacks get killed or captured by police in the process of committing criminal acts they are martyrs or supposed political prisoners like cop-killer Mumia abu Jamal.

The Left has been organizing in poor black communities for decades, not in an effort to improve anyone’s plight, but to get blacks to rise up against free enterprise and the American system.

These leftists have enjoyed spectacular success. Apart perhaps from crazed, drunken college sports fans, what group in society riots the most? When was the last time you heard of an Asian-American riot or a Jewish-American riot or an Italian-American riot?

Sociopathic radicals like Van Jones, Jesse Jackson Sr., Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Richard Cloward, and Frances Fox Piven have been agitating in inner cities for decades, doing everything they can to push blacks to violently revolt.

Cloward, who died in 2001, and his wife Piven objectified blacks, viewing them as cannon fodder in a fifth-column assault on America. They wanted blacks to remain miserable, docile, poor, and angry in black ghettos where left-wing community organizers could easily sacrifice their lives at will, as I wrote in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

In a particularly odious essay titled, “The Case Against Urban Desegregation,” these apostles of depravity wrote, “If the African American is to develop the power to enter the mainstream of American life, it is separatism—not integration—that will be essential to achieve results in certain institutional arenas.” The black American would be better off “consolidating his power within the central city” in order to “have some impact on the environment of the ghetto itself.” Blacks have to “organize as a bloc.” Achieving “effective separatist power” would not be accomplished by arguing “the ghetto must be dispersed.”

It is no secret that radicals want blacks to hate the police because it makes it easier to fan the flames of discontent. The leftist narrative is that the police are “pigs,” the armed wing of the white capitalist class that oppresses poor blacks. Cops are legitimate targets in the radicals’ war against what Sixties radicals called “AmeriKKKa.”

Echoing a sentiment expressed by Bolshevik barrister William Kunstler—defender of the Chicago Seven antiwar protesters, accused of crossing state lines to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention— Piven wrote separately in 1972 that growing numbers of poor blacks viewed police officers as a kind of “army of occupation in the ghetto.”

Piven herself argued that this perception of police-as-invaders was a wonderfully useful thing and that it should be encouraged in order to move the leftist counter-revolution forward. Left-wingers like Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and President Obama’s cabinet think otherwise, regard looting not only as an honorable exercise in redistributionism but also as a legitimate form of political protest.

Today’s violent cop-hating demonstrators in Ferguson have an ideological lineage stretching back at least to Cloward and Piven and other race-baiting radicals.

Even worse, you have been subsidizing this civil unrest for the last half century. Under the leftist-designed War on Poverty, the federal government has been handing out taxpayers’ money since 1965 to so-called community groups in order to encourage them to agitate against the status quo.

No doubt President Obama will find a way to funnel obscene quantities of taxpayer money to his friends in the radical community before he leaves office on Jan. 20, 2017.