Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
BLM and the Great Awokening will follow the same pattern as the Jacobins and McCarthyites. The Left quickly made its points that occasionally and wrongly police use undue force against black suspects. But it then simply went mute when it was a matter of ascertaining whether unarmed apprehended blacks are systematically dying in greater numbers in police custody than are unarmed whites, or at least disproportionally so given the relative number of blacks and whites respectively arrested each year. They are not.
The greatest killer of unarmed African-American men remains tragically other armed African-American males, often in a gang or during the commission of another crime.
Now Leftists are going after milk-toast Leftwing mayors and governors for even mentioning arrests or use of the National Guard, even those who have previously excused street violence and forbid arrests and indictments of looters and rioters. These appeasers hoped that the BLM/Antifa violence would pass them by, or the evil Trump’s departure would usher in the healing days of “You ain’t black” Joe Biden.
No such luck. Arson, looting, and riots are going on now, even well before the Officer Derek Chauvin’s trial ends.
The leaders of BLM? For avowed Marxists they seem mute when asked where did the tens of millions of dollars of corporate protection money go? Do Marxists really like to own four houses, or to become the elite whom they wanted us to hate?
So, the BLM movement is getting close to peak wokeness … It is too volatile, too spontaneous, too liable to consume those who created it.
Do white liberals really believe that their woke credentials, like a Danton’s, will spare them from the reign-of-terror mob? Will their children really still get into Princeton, when white males were limited to 16 percent of this fall’s entering class? Will the ethnic, racial, and gender profiles of their Gulfstream pilots not have to reflect “who we are?” Will their Portland, Seattle or Minneapolis suburban homes really be passed over by this coming summer’s violence?
So the BLM movement is getting close to peak wokeness. Once the public believes no country can continue with wide-open borders in a time of a pandemic, or with CEOs who order baseball games to be moved on no apparent logic, or with cartoons and movies banned by twitter mobs, or a fake white terror campaign against Asian-Americans constructed to hide a real epidemic of African-American violence against Asians, then the madness fades. It is too volatile, too spontaneous, too liable to consume those who created it.