Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass misspoke Monday when she said of the rioters in her city that “people should exercise their right to protest; that’s their First Amendment right.” But she had good reason to expect that few Americans would recognize the error of her words. Thankfully, Harris Faulkner of Fox’s Faulkner Focus refused to accept Bass’s wording in the June 9 lead-in to her show — “you won’t hear me calling them protesters; they are criminals.” (RELATED: Do We Have a Nation?)
For many Americans, designation of activist behavior as “protests” reflexively evokes approbation associated with the Civil Rights movement they honor. But since Barack Obama’s first term as president, protests staged by left-of-center groups have borne less and less resemblance to those led and inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. For those who witnessed Bull Connor’s dogs and hoses in Birmingham, the marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and blacks unlawfully seated at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, the Los Angeles rioters cannot claim to be heirs of the Civil Rights movement.
In contradiction to MLK’s carefully planned events demanding absolute adherence to non-violence methods, Obama called for a general “taking to the streets” and reiterated it repeatedly to fuel the now infamous conflagrations that produced the George Floyd Summer of Love. His attorney general and self-described “wing-man,” Eric Holder, said, “When they go low, we kick ‘em.”
Against the model provided by King, Obama and his heirs have sown violence in the wind, and now America is reaping a whirlwind of destruction as a result.
Of Trump Administration officials, California Congresswoman Maxine Waters urged, “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” From the steps of the Supreme Court Chuck Schumer warned Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh that if either voted to overturn Roe v. Wade “you will pay the price,” and “you won’t know what hit you.”
The contrast between such incitement of mobs with the strategies of King could hardly be more stark. Pointing to both Jesus Christ and Mahatma Gandhi, MLK emphasized above all the necessity that the Civil Rights protests be peaceable, non-violent, and, whenever possible, legal.
King always petitioned for permission to protest from all appropriate authorities. When denied, non-violence was maintained, and protesters did not resist arrest. King’s followers engaged in courageous, self-sacrificing acts of civil disobedience. Post-Obama left-wing protesters do anything but. The most peaceable protests in our time were launched by conservatives and Jews.
The Tea Party gained notoriety for cleaning up after themselves when their protests were concluded. Over the decades, no annual Right to Life marcher has thrown rocks or burned cars. But 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Barbara Steinmetz was burned by a counter-protester as she walked in silent protest with Jews in Boulder, Colorado, on June 5. (RELATED: Unseen, Unchecked, Unsafe — America’s Visa Overstay Problem)
Faulkner’s refusal to call the rioters in LA protesters is appropriate on both historical and constitutional grounds. The First Amendment of the Constitution prohibits Congress from making any law “abridging the freedom of speech … or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The word protest is nowhere to be found. But that word has won widespread valorization and legitimacy in the American psyche because of the Civil Rights movement.
Faulkner recognized that when rioters illegitimately co-opt the now historically freighted and virtually hallowed term “protest” to justify their destructive criminal acts, they win an unwarranted and dangerous legitimacy in the minds of the masses who remain largely blind to the deception perpetrated. Two-thirds of Americans were born since 1970. Vital distinctions between the King-inspired protests and LA today tend to be lost on most of the populace.
What today’s left-wing rioters lack that King possessed touches upon that subject that has so seized the attention of the West in our day — identity. Though King’s theology and politics were liberal and moved further left with each passing year, his American identity was conservative. Progressives burn civilization down as the supposed necessary precursor to a promised utopian future. Conservatives seek to preserve goods bequeathed to them and build upon them. Conservatives, as Roger Scruton put it, have an instinct for home and a large capacity for neighborliness. They tend to be patriots and religious, as was King.
The murderous degradations of Jim Crow notwithstanding, Martin Luther King, Jr. refused to relinquish his claim upon either the flag flown by the nation of his birth or the Bible it placed in his hands. His words, penned in a Birmingham jail cell, record the miracle:
One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
What lay at the center of the identity of King’s nation also lay at the center of his own being, his own identity. Because this was so, Martin Luther King Jr., as a native son, was able to deliver an ennobling shaming of America. Post-Obama protests yield no such noble fruit.
King dreamed of a future in which America lived out the content of its creed. Barack Obama dreamed of a future in which that creed was gone, replaced by a transformed America. Obama sought no recovery of, much less reaffirmation of, America’s founding. He really did not and does not like us very much — insulted us as Bible clingers and gun toters, uncomfortable with folks who don’t look like us. That his political progeny throw rocks and set fires should surprise no one.
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Los Angeles Isn’t What’s Burning. The Democrat Party Might Well Be.