The George Floyd protests and subsequent riots, along with calls for “Defund the police,” are changing political opinions, and not in the way the most in-our-faces activists want.
At Reason, J. D. Tuccille declares 2020 to be the year “gun control died,” arguing that “to push gun control proposals” amounts to advocating “that the likes of Derek Chauvin — the Minneapolis cop who killed George Floyd — should be armed, while the communities they terrorize should be helpless.”
As movements like “defund the police” make headway, gun control seems increasingly bootless. It is wrong “to insist that when police fail at their supposedly core task of protecting the public, people should be deprived of the means for defending themselves”; it is even worse after woke leftists take police off the streets.
As I noted weeks ago, violence in the wake of (or surrounding) protests causes a backlash.
To which even cancel culture is not immune.
Take the case of David Shor, a social democrat who was not allowed to get away with merely relaying the uncomfortable truth just stated above. On Twitter, he synopsized a study that found that “Post-MLK-assasination [sic] race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.”
For daring to tell a truth that protesters did not want to hear, he was fired from his job as a data analyst.
As happened in Salem in 1692, this mania will implode, unacceptable in America’s free and open society.
Even witch hunts burn out.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “The Coming Backlash”
It’s readily apparent that the looters don’t believe in “gun control”. I read in the local Fayetteville newspaper that a number of FFL dealers had experienced break-ins during the riots, and feared for my favorite pawn shop. I visited it last week, and sure enough it had been, and there was video showing a gang of 8-10 individuals systematically looting jewelry and more than 50 firearms. The owner told me that they broke the front glass and shook the bars behind it to set off the alarm. They then lurked nearby to see if the police would respond. After more than an hour when no law enforcement appeared they determined that they could work at leisure. They pried bars off a small upper window, and made off with whatever they chose.
These are not ‘protesters’, Paul. They are anarchists and insurrectionist street-puppet tools of the radical Left. Their goal has nothing whatsoever to do with George Floyd. That was just a convenient excuse for Soros to call out his minions. They are trying to collapse the United States and the Rule of Law that supports our Constitutional rights and they are working in tandem with their sponsors, the Progressive Socialist Party to sway the election. Many of them have been in this movement, under many different names for twenty years or more and many of them are paid by their sponsors. I was writing news articles for local papers about many of the same people in 2000, when they were protesting George Bush.