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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