RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the hours and days after terrorist massacres of police, one cannot justify violence and remain a member of polite society. Indeed, polite progressive society is even now engaged in the project of propping up Black Lives Matter — of spoon-feeding its activists opportunities to declare that they reject violence in all its forms even as their protests continue to be marked by violence and calls for violence. Anything good and peaceful? That’s Black Lives Matter. Anything violent or destructive? That’s not, even when it’s perpetrated at Black Lives Matter rallies, by people professing the same ideals as Black Lives Matter.

Worse yet, there’s a subset of radicals that refuses to completely disavow violence even when given the opportunity. The trick is to find a way to use the violence without exactly condoning it. How can one condemn it and exploit it?

In a (since-deleted) tweet Think Progress’s Zack Ford wrote: “Given how police haven’t been held accountable for murdering black people, it’s no surprise some are taking justice into their own hands.”

What an extraordinary statement. It’s “justice” to kill law-enforcement officers who had nothing to do with any single controversial police killing? If police have been “murdering black people” with no accountability, why not talk about specific cases? Why not deal with specific facts? It is much easier, apparently, to indulge in the crudest sort of moral equivalence, imbued with just enough distance (he’s not explicitly justifying; he’s just not surprised) to ensure you keep your job and your public voice.

The sophisticated approach comes (of course) from white-progressive America’s favorite black intellectual, MacArthur Genius Grant-recipient Ta-Nehisi Coates. Writing in The Atlantic after the Dallas massacre, Coates called the murders an “abhorrent act of political extremism,” but then immediately added this:

A community consistently subjected to violent discrimination under the law will lose respect for it, and act beyond it. When such actions stretch to mass murder it is horrific. But it is also predictable.

According to Coates, the son of a Black Panther, the police represent nothing but force, and are thus just another “street gang.”

For if the law represents nothing but the greatest force, then it really is indistinguishable from any other street gang. And if the law is nothing but a gang, then it is certain that someone will resort to the kind of justice typically meted out to all other powers in the street.

Note what both Ford and Coates do here. Rather than actively seeking peace, they work to create the moral case for violence, feeding the narrative that the police represent a fundamentally illegitimate force. Coates has gone even farther before, justifying burning, looting, and rioting. During Baltimore’s Freddie Gray uprising, he said this:

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con.

Remember, this is not some fringe tweeter, but rather a National Book Award-winner so beloved by white progressives that one New York Times critic said reading him was “essential, like water or air.”

For men such as Ford and Coates, violence is extraordinarily useful. It provides them with a megaphone through which to make their case against the police — just so long as they don’t cross that ever-so-fine line between predicting unrest and excusing violence. No one should forget that their “predictions” rely on the exact same reasoning used by those who not only justify violence but commit violent acts.

RELATED: More Hypocrisy from Black Lives Matter

In this way, a man such as Coates operates much like, say, the leaders of the political or propaganda arms of violent revolutionary movements — the Sinn Fein to the rioters’ IRA. Whenever there’s a violent act, Coates or someone like him is there to patiently explain the reason for the violence, making the rioters’ (or even the murderers’) case for them while offering rote, half-hearted denunciations of the violence itself.

They perpetuate lies about police, and in perpetuating the lies they spread ever-wider the justification for the acts of violence they claim to abhor. Imagine a self-proclaimed pacifist laying out the reasons for a declaration of war and you’ve captured the “respectable” radical in action.

Black Lives Matters rallies often feature activists chanting, “No justice! No peace!” For some marchers, the chant serves as a self-serving prediction. For others, it’s a direct threat against the state. For Coates, Ford, and their ilk it’s an opportunity. It allows them to hold America hostage with another man’s gun.

— David French is an attorney, and a staff writer at National Review.