HEATHER MAC DONALD: Trump Can End the War on Cops:
President Obama has repeatedly accused the police and criminal-justice system of discrimination, lethal and otherwise. During the memorial service for five Dallas police officers gunned down in July by an assassin who reportedly was inspired by Black Lives Matter, Mr. Obama announced that black parents were right to “fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door”—that the child will be fatally shot by a cop.
The consequences of such presidential rhetoric are enormous, especially when amplified by the media. Officers working in high-crime areas now encounter a dangerous level of hatred and violent resistance. Gun murders of officers are up 68% this year compared with the same period last year.
Police have cut way back on pedestrian stops and public-order enforcement in minority neighborhoods, having been told repeatedly that such discretionary activities are racially oppressive. The result in 2015 was the largest national homicide increase in nearly 50 years. That shooting spree has continued this year, ruthlessly mowing down children and senior citizens in many cities, along with the usual toll of young black men who are the primary targets of gun crime.
To begin to reverse these trends, President Trump must declare that the executive branch’s ideological war on cops is over. The most fundamental necessity of any society is adherence to the rule of law, he should say. Moreover, there is no government agency today more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police.
Read the whole thing. The 180 degree reboot of the culture wars will be fascinating, and at times likely extremely painful to watch. Trump will dial back the radical racialism of the Obama White House, but as Ross Douthat warned prophetically in September, in the 1970s and ‘80s, the “Nixon-Reagan rightward shift did not repeal the 1960s or push the counterculture back to a beatnik-hippie fringe. But it did leave liberalism in a curious place throughout the 1980s: atop the commanding heights of culture yet often impotent in Washington, D.C.”
The latter half of that sentence certainly sounds good, but those “commanding heights” Douthat referenced give the left plenty of power to cause fear and dread in their never-ending culture war. As with Trump before him, Richard Nixon was elected by the voters as the “law and order” president to bring order to the chaos caused by an out of control Democrat White House, but thanks to panicked and malaise-ridden nihilistic leftists, the pop culture pumped out by the media in the early 1970s as a response to his election was pretty much this, non-stop: