Miranda Devine: To harm and incite fear — that’s the Democrat’s motto
The chaos crippling the US must be seen in the context of the election, which is why the Democrats have become the party of anarchy and Trump the “law and order” president, writes Miranda Devine.
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The best way to make sense of the chaos in America at the moment, as always, is to view it through the prism of Trump Derangement Syndrome five months out from a crucial election.
Take the absurd new mantra of the American left: “Abolish (or de-fund) the police”.
It took two weeks of protests, violent riots and looting, but the fury sparked by the death of a black suspect at the hands of a Minneapolis cop finally came up with a rationale. The solution to the alleged “systemic racism” of America’s police, for which there is no evidence, is to get rid of them.
Already, the Democratic mayors of New York and Los Angeles have announced substantial budget cuts for their police forces, even though violent crime is on the rise.
And in Minneapolis, where white police officer Derek Chauvin is in jail charged with murder after kneeling for almost nine minutes on the neck of career criminal George Floyd, the majority of the city council pledged on Sunday to disband their police force.
They haven’t quite explained what they will do about the rapes, robberies and homicidal gang warfare that plagues Minneapolis.
That is yet to be “imagined” but there is talk of flying squads of social workers and private security firms.
Minneapolis City Council president Lisa Bender, a white Democrat, was asked on CNN this week to address community concerns about the removal of law enforcement. Her answer was insane.
“What if in the middle of the night my home is broken into?” CNN’s Alisyn Camerota asked. “Who do I call?”
Bender replied: “I know that comes from a place of privilege, for those of us for whom the system is working,” Bender said.
“I think we need to step back and imagine what it would feel like to already live in that reality.”
Got that? Not wanting to become a victim of crime means you are guilty of “privilege”, by which she means “white privilege”.
It’s hard to believe such a radical idea could even get traction on social media, let alone in the real world in an election year. After all, only 16 per cent of Americans even support funding cuts for police departments, according to a YouGov/Yahoo poll conducted at the start of the unrest.
The idea is electoral poison, yet the Democratic mayor of Washington DC has painted “Defund the Police” in giant yellow letters on a road near the White House.
With just five months until the presidential election, these are the battlelines forming between anarchy and law and order.
President Trump, behind in the polls and weighed down by a pandemic-crippled economy, has pitched himself unequivocally as “the law and order president”.
Presidential candidate Joe Biden, whose staff donated to a fund to get rioters out on bail, is trying to steer a course between a Democratic Party that has veered radically left and electoral suicide.
He came out on Monday to say he does not support de-funding police departments but is yet to condemn the idea.
Considering it is black communities which rely most heavily on police and black men who are most at risk of homicide from other black men, it’s hard to see #AbolishPolice and #DefundPolice as winning campaign slogans.
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who restored order to a crime-ravaged New York in the 1990s, says it is “devastating for the black community, much more than the white community”.
“You will literally double, triple the number of black victims if you take the police out of these neighbourhoods,” he said.
“It’s insane and it’s cruel”.
Deaths of unarmed black males at the hands of police have been declining, from 38 in 2015 to nine last year, so there is no current emergency, although Minneapolis police force appears to be dysfunctional, largely thanks to the city’s Democratic leadership for more than 50 years.
But Democrats see stoking black grievance as an electoral necessity. Remember that Biden only clinched the presidential nomination because he won 61 per cent of the black vote in the North Carolina primary in March, thanks to the endorsement of powerful black congressional leader James Clyburn.
Being the former Vice President to America’s first black president is his greatest asset. Yet last month, a week before the death of Floyd, Biden made a catastrophic mistake.
He lost his temper in an interview from his basement with popular black radio host Charlamagne tha God, and said: “If you’ve got a problem figuring out if you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
The comment was staggeringly racist and confirmed the belief of some black Americans that the Democratic Party takes their vote for granted.
It turbocharged the “Blexit” movement, founded by black activist Candace Owens, for blacks “exiting the Democratic Party.
Owens’ video last week, denouncing the riots and the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement has reached 80 million views on YouTube.
Meanwhile, a shock new Rasmussen poll shows Trump has gained a historic approval rating among black voters of 41 per cent.
Even if the poll is wildly optimistic, other polls over the past year indicate he is likely to improve on the 8 per cent of the black vote he won in 2016. This is the Democrats’ worst nightmare, because they need a minimum 85 per cent black vote to win the White House.
They’ve tried everything to discredit Trump since 2016.
They spied on his campaign, sicced the FBI on his advisers, launched the Russia collusion hoax and impeachment, blamed him for every coronavirus death and for the subsequent recession.
Yet Trump soldiers on.
Last week, surprisingly good jobs figures, with the expected 20 per cent unemployment rate coming in at 13 per cent, suggest the economic recovery may be faster than expected.
Trump’s campaign theme is the “Great American Comeback”.
Hiding in his basement, Biden still is ahead in the polls, but attempts to paint Trump as an authoritarian dictator for his tough talk on the riots are likely to backfire.
As cities burn, a majority of Americans are frightened and feel their country is “out of control”, as an NBC poll showed this week.
You’d be foolish not to suspect that many of them will hold their noses to lodge a private vote in November for the law and order president.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph