Black Spring: The ACLU Joins the Lynch Mob

My new article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Black Spring: The ACLU Joins the Lynch Mob

By Matthew Vadum

Cooling down the churning cauldron of mob violence that Baltimore has become is not on the agenda of the ACLU which is now preparing to turn up the heat in cities across America.

Following the suspicious death in police custody of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man with a long rap sheet, angry mobs and radical agitators have turned Maryland’s largest city into a Hobbesian jungle. They were already angry at the endlessly sensationalized deaths in recent years of black males such as Trayvon Martin (Sanford, Fla.), Michael Brown (Ferguson, Mo.), Eric Garner (Staten Island, N.Y.), and Tamir Rice (Cleveland, Ohio) at the hands of non-blacks, but the seemingly senseless death of Gray last month pushed them over the edge.

Cries of “No justice, no peace,” the battle cry of leftist rabble hellbent on the destruction of civil society, ring out in the bloody streets of Baltimore. Violent solidarity protests have rocked several other big cities.

And it’s not just demonstrators who are shouting the phrase embraced by racial arsonist Al Sharpton: Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby said she was answering popular “calls for ‘No justice, No peace,'” by laying murder and other criminal charges against six police officers in connection with Gray’s death.

Renowned criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz has accused Mosby of “overcharging” the three white men, two black men, and one black woman, in order to appease the rioters. Charging a defendant with an excessively serious crime makes it more likely the jury will acquit and when that happens there will be more riots, he says.

The ACLU’s Maryland chapter gushed when Mosby announced the charges.

“For years, victims of police violence, overwhelmingly Black, have sought justice to no avail,” said executive director Susan Goering. “This historic moment is the result of the tireless efforts of families who have lost loved ones to police violence — here in Baltimore, throughout Maryland, and all across America.”

America is rotten, Goering added. “We hope this marks the beginning of a nationwide awakening to the many injustices and inequalities that we have allowed to continue for far too long.”

Maybe the “Black Spring” that ACLU headquarters tweeted Friday about will remedy all these alleged travesties. The group microblogged that the “Black Spring has begun” and urged protesters to learn their legal rights, presumably so left-wingers can riot and loot more effectively during protests about the systemic racial discrimination that they pretend pervades modern society.

At a time of rising racial tensions, an anemic economy, growing Islamofascism, and widespread uncertainty about the future, “Black Spring” can only mean one thing: violent upheaval.

Although it remains to be seen how the ACLU will back up its call for a Black Spring, surely its leaders know that they are pouring gasoline on a raging fire. They know that they are calling for an uprising.

By calling this political offensive Black Spring, the group is likening its push to the Arab Spring of 2011 in which popular, sometimes bloody, revolts ousted various governments in the Middle East and cleared the way for Islamofascists to take over. ACLU leaders know that President Obama’s pen and phone by themselves may not be enough to fundamentally transform America and they want to do what they can to help.

The ACLU has apparently not issued statements explaining exactly what its Black Spring intentions are but some sympathetic commentators have been filling in the blanks.

After the ACLU tweet, radical left-wing law professors Khaled A. Beydoun of Barry University and Priscilla Ocen of Loyola Law School wrote a column cheering on Black Spring. They argued that the United States is just as malevolent and repressive as the dictatorial regimes that have blighted the Arab world.

The Arab Spring happened because “the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and other nations in the region had had enough.”

“They had enough of the violence propagated by the state, of the political and economic marginalization that characterized their existence for generations, and they had enough of the unaccountable governmental agencies that inflicted harm with seeming impunity.”

This description of the Arab Spring “could just as easily apply to the mobilizations in Ferguson, in New York and now in Baltimore. The similarities between these two movements have not escaped the notice of many activists in the US.”

“For these activists the protest movements in places like Baltimore signal the rise of a ‘Black Spring’ — a kindred movement spurred by many of the same structural symptoms and subhuman conditions that ignited the popular protests in the Arab World.”

Ignoring the mischievous left-wing policies that have decimated  black families, they argued that America is to blame for the problems of the black community.

“In Ferguson or Baltimore, the present-day circumstances of poor blacks is rooted in slavery, segregation and their contemporary manifestations including racialized poverty, the school-to-prison complex, the mass incarceration of black men and women, the rapid shuttering of schools and the erosion of affirmative action.”

It’s absolute ahistorical nonsense. Red herrings and shibboleths. Hoary cliche after hoary cliche. Very tedious stuff.

It’s the kind of anti-American Marxist drivel one might expect to spew from the Obama White House.

Speaking of Marxism, no one should be surprised to learn that the morally preening American Civil Liberties Union was founded by in-your-face small-c communist Roger Nash Baldwin.

Baldwin’s comrades were radicals active during the Progressive Era. They simultaneously professed admiration for American ideals and the totalitarian Soviet Union.

“I am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately, for abolishing the state itself,” Baldwin said. “I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.”

Anticipating the teachings decades later of Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky, Baldwin counseled using deception to advance the cause. He spoke highly of American rights and liberties while extolling the virtues of socialism.

Baldwin seemed to recognize that socialist ideas were ugly and foreign to Americans who revered rugged individualism and maintained a healthy distrust of government power. In a 1917 letter on political strategy to journalist Louis Lochner, who was involved in a radical group, Baldwin embraced subterfuge.

“Do steer away from making it look like a Socialist enterprise,” Baldwin wrote.

“We want to look like patriots in everything we do. We want to get a lot of flags, talk a good deal about the Constitution and what our forefathers wanted to make of this country, and to show that we are really the folks that really stand for the spirit of our institutions.”

Obviously, the ACLU still follows the Baldwin-Alinsky playbook.

It also makes sense that the ACLU has long had a protest fetish because the Left has accomplished so much politically over the past century through demonstrations, violent or otherwise. Protesting, instead of doing something productive, is of paramount importance to these people and if it leads to violations of criminal law, including the destruction of private property (such as the hundreds of businesses recently destroyed in Baltimore), that doesn’t bother the ACLU.

The ACLU has been active in the Baltimore protests and in efforts to free jailed demonstrators quickly so they can go back to vandalizing businesses, intimidating perceived adversaries, setting fires, throwing heavy objects at police, and engaging in the left’s usual modes of “mostly peaceful” protest. The ACLU and its allies believe that protesters should be given a blank check to inflict whatever harm they wish on the community in pursuit of social justice.

The ACLU believes that America is hopelessly, systemically racist. It supports affirmative action on “racial justice” grounds and as a way for the country to atone for past sins. ACLU lawyer Chandra Bhatnagar insists that the alleged racial profiling of minorities by law enforcement “remains a widespread and pervasive problem throughout the U.S.”

Like all good leftists, the ACLU believes that almost a century and a half after slavery was abolished, America remains vexed by “the continuing persistence of structural racism and inequality in this country.” And like the radical leftist group ACORN, the ACLU indulges the fantasy that voting rights are constantly under attack in modern-day America. It wants all felons to vote too

Never one to miss out on a opportunity to stir up trouble, Kweisi Mfume gave the recent mob violence in Baltimore his blessing.

Born Frizzell Gerald Gray, the former Democratic congressman and former president of the NAACP said the charges laid against the six police officers only happened because people took to the streets.

“This current generation has realized that it has to shape its destiny and not wait for it to be shaped,” Mfume said. “I think now they’re starting to come to grips with the enormity of this and what they have caused to take place nationwide, and are embracing the fact that perhaps, this is our civil rights movement.”

And when a jury finds the Baltimore cops not guilty of murder, this new so-called civil rights movement will burn what’s left of Baltimore to the ground as Kweisi Mfume cheers the self-righteous rioters on.