CHAPTER 6

Professional Agitators

It was November 25, 2014, and Missouri was burning.

The town of Ferguson, not far from where I used to live, was the scene of violent protests that quickly escalated into looting and arson in the wake of the decision by a grand jury not to file criminal charges against local police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown the previous August. There had been protests then too, in the hot summer days that followed Brown’s death. People from all over the country and the world had descended on this little corner of the Flyover Nation, about thirty miles from my hometown, to protest what they firmly believed was an unjust killing motivated by racism on the part of Officer Wilson. They burned down the QuikTrip, a family barbecue joint, and a beauty salon and looted a liquor store, among many others. Obtaining justice for Mike Brown apparently involved burning down black-owned businesses and stealing beer.

The mood of the city grew violent. As the crowds camped out in front of the Ferguson police station and elsewhere in town, waiting for news of the grand jury’s decision, the tension ratcheted up to new levels. The grand jury had met over several months, hearing from witnesses and reviewing documents related to Brown’s death to separate the facts of the case from the many fictions (“Hands up, don’t shoot” being one) that spread through the media. But the protesters’ only idea of justice was an indictment—Wilson’s head on a legal platter. When the announcement came down that the grand jury had declined to indict the officer, Ferguson exploded.

“Burn this motherf**ker down!” Louis Head, Brown’s stepfather, screamed to the crowd. The crowd obliged. (Head was later investigated for possibly inciting a riot.)

Rioters took to the streets. They were met with a large police presence and some in the crowd began to pelt officers with rocks and fireworks. Gunshots rang out. A car fire raged near the police station. Police used tear gas to break up the larger mobs of protesters, and as they dispersed, smaller gangs went on sprees of looting and mayhem. Two people from my flagship radio station, there covering the protests, were attacked and robbed. Near the police station, a beauty shop and a cell phone store were raided. Down the road, several businesses were set on fire, including a Walgreens and a Little Caesars pizza joint.

Across town, closer to the spot where Michael Brown was killed, the damage was worse. Along West Florissant Avenue, more businesses were torched, including a storage facility and a used car lot. Ferguson Market & Liquor, from which Brown had stolen some cigars before Wilson stopped him, was looted.

By the next afternoon, a total of twenty-one fires had been set around town and more than a dozen businesses burned. Firefighters found themselves prevented from responding to calls at some locations because of “gunfire and objects being thrown all around,” according to the New York Times.109 At least 150 gunshots were reported. Police made more than sixty arrests, and fourteen people were injured.110 During the months-long unrest, twenty-year-old Deandre Joshua lost his life. His body, burned and with a bullet wound to the head, was found in his car close to the spot where Brown had been killed in August. His death came shortly after testifying to a grand jury in Brown’s case. In addition to the tragic fatality and injuries, one estimate put the physical damage from the riots after the grand jury decision at around $28 million. A British newspaper called it the worst unrest in America since the Los Angeles riots in 1992.

I watched the coverage and prayed for the safety of my friends and family in the Ferguson area. But I was also nagged by one persistent question: Why?

Other questions soon followed: Why was this town burning? Why had our news coverage been saturated for months with frantic updates as the Ferguson grand jury deliberated? Why were other protests springing up all across the country at the same time? And for that matter, who had started the whole thing? Of course, all of the attention was focused on the deadly confrontation between Wilson and Brown, but what had caused this to balloon from a local police matter to an international news story and a major “moment” in the history of race relations in America?

The answer to that question is not found in Ferguson.

The literal and figurative firestorm that swept the St. Louis area in the wake of Michael Brown’s death, and continues to sweep the nation as the Black Lives Matter movement shouts its way through political rallies, college campuses, and elsewhere, is part of the long saga of betrayal of Flyover Nation by urban and coastal elites.

On the ground, trouble began with protesters from outside the area, anarchism tourists who descended on Ferguson to take advantage of the tense and at times seemingly lawless situation. Some came from St. Louis, others arrived from different parts of the city, the county, and others from different states altogether. Many were paid to protest, and when they didn’t receive their checks for professional unrest, they protested that too.111 One especially classy county resident named Bassem Masri taunted police officers on camera with such classic civil disobedience lines as: “Coward straight pig out here, b**ch! You gotta go. Your life is in danger, homie.” He also offered threats, like “What happens when we take your gun?”112

That’s a long way from “We shall overcome.”

But far bigger than any street-level provocateur are the professional race-baiters who make it their mission to stir up these controversies at the national level. The moment they catch the faintest whiff of free publicity, they descend like a plague on a place like Ferguson. The biggest name in this business, the patron saint of the viral vampires, of course, is Al Sharpton.

He swept into the Ferguson fray early on, proclaiming at Michael Brown’s funeral, “The policies of this country cannot go unchallenged.”113

Months later, when the grand jury declined to indict Officer Wilson, Sharpton struck a harsher tone in attacking the justice system. As protests raged and West Florissant Avenue burned, Sharpton and professional Black Lives Matter protesters called the decision “an absolute blow to those of us that wanted to see a fair and open trial.”114 Never mind that the decision was made by a jury of Ferguson citizens who had reviewed all of the available evidence. Al Sharpton fomenting controversy and keeping his waning brand in the forefront is obviously more important. (The victor in the battle between the old hustlers like Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and the new Black Lives Matter leaders remains to be seen.)

Sharpton, for all his bluster (and he makes his living from bluster), is only part of a larger system that links mainstream political elites, largely from the Democratic Party, to the activists they use to get their base excited. It’s a get-out-the-vote technique. In that way racial controversy is good for Democrats, because it feeds the mentality of victimhood they need to keep minority voters in America firmly in the D column. This is why progressives have pioneered the solutionless solution. Have you ever noticed how many hot-button issues for the Left have no real policy attached to them? America’s great rights movements—the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the civil rights movement—each had a specific law they wanted passed. Those activists didn’t care about which party, for instance, gave women the right to vote (it was Republicans, by the way). They had a goal. But what does #BlackLivesMatter want? Modern Democrats, by encouraging a hashtag over any particular reform, manage to keep “vote Democrat” the only action people can take. Why come up with solutions to incredibly hard problems like how to support local cops trying to clean up bad neighborhoods or the poor families who are scraping together a better life for their kids? It’s much easier to come up with a slogan or hashtag and have everyone change their Facebook profile pic. Let loose the hashtags of war! (Not that I’ll be excited when the Democrats are forced to name a policy that will remedy a real problem. Thanks to the law of bureaucratic replication, the solutions they propose always amount to nothing more than endless regulations, with expensive training and a bunch of federal paper pushers. None of it does anything except whet the endless appetite of government employee unions for more dues.)

Remember Vice President Joe Biden’s comments during the 2012 campaign? At a stop in Danville, Virginia, a city where African Americans are the largest ethnic group, he told his audience that Mitt Romney and the Republicans were “gonna put y’all back in chains.” The Pennsylvania native and current DC and Delaware resident even added a hint of a southern accent. They’re not even especially subtle about it these days.

More recently, President Obama himself has come to the defense of the Black Lives Matter movement, which regularly protests against police officers. Obama said that the protests were based on “a legitimate issue that we’ve got to address” and that “we as a society, particularly given our history, have to take this seriously.” The president went on to say that “the African-American community is not just making this up” and that the issues were “not just something being politicized,” that “there’s a history behind it and we have to take it seriously.”115

For Obama, Biden, and the liberal elites of this country, along with their agitator foot soldiers in “movements” like Black Lives Matter, America has apparently not moved beyond the hate-fueled rancor of the Jim Crow era, and it never will. That’s how the progressive narrative is preserved. Their playbook is very simple. If minorities are constantly scared into thinking that anyone besides the Democrats wants to put them “back in chains,” and constantly reminded of the shameful history of injustices committed decades ago by people now long dead, the Democratic voter rolls will continue to swell. Let’s not talk about the universality of the American dream or the American values of hard work and freedom of expression. There is no room for those old and creaky (and somehow, through the leftist lens, probably racist) notions. Focusing on identity politics is a much more efficient political strategy. It’s the classic tactic of “divide and conquer”—divide the people and then conquer the ballot box.

The Left’s lecturing is not directed at all Americans, not by a long shot. When President Obama says that “we as a society, particularly given our history” need to pay attention to Black Lives Matter protesters, he’s not talking to his fellow liberals in the country’s urban centers. He’s talking to Flyover Nation. In the elite leftist view, the center of all of America’s racial strife is the Flyover states, where every cop is secretly a Ku Klux Klan member and wakes up every morning with his sister-wife, chomping at the bit to go and arrest’um sum black people! I had an uncle who, before his death, was a cop in my home state of Missouri. Cops don’t decide one day to ruin their lives and their family’s lives by murdering an innocent simply because that innocent is black. While the president lectured Flyover Nation, the urban leftist enclaves, by contrast, are pinkies out, above reproach. Places like New York and San Francisco are supposed to be bastions of politically correct multicultural understanding, right?

Maybe not. After all, it was in New York City that some of the Black Lives Matter rhetoric was shown to have deadly real-world consequences.

On December 20, 2014, New York Police Department officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were gunned down as they sat in their car in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Their killer was twenty-eight-year-old Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, who ran from the crime scene into a subway station and shot himself. Brinsley had arrived in New York on a bus that day, coming from Baltimore, where that morning he had shot and wounded his ex-girlfriend Shaneka Thompson. On his way to New York City, Brinsley had posted a photo of a handgun to his Instagram account with the following caption:

I’m putting wings on pigs today. They take 1 of ours . . . let’s take 2 of theirs #ShootThePolice #RIPErivGarner #RIPMikeBrown. This may be my final post . . . I’m putting pigs in a blanket.116

His hashtags referenced Michael Brown, killed in Ferguson the previous August, and Eric (whom Brinsley’s typo referred to as “Eriv”) Garner, a New York man killed during a struggle with NYPD officers that July. In Garner’s case, as in Brown’s, protests had erupted after a grand jury made the decision not to indict the police officer involved on criminal charges.

The protests that had been raging since that summer, whipped into a frenzy by professional activists, had given rise to sickening antipolice rhetoric. With no big election in the near term to pour that anger into, the energy had to be directed somewhere—and sustained as a get-out-the-vote effort for the next election. About a month before the killings of Ramos and Liu, protesters in New York had stumbled upon a course of action, chanting: “What do we want? Dead cops!” Police responding to a protest had also been attacked with trash cans, which New York Post columnist Bob McManus, writing the day after the murders, called “an escalation that culminated in yesterday’s Bed-Stuy executions.”117

Ismaaiyl Brinsley was a disturbed man with a criminal record and clear propensity for violence. But that in no way makes the motivation for his ultimate action any less clear: He wanted revenge. He wanted revenge because the rhetoric of a nationwide protest movement told him that cops were the enemy, so he resolved to put “wings on pigs.” His perverted sense of “justice” was clear: “They take 1 of ours . . . let’s take 2 of theirs.” It was a case of “us versus them.” And “them” was anyone in a uniform with a badge.

The liberal spin brigade jumped into immediate action, of course. Unapologetic leftist New York mayor Bill de Blasio, who made no secret of his support for the Black Lives Matter protests in his city, called the killing “an assassination” as well as a “despicable act.” He made those remarks in the hospital where the two officers were pronounced dead. During his visit, other NYPD officers turned their backs on him.

Al Sharpton took to Twitter to say he was “outraged” and reminded his followers that “we stress nonviolence as the only way to fight for justice.” In a later interview Sharpton went further, stating: “This is not about trying to take things into our own hands. That does not solve the problem of police brutality.”118 Naturally, “Reverend” Al made sure to bring it back to “the problem of police brutality” before Officers Ramos and Liu were barely cold in their graves.

All of their platitudes couldn’t hide the simple truth of the matter: The protesters who chanted their demand for “dead cops” and the leaders who supported them had—and still have—blood on their hands. It’s the blood of Rafael Ramos, who left behind his wife, two sons, his friends and neighbors in his community of Glendale in Queens, and his fellow members of the congregation at Christ Tabernacle Church. It’s the blood of Wenjian Liu, who came to the United States from China at the age of twelve and gave back to his adopted community by serving on the police force.

You’d think that would be a teachable moment for the professional agitators of Black Lives Matter and their backers in high places, like George Soros, who funded the Ferguson operation.119 Alas, such logic finds no home among the professional Left (“Shocking!” said no one ever). Several months later, violent rhetoric was still a hallmark of Black Lives Matter’s antipolice protests.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, some of their activists decided to launch a protest over the weekend of the 2015 Minnesota State Fair (because something as all-American as a state fair must somehow be inherently racist, right?). On August 29 they led a march down a highway near the fairgrounds, holding a large BLACK LIVES MATTER banner, along with other signs with messages like END WHITE SUPREMACY. The protesters were also provided with a police escort as they marched. As they made their way down the road—along with their taxpayer-furnished escort—they started up a tasteful chant: “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon!”120

Calling police officers “pigs,” especially when they’re on the scene providing protection for your expression of your First Amendment rights, is so blatantly unoriginal that it kills brain cells without the benefit of alcohol. Has the activist crowd really not been able to come up with a more original insult since the anti–Vietnam War protest of the 1960s and ’70s? But the next line—“fry ’em like bacon”—sounds more like a call to action. But what sort of action could it mean?

As it happened, a police officer had been killed just the previous evening in Houston, Texas. Around 8:30 p.m., Harris County deputy sheriff Darren Goforth was filling up his squad car at a Chevron gas station when Shannon Miles came up behind him and shot him in the back of the head at point-blank range. When Deputy Goforth slumped to the ground, Miles continued shooting at him before fleeing the scene.

Does that sound like “frying ’em like bacon”?

When Harris County sheriff Ron Hickman held a press conference announcing Miles’s arrest the next day, he explained that there was no known history or connection between him and the man he had murdered. The killing appeared to be completely unprovoked—unless you counted Deputy Goforth’s profession as provocation. According to Sheriff Hickman, his officer “was a target because he wore a uniform.”121 It’s worth remembering that Texas had seen a surge in Black Lives Matter activity earlier that summer, after a black woman named Sandra Bland was arrested following a traffic stop in Prairie View, some thirty miles from Houston, and subsequently hung herself in her jail cell.122

After the death of their comrade, Deputy Goforth, law enforcement officials in Harris County sounded a clear warning about the heated rhetoric that was continually being used to attack their profession. The district attorney, Devon Anderson, called Goforth’s killing “an assault on the very fabric of our society” and a sign of “open warfare on law enforcement.” She called on “the silent majority in this country to support law enforcement.”123 Sheriff Hickman delivered an accurate assessment of the threat of violent words turning into violent actions. “At any point when the rhetoric ramps up to the point where calculated, coldblooded assassinations of police officers happen, this rhetoric has gotten out of control,” he said. Then he offered some blunt, no-bull Texas truth telling: “We’ve heard ‘black lives matter.’ All lives matter. Well, cops’ lives matter, too. So why don’t we just drop the qualifier and just say ‘lives matter,’ and take that to the bank.”124

I live in Texas, and I know plenty of people in law enforcement. You can trust a seasoned Texas cop to get right to the point of something and not spend any time dancing around the issue. In the nasty debate over whose lives matter more, this was a much-needed dose of Flyover Nation wisdom.

Sheriff Hickman got it right. “Lives matter,” period. No qualifiers needed. My life matters, my family’s lives matter, my black friends and neighbors’ lives matter, my Hispanic friends and neighbors’ lives matter, and on and on. And because our lives matter, we all have the right to defend ourselves if we feel our lives are being threatened. Police officers, who put their lives on the line every day, have the right to defend themselves as well.