Like Clockwork

On July 7, 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson, a heavily armed sniper, started firing from the second story of a Dallas community college into a Black Lives Matter protest. He was aiming at the white police officers who were protecting the crowd. He killed five officers and injured nine others that day. That was the culmination of the Black Lives Matter movement that had been protesting police shootings of black men across America in Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, St. Paul, New York, Chicago, Washington, DC and many other cities throughout the summer of 2016.

The day before the five cops were gunned down in Dallas, President Barack Obama stoked the animus between police officers and the minority community when he said, “These[police shootings] are not isolated incidents. They are systematic of a broader set of disparities that exist in our criminal justice system. When incidents like this occur, there’s a big chunk of our fellow citizenry that feels that because of the color of their skin, they are not being treated the same, and that hurts.” Obama was employing his most effective tactic of dividing the country along racial lines for political purposes.

All of that must have worked because for the next three years, 2017 to 2019, the protesting and rioting over police shootings slowly died down and disappeared. Things were so quiet during that time, that it was fair to conclude that the problem had been solved, that no black men were being killed by police officers anymore. We had heard absolutely no news stories about those types of incidents for three years. The internet, social media, cable news did not drive our country to a screeching halt because an unarmed black man had been killed by police officers. Problem apparently solved.

And then, in June 2020, for some reason, police officers started killing black people again. They had taken a three-year hiatus and then went back to business as usual. On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, killed George Floyd by kneeling on his back for 9 minutes as Floyd died of a drug overdose. People were suddenly enraged by the systemic racism that was rampant in police forces across America that no one had noticed for three years. Once again, we were being told that police officers shooting black men was an epidemic in American life even though the public had not heard of one of these incidents since 2016.

Every year, anywhere between 10 to 15 unarmed black people are killed by police officers. Whether that can be considered an epidemic or an aberration or something in between is not the point. The more salient point is that 10 to 15 black people had been killed by police in the years 2017 to 2019, and no one in the media and no one in politics believed that those deaths were important enough to even mention. It was only when a black man died in police custody in May of 2020, that black people being killed by police became a major issue in our country once again.

From June to November 2020, over 500 riots broke out in many of our major cities, over 30 people were killed, thousands of police officers were injured, billions of dollars of property damage, thousands of businesses burned to the ground, federal courthouse were fire bombed, police precincts were set on fire, lives and livelihoods were lost because people believed they had the right to kill and injure and destroy because they were protesting racism in American police departments. All of that must have worked, because as happened after 2016, police officers once again decided to stop shooting black people. Since 2021, has

there been one major news story about a police officer killing a black man? How many BLM protests have there been for social justice in policing in that time? None that I can think of.

And now, in 2024 we have protests going on across the country, mainly on college campuses. Anti-Israel and pro-Hamas protestors have taken over Columbia University, CCNY, NYU, UCLA, USC and many others. In New York, these anti-Israel protestors took over Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, and the NYPD had to be called in to root them out. At UCLA, police had to be deployed to break up a pro-terrorist encampment that had taken over the campus.  

And the pattern emerges once again. Like the swallows to returning to Capistrano, every four years riots break out across our country over the social justice cause of the month. It just so happens that these protests and riots disproportionately occur during a Presidential election year. This is what the left always does leading up to Presidential elections – create as much chaos as possible with the hope that the enflamed emotions over these issues will motivate their base to show up and vote for a non-inspirational and non-charismatic Presidential candidate, such as Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton.

This time next year, there won’t be anyone concerned with the plight of the Palestinians, just as no one seems to care about blacks being killed by cops anymore. No one seems to care about the welfare of illegal immigrant children anymore. During Trump’s presidency, there were plenty crocodile tears shed by our congressmen for so-called “kids in cages”, but none of those teary-eyed representatives – namely AOC – care at all about illegal immigrant children being raped by coyotes or sex-trafficked because of the Biden Administration open border policy. So, in reality, no one really cares about the people they claim to care about; no one cares about the people they protest for.

So, why do we take these people seriously anymore? What they are doing has nothing to do with the cause they claim to be standing up for. Not one person who has been protesting on college campuses this spring gives a damn about the Palestinians in Gaza. The Palestinians are mere pawns in their game of power. When December rolls around, all these protests and all these emotions will have disappeared. There are wars going on across the Middle East all the time and innocent civilians are killed all the time, and this is the only time that there’s outrage, that there are protests. All of this is purely political.

Our country was on fire from June to November of 2020, every night there was a new riot splashed across our TV screens. Where was all that emotion, where was all that call for social justice in 2021, 2022, 2023 when black people were shot by police? No where. Everyone suddenly stopped caring because it was a waste of time and resources to protest and riot in 2021 because it would have no effect on the presidential election in 2024.

How many black people have been killed by police officers since the BLM riots stopped in 2021? We don’t know because no one has said a word about one black man being killed by cops in 3 three years. No one has protested. No one has rioted. Why? Because they do not care. BLM has never cared about black people dying. The BLM activists, antifa, people on the left, never cared about black people being killed by police officers. They only cared about their ability to exploit their deaths in order to gain politically. And they are waiting right now with much anticipation for a black man to resist arrest, attack a police officer, so the officer draws his firearm. That will be a great day to them. They will have a reason to take to the streets, to loot, burn, riot, injure and even kill, with the sole purpose of pushing Joe Biden across the finish line in November.

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J Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.