Did they really think that they could have it both ways—that they could stir up a political base with animosity, specifically cries of “racist” police, and that there would be no consequences? President Obama has made noises about peaceful protests but he has never spoken out forcefully in a way that would have calmed the protests and kept them peaceful.

Did they think that when people chant “What do we want?… Dead cops!” that they are just using colorful language? A darker interpretation: They know they mean it and either quietly condone such language or find it politically acceptable or actually believe it. Ira Straus writes in NRO:

America and the West are subjected nonstop to a barrage of hate speech from the intelligentsia. Hate speech leads to hate crimes, here as everywhere. Few people have faced up to the extent of the hate crimes and hate speech against the West. The murder of the two New York City policemen Saturday is only the tip of the iceberg.

The two police officers murdered in their squad car Saturday were Rafael Ramos, 40, and Wenjian Liu, 32.  Liu, who had served with the NYPD seven years, was a newlywed. Ramos, the father of a 13-year-old son, had been a security guard before realizing his ambition to be a member of the NYPD.

Their murderer was Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, whose online messages referred to Michael Brown and Eric Garner, who were killed by law enforcement. In the Brown case, a grand jury did not return an indictment and the overwhelming evidence is that the policeman acted in self-defense. Eric Garner, who was stopped by the police for the petty crime of selling loose cigarettes, resisted arrest.

The video of the Garner arrest certainly makes it appear that there should have been an indictment in this case, though we have a grand jury system in this country and they may have had information not apparent on the video. At any rate, Brinsley, who has a long criminal record and apparent ties with a black guerilla group, put this on Instagram before murdering Ramos and Liu in cold blood:

I'm Putting Wings On Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours, Let's Take 2 of Theirs.

He added:

“This may be my final post … I’m putting pigs in a blanket.”

Brinsley killed himself shortly after murdering the two police officers.  

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, “who has suggested this is a racist police force that needs to be retrained to take black lives seriously,” suddenly couldn't say enough nice things about the the police—but too late for the NYPD officers who turned their backs on him when he walked in to deliver his remarks. If you only depend on the mainstream media, you  may have missed the officers shunning de Blasio. Here is the video.

Liberals are likely to blame the increasing lawlessness in our society on social media and lack of civility among conservatives. And there is terrible stuff on social media (I have just cited two examples), but I have to say it is not conservatives who are most often lacking in civility. The  real source of hate speech is the elite itself.

As Straus observes on NRO:

Literally thousands of inciters have propagated a dishonest storyline of widespread police violence against blacks. And what we’ve seen in recent months is only the current instance in a long history of incitement against the West. A view of the West as enemy is cultivated in universities across the country as the cutting edge of moral thinking, with full rein given to a very un-academic manner of speech, replete with the colorful language of vilification. From these heights, the same attitudes inevitably seep into other venues, including textbooks for much younger students.

The bulk of journalists and teachers do not believe in the full range of anti-Western ideology, but they accept it as an orienting guide. It is the only moral doctrine that they have heard with any frequency since they made it into the world of the talking classes. It is the only normative system they hear that makes demands on them with any vigor. They have nearly forgotten the quaint notions they were brought up on as children, such as conscience before society, or guilt for having failed society; they have settled into a subculture where “conscience” is reduced to conscience against society and aggressive accusations about society’s guilt. And so, on issue after issue, year after year, the media speak in a language of blaming the West and identifying with anger against the West.

There are policemen who are overly aggressive and we must be aware of them and take actions to remedy this. However, as former mayor Rudy Giuliani observed this weekend, it is the black communities that always request more policemen on the beat because, unless they are activists, they know that the more police the safer are their neighborhoods.

The profile of police a “pigs” grew out of a puerile sixties mentality that the police were bad because they were defending a rotten capitalist society. It was, in fact, the police were the more likely victims of the Weathermen, the sixties radicals, than the evil capitalists. They were easier targets–and they are easy today to target with hate speech that partly led to the real targeting of two NYPD officers by Brinsley Saturday. But, if we don't find a way to respect those who are willing to protect us by risking their own lives, we are going to suffer from a shortage of people willing to take this job. 

It is infuriating that our pathetic elite sees fit to denigrate those who make their neihborhoods safer–and more important, who make the neighborhoods of people who can't afford to live at ritzy addresses safer. The New York Post compares the profiles of those arrested in New York’s anti-police protests to the two officers executed as they sat in their car Saturday:

Take the profile of the suspects who’ve surrendered or been arrested in connection with last week’s violent melee with police on the Brooklyn Bridge. One is a white union official making six figures. Another is a white CUNY professor. Two more have ties to Rutgers. Meanwhile, one of the cops assassinated Saturday is Chinese and the other a Latino.