Donald Trump's Reckless Rhetoric

He says he’s not responsible for the bad behavior of his supporters. That’s what liberal activists said about the looters and arsonists in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo.

In 1967 the liberal New Republic magazine ran an editorial titled “Blow Up the Cities.” It meant literally. The article hailed “the promise of the riots” that had been traumatizing the country’s largest population hubs.

“Terrifying as the looting, the shooting, the arson are,” wrote the editors, “they could mean a gain for the nation if, as a result, white America were shocked into looking at itself, its cities, its neglect.” The editorial concluded, “The national commitment needed to bring racial justice to the cities is unlikely until New York, Chicago or Los Angeles is brought to an indefinite standstill by a well-organized guerilla action against the white establishment.”

The 1965 race riots that started in the Watts section of Los Angeles resulted in 4,000 arrests and 34 deaths. The 1967 riots in Newark, N.J., claimed 23 lives and left 600 injured. Rioting in Detroit the same year caused 43 deaths and destroyed 2,500 businesses.

“Groping for perspective,” wrote Taylor Branch in “At Canaan’s Edge,” his civil-rights history, “a shell-shocked New York Times editorial observed that the cumulative toll from Newark and Detroit fell far beneath the Pentagon’s latest casualty report in Vietnam.” Relax, folks. Detroit was still safer than wartime Saigon.

Of course, the media’s decision to condone and encourage this violent upheaval reflected orthodox liberal thinking among civil-rights organizations, politicians and leading black activists of the period. The rioting that erupted in Washington, D.C., after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was described by the head of the local Urban League as a “low form of communication by people who seek to get a response from society that seems to be deaf to their needs.” Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell said that riots were “a necessary phase of the black revolution.” H. Rap Brown, the former Black Panther, called for “guerilla war on the honkie white man” and said that “Violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.”

In his history of urban America, “The Future Once Happened Here,”Fred Siegel wrote that in the 1960s black radicals in the U.S. began presenting their methods as part of the Third World rebellion against colonial rule. “If ghettoes constitute a kind of colony, then it follows that the riots were more analogous to uprisings,” wrote Mr. Siegel. “Liberation meant more than securing rights, it meant taking control of the black community and liberating it from the ‘occupying army’ of white police, social workers, landlords, and owners of small businesses.”

Donald Trump’s reckless rhetoric over the past week has been roundly condemned by everyone save his core supporters, for whom nothing that he says or does is disqualifying. But only a fool believes that the violence at these Trump campaign rallies will be confined to those rallies if it continues. History strongly suggests otherwise, and television images of blacks and whites fist-fighting at the University of Illinois at Chicago last week evokes that ugly history.

“When you are inciting mob violence, which is what Trump is doing in those clips, there’s a lot of memories that people have,” Hillary Clinton told a town hall audience in Springfield, Mass., on Monday. She’s right, but where was Mrs. Clinton’s outrage at the intolerant activists who have disrupted events featuring her Democratic presidential rivals?

Last August, Black Lives Matter protesters refused to let Bernie Sanders speak at a rally in Seattle. A month earlier, they repeatedly interrupted a Netroots Nation forum in Phoenix for Mr. Sanders andMartin O’Malley. Black Lives Matter protesters have physically harassed colleges students and chased them out of buildings. They have shut down major thoroughfares in large cities during rush hour. And they have assaulted police officers at demonstrations.

Mr. Trump insists that he is merely channeling the frustrations of voters who are fed up with a political class that seems indifferent to the plight of the working class. But he is also exploiting racial and ethnic fears, purposefully alienating religious minorities, and if not inciting violence then certainly not discouraging it. He is pursuing a political agenda based on threat, intimidation and insult. It’s a brand of identity politics that has animated the post-civil-rights left and that continues to this day.

Mr. Trump says he’s not responsible for the bad behavior of his supporters, which is exactly what liberal activists said about the looters and arsonists in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo. Even so, Mr. Trump is wholly responsible for his reaction to this behavior, and to his discredit he has chosen to escalate tensions. After seven years of racial retrogression under President Obama, that’s the last thing the country needs.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal

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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal