The Fire This Time

"Though this month’s cop-killers are no BLA, they share the same twisted thinking."

Rich Lowry  . . . "Killing cops quickly moved from a rhetorical pose — the Black Panther newspaper gave us the phrase “Off the Pig” — to an actual imperative. The Weather Underground targeted police in a series of — thankfully — relatively ineffectual bombings. It was the Black Liberation Army, an underground force spawned in the poisonous split between Newton and Cleaver, that took up the mission with a deadly seriousness." . . .
"The United States has experienced an extraordinary period of social peace dating from the Rodney King riot in 1992 — more than 50 dead and $1 billion in damages — to today. The recent unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore can’t be compared with that five-day conflagration, or the urban riots of the 1960s. But order is always a fragile thing, dependent on the sense of the legitimacy of our institutions. 

"With the police under a withering moral and intellectual assault, politicized assassinations of cops, which a few weeks ago would have seemed a relic of the 1970s, are back."

Who Was Gavin Long?

"He rejected U.S. law and claimed allegiance to a fantasy nation built on a fantasy history."

. . . " The Washitaw Nation is, charitably put, a marginal movement. Its message is incoherent, its website nearly unnavigable, its reading of history inscrutably deluded. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that active membership is around 200 (with more, perhaps, registered on paper). Its version of black nationalism is far on the fringe, by no means the same as mainstream varieties that Malcolm X and others made fashionable. The fable driving the Washitaw ideology — that a great nation of Moors once populated the American continent — is nonsensical and entirely its own." . . .