The Black Lives Matter movement is attacking America’s institutions, said Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Joel Pollak, offering his remarks on Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s eponymous podcast on Tuesday.
Pollak reflected on vandalism of a public library he observed in Santa Monica, California last week. Such defacement amounts to an attack on knowledge, he assessed.
Pollak said, “What we saw over the last week or so with these riots was an attack on institutions more than an attack on people, and I will never forget the sight.”
“I went to [Santa Monica] the morning after the riots,” Pollak continued, “I will never forget the sight of the graffiti on the library, and the graffiti said, ‘Save a life, kill a cop.’ It’s not a store. It’s not the police station. It’s not even a courthouse or the city hall. It’s the library. The people who work at the library spend all day dealing with homeless people coming in from the cold or on the street — black, white, whatever — these are people who give their lives to those who have nothing, and it’s a free public resource.”
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Pollak continued, “You can drop out of high school, theoretically, and educate yourself at a library for nothing. The library is the foundation of our society. It is the preservation of wisdom [and] the preservation of freedom and free thought, and that’s what they attacked.”
Libraries represent “a shared commitment to liberating every generation from ignorance and poverty,” Pollak added, “because everybody can learn from a library.”
Defacing the library “was completely nihilistic,” added Pollak, noting that children are often brought to libraries.
Pollak advised against indicting American society as bigoted based on real or imagined racial and ethnic slights. People should avoid focus on anomalous negative experiences at the expense of a broader positive experience, he maintained.
“If you want to live in a country where racism is in the DNA, you can live that way,” Pollak explained, “and you can find things in your environment — and in history, certainly — in your everyday life that will seem to confirm that to you. If you want to live in that country, where racism isn’t a problem, you can also live that way.”
Pollak went on, “You can find ways of living where the fact that someone might look at you differently — maybe treat you differently — becomes such a minuscule event in the context of your overall experience that it doesn’t actually define your experience.”
Pollak quoted Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 letter from the Birmingham City Jail to illustrate the roots of America’s promise in the nation’s founding documents. Part of the letter reads:
One day the South will recognize its real heroes. … One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Pollak said that Martin Luther King Jr. viewed America’s founding “as the answer” to racial discrimination, “not the problem.”
“It wasn’t racism that was in our DNA,” Pollak continued. “It was freedom that was in our DNA, and racism was the circumstance. The Constitution was written and signed, partly, by slave owners. The early Founding Fathers had slaves, and not all of them sold their slaves.”
Pollak went on, “So the circumstances into which are country was born were certainly circumstances that lend themselves to racism, not just at the time but … since then, for decades, centuries, but the cure is also there.”
The Black Lives Matter movement is politically linked to the Occupy Wall Street movement, observed Pollak, describing both as political mobilization campaign for the left.
Pollak stated, “[Black Lives Matter] became a way to organize the left in much the same way as the Occupy Wall Street movement had been used.”
Organizing protests and riots are how the left responds to losing elections, added Pollak.
The Democrat Party is increasing beholden to a radical segment of America’s left, Pollak estimated, describing Joe Biden as “powerless to stop what’s happening in his country.”
“[Democrats] are terrified of what they’ve created,” concluded Pollak, “and what they’ve created is a generation of young people who believe that their society is fundamentally flawed.”
Pollak’s latest book, Red November: Will the Country Vote Red for Trump or Red for Socialism?, will be released on July 14.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.
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