John Fund of National Review Online explores one particularly bizarre excuse for urban riots.
If Hillary Clinton is elected president, you can bet that in the wake of the Charlotte riots, her Justice Department will ratchet up the micromanaging of local police departments. But the Black Lives Matter movement that Clinton embraces doesn’t stop with allegations that the police are killing innocent blacks.
Look for an Environmental Protection Agency controlled by Hillary to fully embrace the movement’s theory of “environmental racism,” which holds that minority communities are disproportionately exposed, either intentionally or unintentionally, to hazardous materials and waste facilities. That in turn is said to be a contributing factor to riots and urban unrest. Is my prediction implausible? In 2014, after the Ferguson riots, Deirdre Smith, an environmental activist, said, “To me, the connection between militarized state violence, racism, and climate change was common-sense and intuitive.”
Smith is a law professor at the University of Maine and a strategic-partnership coordinator for 350.org, an environmental organization whose goal is to “reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere from >400 parts per million to below 350.” At 350’s website, Smith wrote: “Oppression and extreme weather combine to ‘incite’ militarized violence.” Not only are minority communities less able to cope with the effects of climate change, but “people of color also disproportionately live in climate-vulnerable areas,” she claims, which makes climate change, yes, a race issue. Smith failed to note that the weeks surrounding the Ferguson riots were only the seventh-warmest in the last 20 years.
In the 1960s, people who blew off the importance of riots as a result of “just the temperature” were thought to be Neanderthals. Gordon Lightfoot even had a song, “Black Day in July,” about the Detroit riots. The song included these lyrics: “And It wasn’t just the temperature / It wasn’t just the season.” Now leftists such as Deirdre Smith are resurrecting this idea.
And Smith is far from alone, Van Jones, who was President Obama’s “green energy czar” until he was forced to resign in 2009 after his past ties to the Communist party surfaced, has long blamed some of the problems in minority communities on “environmental racism.”