Rich Lowry explains in the New York Post why protesters rallying against federal immigration enforcement are no better than the racists of the American past.
On Sept. 30, 1962, the University of Mississippi experienced a “mostly peaceful” demonstration.
As with all such protests, it was peaceful until it wasn’t — it became a riot, and a particularly heinous and destructive one.
The mob attacked federal officers, including border-patrol agents, with rocks and Molotov cocktails.
They ransacked buildings.
They drove vehicles at the officers.
And they did it all to try to prevent the federal government from enforcing the law.
This, discerning readers will realize, was the notorious Battle of Oxford, when students at Ole Miss and outside agitators exploded in fury to prevent the enrollment of James Meredith, an African-American, who was under the protection of federal agents.
President John Kennedy had federalized the Mississippi National Guard days before the disturbance, and sent in the Army when things got out of hand.
Eventually, he drew on 31,000 troops, a necessary exercise of overwhelming force.
Now, once again, mobs are in the streets in opposition to federal power and federal law.
We are probably at the beginning stages of another titanic struggle over whether the writ of federal law will run in jurisdictions opposed to it, and over the morality of those underlying laws.
To use a term borrowed from segregationists in Virginia the 1950s, the opponents of ICE are engaged in a campaign of “massive resistance.”
Virginia Democrat Harry Byrd and his allies came up with an across-the-board strategy to undermine Brown v. Board of Education.
“If we can organize the Southern States for massive resistance to this order,” Byrd said, “I think that in time the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South.”
Similarly, Democratic officeholders and activists hope to make ICE raids so politically toxic and so painful to implement that the federal government stands down and accepts the status quo of routine lawlessness.
