Politico writes about polling results showing the Black Lives Matter movement losing support — and blames it on Trump’s attacks. Excerpt:

“This is the direct effect of the strategy of Donald Trump and Fox News,” said veteran Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher. “The movement to a certain extent, over the last month or so, had been losing ground in controlling the narrative.”

The protests were “resoundingly successful” in creating an “inflection point” around racism, Belcher said. But the drop in favorability, he continued, comes as Trump increasingly describes the protests as “violence” and “anarchy,” rather than about police brutality and racial injustice.

Yes, this is surely the fault of Trump, and does not reflect the public’s judgment based on the evidence of their own eyes. Right? Right?

That same article reports that the polling shows that the drop of BLM’s favorability does not correspond with a rise in Trump’s poll numbers. People still trust Biden more on racial issues. But they also are negative on BLM. Maybe — roll with me here a second — people can dislike Trump, but at the same time dislike BLM.

Here’s an example. A reader writes (obviously I’m not posting his name) wrote to me last night:

I’m a longtime reader and fan. I’ve been reading your recent posts regarding BLM and the protests with some amount of disagreement. I think you are giving the police in the Jacob Blake case too much of the benefit of the doubt and I could say the same regarding Kyle Rittenhouse.

However, that’s not the topic of my letter.  I think you are tapping into a real and growing stream of discontent that is being perpetuated by these protests becoming violent and I don’t see any other journalists willing to discuss that discontent. Let me relate this anecdote to you, please do not use my name if you print this. I’ll try to avoid identifying information.

Recently and not wholly by choice I’ve been changing careers and along with that planning to relocate my wife and 2 young daughters for better access to opportunities. Recently I had a phone conversation with my mother discussing the topic of our relocation and if we had chosen a city yet.

Rod, my mother is an Episcopalian feminist who has told me many times of her belief that “All political problems are caused by extremists”. I know my mother has black friends and co-workers and I have never heard my mother utter anything remotely racist in her life, until this conversation.

She told me I needed to get my kids “somewhere away from all the black people”, these were her exact words. I was floored. I pushed back on this and she told me that I needed to put the needs of my children over any income considerations, “because it’s not safe to live anywhere near blacks”.

I was stunned by this, I have never heard my mother say ANYTHING remotely like this before. My mother lives in a small midwestern city like Kenosha and what happened there really affected her. I think these Black Lives Matter protests have actually backfired and turned my mother racist and I am simply at a loss for how to handle it.

I sense a similar hardening of attitudes in some of my other white friends. People who I thought of as mainstream GOP conservative but non-racist openly roll their eyes and quickly lose patience with the idea that any of the protests are justified in any way.

From where I’m standing, it’s hard to argue that Black Lives Matters isn’t just creating MORE racism. I’m very worried about the future of our country if this continues.

The If It Happened In Kenosha, Then It Could Happen Here Too people are going to be interesting to watch. It is incredibly depressing to contemplate that all the racial progress made in this country since the 1960s could be falling apart right in front of our eyes. Our cultural elites — like, for example, our media — need to think long and hard about what they’re doing.

This reader’s letter depresses the hell out of me, for reasons that may not immediately be clear. How can anybody of good will not be depressed by it? I was born in 1967, and raised in a culture that believed in Dr. King’s vision. However imperfectly we realized it, most of us agreed that we ought to be moving as a nation away from racial prejudice and hatred, and toward reconciliation and brotherhood. We were taught to take King’s magnificent words from his “I Have A Dream” speech as gospel:

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

How far away that seems now. What a difference violent protest — as opposed to non-violent protest — makes.  And what a difference the abandonment by liberalism of King’s liberal vision — of a nation where people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character — makes in the attitudes of whites, who are now told by the left that their skin color convicts them of evil (“privilege,” and so forth).

The black political scientist Omar Wasow wrote earlier this year that his research on the 1960s found that non-violent civil rights protests benefited Democrats, but violent ones helped Republicans. This should be intuitively obvious: when people fear that protests could cause their businesses to be looted and their neighborhoods to burn down, naturally they are going to flip.

When Democratic data guru David Shor tweeted out a link to Wasow’s study during the George Floyd riots, he was dogpiled by progressives on Twitter as “racist” for doing so. The simple act of pointing out hey, this is probably going to hurt our side was a bigoted act, in the eyes of many of Shor’s Democratic colleagues. The left seems to have created a resilient information bubble in which it is impossible for those partisans to see how alarming the things they believe are to those outside the bubble. Only within the left-wing media bubble could NPR have aired a long interview with a radical author who has written a book defending rioting and looting.

So, the reader who sent a letter about how his Episcopalian feminist mom who has never uttered a racist word in his hearing — he’s picking up on something real, I believe. It’s not something the media want to talk about, because it violates their own taboos. It’s something that should alarm all of us who want to see a more racially harmonious, racially just America. The man who wrote me that signed his name to the letter, but I wouldn’t blame him at all for not wanting it publicized. Would you? His mother said something to him that I doubt she’s saying to anybody else — but to her, the safety of her grandchildren is at stake. She is making a racial — indeed, arguably racist — judgment, one that is clearly driven by fear. Because if it could happen in Kenosha… .

What do we do with this? Maybe it will re-elect Donald Trump, or maybe not. If Joe Biden is elected, though, don’t think for a minute that the fears raised within people like that Episcopalian feminist will go away. This is going to be a political reality for a long time. Note well: the fact that the media and professional gatekeepers have so effectively silenced any discussion having to do with race that doesn’t parrot the official line doesn’t make these conversations go away. It just drives them further underground.

I have mentioned in this space once going to a casual social event in my rural South hometown — this, about 15 years ago — in which a white plant worker spoke in a weird way about conflict with “Democrats” in his workplace. I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. Later, after he left, someone there told me that that was his code word for black people. When that working-class man, who only knew me as a stranger from the city (at the time, Dallas), assumed I was a liberal, and immediately switched to code so I wouldn’t know what he was talking about. This startled me — and it startled me that all the other whites present understood what he meant. I was an unsafe person for them to speak about race around — and in truth, I really was, if by “unsafe” they meant “someone who will object if we say something racist.” Even though I was known to most people there as a conservative writer, after that encounter, I figured that it was probably the case that nobody there would talk about race to me in an honest way, if it ever came up — because I was the media, and they figured (again, correctly) that I hold more liberal views on race than many white Southerners.

I think about people like that when I see the polls showing that Trump is still way behind, despite the riots. Maybe he’s genuinely behind. Or maybe there are a lot of people who will not tell the truth to pollsters, in the same way that that working-class white man at the gathering (and, in my reckoning, many of the other whites there) would not be open to me, even though most of them knew me. Maybe they are people like the reader’s mother, who in normal times would never say such things, and might not even allow herself to think them, but in a condition of fear, lets go.

It is a deeply discomfiting thing to discuss. But I believe that non-black people like the frightened liberal grandmother are going to be an underestimated factor in this fall election, and beyond. In the old America, the establishment, at least, believed in old-fashioned liberal values that opened the door to reconciliation and living together in peace. That American vision — that morally beautiful, unifying vision — seems to have gone up in smoke. It’s all now about race and identity, isn’t it?