The first is that Black Lives Matter isn't promoting much, if any, public outrage at city halls run by Democratic Party mayors over urban street violence that is out of control.
BLM isn't a movement as much as it is a political and fundraising arm, founded by neo-Marxists and currently aligned with the Democratic Party. BLM sees no percentage in pressuring big-city mayors to stop street violence. Its outrage is select and reserved for white police officers who kill unarmed Black men.
But it's the second thing that hardly gets attention from media that skews left, and from Democratic Party politicians:
Those young, white and woke BLM supporters who filled the streets, masked, chanting and angry, in legitimate protests over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd by a white police officer aren't venting much public, organized outrage over Black children being slaughtered.
They shouted so loudly and passionately about defunding or abolishing the police, but aren't they also concerned about the lives of Black children being taken in street gang wars across the country?
It's possible they're just terrified and sad and don't know what to do without leaders to herd them. They might need a safe space, even though the children being shot to death don't have a safe space.
Or, could it just be that the protesters, so silent now, see no political advantage for the November elections in drawing attention to the Black children, some as young as 1, who are killed?
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This is July. And what's on their mind is November, November, November.
Nationally, the white protesters who joined BLM and filled the streets during the George Floyd protests are almost sure to vote Democrat in November.
I'll take a leap of faith and guess that the white and woke live in wealthy and working-class neighborhoods. Many no doubt are from white suburbs, and their parents are Democratic Party donors.
They don't live in neighborhoods where car doors open and guns come out and children are killed almost every day. And so from them, we hear nothing but summer crickets.
Then the bullets start flying again, in cities across America, in Chicago, Atlanta, New York and Milwaukee and elsewhere, and babies are cut down.
"They say Black lives matter," said Secoriya Williamson, whose 8-year-old daughter was shot to death in Atlanta the other day. "You killed your own. You killed your own this time. ... You killed a child. She didn't do nothing to nobody."
In Chicago, there were some 90 people shot over the Fourth of July weekend, including 7-year-old Natalia Wallace, who was killed when armed hitters jumped from a car and began spraying gunfire into a crowd.
And on Monday there were some 19 shot. On Tuesday, there were 11 shot.
Chicago has always been a violent city, and street gangs have historically been intertwined with local politics, providing muscle and intimidation long before the days when Paul Ricca let the world believe that Al Capone was the boss.
According to Tribune reporting, Chicago homicides as of Sunday have risen sharply, by 39 percent this year so far, with 353 homicides reported, compared with 254 during the same period last year. And shootings of one or more people struck by gunfire are up 42 percent.
Homicide data alone doesn't tell the story of violence. Shootings tell the story. In Chicago, the worst year on record was 1992, with more than 940 homicides.
But what would 2020's final death count be if paramedics and emergency room doctors were working with technology from the early 1990s?
Does it matter?
If data can't be forged into a weapon for the November elections, does it matter in America anymore?
I called Rafael A. Mangual, a legal policy analyst for the conservative Manhattan Institute and a writer for City Journal.
He's studied the left's new favorite social justice warrior toys, including "decarceration" and liberal criminal bond policy that allows for the release of the violent from jails, even if they'd been arrested previously on gun charges.
And I asked him why white protesters aren't pressuring big-city Democratic Party mayors to do more about the wave of spiking urban violence, including in Chicago, where Mekhi James, 3, was killed in the gang wars just weeks ago.
"As cynical as it may sound, it's hard not to conclude that the lack of political pressure being brought to bear on Chicago leaders to get tough on crime is at least partly a function of the fact that the gang violence claiming so many innocent lives -- like that of 3-year-old Mekhi James -- is a problem from which the donor class lives several degrees removed," Mangual said.
That's not cynicism. That's reality.
"As bad as things are on the city's South and West sides, its high-end neighborhoods and upper-middle-class suburbs remain very safe," he said. "As a result, the political class doesn't bear any of the downside risk that attends the misguided 'decarceration' and de-policing efforts so popular among 'progressives' desperate to establish their social justice bona fides."
When it comes to the lives of Black children taken in street violence, what's clear is that the white woke world has no skin in the game.
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