Prominent conservatives reject their own side's finger-pointers after Dallas

As news broke Thursday night that Dallas police officers were under fire and some had already lost their lives protecting Black Lives Matter protesters, some of the instant responses included racially tinged fearmongering.

The Drudge Report headlined its site with a grotesque slur in all caps: “BLACK LIVES KILL.” The term “race war” was tossed around on Twitter by both black and white users. Former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh tweeted, “This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you.”

Walsh deleted his tweet, but not before it generated a new round of outrage and revulsion. The New York Post took a little more time to come up with a similarly provocative take on the tragedy, running a morning headline that blared, “CIVIL WAR.”

And Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who has a track record of derogatory comments about immigrants, blamed the shootings on President Obama’s criticisms of police, going back to an incident in 2009 involving the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

But on Friday, as the Dallas Police Department continued to release details of its investigation and identified the shooter killed with a remote-controlled explosive, a number of high-profile conservatives rejected the finger-pointing.

Rather than assigning blame, especially before the full facts of the Dallas horror were known, writers like Leon Wolf, the managing editor of RedState.com, and Matt Lewis at the Daily Caller, wrote about the ways in which many white Americans still do not grasp how black Americans fear or distrust the police.

“As the child of white parents who grew up in the rural panhandle of Texas, I was taught that police were there to help, any time I had a problem I should go to them. I should always follow their orders and show them the utmost respect,” Wolf wrote. “Now imagine, for a minute, that your parents instead grew up as black people in the 50s or 60s in one of the many areas where police were often the agents of — let’s call it what it was — white oppression. How might that have changed, for understandable reasons, the way not only those people but also their children and their children’s children interact with the police? More importantly, how might it impact the belief that police will ever be held accountable for abuses of their power?”

Lewis confessed that before smartphone videos, of the sort that have emerged over the last few years showing the deaths of African-Americans like Eric Garner, Walter Scott and Tamir Rice — and then Alton Sterling and Philando Castile this week — at the hands of police, he did not understand the scope of a problem he now believes has been long-standing. “It’s hard to come to any conclusion other than the fact that police brutality toward African-Americans is a pervasive problem that has been going on for generations,” Lewis wrote.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., whom Donald Trump is considering as a running mate, appeared on Facebook Live with liberal commentator Van Jones, a former Obama administration official, and said, “If you are a normal white American, the truth is you don’t understand being black in America and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk.”

These reactions demonstrated a desire to tamp down anger and frustration among white Americans and even encourage understanding and empathy, rather than stoking anger.

Similarly, Charles C.W. Cooke, editor of National Review Online, was one of the first to denounce those who sought to blame Obama or Black Lives Matter for the violence, tweeting early Friday morning, “You know what else is ridiculous? Blaming Obama. And BLM. Nobody knows who did this, and it certainly wasn’t a spontaneous crowd.”

And though Georgia conservative Erick Erickson wrote on his website, The Resurgent, that Obama “has spent eight years playing tribal politics, dividing the rich and poor, the races, the parties, the sexes, etc.,” Erickson’s larger point was that Trump would be far worse for the nation’s sense of unity and common purpose.

“Republicans are responding not with a candidate who will rise above the fray and try to unite us all back into common culture, but a man with no temperament to do anything other than divide,” Erickson wrote. “Republicans have embraced a man who takes tribalism to new levels and, in the process, have put on blinders and willfully ignored how much he excites white nationalists and the race baiters of the right. For every New Black Panther in love with Barack Obama there are two white nationalists willing to march through hell for Donald Trump.”

Among Republican elected officials, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., took to the House floor to lament the deaths of the five officers in Dallas. He also praised the peaceful protesters whose rally was hijacked by a murderous gunman.

“A few perpetrators of evil do not represent us. They do not control us. The blame lies with the people who committed these vicious acts, and no one else. And as the president rightfully said, justice will be done,” Ryan said. “The values that brought those protesters to the streets in Dallas, the values that brought those protesters to the streets in Washington last night — respect, decency, compassion, humanity — if we lose these fundamental things, what’s left?”

Even Trump, who has in the past encouraged supporters to beat up protesters at his rallies and has proposed banning all Muslims trying to enter the United States, issued a measured statement in which he expressed grief over the killings in Dallas but called for “love and compassion” in response. He also acknowledged the deaths of Sterling and Castile this week, though he initially referred to them only as “motorists” and did not mention their names.

Later in the day, he released another uncharacteristically measured statement, this time in a straight-to-the-camera video, in which he directly mentioned Sterling and Castile.

Dallas pays tribute to fallen officers >>>

Photos: The shootings in Dallas >>>

Newspapers react to Dallas attack against police officers >>>