Between the Dallas assassinations and today’s, officers have been shot at and ambushed in Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. Authorities have been circumspect in identifying the reasons behind those shootings—unlike the alacrity with which racial motives are assigned to cops when they shoot someone in the line of duty— and the incidents have been brushed under the rug. But we are quickly reaching the worst days of the nightmare 1960s, when it seemed that the very foundation of society was breaking apart. The difference between the 1960s and today is that the hatred of law enforcement and of whites is being stoked by the highest reaches of the establishment. Universities sometimes seem like little else than factories of desperately ginned-up racial grievance. That the cop killer in Dallas and apparently in Baton Rouge as well came out of the military is an indication that the happy talk about how the military is an engine of racial reconciliation is naïve. The country has been pretending that the main source of racism today comes from whites. Anyone who has spent time in the inner city and even more middle-class black precincts—such as college campuses—knows differently.

It may be too late to stop this fire from spreading. But Obama has one more chance to try to put it out. He failed that opportunity in his remarks hours after the Baton Rouge carnage, delivering instead an anodyne call to heal “our divisions” and discard “inflammatory rhetoric thrown around to advance an agenda.” Implication: Blame for “inflammatory rhetoric” is equally shared by those who attack cops and those who defend them. Sorry, Mr. President, those who tell the truth about crime and policing are not part of the problem and they bear no responsibility for the massacre of cops. The killing of cops is furthered exclusively by those peddling a false narrative that cops harbor lethal bias toward blacks. Obama should call for the Black Lives Matter movement to fold its tent—and he himself should start telling the truth about inner-city crime.