The proverbial chickens of the American Left’s obsession with divide-and-conquer politics, media-abetted false narratives, and the unrelenting vilification of police have come home to roost. Five police officers were killed, and seven others were injured in the commission of a hate crime by racist 25-year-old Army veteran Micah Xavier Johnson, who opened fire during a Dallas Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest. Johnson’s home contained “bomb making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition, and a personal journal of combat tactics,” Dallas police officials stated. His now-deleted Facebook cover photo showed a black liberation flag and a black power fist.

Despite those realities — and black Dallas Police Chief David Brown’s statement that the cornered, and ultimately killed, sniper admitted he had trained for his mission, was angry about recent police shootings, and that he wanted “to kill white people, especially white police officers” — the Leftmedia scrupulously avoid using the terms “racist” or “hate crime.”

Likewise, Barack Obama was mystified: “I think it’s very hard to untangle the motives of this shooter.”

The latest targeting of police has also occurred in Tennessee, Georgia, Missouri and San Antonio, Texas. BLM protesters took over the I-94 freeway in St. Paul, Minnesota, Saturday night and attacked police with concrete, rebar, rocks, bottles, fireworks and Molotov Cocktails, injuring several officers. These attacks are likely to increase, given the calls to violence and hate by many on the fringes of the BLM movement.

Unsurprisingly, the nation’s community organizer in chief wasted no time demagoguing the tragedy. Even as Obama offered praise for the heroism and sacrifice of America’s police officers, he made sure to include remarks about the “racial disparity in the justice system” and idea that people armed with “powerful weapons” make attacks “more deadly and more tragic.” Obama also used the shooting to push for federalizing police training and, just like the Orlando atrocity, attempted to dismiss the shooter’s stated agenda: “The danger is that we somehow think the act of a troubled person speaks to some larger political statement across the country — it doesn’t.”

No, the danger is a president with an odious worldview, one that makes him quick to weigh in on “stupid” Cambridge cops, a nonexistent son who would “look like Trayvon Martin,” or the “racial disparities that appear across the system year after year,” but leaves him conspicuously silent when 32-year-old Kate Steinle’s life is snuffed out by an illegal alien. A president who invited BLM activists and racial arsonist Al Sharpton to the White House in February to discuss race, crime and policing. The despicable race-baiting and violence advocated by the Left gets a free pass — or even support — from a corrupt media.

Yet it isn’t largely middle class “bitter clingers” in flyover country fomenting anti-cop racialist/separatist anarchy. It’s leftist elites promulgating the noxious ideas that America is a nation of “white privilege” and “endemic racism.” It’s a BLM movement chanting “pigs in a blanket fry ‘em like bacon,” even as one of their leaders insists looting is a legitimate form of protest. It is the entire metastatic progressive agenda, rotting from the ground up on violent streets and speech-suppressing college campuses, and the top down in the halls of the Obama Social Justice™ Department, where justice is no longer separated from political connections.

Do millions of Americans really believe their relationship with law enforcement amounts to a devil’s bargain? Or do they see a coordinated effort to demonize law enforcement with anecdotal incidents aimed at creating a broad-brush narrative wholly inconsistent with reality? Do many black communities view cops with mistrust? A 2015 study undertaken by the reliably leftist Washington Post revealed that police kill disproportionately more blacks than whites. Are many of those same communities virtual free-fire zones beset by crime rates that dwarf those of other communities? The same study revealed blacks commit a disproportionate number of crimes (eight times the number of homicides as whites and Hispanics combined) that explains the discrepancy.

Can we expect police to be completely immune to the environment in which they work? “We should hold cops to a higher standard of accountability than the average citizen because they are given great power,” writes Matthew Hennessey. “Yet, we can’t forget that the police are people, too.”

Or can we? It is one thing for leftists to nurture a sense of hopelessness and victimization among black Americans that can be ameliorated only by remaining within Democrat-run urban poverty plantations. It quite another to harness that misguided loyalty and turn it into rage against a law enforcement community that is the only thing standing between Rule of Law and anarchy.

Who will pay the most egregious price for the rush to judgment? “Blood was shed in Baltimore at an unprecedented pace in 2015, with mostly young, black men shot to death in a near-daily crush of violence,” the Baltimore Sun reports. The number of Baltimore police offers declined by 6.1% last year, and even more this year. And not just in Baltimore, but in other major cities.

Why? “They’re having trouble recruiting because since Ferguson there has been a lot of negative press about policing,” said John DeCarlo, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven and former Branford, Connecticut, police chief.

Yuseff Hamm, a black, 15-year NYPD veteran, bemoans the “racial disparity in policing nationwide.” Yet getting police forces who reflect the racial demography of the community is belied by a reality best described by Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder and president of The Center for Policing Equity at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If you were taught from the time that you could speak, from the time that you could understand speech, that police are to be feared and that they’re part of an occupying force that is there to circumvent the democratic processes and to strip you of your rights,” he explains, “then it’s very difficult for that department to come into your neighborhood and tell you that they respect you and that you should join their team.”

Columnist Richard Fernandez warns that America’s security system requires trust, “which manifests itself in legitimacy which in turn makes it possible to govern a huge nation largely on consent. The mistake was to believe it was possible to play the identity card endlessly, to set one against another, to destroy trust — without consequences.”

America has long endured the consequences of a morally bankrupt progressive movement that embraces anarchy — and calls it social justice. A war on cops is more like it.