At a recent campaign stop in Iowa, Chris Christie preemptively announced that he would not be meeting with Black Lives Matter activists, so they shouldn’t even bother to ask.

“I want the Black Lives Matter people to understand: Don’t call me for a meeting,” Christie said. “You’re not getting one.”

To which I say, HA!

I follow the goings-on with Black Lives Matter pretty closely, and to my knowledge, activists are mostly just meeting with, y’know, presidential candidates who have a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming the Republican nominee. So, Chris Christie is pretty cocksure for someone whose poll numbers are so abysmal—1 percent, according to the most recent poll from Public Policy Polling—that he got demoted from the adult debate to the kids’ table last Tuesday, where he spent most of the night fending off puerile attacks from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Or perhaps that is what is driving Christie’s comments: He’s doing so poorly in the polls that he figured he’d dig into his bag of tricks and pull out some standard conservative pablum about how Black Lives Matter really wants to just murder cops.

If Christie were a serious contender for the presidency, he wouldn’t be blustering the way he is. He would recognize that the Black Lives Matter movement wields a lot of political power right now, and any candidate who ignores that does so it at his or her own peril.

Marco Rubio gets it. He has recognized the legitimacy of the grievances that communities of color have with the police, which shouldn’t be a revelation, but is, because he’s a Republican. And Rubio, unlike Chris “BridgeGate” Christie, actually has a shot at the presidency, judging by poll numbers. Hell, even Ted Cruz said he’d meet with Black Lives Matter. (But Cruz has also said that Black Lives Matter is “literally suggesting and embracing and celebrating the murder of police,” which, no they’re not.)

So, Gov. Christie: It is unlikely that anyone even loosely associated with Black Lives Matter feels any burning urge to ask you for a meeting, especially given your penchant for bullying and violent rhetoric. Wasn’t it just a few months ago that you claimed that the teachers’ union needs a punch in the face? Oh yes. That was you.

And yet, given the disconnect between Christie’s idea of what Black Lives Matter is about and the actual police violence happening in his own backyard, he could particularly benefit from a meeting with them.

At the same campaign stop, in a statement that makes little to no sense, Christie also blamed the student unrest at the University of Missouri and Yale University on President Obama, claiming that President Obama has created an atmosphere of lawlessness. “I think part of this is a product of the president’s own unwillingness and inability to bring people together,” Christie said.

“When people think justice is not applied evenly and fairly, they take matters into their own hands. The lawlessness that the president has allowed to exist in this country just absolutely strips people of hope. Our administration would stand for the idea that justice is not just a word, but it’s a way of life. Laws will be applied evenly, fairly, and without bias to everyone.”

What “lawlessness” is Christie talking about?

Black Lives Matter.

Christie believes, as made clear by his statements at previous campaign stops, that Black Lives Matter is all about celebrating the murder of cops because at one massive demonstration the day that Dan Donovan, the former Staten Island district attorney, announced that no charges would be brought in connection with Eric Garner’s death, a small group of protesters chanted, “What do we want? Dead cops.” Of course with any grassroots movement, there will be some bad actors. And only a person like Christie who is truly committed to opposing a particular movement—here, Black Lives Matter—would purposefully hone in on those actors to delegitimize the entire movement.

But that’s what conservatives have been doing for more than a year now. They have purposefully tried to make Black Lives Matter about killing cops because, as with almost every movement for liberation in history, it’s easier to demonize it than to make even the feeblest attempt at understanding it.

Black Lives Matter is not calling for the murder of cops. And either Chris Christie knows that and he’s lying, or he’s too incompetent to have someone on his campaign spend five minutes on Google researching it. 

Because five minutes on the Google Machine would tell Christie that Black Lives Matter is not about targeting individual cops. Black Lives Matter is about reforming a system that allows state violence against Black people to go unpunished.

Christie, like many of the conservatives who have been propagating the lie that Black Lives Matter is about killing cops, is missing the plot.

The lawlessness that concerns Christie is not the lawlessness in the police departments that have either been ordered by the Department of Justice to get their shit together or are currently under investigation for not having their shit together. Christie doesn’t mention the police departments that have been found to be in such dire need of reform that under threat of being sued for civil rights violations by the DOJ, they’ve signed settlement agreements called consent decrees that require them to implement specific reforms within a specific time frame, usually five years. The police departments that have entered into federal consent decrees with the DOJ over the last few decades vary widely: They include Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Oakland, Portland, Oregon, Cleveland, New York City, Detroit, Seattle, Albuquerque, and—wait for it—Newark, New Jersey and the New Jersey State Police.

I would be remiss if I did not point out that the consent decree involving the New Jersey State Police was dissolved in 2009, before Christie was elected governor in 2010. But the police department in Newark, New Jersey, entered into a consent decree following an ACLU investigation that began in 2011. This was, in fact, the first time in New Jersey’s history that a municipal police agency was required to operate under a federal watchdog. 

Ultimately, the federal government determined on two separate occasions that lawless police were running wild in New Jersey. But Chris Christie is still concerned about the way President Obama is supposedly supporting lawlessness by remarking, essentially, that maybe cops should stop killing folks. And Christie is concerned about the “lawlessness” of the students at Yale and Missouri standing up against injustice and demanding that those schools do something about the rampant racism that exists on those campuses.

Let me repeat that: The guy who thinks that the teachers’ union deserves a punch in the face, and who has two police departments in his own state that have been forced by the federal government to reform their police practices, is criticizing the president for “encouraging lawlessness.”

It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is for Chris Christie to look up the word “ironic” in the dictionary.

Chris Christie has bought into the conservative outrage machine hook, line, and sinker. It is a simple-minded framework that permits conservatives to continue to avoid engaging in the difficult conversation about the sort of structural racism and biases that lead to police violence against Black people. If Christie, like so many conservatives spewing nonsense about “thugs,” can convince himself that Black Lives Matter is a hate group and make a big show out of not meeting with them, then he can continue to ignore the over-policing in Black communities and the ever growing mass incarceration rate for Black people. He can pretend that police brutality is not happening in his own state.

Christie may not want to take a meeting with Black Lives matter activists, and those activists are likely not losing any sleep over it. But frankly, Chris Christie would benefit from a meeting with Black Lives Matter activists. 

New Jersey is no stranger to police brutality. And Christie might do well to remember that.