Article by Scott McKay in "The American Spectator":
As a columnist and pundit, it’s usually a lot easier to hammer out good content on small, self-contained items. Some politician says something stupid. Some economic study pops out and either destroys or reinforces some narrative. And so forth.
But the events of the last week, in which a bad Minneapolis cop killed an arrestee by kneeling on his neck — which practically everybody in America agrees was a criminal act deserving criminal charges, and those charges came to Derek Chauvin by the end of last week — and then almost three dozen cities erupted in violence purportedly as a result, make it a lot more difficult to offer punditry.
This is too big, and it’s moving too fast. It’s hard to draw conclusions and be correct.
That said, certain things are both obvious and haven’t been said quite enough, and so I’ll offer them for the perusal of our readers.
1. It’s Antifa. It’s not Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter doesn’t matter anymore. And you have to have the IQ of trouser lint to think it’s “white supremacists” destroying those cities.
Sure, sure, if you look at those “protests” you’ll see the usual suspects from the Black Lives Matter gang, and yes, yes, there are the looters who generally speaking don’t look much like Antifa — though the people breaking those store windows to start the looting look a bit more like Antifa than Black Lives Matter in an awful lot of cases.But there are lots of examples out there, circulating on social media, where some of the protesters who are legitimately motivated into the streets by what happened to George Floyd have begun to realize what’s happening. Namely, that their protests are being used by a sinister gang of communist thugs to try to start a revolution.
You don’t have riots in 30 cities without somebody organizing them. You don’t have mysterious pallets of bricks showing up out of nowhere unless there is money behind this insurrection.
And the one thing nobody really reported on was that after Ferguson, the Black Lives Matter crowd started to realize their methods were counterproductive. Particularly after unhinged lunatics slaughtered police in Dallas and Baton Rouge, particularly after Trump won the 2016 election, and particularly after those areas they torched in their riots stayed torched.
Those areas were black areas, after all. And when the businesses destroyed in Ferguson and Baltimore and other places weren’t replaced with new businesses, things got worse there while other areas, even other black areas, started to see economic growth by last year.
There are enough Black Lives Matter people seeing that incontrovertible evidence that their passion for violence cooled some.
But not Antifa. Antifa has never been properly punished for anything it has done. Maybe now that will change with Trump calling a spade a spade and branding them a domestic terror group; Antifa needs to be rolled up in a major way.
But do you think a bunch of gender-bent white twenty-something communist revolutionaries from middle-class families have any compunction about starting riots that trash black neighborhoods? Think again. They’re communist revolutionaries, which means their entire motivation is to rile up the proles to start Karl Marx’s revolution.
And they see blacks in the cities as the proles. Ergo, they show up at the racial protests and try to turn them into riots and mayhem. Quite successfully, as it turns out.
This isn’t complicated. What also isn’t complicated is the abject stupidity of some in the media parroting the insane statements of Minnesota’s failed governor, Tim Walz, to the effect that there were “white supremacists” starting these riots. Well, if that was the case, then why aren’t Tim Walz and the rest of these panty-waist governors and mayors not cracking skulls from Seattle to Tampa? Nobody will miss a bunch of real-life white supremacist Trump supporters, right, Tim? Get those lead bullets out and clean up the streets!
They don’t even bother to check their own statements for brazen stupidity. It’s insulting.
2. Tom Cotton’s sentiments are spot on, but his methods are off.
I’m a fan of Tom Cotton, but when he tweeted over the weekend that the rioters ought to come face to face with the 101st Airborne, or the 10th Mountain Division, I’ve got to admit I wasn’t crazy about it.Trust me, I agree with Cotton’s sentiments. The visceral reaction to a bunch of losers indoctrinated in pinko grievance in schools paid for with my tax dollars running around setting fires and looting and throwing Molotov cocktails at police ought to be that you’d like to see the Bradleys and M1A1s rolling through the streets and mowing them down. Part of you roots for that.
But part of you doesn’t, because we really don’t need Tiananmen Square here. We really don’t need that visual when the country might have the choice of putting a crooked, senile pervert like Joe Biden as a figurehead president for … Lord knows what nefarious bastards might actually run the country should Biden win. It’s one thing to muse about the results of a battle between sexually confused comparative lit majors in black sweatshirts throwing bricks in the streets on one side and hardened troops fresh out of the killing fields of Afghanistan on the other. It’s another thing to actually let that fly.
Most importantly, we don’t need that.
The police can handle these rioters if they’re allowed to. If the police can’t, in some circumstances, the National Guard certainly can. This isn’t some invading army; it’s the dregs of society who have been induced into the streets for free air fryers from Target. The slightest application of law enforcement muscle will put this rioting down.
Which brings us to …
3. The Democrats refuse to condemn the terror on our streets, but what’s more important they refuse to put a stop to it.
This was the message Trump delivered to the nation’s governors in a call on Monday, the meat of which was immediately leaked to the legacy media by the Gretchen Whitmers of the world.It doesn’t appear any of them pushed back on Trump’s statements that they ought to be seeking to dominate their own streets and getting those riots in hand. Instead, they ran to their own friendly media and talked about Trump like he was unhinged when he told them what is obvious to the majority of the country.
And this comes after a full week of rioting, during which it should have become obvious to them that gaining control of their streets was their job well before Trump even got involved.
But what’s even more obvious at this point is the current batch of Democrats doesn’t want to put a stop to the rioting. They won’t even verbally condemn it, Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Bottoms, being one of very few exceptions. Engaging in any real action to end the lawlessness before it results in millions or even billions of dollars in economic losses, or even more dead bodies, certainly isn’t in the cards. Some of these clowns have even resurrected the comic stylings of former Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who talked about giving the rioters in her city a few years ago the “space to destroy” her city.
4. The parts of those cities that have burned won’t come back. And they shouldn’t.
And after all of those businesses burn, guess what happens?Nothing. That’s what.
They don’t come back. Why would they come back? These are not the businesses located in the high-rent commercial districts. Those are in the really nice parts of town or in the suburbs. You aren’t allowed to riot and loot there. No, these are in the marginal and struggling parts of town, where crime is already at unacceptable levels and the merchants have half a foot out the door anyway.
When those commercial areas go up in smoke, the business owners don’t come back. If they’re not ruined, since their insurance doesn’t cover damage suffered in riots, they’re going to start over somewhere else.
So that burned-out building stays burned out. Or even if it doesn’t, it surely stays vacant.
Sure, you can do opportunity zones and you can try to use tax credits to induce commerce back into those areas. That generates marginal success at best. Because at the end of the day, everybody figures this is an area where the locals were so stupid and so disrespectful that they looted and burned down the very shops that kept the neighborhood going. And who wants to do business with such people?
Even the Black Lives Matter people, who don’t set records for their problem-solving skills, are starting to understand that. That Antifa comes into those neighborhoods and starts riots is doubly, if not triply evil, and there is literally no punishment too severe for it.
5. Virtually every one of the police departments the Left is screeching about is governed by Democrats. Where is their accountability? And what does that teach us?
An obvious point, to be sure. And one we all know. But let’s not ignore it, because it should be thrown in, for example, Jacob Frey‘s face every time he whines about “400 years of oppression.” Hey jackass, your party has controlled Minneapolis for 60 years. You don’t bear responsibility for its hideously unprofessional police force?Enough on this one. You all know it by heart.
6. The suburbs aren’t burning despite all the calls to burn them. It isn’t hard to understand why.
Brandon Morse has a great piece at RedState warning the Antifa clowns that if they actually follow through on their threats to invade the suburbs, they won’t like the result.“Suburbanites have a lot more to lose and are going to be a lot more apt to go to extremes to make sure no harm befalls what they’re protecting,” he says. “Too much rides on it. In the city, you were the pack of lions seeking whom you may devour. In the burbs, you’re the gazelle.”
That’s certainly true, and the rioters know it. Some of the Antifa clowns have been trying to rally their people to descend on the suburbs, and so far it hasn’t panned out.
Morse’s warning is one reason why. Know what the other one is?
Because the pasty honkies in the black sweatshirts live in the suburbs. Where do you think mom’s basement is, Watts? They’re not going to burn down their own neighborhoods; that’s for the proles to do, not the Marxist vanguard.
But sure — let’s have an attempted riot in the suburbs. Go ask Polk County, Florida, Sheriff Grady Judd, and he’ll tell you what’ll happen.
7. Today’s Democrats are too stupid to understand history, and they’re reelecting Trump with every building that burns.
You don’t have to go any further back than 1968 to know that when America gets its fill of domestic violence and insurrection, it votes for the most conservative candidate it can find. How do you think Richard Nixon, who was the political version of a broken-down claiming horse who had lost an election for the governorship of California just a few years earlier, rolled into the White House like a tsunami? Nixon was the law-and-order candidate. It didn’t really matter what else he was; the Silent Majority gave him the job and a mandate to put an end to The Sixties.Democrats have been trying to recreate The Sixties ever since, and the public has been trying to tell them The Sixties weren’t all that awesome.
It’s not a surprise that the animating force in that party is a gaggle of poorly educated, horrendously anti-intellectual twenty-somethings who couldn’t even tell you the Democrats’ nominee in 1968 (Hubert Humphrey, who was far more lucid than Joe Biden), much less recognize the lessons of that cycle.
Instead, they think this will be 1992, when Bill Clinton beat George H. W. Bush after the L.A. riots.
Except Bush 41 didn’t present himself as the law-and-order candidate. If anybody was that in 1992, it was Ross Perot. Bush 41 was the “kinder, gentler” guy who couldn’t stand up for himself. And he still probably would have won if Perot hadn’t gotten into the race and stolen a quarter of his base.
Trump is going to law-and-order this all the way home. It’s an easy play for him. This is a guy who walked to the burned-out church across the street from the White House after the Secret Service, 50 of whom had been injured by rioters over the weekend, doused a crowd of protesters in Lafayette Park with tear gas to pave the way for his photo op.
Sure, that was obnoxious. Do you think Trump cares? Why should he? Less than 72 hours before, he and his family had to be moved to the White House bunker, those 50 Secret Service people got hurt and the church was burned, and yet the protesters were back in Lafayette Park? Talk about obnoxious.
Trump’s response hasn’t been perfect, but he’s going to dominate the discussion the longer this goes. Do Democrats really think they’re going to beat him without even denouncing the riots? Are they that stupid?
Of course they are. Of course they are.
https://spectator.org/seven-thoughts-on-the-civil-war-the-other-side-wants-so-badly/