"It was a coward hiding behind a badge who knelt on George Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes until he died, pleading for his life. And it is cowards who now give into the mob, allowing it to wreak havoc on their fellow citizens."

Billy Gribbin writes in the Daily Caller,

Mass lawlessness has erupted from the lawless act of an officer who should have served and protected the people of Minneapolis. Millions of Americans now watch with horror as their cities burn, their businesses are looted, and their neighborhoods explode in street violence. The unwillingness or inability of elected leaders and law enforcement officials to stop the chaos has confirmed an unsettling reality: the institutions we have trusted to protect us from lawlessness are more willing to let the innocent suffer than to administer swift justice to the lawbreaker.

In Minneapolis, police abandoned a precinct under assault from rioters. A few days later, on the evening of Pentecost Sunday, rioters in DC set ablaze St. John’s Episcopal Church across Lafayette Square from the White House, with seemingly little interference from police. Communities across the nation have taken to self-patrol and self-protection, as they have learned not to rely on law enforcement for defense. Countless instances of beatings, arson, and looting appear to have taken place without consequence.

The Fourth Estate proved itself to be yet another unreliable institution, as talking heads and reporters bent over backwards in the midst of the flames to claim that everything was “mostly peaceful.” NBC banned its staff from even using the word “riot,” for fear the term might unduly bias viewers against the thugs looting stores and beating men in the street. This delusion was so internalized that one reporter for CNN praised a “merry caravan” of “very, very peaceful” protesters in Minneapolis even while dodging a bottle thrown at him.

As much as they have howled at President Trump’s designation as “enemies of the people,” members of the mainstream media did their best to earn that designation last week, transparently and desperately gaslighting the American people as to the origins of the situation. Whether hyping mysterious, unseen white supremacists for infiltrating protests, or credulously interviewing Susan Rice about insidious Russian agents, the theme was common: we can’t blame the people throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails, it must be someone else.

But whether the perpetrators are indeed Antifa, which President Trump wants to designate as a domestic terrorist organization, opportunistic criminals, or frenzied protesters matters little to the victims of these crimes. What matters is that criminals are running rampant, and there appears to be little political will to stop them in or before the act, and certainly not with lethal force.

Law-abiding citizens who play by the rules, pay their taxes, and don’t torch police stations rightly assume they could be shot if they attempted to burn down a church, assault a woman, or throw a brick at a cop.

For some reason, there appears to a near-universal assumption amongst the ruling class that if enough people engage in these activities at once, it is manifestly unjust that they should stopped with force. Unfortunately, many police departments—which undoubtably wish to respond more forcefully—answer to such cretinous bureaucrats.

The message is clear to most Americans: Stay at home during lockdowns and curfews, and maybe someone will burn your car out of “righteous anger.” Join a violent mob in looting storefronts, and you’re fine.

The failure of those entrusted with enforcing our laws and protecting our society is simply the other side of the coin of police brutality: cowardice.

It was a coward hiding behind a badge who knelt on George Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes until he died, pleading for his life. And it is cowards who now give into the mob, allowing it to wreak havoc on their fellow citizens.

"The agents of anarchy haven’t ever disappeared, they’ve only rebranded."

In Red State, Kira Davis writes in part,

there is an element in this nation that longs for anarchy. Piggybacking on racial tensions and stoking the fires of unrest is literally their business model. Antifa is the latest group of professional anarchists but they are nothing more than OWS rebranded. The anarchists never really went away. Agents of chaos still long to see this country burn and that’s who you see breaking windows and lighting fires. Sure, some genuine protesters may have followed but these people know how to use mob mentality for maximum damage.

This is an organized, racist assault on peace and productive protesting aimed at placing the blame at the foot of the black community, just like they aimed to place the blame on sweet old ladies with homemade signs at Tea Party protests all those years ago.

But I know better and so do my colleagues who there that weekend in Denver. The agents of anarchy haven’t ever disappeared, they’ve only rebranded.

Read more here.

Beating a defenseless woman

I’m sure Vox and The Atlantic can explain the mechanism that transmutes the beating a of a defenseless woman into salutary social reform. https://t.co/AtfhXlsqKS

— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) May 31, 2020

"What about the “harms” of destroying other people’s property or bashing in their heads with a skateboard?"

Roger Kimball writes in Epoch Times,

...Many of the thugs looting and destroying property are white. So what we are witnessing is not a battle between black and white. It is a battle between the forces of civilization, on the one hand, and the forces of anarchy, on the other.

...It is curious that the most egregious scenes of violence are taking place in blue states in cities run by left-wing mayors. Many of the mayors and chiefs of police are themselves black. In many locales, the police have been told to stand down as the mob rampages. The mayor of Minneapolis blamed “white supremacists” and “outsiders” for the violence.

Unfortunately for that assertion, there are no white supremacists to be found, only members of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and kindred groups. An analysis of the zip codes of those arrested shows that they are overwhelmingly from the Minneapolis area.

Meanwhile, various celebrities are encouraging lawlessness by cheering on the malefactors, publicly promising to post bail for them.

Justin Timberlake, to take but one example, encouraged his fans to join him “in supporting the Minneapolis protestors” by donating to a “freedom fund” to combat “the harms of incarceration.”

What about the “harms” of destroying other people’s property or bashing in their heads with a skateboard? Ultimately, as Calvin Coolidge observed, “property rights and personal rights are the same thing.”

...There is some macabre irony in the fact that while most of the country is “locked down” by the diktats of the health police, enforced by power-mad governors and those aspiring to power in city councils and mayors’ offices throughout the country, abetted by virtue signaling sheep who scream at their neighbors if they get within six feet of them or appear in public without a mask, thousands of vicious criminals are given leave to loot and burn and pillage. The rules about “social distancing” are suspended so long as people are bent not upon making their living but destroying the livings of others.

...Many if not most of the violent hooligans defacing our cities today are young beneficiaries of the richest and most generous society the world has ever seen. At school, they were taught to despise their country as racist, sexist, colonialist, and exploitative, attitudes that were reinforced in college and from the megaphones of the media, Hollywood, and our elite universities. How thin is the line between civilization and violent anarchy!

Read more here.

The line between civilization and anarchy

Heather Mac Donald writes in the Wall Street Journal,

For two years American police departments have endured relentless attacks from the Obama administration, its media allies and the Black Lives Matter movement alleging that U.S. law enforcement is a racist, deadly threat to African-Americans. A handful of disturbing videos depicting police shootings helped galvanize widespread hostility to law-enforcement officers, and cops began backing away from the proactive policing that stops crime but has been repeatedly denounced as racial oppression.

...Make no mistake: Assertions about systemic, deadly police racism are false. That has been true throughout the period following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014; recall that the cop involved was ultimately exonerated by the Justice Department. But no number of studies debunking this fiction has penetrated the conventional story line.

...Every year, officers confront tens of thousands of armed felons without using lethal force. According to the Washington Post, police officers fatally shot 987 people in the U.S. last year; the overwhelming majority were armed or threatening deadly force.

Blacks made up a lower percentage of those police-shooting victims—26%—than would be predicted by the higher black involvement in violent crime. Whites made up 50% of police shooting victims, but you would never know it from media coverage. Note also that police officers face an 18.5 times greater chance of being killed by a black male than an unarmed black male has of being killed by a police officer.

...Hillary Clinton has also taken up this warped cause. On CNN Friday, she decried “systemic” and “implicit bias” in police departments. She also called on “white people” to better understand blacks “who fear every time their children go somewhere.”

Mrs. Clinton ought to take a look at Chicago. Through July 9, 2,090 people have been shot this year, including a 3-year-old boy shot on Father’s Day who will be paralyzed for life, an 11-year-old boy wounded on the Fourth of July, and a 4-year-old boy wounded last week. How many of the 2,090 victims in Chicago were shot by cops? Nine.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump emphasized “law and order” in a video released Friday, saying: “We must stand in solidarity with law enforcement, which we must remember is the force between civilization and total chaos.”

Given the nightmarish events of the past several days, Mr. Trump could do worse than making this presidential campaign one about that line between civilization and anarchy.

Read more here.