The Left Owns The Riots

It’s fitting that so many Democratic governors and other swamp creatures (the Pelosi from the Leftist Lagoon) are bashing Trump and rationalizing the coast-to-coast violence that seems almost demonic.

For the Democratic Party, these riots have been a project long in the works.

The rioting has two components – the rage-filled savages who are burning and looting for the insane joy of destruction, and the left’s brownshirts, who are taking advantage of the chaos to bring down what they call the system. The fingerprints of the Party of Plunder/Party of Treason are all over both.

Starting in the 1960s with the Great Society, the Democrats destroyed the black family. Instead of welfare going to families, it went to single mothers. You get more of what you subsidize. Back then, the out-of-wedlock birth rate was 3% for whites and 23% among blacks. Today, it’s 28% and 73% respectively. In some inner cities, it’s as high as 90%.

Boys raised without fathers, especially in decaying neighborhoods, often grow up to be angry, bitter young men – the type who beat helpless strangers, watch stores and homes burn, and dance around the flames.

The Democrats have nurtured this for decades. They can see no connection between single-parent families and all of the pathologies (crime, drug abuse, joblessness, early sexual activity) that afflict inner cities.

Almost as bad is the sense of entitlement Democrats have cultivated among those they consider their core constituency.

Whatever your problems, you’re not to blame, they tell impressionable young men. You have no responsibility for your condition (substance abuse, failure to find meaningful work, poverty). It’s all due to institutional racism, the “legacy or slavery and segregation,” police brutality, and the “white man’s culture.” As the presumptive Democratic nominee said on Tuesday, upon finally emerging from the Biden Bunker, “The black community has had a knee on its neck for too long.”

Now, rioters are taking the opportunity to strike back against their oppressors (like Korean grocery store owners and ATMs) by stealing, burning, looting, and stomping.

Still, Democrats tell them, it’s not your fault. It’s those damned, racist Republicans, white supremacists, Confederate war memorials, and FOX News. That this only increases the sense of alienation that’s endemic to the black community is irrelevant to those who claim to be its champions.

Antifa and other radical groups hellbent on tearing down civilization are products of the anti-Americanism, and an ethic that condones violence, that pervade what used to be the party of FDR and JFK.

From public school indoctrination to college groupthink, Democrats and their academic cadre have taught millennials that America was founded on genocide, nurtured on slavery, and grew to greatness through exploitation and subjugation -- that we’re responsible for most of the wars of the past hundred years and generally are a blight on humanity.

The man who mentored our last Democrat President is a case in point. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright – 9/11 was “the chickens coming home to roost” and “God damn America” – has enough hatred in his carcass to fuel an Antifa convention.

Democrats have also taught the nihilists surging in our streets that it’s perfectly acceptable -- in fact, preferable -- to shout down, harass and assault reactionaries. The skills Antifa thugs learned at colleges and universities they’ve applied to the current insurrection.

Viktor Frankenstein tried to kill his creature. The Democrats adore theirs. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was proud of his daughter, Chiara, for joining a Midtown mob throwing projectiles at the police. His response to the mayhem rocking Gotham was so bizarre that Governor Cuomo, a fellow Democrat, threatened to have him replaced.

When asked for her thoughts on the violence which just destroyed Newberry Street (Boston’s upscale shopping district), Massachusetts Attorney General Mura Healey said burning is “how forests grow.” I’m sure those who spent years collecting the kindling appreciate those sentiments.

New York State’s Attorney General Letitia James says she’ll investigate the police. First, she’ll have to keep her knee from jerking.

At the 2020 Democrat Nominating Convention, the looters, wrecking crew and goon squad that have spent several days making a hell of the lives of ordinary Americans, should be brought to the stage so Biden can embrace them – like a proud father showing off his sons.

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The Cost of Riots

It’s weird that this needs to be said, but here we are.

Then again, the pundit who reprehensibly claims that destroying property “is not violence” risks nothing. She agitates for revolution from the safety of her apartment.

Much the same, I suspect, most of those excusing the destruction of our cities—either contending that businesses “have insurance” or peddling false choices about life being “more valuable than property”—have never built a business themselves.

Nor have I. Yet, I do know that having a business destroyed can be devastating, and “having insurance” won’t make victims whole.

My parents were immigrants from Hungary. My father, who’d worked as an industrial chemist in the old country, ended up in New York’s jewelry district in the 1970s learning how to set diamonds. Learning a new craft takes patience and hard work.

My mother, pregnant with me and unable to speak much English, would take the F-train from Rego Park to Manhattan to bring home necklace-beading work.

Like millions of Americans, after years of plying a trade, saving money, and taking out loans, my parents opened a small business in a strip mall in the suburbs.

As a kid, I often walked the mile and a half from my elementary school to spend time at our small jewelry shop. I was no different from the kids in the neighboring liquor or Chinese food stores, where parents toiled away for endless hours.

In those days, it was more common to see children helping out in family-run businesses, or at least that’s my recollection.

One day—on a half-day of school, as my luck would have it—our shop was robbed. The fact that the strip mall was situated on a busy road, or that it was the middle of the afternoon, didn’t deter the thieves. Three men, two inside and one outside, pulled out guns and demanded the combination to the safe. They cleaned out the place.

Seeing a sawed-off shotgun pressed against a family member’s head is not an experience I recommend. Yet, in 1981, many people in the metropolitan area had been either mugged, robbed, threatened, or had their cars stolen. That year, New York City reported more robberies than in any year in its history—over 120,000—and over 2,100 murders.

Anyway, my parents had insurance. They were lucky enough to be reimbursed for the things that were stolen, but they would never see a penny for the years of preparation, exertion, and sacrifice.

I suspect thousands of Americans who have built business—given up time with their kids, spouses, and parents—will end up in similar circumstances due to the inability of our elected officials to stop criminals and cosplay revolutionaries.

While it’s sickening to watch an Obama bro grouse that there’s too much media attention being paid to devastated communities, it’s unconscionable to see the attorney general of Massachusetts, the top law enforcement officer in her state, say, “Yes, America is burning, but that’s how forests grow.”

Is the forest growing in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered? Doesn’t sound like it:

The riots and arson that followed protests of Floyd’s death have devastated organizations and businesses that serve communities of color. Destruction from the south side’s Lake Street to West Broadway Avenue in north Minneapolis has hit immigrant- and minority-owned businesses already struggling amid the pandemic-induced shutdown.

Now, ethnically diverse neighborhoods are grappling with the loss of jobs, services, and investments.

Riots may excite the keyboard revolutionary, but they won’t bring racial equality. The opposite, in fact. Not only are the anarchists who burn and loot stores subjecting many of their neighbors to a dehumanizing experience, they are destroying poor and minority neighborhoods.

Big businesses might be able to afford to fix the smashed windows and ransacked supply room, but family-owned ones are going to struggle.

Chain stores have insurance, but the individuals and smaller manufacturers who depend on them for their livelihoods also are threatened.

The big stores themselves will be paying higher insurance rates, and some of them may decide to never come back to these poorer neighborhoods.

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The Silly Science of COVID-19 'Experts'

Appealing to the authority of "science" has arguably never been more political.

Like journalism before it, science experts are quickly losing their credibility as they have become more beholden to promoting biased narratives over the unvarnished truth. The COVID-19 pandemic is serving to expose this sad reality.

“From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual,” stated Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit. She further explained, “We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They’re following asymptomatic cases. They’re following contacts. And they’re not finding secondary transmission onward. It’s very rare.”

The implications of this claim could be significant given the fact that one of the primary arguments for the mass lockdowns was predicated on the notion that COVID-19 was being widely spread by asymptomatic carriers. If this latest claim is accurate, then it calls into question the extremity of the shutdowns, social distancing, and mask-wearing protocols government leaders have implemented. Still, note the source — the WHO’s track record with the China Virus should give everyone pause before accepting any of its conclusions.

In fact, Kerkhove later clarified that “asymptomatic” did not include those individuals who were “pre-symptomatic.” If that’s the case, Kerkhove’s claim doesn’t actually negate the apparent high rate of virus spread by people prior to becoming sick. This important distinction may explain the findings from a recently published study in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluding that 40% to 45% of infected individuals spread the virus without realizing they were sick.

Further adding to the “science” confusion is the fact that states reopening early — like Florida, Georgia, and Texas — have not experienced the so-called experts’ widely predicted massive spike of infections or significant rise in hospitalizations. While the numbers of infections did indeed increase, they have not come anywhere near overwhelming these states’ healthcare systems. Remember when “flattening the curve” was the original goal for the shutdowns?

Given the results from these reopening states, one would think others would follow suit. However, politics clearly determines the “science” of these “experts,” as notably most Democrat-run states have still doggedly maintained their shutdown measures … except, of course, for anyone joining the Black Lives Matter protests. This nonsense was typified by a letter signed by more than 1,000 health “professionals” who literally argue, “As public health advocates, we do not condemn these [BLM] gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from demonstrators’ ability to gather and demand change. This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders.” So, according to these “health experts,” COVID-19 is only a problem for those who express the “wrong” political opinions.

This isn’t science; it’s pure propaganda. As City Journal’s John Tierney astutely observers, “However scientific they try to be, they’re swayed by some of the same irrational biases and perverse incentives that afflict politicians and journalists. In creating their models and presenting their data, they’re rewarded for skewing negative, because scary predictions will bring them more attention, more funding, and more power. Their worst-case scenario may be utterly implausible, but it’s newsworthy, and it guarantees that no one will blame them for not anticipating every possible death from the virus.”

Update 6/9: Naturally, after we went to press, there’s more argument and backtracking on the science. The WHO walked back the claim on asymptomatic transmission, saying it probably accounts for somewhere between 16% and 40% of cases. This is, of course, a political walk back, especially in light of the German study just released. It makes WHO look very bad, so just walk it back.

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