In The Glare Of The Flames . . . Rioters’ Rule Doesn’t Look So Different From Old Red Guard

By DEXTER DUGGAN

The left-wing chaos imposed here and there around the nation revealed its own kind of conformity amid the disorder.
Only certain ways of thinking and living would be considered acceptable, even when they extended to unimaginable extremes like doing away nationwide with police departments, even when prisons prematurely were releasing inmates. And the left also wants to take away law-abiding people’s firearms?
If the political thugs with their massive destruction had been wearing Donald Trump’s MAGA hats, dominant media would be screaming for military help from around the world to suppress them. But as long as these media viewed the thugs as their ideological kindred, although perhaps a bit untidy, the “news” and opinion slant was on their alleged peacefulness.
“Peaceful George Floyd protests marred by bursts of violence,” said a typically facetious USA Today headline. And USA Today didn’t even represent the extremes of dominant legacy media such as The New York Times and Washington Post.
Who would replace the necessity of police officers when looting, arson, lives threatened and even killed, and other lawlessness prevailed? Maybe the left-wing thugs had an idea or two about who would step in to enforce authority? Like themselves? Like in the new, police-less “autonomous zone” in Seattle.
Fr. John T. Zuhlsdorf posted at his blog (wdtprs.com) on June 10, “In Seattle, demon-fueled ideologues have taken over a few blocks for themselves and have called it ‘The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.’ I went to the park that Occupy had taken over in New York City (in the past). The smell was memorable.”
The leading illustration for Zuhlsdorf’s blog that day was of Blessed Miguel Pro about to be executed by soldiers of the fiercely anti-Catholic regime in Mexico in 1927.
Dominant U.S. media already had long shown their lying skew, but it became even plainer with the bedlam that allegedly was caused by the death of George Floyd already handcuffed and in custody, but pinned down by a Minneapolis police officer’s knee on his neck.
How did left-wing mobs’ injuring and killing other blacks and destroying their businesses bring justice for Floyd?
If black lives mattered, where were the nationwide strident Democrat and media demands for justice for, say, David Dorn, a retired St. Louis black police captain fatally shot while a pawn shop was looted amid the disorders?
Or for, say, Patrick Underwood, a black Federal Protective Service Officer who was shot dead outside the Oakland, Calif., federal courthouse as he worked security during leftist chaos supposedly protesting Floyd’s death? A second officer reportedly was injured at the same time.
Yet leftists descended into such babble that when anti-police Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender was asked what she’d do if someone was breaking into her own home, she said that calling the police “comes from a place of privilege.”
This illustrated how leftists have no anchor, but swing and sway however they think the wind goes. On New Year’s Day 2020, who would have thought that only a few months later prominent political leftists would be insisting on their duty to disband city police?
Along the same line, The Federalist website posted on June 10 that when anarchist protesters occupied the Seattle City Hall, their demands included “the total abolition of the city’s police force, the blanket exoneration of felons, explicit segregation in hospitals and schools, and mandatory re-education of teachers and public servants to adhere to the new world order after ousting the progressive mayor.”
Indeed the revolution was eating its own.
Once again the elite left didn’t worry about how their policies would mangle other people.
No less than Chicago PBS station WTTW recounted local politicians’ dismay at the riots destroying their districts, reporting on June 5 that it had obtained a tape of a recent conference call between the mayor and all 50 aldermen.
“As unrest swept the city Sunday (May 31), aldermen pleaded with Mayor Lori Lightfoot to help them protect their communities from roving bands of criminals clashing with police and looting businesses,” WTTW reported.
Among the despairing comments, the station said Ald. Michelle Harris wondered how she could convince businesses to rebuild on the South Side, saying, “My major business district is shattered.”
The Wall Street Journal was in the same vein, posting on June 9 that 18 people were murdered in Chicago on May 31 alone. A Journal editorial said: “Do America’s cities need police? Some progressives want to replace police with social workers, but we doubt that includes the people in Chicago who witnessed or were victimized by a crime rampage on a recent single day in Murder City, U.S.A.”
A strange theme emerged among leftists that, at first glance, sounded logical, but led straight to a deadly swamp. Life is more important than buildings, the theme said. Of course life is a primary value, all could agree.
But in this context it meant that buildings can be replaced while life cannot, so it’s all right for rioters to loot and destroy other people’s “replaceable” things.
Suddenly, when your own place of business or your home is being wrecked by rioters who don’t care for a moment about George Floyd, the theme was exposed as completely false.
Yet the veteran executive editor of the major Philadelphia newspaper, the Inquirer, was forced to resign by angry staffers after the apparently indisputable headline “Buildings Matter, Too,” appeared above an article by the paper’s architecture critic.
The article acknowledged the racial protests but also their damage to Philadelphia’s Center City, concluding that “you can be appalled and heartbroken by our country’s deadly racism, and yet still quake at what the damage to downtown portends for Philadelphia.”
This was no more than the Chicago aldermen’s distress over what the chaos was doing to their own constituents including the poor ones, but the censorious journalist consensus demanded the top editor’s head on a pike. So off went executive editor Stan Wischnowski in disgrace.
Architectural Digest reported, “Disappointment and outrage over the headline were almost instantaneous, and it drew widespread criticism on social media. Organized action from within the Inquirer’s newsroom materialized just as quickly.” Three words about buildings mattering ended an editor’s career. Was the scent of Communist China’s Maoist Red Guards returning?
Almost simultaneously, the head of The New York Times’ editorial page, James Bennet, was sent packing and his deputy Jim Dao was reassigned because Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) was allowed to express his view in an opinion column in the Times that federal troops actually might be needed to help combat the widespread danger.
To leftists denying the danger of mob action, Cotton’s warning remarkably was regarded as a threat to their very own selves. But it was hard to see how, unless they somehow planned doing their own violence. As neighborhoods around the nation were broken and burning, Cotton’s viewpoint probably seemed timely to the majority of Americans.
Yet more than 800 Times employees reportedly signed a letter protesting Cotton’s opinion column. “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger,” said one remarkable and phony complaint.

Maoists In The Media

Times workers, however, had patiently tolerated all sorts of other opinions published there. Back in Cotton’s home state, the largest daily paper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, posted on June 9: “Note well: The reporters in its newsroom didn’t pop a rivet when the opinion section published an op-ed by the Taliban only months ago.
“Yes, the Times published ‘What We, The Taliban, Want,’ in February,” the Democrat-Gazette continued. “It was written by Sirajuddin Haqqani, a deputy leader of the Taliban who oversees armed combat units against American forces. And according to dispatches, he also ‘provides shelter’ to al-Qaida. But the news staff at The New York Times saves its revolt for Tom Cotton.”
Another Democrat-Gazette editorial on the same topic noted that leftists’ “tolerance” for other views doesn’t extend so far. The Arkansas paper said, “Which reminds us of all those who welcome debate on the abortion question/issue/horror as long as nobody goes so far as to include the word ‘baby’ or ‘mother’.”
In addition, the “Cockburn” column at the Spectator/USA website on June 5 reported that pundit Andrew Sullivan wasn’t being allowed to publish his weekly column at New York magazine this time around. “The reason? His editors are not allowing him to write about the riots,” “Cockburn” said, adding: “. . . Who cares about the First Amendment? Not the Maoists who are marching through NYC’s media institutions.”
Journalism by left-wing mob rule in the newsroom? Still another reason to disregard the hoax journalism that has tried to destroy the Trump administration throughout Donald Trump’s presidency.
And, speaking of babies and mothers, literally millions of black preborn babies have been destroyed at abortion clinics since the U.S. Supreme Court magically discovered the “right” to nationwide permissive abortion back in 1973. Ever see any rampages done on their behalf?

Back in 2009, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told an interviewer for The New York Times, Emily Bazelon, “Frankly, I had thought that at the time (Roe v. Wade) was decided, there was concern about population growth, and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
The context was Medicaid funding for abortions for poor women — funding that the High Court in 1980 said wasn’t required. Left-winger Ginsburg was puzzled that if the court back in 1973 had approved abortion for “populations that we don’t want to have too many of,” why would it later say taxpayer funding wasn’t required for abortions for poor women?
(Former ACLU attorney Ginsburg wasn’t on the court for either of those decisions, not having been appointed to it until 1993 by reprobate President Bill Clinton.)
The implication that permissive abortion should target poor blacks — as it in fact does — was so obvious that left-wing media, including the Times itself, quickly ignored Ginsburg’s clumsy truth-telling. Whereas, of course, if some conservative court justice had expressed the same thought, media outrage probably would have driven him from the bench if not from the entire world.
The first former justice to live aboard the International Space Station! And his tailcoat wasn’t blazing because of the rocket liftoff.

Fight Back

Morning radio talk host James T. Harris at the Phoenix-based KFYI (550 AM) is one of the black conservatives having none of the radicals’ nonsense. On June 10 he referred to them as The American Taliban, specifically referencing the Taliban in Afghanistan having blown up the cultural treasure of monumental, historic Buddha statues in 2001 for the offense of being “idols.”
Harris recently told his audience that if his kids attend a college that indoctrinates them with liberal ideas, they’re paying for their own schooling, not him.
Another Arizona black conservative, pro-life GOP state legislator Walter Blackman, posted at the local “Republican Briefs” blog for June 10 that he refused to be intimidated by a local left-wing black activist.
Blackman asked rhetorically, why did the activist attack him? “Simply because I don’t conform to what he wants black Americans to think like. But this isn’t just an attack on me, or on other black Americans. It’s really an attack on you. The extremist left doesn’t like Americans like you who do not fear or submit to their propaganda machine. They don’t like Americans like you who dare fight back.
“I have a strong record of supporting criminal-justice reform and supporting equal opportunity for all. For (the activist) to suggest that I am working to harm the black community is insane. We simply can’t let the left continue to victimize black Americans and use them as pawns for their political agenda,” Blackman said.
Meanwhile, CNSNews.com posted on June 9 that in New York City, “dozens of police union chiefs spoke out against the press and lawmakers for ‘vilifying’ them,” with a spokesman saying, “Everybody’s trying to shame us. The legislators. The press. Everybody’s trying to shame us into being embarrassed about our profession. Well, you know what? This (badge) isn’t stained by someone in Minneapolis.”