American cities aflame after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police should come as no surprise.

Those small businesses and lives of everyday Americans that weren’t already crushed by the Democrat governors’ prolonged Covid-19 lockdowns were debilitated by the Dem mayors across the nation enabling and ennobling rioters, roving thugs, and bomb-throwers.

Democrats own the consequences of their devastating policies, starting with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society welfare state.  Barack Obama’s race hustling criminal coddling set the more recent tone where state and local law-enforcement officers were routinely attacked, accused of serial hate-inspired killings of suspects; where civilized norms were declared the illicit fruit of white privilege; where the epidemic of black-on-black homicides was either ignored or blamed on unresolved racial grievances.

Where Marxist mayors demonizing and disarming their own police, nullified enforcement of criminal codes by issuing stand-down orders; embraced militant advocacy of open borders, enacted sanctuary city statutes to harbor illegal aliens; refused to prosecute and/or deport illegal aliens with long violent records including rape, kidnapping, sex trafficking, and murder.

Willis L. Krumholz has it correct in a City Journal piece “Standing Down”:

“For what it’s worth, every public official responsible for the mayhem is a Democrat—the governor, the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and even Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, who finally had Chauvin arrested on Friday. And it was current Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar, the former county attorney, who failed to prosecute Chauvin for misdeeds in the past. Democrats collectively run a state that has one of the widest racial disparities in the country in terms of education and income.”

As Roger Kimball notes here:

“In a magnificent monologue on his television show, Tucker Carlson peeled back the headlines to expose the festering reality that has brought us to this pass.

“The ideologues will tell you,” he noted, “that the problem is race relations, or capitalism, or police brutality, or global warming. But only on the surface. The real cause is deeper than that and it’s far darker. What you’re watching is the ancient battle between those who have a stake in society, and would like to preserve it, and those who don’t, and seek to destroy it.” That’s exactly right.

“Writing in the dark days of 1939, Evelyn Waugh noted that “barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity.”

“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!”

It was the Dems who created multi-generational wards of the state, yet never delivered a better life to any of its captives, filling a reservoir of resentment, and pent-up fury.

Instead of safe neighborhoods, good schools, and a climate for businesses to thrive and add jobs, the Dems ushered in wretched schools where union spoils are a higher good than children’s futures, where small business entrepreneurs have to compete with drug dealers on street corners, and no one is shielded from gunfire.

Where vermin infested apartments are better than living on the streets, barely. 

Where police officers and firefighters don a bulletproof vest before responding to a call. Where corrupt mayors and city councils loot their constituents’ meager take-home remains, to pay for second homes and obscene wardrobes.

And now the good citizens who endured such prolonged humility and depravation, especially small business owners who just wanted a chance -- a puncher’s chance against all odds -- have seen their sweat equity, a tiny bit of tangible reward, up in flames as Dem mayors and governors talk of the sanctity of protest voices even as some use violence as their medium, while watching their cities burn to the ground.

Yes, the Dems are directly responsible, and the rest of us would be complicit in denial, or in soft-pedaling the obvious.

Rudy Giuliani nailed it on Hannity:

"Progressive Democrats are incapable of keeping their people safe," he said, "because they have criminal-friendly policies that are pathetic, that are dangerous, and now we are seeing the results not only there [in Minneapolis], but watch the cities that start burning.

"They are all going to be run by so-called progressives, idiot Democrats who let criminals out of jail, who set bail for murderers and encourage exactly this kind of thing."

As John Wohstetter points out from The American Spectator “ When you reward bad behavior, expect more of it”

Wohlstetter chronicles the inept and incoherent responses to riots in the late 1960s to the 1990s from which we have learned nothing.

“Detroit 1967-- five days of violence, with more than 40 fatalities and more than one thousand injured. …It was the worst rioting in America since the 1863 New York City draft riots, not to be exceeded in scale until the 1992 Rodney King riots (LA 1992)…

“Detroit and Newark (also 1967—four days of violence 26 deaths, over 700 injured) never recovered from the destruction of 1967. Washington, D.C. never fully recovered from the riots after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King…

 “And in 1991 NYC Mayor David Dinkins took a “let off steam” approach, as black rioters marched through the streets of Crown Heights shouting “Heil Hitler!” as they assaulted Jews, after a rabbi’s car accidentally struck two children, killing one. A rabbinical student — a student guest from Australia, a more civilized place than was New York City in 1991 — was stabbed to death. “

The false narratives endorsed and disseminated by Democrat politicians and the press about the Baltimore police and Freddie Gray, George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, the Ferguson police and Michael Brown endure against truth tellers consigned to the shadows.

Dems stood aside while dozens of their neighborhoods were firebombed, businesses destroyed, cities ravaged --- activated by Democrat mayors and their states attorneys, county and city DAs whose selective readings of criminal statutes  emboldened and offered safe harbor to unrepentant violent criminals and revolutionary anarchists -- all  supported by Obama’s radical communist community organizer sympathies, who vilified Tea Party patriots while beatifying Occupy Wall Street deconstructionists.

The Democrats have successfully disintegrated decency and civility, re-shaping society.  Lawlessness, anarchy, random violence, and destruction of private property frames their new normal.  Imposing nihilist tyranny of the majority as a substitute for a constitutional process in resolving competing political visions, punishing victims while cheering criminals, are all standard- issue Dem behaviors, unconditionally underwritten by the MSM and purveyors of social media.

And so, we have the likes of David Gergen, establishmentarian, onetime advisor to four presidents, now a political analyst for CNN, lamenting that AG Barr’s plea for returning to “law and order” was a dog whistle, harkening to the civil rights days in the South, having no place in the present discourse.

Clueless Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey issued this pee-on-the-ashes nonsense while his city was ablaze:

“The City encourages everyone to exercise caution to stay safe while participating in demonstrations, including wearing masks and physical distancing as much as possible to prevent the spread of COVID-19,”

All of America’s most important cities from NYC to LA, to Chicago, to Seattle, to Boston, to Chicago, to Minneapolis, to St Louis, to Houston to San Francisco, to Washington DC, Baltimore, and Philadelphia are run now, and for the most part have been for last half-century, by Democrats, are to some degree in ruin, ungovernable.

Covid-19 is a sideshow compared to the takeover of American urban life by the malignant Democrats, as they champion the house arrest of everyday innocent and healthy Americans, while reopening America to the erstwhile underworld, now mainstream practitioners of despoiling all that is good.

Photo credit: YouTube screen grab