The left everywhere, from college campuses and newsrooms, to corporate headquarters and city councils, has gone stark, raving mad. I’m not the first to say it, and probably not the last, but most Americans are rational and aren’t going to take this much longer. As for those wanting to defund and abolish the police, and -- in colleges and newsrooms -- forbid dissent from the BLM injustice mantra, Edmund Burke’s observation is timeless:

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites… in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

The Newsroom Revolts

In an essay in which this leftist writer bends a necessary knee to Trump hatred, Matt Taibbi nevertheless hits the press where it deserves to be smacked:

It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily. 

They’ve conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it’s established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” out loud to a data scientist fired* from a research firm for -- get this -- retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones! 

Now, this madness is coming for journalism. Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who’d made politically “problematic” editorial or social media decisions. 

Only people who miss hearing the ravings of the juiced-up sophomores in their college dorm will continue reading the bilge produced under these constraints.

Minneapolis

The city from which the urban rioting first took hold is, by Daniel Greenfield’s shrewd analysis, a place where student government was placed in charge with the totally foreseeable consequence that the city was destroyed.

He details the background of City Council president Lisa Bender, who wanted to turn the city (which gets 100 days a year of snow) into a giant college campus where everyone lives in glass boxes, bikes everywhere, and sits around coffee houses. The bike lanes they created went largely unused and she and her Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition fought traffic enforcement as “racist.” Greenfield ponders how these folks would keep cars out of bike lanes without it. I don’t know either. 

Mayor Jacob Frey is as delusionary as Bender is:

Frey, Bender, and the rest of the aging college gang, were selling Minneapolis the same bill of goods that Buttigieg had sold South Bend, and that numerous other young and eager student council members had sold other declining cities, that with more bikes, glass boxes, and green energy, they would attract dot coms that would build their own versions of Facebook and Amazon in their cities generating billions.

If Bender was a character out of Portlandia, her enablers had sprung straight from South Park.”

In the meantime, muggings and robberies in the city increased. With no real law enforcement, local militias formed and acted to protect persons and property.

 Bender is now advocating defunding the police.

On social media and CNN, Bender has explained that the only way defunding the police will work is if people check their privilege and refuse to call the police when they’re being robbed or mugged. Some of the condo residents biking in the snow might go along with that, but most people aren’t going to do it. If there are no police, they will set up neighborhood watches and eventually those will be armed.

Minneapolis City Council members have claimed that policing is rooted in white supremacy. That’s the kind of dumb thing a freshman student would say in a social justice class. Law enforcement is how local governments provide security in a lawful manner. Remove the law enforcement and you also take away the law and the security. But there are older laws than those of Minneapolis and the United States.

Defund the police and some people will lose their property to looters while others will fight them. When there is no law enforcement, the only law that will matter is the law of force.

Seattle

A group of anarcho-communist-BLM nitwits surrounded and  “occupied” six city blocks in Seattle’s Capitol Hill. David Burge “Iowahawk” refers to this as the “Goth ISIS Utopia,” a description so apt I’ve appropriated it for the headline of this article. The mayor of Seattle, older but just as dumb as that of Minneapolis, laughed it off as a “block party.” Civilians and business owners trapped inside the borders aren’t too happy. Neither is the chief of police, who was forced to abandon a precinct there, blames the mayor for making her abandon it, and asserts she plans to take it back. The various elements in the enclave are already fighting each other and within days a man called Warlord of CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) controlled the area. He’s black; most of the denizens are white. He is the judge and jury there, it seems, and in one documented incident, caught someone drawing unauthorized graffiti on a wall and his gang punched out the author of the  message, broke his glasses and confiscated his cell phone. The Warlord is reportedly the only one in the commune who’s armed. 

It has occurred to these “revolutionaries” that they need supplies (more than they can extort from the businesses still in the area) so they’re begging for vegan foodstuffs and toiletries. Not that they lack the ability to provide for themselves. A garden signposted “for Black and indigenous folks and their plant allies” has been created. Obviously, they learned how easy horticulture is from Mike Bloomberg, because the garden consists of cardboard placed on some grass, covered with potting soil and some sprouts planted in these couple of inches of dirt. I suppose the idea behind this is that until cargo planes drop vegan supplies into the area the rich harvest from this garden will sustain them.

Black Lives Matter

An anonymous black professor at Berkeley urges historians to challenge the “problematic hypothesis “ that “white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination” are the cause of the difficulties in the black community. 

He must make his argument anonymously as Berkeley and “our culture” leaves no room for dissent and he would lose his job and forfeit the opportunity for any other if his name were known. He says, and I agree, that dissent is necessary and factually warranted. Among his arguments detailed and documented (in his email attachments) are these:

“ *Black lives only matter when whites take them;”

“*It is for historians… to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn’t led to equivalent rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively;”

“*Our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly.”

I take to heart his conclusions in a statement worth your reading in its entirety:

The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden statement on the black race, all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence. This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent in academic circles. I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you.

The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed.

There also exists a large constituency of what can only be called 'race hustlers': hucksters of all colors who benefit from stoking the fires of racial conflict to secure administrative jobs, charity management positions, academic jobs and advancement, or personal political entrepreneurship.

Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist.

Trump Jujitsu

If the mayors of places like Minneapolis and Seattle think they can stand by and wait to goad the President into acting so they can get the kind of optics the Kent State shooting presented to the anti-Viet Nam crowd, they must be surprised. Instead of soldiers with drawn bayonets, they got “tactical units from the FBI, the Secret Service, the DEA, ATF and the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Prisons, and other agencies, in full gear, many with no rifles, and certainly no bayonets.” 

It’s Trump jujitsu again. Just as they tried to goad him into locking down the country over the ridiculously hyped pandemic, he used the tools of the presidency creatively to cut red tape and get done what the federal government could do and the states could not. (The “public health experts" who urged irrational lockdowns and attacked those who protested them, also lost all credibility when they supported mass protests in support of BLM. He leaves on the cutting room floor those hypocritical critics whose status they themselves destroyed.) Those governors who instituted draconian lockdowns and prolonged them bear the blame for the damage they caused -- just as the misguided governments of Minneapolis and Seattle will for the wreckage in their cities.

Correction: Wayne State corrected to Kent State