There are plenty of leftists swaggering these days. Cities have blazed, municipal and state governments have been humiliated, police forces are cowering, mighty corporations are trampling each other to apologize for things they had absolutely nothing to do with.

At first glance, this appears to be the left’s moment in the sun, something they’ve looked forward to for many years, if not generations. Throughout the 20th century, the left’s problem with the United States was the lack of a proletariat to lead against the oppressors. The American working class  was the farthest thing in the world from an “oppressed” – they lived better than all but the ruling classes in most societies. What did they have to revolt against? Thanks to this, a revolutionary situation simply refused to develop. No thesis, no antithesis, and certainly no synthesis. The Left’s recent history was a forlorn search for an American proletariat it could place itself at the head of. First it was labor unions, then the blacks, and lately college students. American blacks, who had in fact suffered true oppression, were the most dependable.

By 2020, it must have seemed to many that the moment had arrived. Institutions had been suitably debased. The country was suffering from a universal pandemic along with an economic crisis brought about an incompetent near-hysterical response from bogus “experts” in fields ranging from epidemiology to economics.

From the Left’s point of view, the murder of George Floyd (and it was a murder, the video allows no doubt about that) came as a godsend. [See update, below.] The Left immediately framed it as a racial crime, in the process obliterating the actual question, which has been staring us in the face for decades:  why are psychopaths and demented narcissists allowed – not to say encouraged – to join police forces? (In particular, police forces in ultra-blue municipalities such as NYC, Baltimore, and yes, Minneapolis.)

That’s all that needs to be said about George Floyd. Because Floyd, God rest him, is a pretext. It could have been anything or nothing that set the Left off. Antifa has been frothing at the mouth and raging for violence for years. (How is it that everyone has forgotten how Antifa and its related groups called for the “uprising” to begin each November 4th year after year?)

Murder went down, the pretext went live, and the hard Left’s plans went into effect. And there’s no question that this planned -- the preplaced brick supplies, weapons caches, and communications on social media allow no other conclusion.

We can’t overlook the obvious desperation here either. Early this year the Orange Godzilla stood in pure triumph. Every last single effort to take down Donald Trump – the emoluments clause, the 25^th amendment, Russia collusion, Crossfire Hurricane in its various iterations, and finally that forgotten… “impeachment,” I think the term is – ended in complete ignominy. Not just failure, not even catastrophe, but pure irrelevance. Not even COVID dented his popularity. With the pandemic tapering off, it became apparent that the accompanying economic slowdown was in fact a natural disaster recession, with a vee-shaped recovery coming rather the u-shape of a standard recession, or, God forbid, the lengthy rectangular shape of a true depression. Add in the fact that his Democrat opponent a half-senile ancient dogged with numerous ethical, sexual, and criminal scandals, and we can see why the Left was running scared.

The BLM uprising was designed to take out the president, based on the example of 1968, when Lyndon B. Johnson was forced to abandon his reelection campaign largely due to unending riots caused by racial antagonism and opposition to the Vietnam War.

The Left figured that once American cites were occupied by BLM and Antifa stormtroopers, Trump, being a racist and a tyrant, would immediately respond with a massive military intervention. This would in turn encourage further uprisings and enable the Left to play the “fascist” card in the leadup to the Fall elections.

But the Left assessed their opponent poorly. Instead of exploding, the President behaved like the leader of a federal republic, demanding that the states and cities fulfill their responsibilities to the citizenry while assuring the public that he was ready to move if necessary. The cities in which Antifa has run wild – Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis – are all hyperliberal environments to which the President owes nothing and whose governments have uniformly displayed contempt for Trump personally along with sympathy for the insurgents. This left the President with absolutely no reason to intervene. To paraphrase a previous statesman who confronted similar problems – downtown Seattle is not worth the bones of single National Guardsman.

Trump’s response has confused a lot of people. We’ve become so ingrained to an overactive federal government leaping into action every time a tree branch falls that a lack of response seems strange, even though that’s how our system is designed to work. The mayors and governors are supposed to put their fingers in the dyke while the feds make the arrangements for further repairs. This has not been the practice since the New Deal. Even some “conservatives,” who should know better, have criticized Trump’s lack of abrupt action (I’m speaking here of serious conservatives, not the #NeverTrump crowd). They need to remind themselves that the United States is not Imperial Rome.

As for the establishment Left -- the institutional leftists among pols, media, and NGOs, the ones who pose as “liberals” when it’s convenient -- the uprising has become a blow upon a bruise. The pandemic, and specifically the botched elite response to it, has exposed most Democrat state governors as either sloppy with people’s lives (Cuomo, Murphy, and Wolf), or thirsting for absolute power to an extent unacceptable to any sane individual (all the above, with Newsome, Whitmer, and Mills added). By April, the reputation of the Democrat political establishment lay in shambles, with further thrashing yet to come as cases involving businesses being ground under and granny being sent to the extermination center inevitably make their way to the courts.

The Antifa uprising simply carpet-bombed the rubble. To the panic, hysteria, and callousness of COVID we can add the gibbering idiocy of the current Dem leadership. Jay “What, me worry?” Insby had to take refuge in willful ignorance. Mayor Jenny Durkan burbled on about “street festivals” and the “summer of love.” Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis whimpered like a small child, while Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot, a true Dem superstar, being black, female, and lesbian, was revealed as nothing more than a petulant, foulmouthed harridan. The American Left collapsed in the face of both great crises of 2020, and furthermore, they were seen to fail.

As for insurgents themselves – the flip side of the left-wing coin -- well, we’ve all seen The Road Warrior and Escape from New York. The fact that the best that the Left, the tribunes of the people, can come up with is a reflection of the worst dystopian nightmares of decades past speaks for itself.  Warlord Raz Simone handing out beatings, the extortion of merchants and shopowners, random shootings, everyday working people crouching in terror behind their locked doors as the black-clad Antifa goons parade outside…. How can this possibly be spun in any positive way?

How to explain this? How did the party of FDR, Harry Truman, and JFK – or even such ineffectual but decent types as Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale -- come to this?  The question beggars speculation, even from somebody who knows the left well. The best I can come up with is a comparison to the banzai charges of the late Pacific War, a crazed, screaming mass deprived of any rational alternative scrambling madly toward some impossible victory. We know how those worked out.

And where does it go from here? What could possibly be the next move? Does Joe Biden don a black ninja outfit? Does he choose some purple-haired loon as a running mate? Does he arrange for the Democratic convention to occur within CHAZ or CHUMP or whatever they’re calling it this week? In truth, the insurgents are likely to come to him. Their road leads nowhere else but to Chicago 1968.

And that is the way it should be. There is no move that the Dems or their leftist allies can make that is not even more catastrophic, more humiliating, and more revealing. The Antifa mob holds downtown Seattle? Let them keep it. The people of Seattle, and Milwaukee, and Chicago, voted for this – have been voting for it for decades – and now here it is. It’s time to pay the piper. They deserve whatever they’ve got coming, and I have no sympathy for them. No city and no state has any right to put the nation as a whole in jeopardy, and that is the end of it.

In the late 70s, New York City was on the verge of complete financial and moral collapse. In response, the city government begged the feds to effectively make NYC the first city to be put on what amounted to federal welfare. The feds, under the leadership of (of all people) Jerry Ford, told them, according to the Daily News to “Drop Dead.” This shock treatment kicked off a slow and grueling climb out of the abyss that led through Ed Koch to Rudy Giuliani. The fact that they’ve thrown it away in the past two decades is neither here nor there. That’s how it’s done, and Seattle, Milwaukee and Chicago must follow that path. They made their beds – they created a situation in which they could be utilized as weapons by hard leftists against the rest of the country. It’s up to them, and nobody else, to make it right.

The left is notorious for complete self-delusion. So let them swagger. Antifa has already been declared a terrorist organization. Arrests and indictments will follow. The investigations will undoubtedly uncover some very interesting connections to our elites. Antifa and BLM, like all revos, will have to learn what it means to go underground.

UPDATE 2021.04.08: With new information available -- the coroner's report about the drugs in Floyd's system and the body cam showing that Chauvin had pressure on Floyd's shoulder, not his neck -- it is no longer reasonable to believe that Chauvin murdered Floyd. American Thinker's subsequent articles reflect this changed point of view based upon the new information.