Far-left Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told police (and firefighters) to stand down while rampaging groups of thugs looted, pillaged and burned down parts of his city yesterday. This is the same mayor who just days before had proclaimed that it would be a “public health disaster” if he were to allow in-person religious services. Much less dangerous to allow theft, destruction, and arson-- on a grand scale-- to continue unchallenged.

To be fair, Mayor Frey was thinking of people’s safety. He was so concerned about the health of the rioters that he provided free facial masks to those without them and praised those already wearing them. (This may have been the first time in history that an official praised criminals for covering up their faces.) Proper etiquette and safety considerations are important when you are trying to destroy a neighborhood! Fortunately, the masks also help prevent one from inhaling the smoke and toxic fumes emanating from the various fires one has set.

Frey’s response was so weak he even ceded the rioters the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct. Experiencing no real push-back, the rioters vowed to expand their attacks into the suburbs. Many businesses allowed by the government to stay open during the COVID-19 pandemic boarded up shop and will remain closed until the threat of violence and destruction recedes.

Press and pundits, naturally, blamed President Trump for the horrendous violence. Even though he immediately decried the death of George Floyd and opened a federal investigation into his death at the hands (and knee) of a white policeman. And even though Minnesota, a solidly blue state, has a Democratic governor and Minneapolis has been run by Democrats for 43 consecutive years. But, hey, if Democrats can blame Trump for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s decision to place people with the coronavirus in nursing homes, I guess anything is possible.

Watching Gov. Walz’s press conferences dealing with the urban terrorism was a source of macabre humor. He spoke at length without wearing a face mask. The person responsible for signing his remarks for the deaf, who obviously doesn’t even need to speak, chose not to wear one, either. Yet a Minneapolis cop and a member of the National Guard stood at a socially-distancing-correct remove from the governor-- and each other—each wearing a cheap cloth facial mask. Did their masks get issued with their guns? The city was literally burning down around them and they stood there proudly sporting a small facial diaper. Don’t mind the mushroom clouds, I’m wearing a mask! Don’t want to risk catching an airborne disease. Or being seen as less than woke! This is as if a ship’s captain, after pledging to go down with his ship, pulled on a facial mask. Preposterous. Meaningless in any real sense.

There is another aspect of the riots that is inexplicable to any sentient being that has been paying attention. When folks peaceably gathered at the Michigan state capitol to protest Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s unconstitutional continuing lock-down orders, many in the media-academia complex derided them as dangerous thugs, would-be terrorists and Nazi sympathizers. Not a fly was harmed, nothing was looted, burned or destroyed. There wasn’t even much—if any-- foul language on display. The handful of Nazi symbols displayed were meant to be seen as what they are: heinous totems of tyranny and vile government overreach, to call out Gov. Whitmer’s totalitarian tendencies. Yet when the rioters in Minnesota ransacked a Target store, burned an auto parts outlet to the ground, set cars and gas stations alight, allegedly roughed up an elderly lady in a wheel chair, set fire to a new low-income housing unit and a Native American youth center, the self-same media-academia complex was outraged that Trump called them “thugs.” “Thugs” is a pronounced understatement for those who will loot and steal, arbitrarily destroy private property and innocent people’s businesses and livelihoods, and assault and endanger others.

It is no coincidence that nearly all the major cities that have been run by Democrats for decades are devolving into dystopian hell-holes full of violence, human dung, used hypodermic needles and the homeless. People are fleeing New York, Chicago, L.A. and San Francisco. Portland and Seattle are deteriorating. Minneapolis is on fire. Oakland and Baltimore are crime-ridden, textbook examples of urban blight. Etc., etc.

 If not stopped, our elite “progressive” rulers will see that America is “fundamentally transformed” into a third world “s***hole” country where everyone shares the privation equally.

Except for the elite progressive rulers themselves, of course.

Image credit: Tony Webster, via Flickr