The death of George Floyd on May 25 was horrific, an obvious abuse of power by the Minneapolis police officer and three colleagues who made no attempt to come to Floyd's aid.  The next day, the rioting began in Minneapolis.  It was violent, destructive, and murderous.  Tragically, the death of this one man at the hands of one particular bad cop became an opportunity for the demolition of the city.  Hundreds of small businesses, many of them minority-owned, were destroyed.

Like previous riots, the rioters have set their own communities back decades.  The riots spread to New York; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Chicago; Santa Monica; Beverly Hills; and elsewhere.  There have been protests in nearly every other city in America.  Hundreds of millions of dollars in losses due to looting and damage to buildings have been incurred.

The crisis has devolved into more destruction of historical statues; Columbus has been executed over and over again.  In nearly all cases, the police have been ordered to let the rioters have their way; they were not allowed to do their job.

Nearly all the rioting took place in cities chronically and badly run by Democrats, public officials who have for years implemented every misguided progressive policy known to man.  They are all destined to fail.  As Dov Fischer wrote, "Systemic Racism and Bigotry Are the Lifeblood of the Left."  These riots tell the story.

The question is, where on Earth are the Republicans?  Why has there been no press conference with every Republican in the House and Senate standing together to denounce all this violence?  To passionately defend our police?  They know damn well that Chauvin is an outlier, a bad cop who has kept his job because his Democrat-run city kept him despite his abusive tendencies.

Would any of these Republicans put up with their own children behaving in such a manner?  Of course not.  Every Republican knows that when you permit bad behavior, you get more of it — lots more of it.  A small child wants to find out where the limits are.  The same is likely true with these perps.  Let them act out day after day, and they will escalate, as they have in Seattle.  Governor Inslee is a fool, as is Mayor Garcetti of Los Angeles.

The thugs in Seattle who have taken over a seven-block section of downtown, which includes a police precinct, are armed and dangerous.  They are extorting the businesses within their "autonomous zone."  No one is stopping them.  The mob has taken over.  They have made the mayors of these cities cower in the corners of their mansions.  There is not a courageous one among them.  They are all yielding to the lowest common denominators, the thugs.  Where are our law-and-order Republicans brave enough to name what we are seeing unfold: domestic terrorism?

YouTube screen grab (cropped).

Republicans know that nearly all of the people who go into law enforcement are good people.  They are not racists; they do not mistreat the thousands of people with whom they come in contact every day, every week, every year.  There will always be bad seeds who need to be culled.  And yet the Republicans are not speaking up for the hundreds of thousands of good cops.  Why?  Are they, like the boarded up businesses who spray-paint "black lives matter" on those boards, afraid of these goons showing up at their own homes?  Perhaps.

The rioters have an army of allies who are in charge of destroying those who condemn their actions or fail to support them on social media.  It is not a reach to assume they have members willing to go to the homes of any Republican brave enough to call out these miscreants.  But if you run for office to represent a body of constituents, your supporters have a right to assume that you will stand and deliver when support and protection are needed.

All the Democrats in the affected cities have failed the test, but to their everlasting shame, so have all the Republicans.  Not one has spoken out and demanded that every governor and mayor take charge of his city and allow the police to do their jobs.  Tom Cotton was vilified by the left for his suggestion in a New York Times op-ed that the military should be called in to quell the violence, even though a majority of Americans support his view.  And when Trump briefly brought the National Guard into D.C. to defend against particularly violent protesters, he was condemned by the media and many Democrats.

The Democrats are fomenting this violence, and the Republicans are doing nothing about it.  If they think all this leftist violence will serve them well in November, they may well be right.  There is a silent majority that is silently outraged by what it is seeing: submission.  But even that political calculation reeks of cowardice.

Why is President Trump always alone in saying what needs to be said? And when he says what needs to be said, he is viciously attacked by the Democrats and the media who, like Pavlov's dog, consider any word he says as an opportunity for slander. And the Republicans do not come to his defense.

At the moment there is no Republican but Sen. Cotton who has won or even kept the respect or support of his or her constituents. They have all made common cause with their Democrat counterparts. They are letting Antifa and Black Lives Matter, both of which are Soros-funded terrorist groups, have their way with all of us, and it is disgusting. They are not out there defending our police without whom we cannot exist. They know this! They are all -- all of our elected officials except Trump -- capitulating to violent actors who will think nothing of killing indiscriminately next. Antifa and BLM are just a step away from adopting the tactics of the drug cartels of Mexico and the Palestinian jihadis. One small step. 

Senators McConnell, Cruz, Scott, Lee, Rubio, et al. Where are you? Congressmen Nunes, Johnson, McCarthy, Gaetz, Jordan, et al., all you good guys, where are you now when we need you to stand up for our values, our safety, our property?

This is not about race. The people who have taken over that section of Seattle claim to represent BLM but are mostly white social justice warriors embracing the violence. This is about civil society. Do we keep it or let it devolve into madness? Do read Jeremy Carl's column on capitulation and cowardice.