Quote of the Day:
Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians and the ecstatic annihilation of businesses and symbols of the state. Welcome to a real civilization-destroying pandemic, one that makes the recent saccharine exhortations to “stay safe” and the deployment of police officers to enforce outdoor mask-wearing seem like decadent bagatelles.
Robert L. Woodson, founder of the Woodson Center and (not coincidentally) leader of the 1776 Project, a group of black leaders who uphold the authentic virtues of the American founding, has a must-read op-ed in this morning’s Wall Street Journal on the terrible savagery engulfing our nation.
Woodson’s piece is headlined “Riots Invite Crime, Not Justice.” Woodson writes of the tepid police response to the riots that were triggered by the horrific death of George Floyd in police custody:
The devastation will likely continue after the ashes cool and the remains of shops and other businesses are swept away. A pattern known as the Ferguson effect has emerged across American towns and cities racked by antipolice protests in recent years. To avoid charges of racism, officers have stepped back from fully enforcing the law. In this state of “police nullification,” entire neighborhoods have descended into free-fire zones, where street violence and homicides have skyrocketed.
The police have been ineffectual—mostly because governors and mayors have ordered them to be that way. Townhall’s Kurt Schlichter notes that citizens may be realizing that they have to protect themselves. This means guns, the very thing that the ineffective Democratic officials who refuse to take strong actions to quell the riots don’t want:
Watching the Minneapolis Police Department abandon its precinct to the torch and crowbar-wielding peaceful protesters in that Democrat-run state and city, my first thought was that I should disarm. After all, I have been reliably informed by our smart and competent elite betters that I don’t need firearms because the police will protect me, and I am sure that even though they can’t defend their own police station they will absolutely defend me, my family, and our pet unicorn Chet.
The withdrawal of the police harms the poor in inner cities disproportionately. The Wall Street Journal has a good editorial about how looting and rioting harm minorities the most. Obvious but bears repeating.
But do the “protesters” care about these casualties?
Don’t we give them too much credit when we assume that if they could just see the damage they are inflicting on the less affluent, the elderly black woman who is now homeless, the man who lost his business, they would stop? I think we do.
The tragedy of the riots sparked by George Floyd’s death was brought home by a distraught elderly black woman interviewed by the local ABC affiliate in her ruined south Minneapolis neighborhood.
“These people did this for no reason,” wept Stephanie Wilford, who lives in an apartment next to where shops were looted and burned Friday night. “They went straight to . . . every store over here that I go to. I have nowhere to go now and I have no way to get there because the buses aren’t running.”
The violence “is not going to bring George back. George is in a better place than we are. I’m going to be honest, I wish I was where George was.”
But liberal agitators don’t care about Stephanie and the poor urban communities that have been destroyed in the four-day orgy of self-congratulatory violence they sanctioned.
“Protesters” also went for our cultural and historical landmarks, besieging the White House itself, defacing St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and the Lincoln Memorial in D.C. with graffiti, and setting fire to historic St. John’s Church, across from the White House and attended at one time or another by almost every U.S. President.
Here is what the Rector, the Rev. Rob Fisher, said:
“I am happy to share with you that I could see no other real damage besides that one room, and quite a bit of graffiti and debris around the exterior of the church,” Fisher said.
He added: “Protestors easily could have done a lot worse to our buildings, but they chose not to do that. (The damage I saw to other nearby buildings illustrated this point.)”
Chose not to do that?
Dear Lord.