Pendulum swinging toward law and order as cities burn

Since the death of George Floyd beneath the knee of a cop in Minneapolis on Memorial Day, the nation has been instructed by its cultural elites that this is the daily reality that a racist America has too long ignored

Our nation, it was shouted in our faces, is a place where white cops harass, brutalize, assault and kill Black Americans regularly and with impunity.

“Defund the police!” the Black Lives Matter demand went out, to be echoed and re-echoed by BLM’s amen corner of progressive elites.

The pendulum may be swinging back, for this weekend reintroduced us to the old familiar world.

In Washington, D.C., about midnight Saturday, at a block party in the Southeast sector of the city, three shooters fired 100 rounds, wounded 20, killed a teenager and left a female police officer in critical condition.

It appears to have been an attempted massacre, a slaughter.

“More than 115 people have been slain in the District this year, a 17% increase over this time in 2019, which ended the year with a decade high,” reports The Washington Post.

D.C.’s numbers, however, pale by comparison to Chicago, where this weekend recorded 32 more people shot, with three dead.

According to the SunTimes, there were 106 homicides in the city in July, a single-month body count almost equal to the toll D.C. has piled up in all of the first seven months of 2020.

A disproportionate number of the dead and wounded are Black Americans, and a disproportionate number of the shooters and killers are Black men.

If black lives matter, where is Black Lives Matter? Rarely in these stories of shootings and killings does one read that the dead were the victims of rogue cops or white supremacists.

Indeed, the front page of Monday’s New York Times gave voice to the city’s Black and Hispanic leaders who are objecting to a proposed $1 billion cut in the police budget. The people in highcrime precincts, for whom these leaders speak, want more, not fewer, cops on the beat.

Even Portland, Oregon, which has been indulging nightly protests since the Floyd killing, seems to be awakening to the real world.

When the Department of Homeland Security pulled its agents out of Portland and handed the defense of the federal courthouse to the state police, the “peaceful protesters” shifted their attention to the city’s buildings and Portland Police Bureau’s East Precinct.

With police personnel corralled inside, the East Precinct was barricaded with cars and wooden planks, and an attempt was made to set it afire by throwing flaming objects into the building.

Mugged by reality, Mayor Ted Wheeler seems to have belatedly awakened to the character of the protesters he has been coddling. Wheeler finally ordered police to do “what is necessary” to quell the rioting, even if it means using tear gas.

All over, people watch their leaders in city after city fail to keep the peace and restore order as protesters riot at will, and they make plans to move out. In the suburbs and country, they quietly observe the inability of cops to quell the violence, and they buy guns.

The ultimate battle here may be between liberal Democrats elected to, and failing to, run the cities, and the radical left and Marxists who welcome their failure as they intend to kick the liberals down the stairs.