Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind

What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation,” the longshoreman and philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote about America in 1967.

Hoffer was referring to the Black Panthers, but his insight applies a half-century later to the QAnon cultists who stormed the nation’s Capitol on Wednesday in a crazed, costumed riot aimed at insurrection (defined by Webster’s Second as “a rising up of individuals to prevent the execution of law by force”) ahead of Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College win. And Hoffer’s insight also applies to the Tea Partiers turned Trumpists who provided cover for the political violence coming from their own side.

Five people are dead because of this movement turned racket, including a Capitol Police officer and Air Force veteran Brian Sicknick, as the supposed party of law and order hit another awful new low.

Someone was telling me the other day about her mother-in-law, in Europe, who’s suffering from dementia and who they can’t travel to be with right now. So they’re calling twice a day, including once before the evening news there to tell her about the pandemic because otherwise she’s shocked each time she turns on the TV and learns about it.

Maybe we could agree after this week’s riot that encouraging confrontational groups to cross police lines and “take” public places as a way to stage dramatic confrontations meant to effect change isn’t generally a good idea?

Or we can just keep turning on the news and being shocked.

That seems non-controversial enough to me, but a single tweet citing a study by Princeton Professor Omar Wasow about how “Post-MLK-assassination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election” and make Richard Nixon president was itself enough to get data scientist David Shor publicly condemned as a racist, fired from his job and booted from a listserv of data-oriented progressives — even after he quickly apologized for his thoughtcrime.

Shor’s tweet came amid a summer of massive and mostly peaceful and righteous protests, spurred in part by months of virus-inflicted isolation and economic harm as well as lifetimes of built-up frustration over abusive policing.

Those Black Lives Matters protests, often met by a wildly overaggressive police response that starkly contrasts with the pathetically underwhelming one on display in Washington last week, were widely applauded by the press even as they broke the new public health rules and came to include moments of rioting, arson, looting and killings along with police abandoning precincts in Minneapolis and Seattle, where the mayor let the protesters set up a “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” that lasted for weeks and, as Michael Lind observed in a superb essay at Tablet, in some sense anticipated the occupation of the Capitol Building this week. And the protests also aligned with the beginning of a disturbing and still ongoing sharp rise in shootings in American cities including New York.

There are some incredible photos from Wednesday’s riot of a D.C. cop swallowed up by a crowd of shoving MAGA madmen, and it’s indeed almost all men. As the cop is surrounded on all sides, one of the men surrounding him is waving the Thin Blue Line flag that, in any other context, signifies someone’s allegiance to law enforcement and opposition to anarchic rioting.

After decades of associating the left with disorder and rolling riots, Republicans, having opened the Pandora’s Box of street protests and clashes, are learning now how dangerous it is to be the face of those things.

The Tea Partiers boasted about how they always left the scenes of their rallies cleaner than they’d found them; the Trumpists just trashed the Capitol building. They walked out mostly unmolested, but nonetheless yelling about “pigs” and “f—k the blue” and sounding like some of the BLM protesters who they loathe.

Too many of the president’s supporters, not only the intellectuals who saw Trump as a weapon to wield against the administrative state but also the average populists who believed that they’d finally found someone who would champion their forgotten interests, ignored what’s been obvious all along: You cannot wield madness, resentment and unreason without being consumed by them.

The year after he first used the movement-to-racket line, Hoffer returned to it and then added that the accelerating rate of change is “having peculiar consequences. When the present is almost nonexistent, future and past too become blurred. The future is so immediate that one no longer waits for it. Hope turns into desire. At the same time, rapid change impairs memory — yesterday seems beyond recall. It is a state of affairs ideally suited to the inclinations of the adolescent.”

Eugene R. Dunn

President-elect Biden’s choice of Merrick Garland to be his attorney general is an excellent one. After four years of politicization at the highest levels of the Justice Department, the new AG has to be a person of the highest level of integrity to build a department that must follow the law and not politics. Garland has shown from his time as a federal judge that he has the leadership abilities needed to head the department at this critical time. He would have been a consensus builder if he was granted a vote to be a Supreme Court justice, and will do so as our attorney general.

Be careful what you wish for, Nancy Pelosi and fellow Dems. If the Donald is removed by the 25th Amendment, Mike Pence will take over. The first thing Pence will do is pardon Trump. This is what his plan was along.

Joe Biden gave many speeches that he wanted to unite the country and both parties, then he went on to criticize Trump and all of his followers. I do not think that is the way you unite the country. It is pure politics as usual.

Manhattan: The embarrassment of what now constitutes editing for the Daily News continues apace. Friday’s “Money line to win the American League Pennant” lists 10 National League teams, from the Dodgers to the Marlins. I am willing to wager any amount, any time, that none of these teams has the slightest chance to win the American League crown!