2020

Since the 2024 presidential election, America has been braced for violence from the political far-left — and with good reason. Extremists like antifa, the “anti-fascist” group, are explicitly aggressive. They think looting, arson and intimidation are all acceptable, and until very recently they’ve had the support of the establishment. For a decade their liberal allies gave antifa carte blanche to cause criminal damage in the name of “resisting fascism” or opposing racism. So where is antifa now? What is it planning? It’s an understandable concern. The citizens of Portland remember all too well the bouts of rioting and violence by Black Lives Matter-antifa in November 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump.

I was seven months pregnant in March, 2020. I had miscarried before, and it had taken a little while to conceive, so even before the world became anxious about reports of a novel coronavirus, I was a nervous wreck. When the pandemic came in earnest, I was utterly overcome. I had been working on a live news show. Every day in late February, and even at the very beginning of March, we were telling Americans to wash their hands, but that everything would be okay. Local politicians and medical experts came on the show to tell people it was all going to be fine. This was The Before. One day, I came into the studio during a commercial.

The thing about an annus horribilis is that eventually it's supposed to end. Yet this has not been the case with 2020, which incidentally, according to the Chinese calendar, was a Year of the Rat, proving that the universe can be just a bit too literal sometimes. Dashed were the hopes that 2021 would be a fresh start, that the endless problems of 2020 would dissolve into the ether like so much smoke at a mostly peaceful protest. Instead this year began like it was going to be even more 2020 than 2020 was. Six days into 2021 and we'd already suffered an event so jarring that it's now denoted by just a date.

Joe Biden crawled ahead early in Tuesday night’s thrilling electric scooter race between two near-octogenarians, whereas of midnight Biden took the majority of delegates in the Super Tuesday primaries, including a sweep in Southern and Midwestern states. But goofy Democratic party apparatchiks posing as journalists in the mainstream media needed to dust the obvious under the rug and inject a little pizzazz and intrigue. Uttered without a tinge of sardonicism, they called it ‘the Biden phenomenon’. While staffers may need to continually check that Biden doesn’t think he’s actually president now, this was, of course, part of the plan all along as the doddering former Vice President and establishment favorite became ever more irrelevant in recent weeks.

According to a New York Times report, ‘At the midpoint of his term, Mr Trump has grown more sure of his own judgment and more cut off from anyone else’s than at any point since taking office. He spends ever more time in front of a television…’ This is too much of a theme of the Trump presidency to be dismissed as more fake news. During his 2016 campaign, the Donald confessed to developing positions on national security and foreign policy by watching retired generals on the Sunday shows. These days, Trump has access to the FBI, CIA and other intelligence organizations – but has repeatedly expressed that he does not trust them.

Block after block, thousands queued to enter Oakland’s Frank H. Ogawa Plaza to hear Sen. Kamala Harris announce her campaign for president. As police and security fielded anxious questions – ‘Will we get in? Will we see her?’ – the guard by me repeated: ‘I’m not sure, but don’t lose hope’. Hope was in the air. It was an atmosphere of a home crowd waiting to see a hometown team: here, the junior senator from California, a ‘daughter of Oakland,’ raised by immigrants in the East Bay, who served as District Attorney and California’s Attorney-General before becoming the second black female senator and first Indian American senator. As I spoke to people on the rope line, they told me why they came.