Riots

Tuesday

Sohrab Ahmari

Can COVID-19 tell whether a protest is progressive?

From our US edition

New York City This past month shattered all my sense of stability and permanence in New York, the city I’ve called home since 2012 (though I’ve spent some of those years in London). The looting mobs that rampaged through Gotham’s streets put me in mind of my native Middle East, a phenomenon I thought I’d left behind ‘over there’, not to be encountered except on the occasional reporting trip to Iraq or Egypt. But no. An unjust police killing in Minneapolis — combined, no doubt, with the effects of a prolonged lockdown — Arab Spring’d the United States, if you will. Or rather, the riots revealed that America’s advanced liberal society isn’t all that different from the Arab client states Washington likes to lecture.

protest

Tuesday

Conrad Black

The Biden factor is difficult to calculate

From our US edition

The final stage of the election campaign and its result will depend on four factors: management of the balance between demand for police reform and concern for the maintenance of public order; whether there is a significant revival of COVID-19; the swiftness of the economic recovery; and the resolution of questions about Joe Biden’s apparent capacity to serve as president. Hovering above the campaign will be the question of indictments from US Attorney John Durham’s special counsel investigation. On all that has been revealed, crimes will be charged, and Attorney General William Barr confirmed last week that those whose conduct is likely to be judged controversial will be 'familiar' names. But they may not include elected officials and apparently not Biden himself.

joe biden

Friday

Cockburn

Why isn’t Andrew Sullivan allowed to write his column?

From our US edition

What has happened to New York media? Just as the New York Times was experiencing its own Inner Mongolia Moment over the now notorious Sen. Tom Cotton ‘Send in the Troops’ op-ed, the Maoists at New York magazine were going after their best columnist, Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan revealed on Twitter yesterday that his column wouldn't be appearing. The reason? His editors are not allowing him to write about the riots. https://twitter.com/sullydish/status/1268564124423933953 Presumably Sullivan’s editors are frightened that he might make the radically bourgeois point that looting and violence are wrong.

andrew sullivan
hong kong
Melissa Chen

Don’t compare the nationwide riots to Hong Kong

From our US edition

As soon as the unrest began in Minneapolis, the inevitable comparisons with Hong Kong began. We saw throngs of masked demonstrators take to the streets holding placards and chanting slogans while police in riot gear discharged rubber bullets, pepper spray and tear gas. We saw skirmishes in which protesters were pinned to the ground with excessive force. We saw smoldering barricades and burning police vehicles. But that’s where the superficial similarities between the two protest movements end. Hong Kong’s protests began as a revolt against the controversial extradition bill (which would have allowed extraditions to mainland China). It built upon past pro-democracy movements and morphed into an existential battle against the Chinese Communist party.

Wednesday

Kate Hyde

Bill de Blasio unites cops and protesters — in disgust

From our US edition

New York City is crumbling into shambolic lawlessness and its citizens are growing more afraid and frustrated by the day.Why?Because Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have once again proven to be categorically incompetent leaders incapable of working effectively together in a time of crisis.On Tuesday, the Governor was forced to confront the glaring issue that the state’s top concern had shifted from COVID prevention to the demolition of its biggest metropolis by unruly riots. During his daily press conference, Cuomo took the opportunity to chastise the Mayor and the NYPD for the turmoil, calling Mayor de Blasio’s handling of it a ‘disgrace’.

bill de blasio
civilization
Roger Kimball

How to destroy civilization

From our US edition

Yogi Berra was right: it’s déjà vu all over again. Just turn on the evening news. If you are old enough, you might blink twice and wonder whether you are not back in 1968. The looting and mayhem, the promiscuous invocations of universal 'racism' and 'non-negotiable demands.' Haven’t we been there, done that? 'We must recognize that justice is a higher social goal than law and order.' Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to some eager CNN reporter? No, that was William Sloane Coffin, Jr., chaplain of Yale University, in 1972. Remember Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers?

Tuesday

Ben Zeisloft

A night in an American riot

From our US edition

Race riots have gripped the nation over the past week, eclipsing the peaceful protesters demanding justice for the death of George Floyd. Violent rioters — including members of antifa — have laid waste to virtually every American city. As darkness descends on an American city, what is it like to be on the front lines of the riots?Reporters who set out to document the chaos described to The Spectator how the mood shifted as the sun went down. Rioters felt empowered under the cover of darkness and set out to fight, destroy, and steal.Krista Oliver, who covered the weekend-long protests in Washington, DC for the Daily Caller recalled ‘how scary these riots are getting as the night progresses.

riot
Stephen L. Miller

Dear dictators: don’t lecture the US on how to treat its people

From our US edition

If you’ve been watching the news, you would think the United States is a third world nation on the verge of collapse. Less civilized countries all over the world have noticed American policing problems and the volatile riots we’re having; riots that they either experience on a weekly basis — or their governments don’t allow to take place at all. Take Iran, for instance. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted, ‘some don’t think #BlackLivesMatter. To those of us who do: it is long overdue for the entire world to wage war against racism.

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children
Dominic Green

Children of the revolution

From our US edition

Some steal their luxury leisure goods, but others take their leisure by the luxury of right, and all of it is wrong. While gangs using luxury vehicles and lookouts cross the bridges into Manhattan for targeted looting — as opposed to looting Target, which is how the George Floyd riots began — the children of the elite parade their virtue and distract the police by acting out fantasies of violent revolution. How proud Mr and Mrs de Blasio of Yorkville, Manhattan must be of young Chiara, arrested on Saturday night in Manhattan for unlawful assembly.

manhattan
Nick Gillespie

Mayhem in Manhattan

From our US edition

It’s important — and easy — to tell the difference between protesters and looters. Just as New York should have been opening up after the peak of the coronavirus lockdown, the city is instead retreating further indoors, hunkering down behind increasingly thick barriers of plywood as the evenings become free-for-alls for window-smashing rioters.New York City, America's cultural and economic engine, is rapidly degenerating into a scenario inspired by The Ωmega Man (1971), a post-apocalyptic movie in which Charlton Heston, seemingly the last unaffected survivor of a chemical-weapons attacks, wanders a deserted Los Angeles by day and fends off increasingly brazen bands of mutant hippies who torch the city every night.

nike
Daniel McCarthy

This riot is brought to you by Nike

From our US edition

In Chicago last weekend 82 people were shot, 22 of them fatally. Between May 2019 and late May 2020, homicide claimed the lives of over 300 black men in the city. That’s not a police brutality problem, that’s a problem of insufficient police power being deployed to stop violent criminals. If the death of one man, George Floyd, while under arrest in Minneapolis is cause for nationwide protests, why don’t the deaths of hundreds of George Floyds every year prick the conscience of protesters that much more?Better yet, why don’t the antifa kids who are mighty bold with the police go and toss bricks at the gangbangers in Chicago? Because unlike the police, the gangs will shoot them dead.

Monday

Jacob Heilbrunn

War footing: can Trump turn left-wing protests into victory?

From our US edition

Don’t cross Donald Trump. Trump originally ran for the presidency because Barack Obama mocked him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. He has devoted himself to tearing up every accomplishment, every treaty that Obama signed. Yesterday he was mocked for the revelation that he was conducted into the White House bunker by the Secret Service. Now he has had his revenge. Speaking in the Rose Garden today, Trump declared, 'If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for there.' He indicated that he is prepared to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to quash to the protests.This isn’t rodomontade.

protests
Amber Duke

Pity the shopkeepers

From our US edition

Small businesses in America have been hit by a devastating double whammy. Stores that managed to survive the economic shutdown now face a severe outbreak of looting and vandalism that could close them for good. Rioters might justify their actions by arguing that property damage is nothing compared to the suffering of black Americans at the hands of police, but the destruction of small businesses has profound economic and cultural consequences. As of mid-May, economists projected that more than 100,000 small businesses had been lost thanks to the COVID-19 quarantine. That accounts for at least 2 percent of small businesses in America. More than 30 percent of small business owners said they would be at risk if the shutdown lasted more than two months.

small Shop owners survey the damage to their store in Philadelphia, PA
Jacob Heilbrunn

The Washington war zone

From our US edition

Washington, DCLast night, I took my usual evening stroll in Friendship Heights, only to realize that it could have an insalubrious outcome as I saw a group of 'protesters', as they are known, huddling on Wisconsin Avenue. Discretion appeared to be the better part of valor: I made a swift left to avoid them only to detect another group of about 20 young men and women wearing ski masks and holding what appeared to be sticks and batons. No police were around. A quick calculation suggested that a reversal would be interpreted as fear. I strode ahead and about 10 seconds after I passed the group, I suddenly heard them rush toward me, yelling and laughing. Their target turned out not to be me but the stores on the business strip in Friendship Heights.

washington
Matt Mayer

Republicans should now reclaim their strong history on civil rights

From our US edition

If you want a perfect example of how the progressive mindset betrays African Americans, look at the now viral video of two white women spray-painting a Starbucks with Black Lives Matter slogans while a black woman pleads for them to stop. 'Y'all doing that for us and we didn't ask you do that,' says the black woman. 'Don't spray stuff on here when they gonna blame black people...and black people didn't do it.' 'Don't police people's way of expressing themselves,' says the white woman's white friend. That is a neat metaphor for how white liberal Americans have behaved for the last 40 years, taking actions they think show support for minorities but which only hurt them more. https://twitter.

civil rights

Saturday

Daniel McCarthy

The roots of riot

From our US edition

That LEGO set or Louis Vuitton bag you’ve always wanted can be yours free if you just wait for the next black suspect to die in police custody. That’s the lesson so far from the riots in Minneapolis, Portland, Atlanta and elsewhere following the death of George Floyd. Arson and luxury looting are not the most obvious ways of fighting racism or police brutality, but at this point riots are a ritual. ‘Antifa’ means bourgeois bolshevism — college-educated mock revolutionaries performing to a predictable script. This is the most sterile rebellion any country has ever seen. Far from terrifying the establishment, it reflects exactly what is taught in schools and preached over the airwaves and in respectable op-eds.

riot
Freddy Gray

America’s immune system is failing

‘This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,’ said President Donald Trump in his inauguration speech on January 20, 2017. Three and a half years later, in the early summer of 2020, a bout of heavy riots has broken out, like a virus spreading, in cities across America. Minneapolis rioted for days on end. Other cities erupted: in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, New York and Washington. A mob now menaces the White House. Maybe that American carnage is just beginning. This latest unrest, coming as it does in the middle of an ongoing global health crisis and a concomitant economic recession, feels more devastating We’ve seen plenty of riots in America in the last few decades.

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

Paris’s banlieues are burning once again

One of the persistent misconceptions of the riots that swept through France in the autumn of 2005 is that they were solely the result of the deaths of two youths as they ran from the police. The deaths of the teenagers on October 27 in Clichy-Montfermeil provoked unrest in the north-eastern Parisian suburb but it was what happened three days later that led to three weeks of nationwide riots and the declaration of a state of emergency by the then president of France, Jacques Chirac. According to Gilles Kepel in his 2015 book, Terror in France: genesis of the French Jihad, it was a stray tear gas grenade fired by police that landed close to the entrance of a mosque that lit the touch paper.