The left's war on America's past crossed several new frontiers last week.
Portland's statue of George Washington, the Father of his Country and the first president of the United States, the greatest man of his age, was toppled and desecrated.
Culturally informed by Roman Catholicism's expectation that regret must prompt an apology as well as penance, Western European tradition calls for a rhetorical journey by politicians who claim to have changed course. A chastened leader should explain why and how he came to his previous belief, explain the circumstances that changed his mind and make the case for his new, different policy. He must expend political capital in order to get changes enacted.
Success breeds failure. That's a lesson taught by America's current woes, the stumbling attempts to cope with the novel coronavirus, and the all-too-familiar scripts for responding to police misconduct and violent riots.
Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met for seven hours at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii with the chief architect of China's foreign policy, Yang Jiechi.
The two had much to talk about.
— Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice enter our list of Joe Biden’s vice presidential contenders.
— Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) drops off.
— The top names remain the same.
If you type "#HoustonLynching" in Twitter's search engine, hundreds and hundreds of tweets appear. Thousands more appear under the hashtags "#Lynchings" and "#Lynched." Social media activists supporting the Black Lives Matter movement have spread a terrifying story: Evil racists are hanging black men from trees across the country.
For my internet video this week, my staff showed me clips of violent cops.
It's not just Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd's neck for almost nine minutes -- it's the other cops who just watch.
Biden’s lead has been similar to Clinton’s, but it has been more stable.
— In aggregate, Joe Biden’s national lead over Donald Trump so far this year is very similar to the lead Hillary Clinton held over Trump in the first half of 2016.
— However, Biden’s lead has been more stable.
It's the oddest thing. The more America's Big Tech companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have contributed to keeping America's economy afloat during the coronavirus lockdown, the louder the voices get to break them up or to tie them up into regulatory knots.
"Can we all just get along?"
That was the plea of Rodney King after a Simi Valley jury failed to convict any of the four cops who beat him into submission after a 100-mile-an-hour chase on an LA freeway.
It's all about religion, isn't it? "(W)e have the cult of social justice on the left," Andrew Sullivan wrote in New York Magazine, "a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical."
Linguist John McWhorter elaborated on that theme in The Atlantic. "(A)ntiracism," he wrote, "is a profoundly religious movement in everything but terminology."
On Gen. George Washington's orders, the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia, was read aloud to his army. On hearing it, the troops marched to Bowling Green, decapitated and pulled down the statue of George III, and sent the remnants to be melted down into musket balls.
It was a revolutionary act, a symbolic statement. These once-loyal American subjects were now rebels and no longer owed allegiance to the king. They would fight to end his rule in America.
— Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D) seems to be rising in the Biden veepstakes.
— Late Wednesday, Jon Ossoff (D) apparently captured the Democratic nomination to face Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), thus avoiding a runoff.
— Primaries in South Carolina and West Virginia saw protest voting in some key races.
Across our looted plain, statues are under siege. Smashed. Spray-painted. Shrouded. Expunged. In the name of social justice, we are witnessing the systematic eradication of history. Edifice vigilantes will not rest until all monuments of Western civilization fall.
Deaths from COVID-19 are dropping, but we probably can't resume normal life until someone develops a vaccine. Experts say it will take at least 12 to 18 months.
Why so long?
The crisis of the coronavirus-induced economic lockdown and now the violent protests in the streets have unleashed a depression-level financial crisis and unprecedented human suffering -- especially in our inner cities. These events have also exposed a Grand Canyon-sized chasm that now separates how the left and the right see America today.
Newly painted in huge yellow letters on 16th Street, just north of the White House, is the slogan: "Defund the Police."
That new message sits beside the "Black Lives Matter" slogan, also in huge letters, painted there at the direction of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Few things are more terrifying than the unknown, as we are discovering as we struggle to navigate, avoid and (if we fail to avoid) survive a mysterious new virus. That goes double when reliable information is hard to come by; it is unquantifiably worse without credible leadership.
In his statement to The Atlantic magazine, former Defense Secretary General James Mattis says of the events of the last 10 days that have shaken the nation as it has not been shaken since 1968:
"We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers."
"America is burning. But that's how forests grow." So spoke Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.
"Riots are an integral part of the country's march towards progress." So read a now-deleted tweet from the Democratic Committee of Fairfax County, Virginia, the affluent Washington suburb with a population of 1 million.
