"A Real Civilization-Destroying Pandemic"

Another fan favorite on this blog, Heather Mac Donald has a few thoughts on the current state of the nation. She opens her column by remarking that the violence currently sweeping the nation’s cities feels like a real pandemic, one that is designed to destroy civilization itself. As it happens, some of the rioters, those who attended elite universities, have been taught that they should devote themselves to destroying Western civilization.

Mac Donald opens:

Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians and the ecstatic annihilation of businesses and symbols of the state. Welcome to a real civilization-destroying pandemic, one that makes the recent saccharine exhortations to “stay safe” and the deployment of police officers to enforce outdoor mask-wearing seem like decadent bagatelles.

George Floyd was murdered by a policeman in Minneapolis. What did that city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, do? He ordered the police to evacuate a precinct, leaving it at the mercy of the mobs:

On the night of Thursday, May 28, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey ordered the city’s Third Police Precinct evacuated as the forces of hatred, distinct from legitimate forms of protest, descended upon it for a third day in a row. The building was promptly torched, sending a powerful sign that society would not defend its most fundamental institutions of law and order.

Weakness invites aggression. Frey sent a signal to the rioters. Doubtless he was consumed by his white guilt. He got what he was asking for.

The media came together to explain that the rioting was taking place because Floyd’s murderer had not yet been arrested and charged. Then, when the police officer was arrested and charged, nothing changed. In fact, it got worse:

The media, visibly exhilarated by this latest explosion of black rage, had its own explanation for the chaos: people were outraged that the officer who had kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for a sickening eight-plus minutes had not yet been arrested and charged. But when that arrest came, along with murder and manslaughter charges after a lightning-fast investigation by the district attorney, the anarchy continued—not just in Minneapolis but across the country.

Why has the violence gotten worse? Mac Donald posits that the rhetorical violence directed against white people, especially against white privilege and white supremacy, has fueled it:

This pandemic of civil violence is more widespread than anything seen during the Black Lives Matter movement of the Obama years, and it will likely have an even deadlier toll on law enforcement officers than the targeted assassinations we saw from 2014 onward. It’s worse this time because the country has absorbed another five years of academically inspired racial victimology. From Ta-Nehisi Coates to the New York Times’s 1619 project, the constant narrative about America’s endemic white supremacy and its deliberate destruction of the “black body” has been thoroughly injected into the political bloodstream.

One might, she continues, put the police violence in some perspective. It’s the exception, not the rule. What is the rule, when it comes to crime, is black-on-white violence. Obviously, most blacks who are murdered in this country today are murdered by other blacks, not by white police officers:

Far from destroying the black body, whites are the overwhelming target of interracial violence. Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5 percent of all black-white interracial violent victimizations (excluding interracial homicide, which is also disproportionately black-on-white). That works out to 540,360 felonious assaults on whites. Whites committed 14.4 percent of all interracial violent victimization, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks. Blacks are less than 13 percent of the national population….

The national media have been insisting on the theme of the allegedly brutal Minneapolis police department. They said nothing as black-on-white robberies rose in downtown Minneapolis late last year, along with savage assaults on passersby. Why are the Minneapolis police in black neighborhoods? Because that’s where violent crime is happening, including shootings of two-year-olds and lethal beatings of 75-year-olds. Just as during the Obama years, the discussion of the allegedly oppressive police is being conducted in the complete absence of any recognition of street crime and the breakdown of the black family that drives it.

As for the therapy culture’s contribution to the mayhem, we agree with Mac Donald. The urge to understand why people are committing acts of violence is, as noted in my previous post, an effort to exculpate them. If violence is committed for a righteous cause, it is not criminal:

Once the violence began, any effort to “understand” it should have stopped, since that understanding is inevitably exculpatory. The looters are not grieving over the stomach-churning arrest and death of George Floyd; they are having the time of their lives. You don’t protest or mourn a victim by stealing oxycontin, electronics, jewelry, and sneakers.