The Left Won’t Rest Until Every American City is Detroit
In the 1950s, Detroit, population 1.85 million, was America’s fourth-largest city and the world’s wealthiest.
Able-bodied workers of all races moved to the Motor City for well-paying jobs.
1950s Detroit contained some of the world’s greatest pre-depression 20th century architecture. In 1959, Berry Gordy founded Motown Records and made Detroit a center of American popular culture.
But, in 1967, violent, destructive urban riots changed Detroit’s fortunes forever. The liberal mayor – all Detroit mayors since 1962 have been Democrats – made the fateful decision to restrain the police and let the riots burn out.
“Burn, baby, burn!” rioters chanted, and burn Detroit did. In five days, 43 people died, 342 were injured. Nearly 1,400 buildings were destroyed.
Detroit’s population, job base and tax revenues began dropping immediately. In 1992, Detroit’s debt rating fell to junk status, and, later, the city filed for bankruptcy.
Today, Detroit, population 667,000, remains Michigan’s largest city, but, in 2019, Detroit had 43,000 abandoned homes. The city is now among the nation’s most dangerous.
The American left learned nothing from Detroit.
In May, riots disguised as “protests” and “demonstrations” turned Detroit and other American cities into cesspits of lawlessness, appallingly whitewashed by liberal national media as “mostly peaceful.” But, normal Americans – both Republicans and Democrats – know the difference between peaceful demonstrations and anarchy.
Street mobs, matched up, organized and mobilized through social media – largely undereducated, disaffected, otherwise-powerless young people, many mentally unstable – assaulted American cities.
Falsely assuming that affectations of “righteousness” transcend the law, rioting mobs first looted, vandalized and torched city centers, then invaded quiet neighborhoods, and, later, began defacing and tearing down statues and monuments – erasing America’s history – while simultaneously attempting to instill fear everywhere.
Officials in affected cities, all Democrats, at least tacitly endorsed, then encouraged the anarchy by ordering police “restraint.” Some allowed mobs to vandalize and destroy federal property.
In Philadelphia, America’s founding city, the mayor, a Democrat, opposed, and the city’s district attorney threatened to “arrest” agents deployed to maintain order around federal property there.
In Oregon, Portland’s mayor, another hard left-liberal Democrat, expressed “outrage” that federal officers resisted rioters’ assaults on a federal building, and demanded that federal agents remove barriers to allow rioters access to the property. The mayor called the feds “a direct threat to our democracy,” and accused them of making “unconstitutional” arrests and “inflaming protesters.”
Similar events occurred in Seattle, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Washington, DC, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Phoenix, and dozens of smaller Democrat-run cities. In some, anarchists declared “autonomous zones,” areas of “secession” from federal jurisdiction.
But, rather than remaking America’s Democrat-run cities into little “Fort Sumters,” potentially, at least, out-of-control left-liberals and irresponsible mayors are turning virtually every Democrat-run American city into another Detroit.
Why?
Believing that politics is downstream from culture, social media and street mobs, enabled by left-liberal politicians and media, seek to redefine and control America’s culture, then convert that control into broad political power.
The mobs’ aggressive, often-violent campaign to eliminate or, at minimum, desecrate American history, religiosity, patriotism, customs and traditions, while shaming Americans who value them, is a tactic designed, first, to silence regular people and, ultimately, control them.
Left-liberal mobs have no genuine values, only ambitions. While claiming to fight “fascism,” revolutionary mobs employ fascist methods to impose totalitarian rule – theirs.
While allowing “protesters” to mass assemble, and urban lawlessness to continue during the COVID-19 pandemic, elected Democrats, mayors and governors, continued to restrict and fine the activities of otherwise law-abiding citizens and business owners/employers.
Think of it: Democrats arrested people for reopening businesses and enjoying normally-lawful activities, but protected, even rewarded the anarchists who were destroying their cities. Some began to defund police forces.
Democrats and national media are desperately rationalizing those facts, but there is no rational way to explain or excuse them.
Ironically, passive, tragically-incompetent, often-complicit Democrats have enabled/unleashed two forces they cannot control.
Urban anarchy, the first, coupled with elected Democrats’ COVID hypocrisy and incoherence have energized an equally-unmanageable, far more powerful counterforce – an American silent majority who understand that people who covet and wield power so irresponsibly should be allowed nowhere near it.
A backlash is inevitable. In swing-state Pennsylvania alone, Republicans are gaining new registered voters at more than five times the rate of Democrats.
The public backlash will be felt in November.
