Gaping black holes of smashed store windows look out on America’s streets like the eyes of some giant memento mori goading the nation with the horror of our current crises. These eyes are quickly covered with boards, but there is no concealing the businesses ruined, livelihoods trashed or incinerated, and, in many areas, the hopes of a thriving community vaporized.
Mob violence, some of it political and revolutionary, some of it merely criminally acquisitive, has hit an economy already reeling from the pandemic shutdown like a cruel blow upon a dark and smarting bruise.
High-end businesses have been trashed and their stock purloined, but a disproportionate number of those targeted by the mob are more vulnerable, in poor minority areas, minority owned, and less likely to have the financial cushion of insurance or substantial savings.
This bleak picture, setting back an economic recovery that was beginning to gather momentum as society emerged from the restrictions of social distancing, underlines that the perpetrators are animated by one of three ugly motives — a vaguely egalitarian sense of entitlement they think makes it fair for the have-nots to steal from the haves; a nihilism that simply wants destruction; or a revolutionary fervor that, like its Soviet predecessor, is indifferent to individual suffering so long as it furthers the cause.
It’s sometimes said on Wall Street that bad news is good news, and the same view prevails among those for whom a stable, prosperous America is the enemy.
Our cover story this week, “The Left Gets Busy,” examines the role of militant organizers, particularly antifa, which is avowedly anarchist and less honestly Marxist, who seized on race protests as a golden opportunity to foment violence and assault their nation. Reporters Jerry Dunleavy and Joseph Simonson find that the perpetrators are an important part of the Democratic base, which explains why the party of the Left finds it awkward to condemn the riots.
Naomi Schaefer Riley and Jim Piereson expose the ways that statist opponents of private philanthropy have opened up a new front against private giving during the pandemic. They point out that donors financing private initiatives are a vital supplement to actions by government, which cannot possibly cope by itself.
Alexandra Hudson investigates innovative teaching programs that are thriving now that students must learn at home and schools are shut down, perhaps into the fall semester.
In the Life & Arts section, Christina Hoff Sommers explodes the pretentions to accuracy of Mrs. America, the FX series on Hulu that traduces Phyllis Schlafly and her work in blocking the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Several media outlets have “fact-checked” the series and somehow failed to notice entirely fabricated episodes, all of which tend to make a principled and good-natured woman look like a monster.
Rob Long conducts a humiliating archaeological dig through his clothes closet, and Eric Felten risks arrest by the curfew police in Washington, D.C., to get his hands on a snow cone.
