Anti-Racism Movement Gaining Momentum in Social Change

The calls for racial justice and equality in America have sparked a moment of reckoning for the entertainment industry.

As protests following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among other Black Americans at the hands of police officers, have swept across the world, audiences are pressuring Hollywood studios and streaming giants to re-examine popular films and television shows.

The following shows have been yanked from their respective networks:

Gone With the Wind (HBO Max)

HBO Max, AT&T’s (T) new on-demand service that launched on May 27, pulled the classic film “Gone With the Wind” on Tuesday. The 1939 film, adapted from Margaret Mitchell’s novel by the same name, is shrouded in racist depictions — both blatant and subtle. With the Civil War as the backdrop, “Gone With the Wind,” which went on to win 10 Academy Awards, perpetuates harmful stereotypes of people of color.

This decision came after movie director John Ridley penned an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times Monday requesting the removal of the film. This move is likely to be temporary, but WarnerMedia would bring it back with a “new introduction from a prominent African American studies scholar,” according to The Washington Post. In an unintended second order effect, the movie hit the top of Amazon’s best-sellers chart on Wednesday.

Cops (Paramount Network)

The fury around the senseless murders of Black Americans has only been rivaled by the demands to restructure or defund police forces across the country. And depictions of cops — good or bad — are being scrutinized across the board. The cop genre is a particularly popular genre, with 61.8% of prime-time dramas that aired on the four major broadcast networks focused on crime and law (21 of the 34), according to a report from civil rights advocacy nonprofit Color of Change.

Last week, Paramount Network (VIAC) pulled “Cops” from the lineup, and officially canceled the show on Tuesday. Cops, which ran for 25 seasons on Fox, was resurrected on Spike TV (now known as Paramount Network) in 2013.

“Cops is not on the Paramount Network and we don’t have any current or future plans for it to return,” a Paramount Network spokesperson said in a statement to Deadline.

Live PD (A&E)

Similarly, A&E’s popular flagship show Live PD was pulled last week and officially canceled on Wednesday, a day after “Cops’” pause became permanent.

“This is a critical time in our nation’s history and we have made the decision to cease production on Live PD. Going forward, we will determine if there is a clear pathway to tell the stories of both the community and the police officers whose role it is to serve them. And with that, we will be meeting with community and civil rights leaders as well as police departments,” an A&E spokesperson told Deadline.

Host Dan Abrams expressed his disagreement with the network’s decision to pull the show. “Shocked & beyond disappointed about this...To the loyal #LivePDNation please know I, we, did everything we could to fight for you, and for our continuing effort at transparency in policing. I was convinced the show would go on,” he tweeted.

Others under scrutiny

Now there are even calls to cancel the popular Nickelodeon cartoon series “Paw Patrol,” which portrays public service officials in a positive light. The children’s show focuses on six rescue dogs that operate under the mantra "no job is too big, no pup is too small.” Parents are taking to social media to defend the well-meaning show.

Everyone better leave my son's favorite show alone, can't cancel every show in the world that has cops because of a few bad ones.. Not every cop is racist there are good police too.. Plus it's a kids show..  #IStandWithPawPatrol #PawPatrol

Beyond entertainment content, relics of white supremacy are deeply embedded in the physical foundation of America. There has been a slow unraveling of this structural racism, with more than 114 Confederate symbols removed since the 2015 Charleston massacre of nine African Americans, according to 2019 data from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Since the death of George Floyd on May 25, at least seven cities across the country have removed public Confederate statues and memorials.

And top executives are under scrutiny, for institutionalizing or facilitating systemic racism in their organizations. Just this week, the editors-in-chief of Bon Appétit and Refinery29 and the CEOs of CrossFit and The Wing resigned amid accusations of racial inequity.

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Facts Worth Knowing

by Walter E. Williams, Professor at George Mason University

Imagine that you are an unborn spirit in heaven. God condemns you to a life of poverty but will permit you to choose the country in which you will spend your life. Which country would you choose? I would choose the United States of America.

A recent study by Just Facts, an excellent source of factual information, shows that after accounting for income, charity and non-cash welfare benefits such as subsidized health care, housing, food stamps and other assistance programs, “the poorest 20% of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in the world’s most affluent countries.” This includes the majority of countries that are members of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, including its European members. The Just Facts study concludes that if the U.S. “poor” were a nation, then it would be one of the world’s richest.

As early as 2010, 43% of all poor households owned their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage and a porch or patio. Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. The typical poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities throughout Europe. Ninety-seven percent of poor households have one or more color televisions — half of which are connected to cable, satellite or a streaming service. Some 82% of poor families have one or more smartphones. Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher. Most poor families have a car or truck and 43% own two or more vehicles.

Most surveys on U.S. poverty are deeply flawed because poor households greatly under report both their income and noncash benefits such as health care benefits provided by Medicaid, free clinics and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, nourishment provided by food stamps, school lunches, school breakfasts, soup kitchens, food pantries, the Women, Infants & Children Program and homeless shelters.

We hear and read stories such as “Real Wage Growth Is Actually Falling” and “Since 2000 Wage Growth Has Barely Grown.” But we should not believe it. Ask yourself, “What is the total compensation that I receive from my employer?” If you included only your money wages, you would be off the mark anywhere between 30% and 38%. Total employee compensation includes mandated employer expenses such as Social Security and Medicare. 

Other employee benefits include retirement and health care benefits as well as life insurance, short-term and long-term disability insurance, vacation leave, tuition reimbursement and bonuses. There is incentive for people to want more of their compensation in a non-cash form simply because of the different tax treatment. The bottom line is that prior to the government shutdown of our economy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Americans were becoming richer and richer. The question before us now is how to get back on that path.

Speaking of the COVID-19 pandemic, Just Facts has a couple of interesting takes in an article by its co-founder James D. Agresti and Dr. Andrew Glen titled “Anxiety From Reactions to Covid-19 Will Destroy At Least Seven Times More Years of Life Than Can Be Saved by Lockdowns.”

Scientific surveys of U.S. residents have found that the mental health of about one-third to one-half of all adults has been substantially compromised by government reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

There are deaths from non-psychological causes, such as government-mandated and personal decisions to delay medical care, which has postponed tumor removals, cancer screenings, heart surgeries and treatments for other ailments that could lead to early death if not addressed in a timely manner. 

Interesting and sadly enough, New York state enacted one of the strictest lockdowns in the U.S. but has 22 times the death rate of Florida, which had one of the mildest lockdowns.

Intelligent decision-making requires one to not only pay attention to the benefits of an action but to its costs as well.

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Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. 

To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other 

Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the 

Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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It’s Bigger than George Floyd

Commentary by Charita Goshay

I’ve long known that no matter what I write, some of you are going to be mad about it.

That’s fine. So long as you aren’t ambivalent about what’s happening to the country we both love.

The events roiling and shaking us to our core may have been ignited by the death of George Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers, but the problems have been festering since 1619.

Those demanding justice are contending this latest deadly encounter is not an aberration, but rather a burdensome norm for Americans of color.

If people didn’t love America, by the way, they wouldn’t be protesting to make a great nation even better.

Now, this shouldn’t have to be said, but there can’t be any wiggle room: Wanton acts of thievery and violence under the guise of protesting are indefensible. It only hands an excuse to people who don’t want to hear about the issue in the first place.

It’s about an unequal application of justice which results in being choked to death for selling cigarettes or trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.

It’s about a 19-year-old white supremacist illegally acquiring a firearm, then using it to kill nine Americans in a church, and living to tell about it.

It’s about Tamir Rice not being allowed to live to tell how, when he was a kid, he once made a childish mistake.

It’s about James Holmes spraying a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., with bullets, then booby-trapping his apartment to kill police, and living to tell about it.

It’s about Trayvon Martin, dying for the sin of being a mouthy teenager.

It’s about Sandra Bland, being arrested during a traffic violation, and not living to fight it.

It’s about Philando Castille following a police officer’s instructions to the letter, and still not coming out alive to tell the tale.

It’s about Breonna Taylor, a first-responder in Louisville, Ky., dying in a hail of bullets because of a no-knock raid at the wrong address.

It’s about Black Lives Matter being labeled as terrorists, but not the white supremacist groups who have terrorized Americans of all races with impunity for 150 years.

It’s about the conspiracy of silence embraced by good police officers who are just trying to get home in one piece but who are protecting the unfit in their ranks.

It’s about how too many departments have moved away from community policing and toward militarization.

It’s about accountability and the need to reform, improve and standardize how policing is practiced, something that only can benefit everyone.

It’s about two Americas, one growing poorer and sicker, and the other, growing richer and richer.

It’s about the abject silence of white evangelicals and the absence of righteous anger which seems to be reserved for self-pity and those whom they support at the ballot box.

It’s about jogging while black, working while black, bird-watching while black, and how the presumption of criminality and guilt grinds away at one’s soul like water wearing down stone.

It’s about whether a great country can summon the will, the vision, and the courage to live up to its own creed as a nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

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Charita M. Goshay is a native of Canton. She is a graduate of Timken High School and Kent State University, where she majored in Communications. Goshay has been employed at the Canton Repository since 1990. Her duties have included in-house librarian, editorial assistant, and staff writer. Her areas of coverage have included Jackson Township, medicine, religion, and general assignment. Goshay, a nationally syndicated columnist at Gatehouse News Servicem is a member of the Repository editorial board. She is a seven-time Associated Press Best Columnist in Ohio and has earned recognition from the Stark Bar Association, the Greater Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, Ohio Legislature, Canton City Schools, Boy Scouts of America, Buckeye Council, and others. A founding board member of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Stark and Carroll Counties, Goshay is also a graduate of Leadership of Stark County.
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Government… Will IT Save Us?

By Steven K. Haught, MBA

Government simply doesn’t have the capacity to do all the good we want it to do in this world. Who will save us from this current crisis and what can you and I…”Us” do about it?  Last time I checked it’s still…

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Government is under incredible pressure right now. The economic crisis brought on by the pandemic, a growing recession and the ugly racism that has once again stained our social conscience.   This might be thought of as the triple whammy… three converging plagues that have hit every sector of our economic engine. 

In other words, more people out of work need government services to survive. Government simply doesn’t have the capacity to do all that needs to be done.  Right now, the “world” that matters to most Americans is America.  Who will save us from this crisis and what can you do about it?

The work of government happens at 4 levels: politics, policy, performance and people. All 4 levels get jumbled together and are thought of as government. The reality is that each of the 4 levels have a distinct and important role to play – but one level is the most critical and also the most ignored.

Let’s look at a really simple analogy. Suppose there is a big societal problem that needs government attention.  For this example, not the current problem of racism and police brutality – but something that is common to all citizens… water.  People are thirsty, and everyone is turning to government for the solution. 

Here is where the four levels of government kick in.

1. Politics. Democrat vs. Republican, liberal vs. conservative. Incumbent vs. challenger. How do the politicians deal with the water/thirst crisis? It disintegrates into an ideological debate about whether people should find their own water or whether everyone should have equal access to affordable, high quality water. The ideological debate is funded on both sides by special interest groups who have an enormous stake in how the problem gets resolved.

2. Policy. Eventually the politicians lay down their arms and agree that the people need water and that government will play a role in making that happen. This is where policy kicks in. Policymaking deals with the questions of who gets the water? How much can they have? If they have water can they also have bread? Who will pay for the water? Policymaking is performed by the politicians, influenced by special interest groups and senior management of affected agencies.

3. Performance. The performance of government deals with how we actually deliver the water to those who need it. The politicians have decided people need water, the policy makers decided who gets it and how much, now the managers of government create systems (processes, procedures, tools) to deliver good water to people as efficiently as possible. The performance of government is the pipeline used to deliver the water to “customers”. The role of government managers is to continue to find ways to maintain and improve the pipelines so we have enough capacity to meet the demand. (By this point in a real-time water crisis, most people have already died from thirst, as government grinds slowly through their self-interests and egos.)

4. People. Inside all the “pipelines” of government are the people of government.  The workers in government agencies, the paid employees in various bureaucracies that are expected to make things happen. Their tasks combined with other people’s tasks are what moves the water through the systems of government to be delivered in drinkable form to thirsty people. They will first create specifications for the water, advertise for bids to be submitted for contracting for the water, then they will hire and train inspectors to inspect water producers, they will issue permits for “approved” water, then they will generate and issue water vouchers to citizens authorized to receive the water.  Of course as previously stated, everyone by this time is already dead of thirst, so its all a moot point, isn’t it?

When people think of government they jumble all four together. Outrageous acts by politicians make government workers look bad and slow their potential to act quickly to a slow laborious most redundant and inefficient process. . Bad policies and ridiculous processes make the performance of government look bad.  

Poor performance makes politicians look bad. It’s all a giant mess and everyone blames each other. It’s easy to just throw up your hands and say, “it doesn’t work”. But it can work if we focus our efforts to fix government in the right place.

We can’t change politics. No matter how many tea parties we throw or how loud we chant, “yes we can”, the political system isn’t going to change. Let’s be honest, the current political system is not designed to solve problems.

We also can’t change the people of government. No matter how many process improvement plans, and restructuring plans are developed—the way the people, the employees in the bureaucracies work will not easily be changed. 

Government agencies are full of hard working people. In fact, the number one thing private sector people who come to work in government soon discover is just how hard public sector people work (both in duration and complexity).  It may be “lather, rinse, repeat” work performance, none-the-less the employees in government agencies are not loafers, putting in time for the dime.

These hard working people are trapped in amazingly dysfunctional systems, i.e. the aforementioned pipelines. And that is where the focus of the American people has to be – fixing the pipelines, streamlining the efficiencies of agency workers which will impact the overall performance of government.

You are probably thinking, there’s no way “we the people” can change the pipelines work. The workers can only be as productive as the pipelines will allow.

Who controls the pipelines? “We the people” control the systems of government. Who has fix for the inefficient pipelines? “We the people” have the power to affect positive changes in government bureaucracies… we are the only ones who can. Here’s who can’t—politicians, policy makers and the agency employees.

The politicians. For whatever reason, and I can’t figure out why so few elected officials care about the overall performance of government.  They want to serve, they get elected and then they contribute to the same ineffective government that has existed for the past 150 years. We are in the presidential election season, and you will be watching campaigns that focus on improving government followed by fresh-start administrations that will do little or nothing to actually impact performance. At best, they try to fix subpar government performance through policy and laws, which only serves to further complicates and clog up the pipelines.

Politicians and elected officials rarely care about performance. But they should. Politicians want to tackle big new stuff. Ironically, the ability of any new administration to tackle big new issues is influenced by how they have been performing handling the old issues. Remember the never-ending health care debate?  It was framed by cogent arguments like “you want the people who run the post office and DMV to run your hospital?” Expressions like that coming from elected representatives are inflammatory and serve no purpose other than to perpetuate the political divisiveness that plagues government.  

Our government neighbors to the north in Canada have a great motto: Performance equals Trust. People’s trust in government to solve problems (currently at an all-time low) is shaped by their experience with the performance of government. If we can’t get them a birth certificate before they get their death certificate, they will rightly question our ability to improve health care.

Elected officials also need to care about performance for one simple reason—capacity. Elected officials take office with bold agendas and big plans. They want to do more things, great things.  But they quickly realize they can’t do any of it, because the systems they must depend on for implementation have no more capacity.

They want programs to improve family self-sufficiency but the social workers are maxed out. They want to increase literacy but the teachers' are maxed out. To some small degree we should probably sympathize with all the elected officials who will basically spend their entire terms in office figuring out how to shrink the pipelines, not how to quench thirst.  If they are ever going to get to their agendas, someone has to figure out how to move a ton of water through some narrow, clogged up bureaucratic processes.

The policy makers. There is no doubt policy has huge impact on government agencies. Vague rules, overly burdensome requirements or funding restrictions can kink up the pipes and seriously slow the water down. 

We can’t change policy in the abstract, rather we change policy as we examine and improve the agencies. Too often the pipelines are subordinate to the policies. Policy makers need to spend time in the pipelines to see exactly what impact their decisions have on the flow of water. The managers of the pipes need to continue to challenge policy constraints and make compelling business cases as to why change has to happen.  No well run business would ever allow itself to be bogged down by its essential pipelines for deliverables to its customers by ineffective internal policies.  People would be fired for such stupidity.

The employees. The employees work in the agencies of government – they don’t create them. They don’t make the rules or order the equipment. They show up each day to do their best work within the confines of the system created for them. Further, they are usually in one small piece of the bureaucracy and actually don’t see the whole picture because they are organized by unit, section, bureau, division and department.  They have no idea what it might be like if they worked in a “flat” structured organization, where strategic decisions can be implemented in minutes or hours, often by those making the decisions.

Their success is greatly dependent on the work done upstream from them and will be greatly influenced by the work done downstream as well.

Individuals can do much to improve their own productivity, but rarely have any influence over the productivity of the entire system. This is why employee suggestion programs rarely yield organizational transformation. Employees can see and improve their piece of the system, maybe,  but ultimately this may have no bearing on the overall performance of the system.

This is where “we the people” come in. 

Maybe you like me, have lost touch with the fact that “we” are the operational managers of America’s systems of government. “We the people” are responsible for the pipelines, the systems and the far-flung agencies that make up the structure of our government.

To change government we don’t need to fight the political machine, can’t win anyway.  And frankly, the sooner we render much of the political apparatus irrelevant, the quicker we can improve our government.

Yes, I know, you are only one person and you probably can’t rescue our democracy all on your own. No one person can.  Which is why each of us should be actively engaged with our governmental agencies and elected officials at every level, right down to the local tax collector and if you have one, a dog catcher, if its an elected position. 

Share this piece or the points it raises with your friends and family, and pledge to change a small piece of your local government together.

We really are a nation founded on the best “words” ever written down to govern the needs of a people… the Constitution.  We really are “the people” one-by-one, who can change what we don’t think is working for all peoples.

Our government takes its cues from us, and it won’t change, unless we do.  We must be involved.  We must care enough to raise our voices beyond the ballot box.  Voting is only the beginning of our responsibility as citizens and caretakers of this great nation.  We must be involved.

Right now we don’t think much is right with America.  Some say its time for a new revolution.  The climate of racial bigotry, anger and violence should make everyone think that a radical change in the way America and even the world works is long overdue.

Radical change can happen, if done in the right way.  Insurrection and violence is not the answer… collaboration and active engagement is.  Its YOU… its WE.  We cannot bring change if we allow America to be defined by divisions, racism, bitterness and anger.

We have to be united together, blessed by diversity of ideas and perspectives yes, but united and focused on a common cause… making America what she once was and can be again. 

Maybe its time to think about who you are, where you live and give your personal self-indulgences a rest in favor of being a soldier in the quest for genuine change in America.

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Steven K. Haught, is the founder and managing director at ENCORE! 2.5™ Strategic Solutions LLC, a strategy consulting practice headquartered in S.E. Pennsylvania. Internationally recognized author, writer, speaker and publisher; currently publishes—Global Insights & Trends and Renovations4Living; formerly a newspaper senior executive/publisher/editor; directed an international sales team for an top-tier software company; founder/director of two non-profits including a humanitarian/educational services organization based in S.E. Asia; He holds an MBA in strategic management and a doctorate in theological studies.

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Commentary: America’s Nervous Breakdown

By Roger L. Simon

Don’t think we’re having a nervous breakdown? When can you remember two New York corporate attorneys tossing a Molotov cocktail into a cop car?

Or how about the city executives of Santa Monica, warned via social media that their many trendy shops and upscale restaurants were about to be looted en masse the day after similar actions had already occurred, doing nothing as millions, perhaps billions, of damage was done to one of the wealthiest parts of our country?

That pattern was repeated throughout the land in areas rich and poor as liberal mayors and governors demonstrated what I suppose we could call their “liberalism.”

How far would it go? Would they allow their daughters to be absconded for the good of the cause? It’s hard to know because several of those daughters had already joined Antifa.

As for the media, they’re doing their best to deny what’s happening and blaming Trump when they can’t. What else is new?

The mysteries in all this are who’s behind it and where will it end?

The latter was ironically answered for us by the Ancient Romans who at some point must have stomped their sandals on the ground and declared regarding civilizations that had come before, “Non fiunt.” “It can’t happen here,” in Latin. (I’ll leave it there.)

Police Killings

As for who’s behind it, of course, it’s caused superficially by the murder of George Floyd—whether by asphyxiation or a combination of what we have recently learned are called co-morbidities—is ultimately irrelevant.

But his death is what the shrinks term the “presenting complaint” because the real causes are more complex and much deeper.

Besides, there’s a Big Lie attached to Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police and that lie—call me a racist, if you will—is that such things are a common occurrence. They decidedly are not, as Jason Riley, the African American columnist for the Wall Street Journal, reminded us the other night. In fact, it’s the reverse. It’s quite rare and increasingly so. The facts bear him out.

Last July, Heather Mac Donald wrote in “There Is No Epidemic of Racist Police Shootings”:

“A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings, which holds that white officers are engaged in an epidemic of racially biased shootings of black men. It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. … In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.”

Oh, no. That can’t be—except, as anyone paying attention knows, for the last decade at least police have spent more time in sensitivity training than in learning how to shoot. “Community Policing” has been the watchword of the day since 1994 (actually considerably before) when the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act established the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS).

Perhaps the Minneapolis force needs a refresher course but basically they were victims of the old rotten apples syndrome that, in the grand scheme of things, is always hard to avoid anywhere, although we should try.

Also, as most people interested know, black on black killings outnumber police (black, white, or Hispanic) on black killings somewhere in the vicinity of ten to one. If you’re really interested in the welfare of our black population, why aren’t you paying more attention to that? (There apparently is little profit in it, just as there appears to be little profit in reversing the precipitous decline in the black family.)

Communist Groups

Meanwhile, neat, construction-size stacks of fresh bricks that could only have been expensively trucked in are appearing on street corners and in alleys everywhere close to protest sites, ready to be utilized as darkness falls. (Some disturbing examples are currently available on ZeroHedge.) Who’s paying for that? Is it Antifa? Who’s financing Antifa?

Also available at the same ZeroHedge link is a fascinating video shot by a black woman near LA’s Farmers Market where two white and Asian seeming Antifa operatives are graffitiing “BLM” (Black Lives Matter) on a Starbucks. The black woman tells them they are actually hurting black people by their actions when the Antifa pair start to tell her what’s best for black people. Go figure. Or better, go Marxist.

According to a friend who has been researching a book on the subject, there are several dozen branches of Antifa in this country at various levels of the clandestine. They claim to be anarchist but they work behind the scenes with By Any Means Necessary or BAMN (more or less Trotskyite), Refuse Fascism (formed out of the remnants of the Revolutionary Communist Party and with a Maoist tilt) and a surprising number of other groups of similar ilk, including the Revolutionary Student Front (Austin) and the Democratic Socialists of America.

The latter, once genuinely democratic under its founder Michael Harrington, is, my friend told me, going progressively hardline and anti-democratic (as Antifa has been for a long time) and now has as many as two hundred thousand members.

In all, the numbers for Antifa and Co. on the left completely dwarf those for the dwindling white supremacists, although that’s news to Governor Walz of Minnesota who thinks, or did anyway until he was disabused, that such supremacists are responsible for the violence in his city. (Undoubtedly he wishes they were.)

He and a host of others should get a clue before it’s too late. Maybe it already is.

And it’s just not the reactionary liberals of our culture who need to wise up fast. Many on the right got on their high horse when Trump said he was going to declare Antifa a domestic terror organization, saying that was legally impossible. That was only for foreign groups like ISIS.

Besides the fact that Antifa is global and started in Europe, in this instance at least, so what? Trump’s declaration was a way of dramatizing the imperative that they must be stopped. And indeed they must. His critics vitiated this in their pomposity.

As for where the group gets its money, there are undoubtedly many cutouts. But I have two suggestions to offer up: George Soros and the Chinese Communist Party. There are probably others.

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Roger L. Simon  is an American novelist and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter. He was formerly CEO of PJ Media and is now its CEO Emeritus. He is the author of eleven novels, including the Moses Wine detective series, seven produced screenplays and two non-fiction books. He has served as president of the West Coast branch of PEN, a member of the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America, and was on the faculty of the American Film Institute and the Sundance Institute.

His many journalistic articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Commentary, Real Clear Politics and City Journal, among others. Mr. Simon has also been a Hoover Institute Media Fellow. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Yale School of Drama.

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Those Burning Our Cities Aim to Destroy Our Civilization

Commentary by Roger Kimball

CONTRIBUTOR

The first thing to understand about the destructive mob riots sweeping the country is that they are not race riots. The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week while being arrested by the police is merely the pretext for the violence. The cause is hatred. Hatred of America, first of all, but ultimately hatred of civilized order itself.

Many of the thugs looting and destroying property are white. So what we are witnessing is not a battle between black and white. It is a battle between the forces of civilization, on the one hand, and the forces of anarchy, on the other.

But no—that is not quite right. To speak of a battle between two things implies that there are two active sides. That is not, not yet, the case with the tsunami of destruction and murder we are watching on nightly television. Rather, what we are witnessing is an assault by the forces of barbarism on a supine establishment that has been pretending to represent the authority of civilization.

It is curious that the most egregious scenes of violence are taking place in blue states in cities run by left-wing mayors. Many of the mayors and chiefs of police are themselves black. In many locales, the police have been told to stand down as the mob rampages. The mayor of Minneapolis blamed “white supremacists” and “outsiders” for the violence.

Unfortunately for that assertion, there are no white supremacists to be found, only members of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and kindred groups. An analysis of the zip codes of those arrested shows that they are overwhelmingly from the Minneapolis area.

Meanwhile, various celebrities are encouraging lawlessness by cheering on the malefactors, publicly promising to post bail for them.

Justin Timberlake, to take but one example, encouraged his fans to join him “in supporting the Minneapolis protestors” by donating to a “freedom fund” to combat “the harms of incarceration.”

What about the “harms” of destroying other people’s property or bashing in their heads with a skateboard? Ultimately, as Calvin Coolidge observed, “property rights and personal rights are the same thing.”

Snarling Criminality

I should say a word about The Narrative. The official line is that police officer (now ex-police officer) Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly 9 minutes and asphyxiating him. The whole horrible incident was captured on video—Floyd can be heard piteously saying “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe”—so it’s an open and shut case.

Except that there is a wrinkle. The preliminary autopsy report revealed “no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation.” The report went on to note that “Mr. Floyd had underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease. The combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by the police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system likely contributed to his death.”

This does not necessarily exonerate Derek Chauvin. It does, as Andrew McCarthy notes in a thoughtful column about the legalities of the case, show that here, as is so often the case, things are more complicated than that may first appear.

What is not complicated is the snarling criminality of those smashing storefronts, setting fire to cars and police stations, and sending innocent passersby to the hospital or the morgue.

There is some macabre irony in the fact that while most of the country is “locked down” by the diktats of the health police, enforced by power-mad governors and those aspiring to power in city councils and mayors’ offices throughout the country, abetted by virtue signaling sheep who scream at their neighbors if they get within six feet of them or appear in public without a mask, thousands of vicious criminals are given leave to loot and burn and pillage. The rules about “social distancing” are suspended so long as people are bent not upon making their living but destroying the livings of others.

President Trump has responded vigorously by calling out the National Guard. We must all hope that they will soon restore order. But the glimpses of viciousness broadcast across the country cannot be unseen.

A Thin Line

In a magnificent monologue on his television show, Tucker Carlson peeled back the headlines to expose the festering reality that has brought us to this place.

“The ideologues will tell you,” he noted, “that the problem is race relations, or capitalism, or police brutality, or global warming. But only on the surface. The real cause is deeper than that and it’s far darker. What you’re watching is the ancient battle between those who have a stake in society, and would like to preserve it, and those who don’t, and seek to destroy it.” That’s exactly right.

Writing in the dark days of 1939, Evelyn Waugh noted that “barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity.”

Many if not most of the violent hooligans defacing our cities today are young beneficiaries of the richest and most generous society the world has ever seen. At school, they were taught to despise their country as racist, sexist, colonialist, and exploitative, attitudes that were reinforced in college and from the megaphones of the media, Hollywood, and our elite universities. How thin is the line between civilization and violent anarchy!

Waugh was right. “The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat.”

We got a taste of that vulnerability when we indulged in a strange cult-like exercise of society-wide self-asphyxiation over a novel respiratory bug. Now we seem bent on trying self-immolation instead.

“At a time like the present,” Waugh warned, society is “notably precarious. If it falls we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.”

I think that is worth keeping in mind as we watch CNN and MSNBC cheer on the “protestors” who are determined to destroy us.

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Roger Kimball is the editor and publisher of the 

The New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books. 

His most recent book is “The Fortunes of Permanence: 

Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia.”

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