JACK DUNPHY: On the Violent Left, Eternal Recurrence.
Have we learned nothing from the past? It’s not as though we need to explore antiquity for lessons in how to confront today’s issues. While such an exploration would no doubt be helpful, any effort in that direction is beyond – far, far beyond – the stunted intellectual capacities of our current crop of ruling elites, certainly to include our degreed betters running our so-called institutions of higher learning.
But is 2020 so shrouded in the mists of history as to be inaccessible to the people who hold themselves out as arbiters of all that is good and just? Apparently so. Consider: it was a mere four years ago that every major city in America was convulsed in the paroxysms of violence that followed the death of George Floyd. We must, said these lettered sophisticates, allow the oppressed to vent their outrage at the death of one of their own at the hands of state oppressors. To deter them in any way would only deepen their pain. And never mind that our hero of the moment had lived a life of depredation and was found to have consumed a fatal dose of fentanyl. Such trivial details need not dim the luster of the man’s memory.
A result of the ensuing anti-police hysteria, one that was easily foreseeable in nature if not necessarily in its horrifying scale, was that the number of homicides in the U.S. rose by nearly 5,000 from 2019 to 2020, and that nearly 3,400 of these added victims, 68 percent, were black. But there must be martyrs to the cause, after all, and who is to say how many of those 5,000 people wouldn’t willingly have sacrificed themselves in the name of a more just society? Eggs and omelets, right, comrades?
Still, one prays for more wisdom in those we’ve entrusted with authority. For the most part, we pray in vain. Witness the chaos this week on display on college campuses across the country, where we find that the protesters who brought so much death and disorder in 2020 have swapped their BLM T-shirts for kaffiyehs and adopted the Gazans as their Cause of the Season. Same clowns, different circus.
Not surprisingly, the AP isn’t willing to connect the dots:
There are some echos—for instance, at Kent State they were protesting in support of the mass murdering Khmer Rouge regime and today’s protests are in support of the mass murdering Hamas regime! https://t.co/tpQy5Ilo7k
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) May 4, 2024
Or as Jon Gabriel recently noted: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same.
Because, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”