The demonic year 2020 was the source of innumerable indignities and insults. The American right was afflicted by too many to count, but one that was perhaps more vexing than most was the American left’s unwillingness to call the violence on our streets by its name. Instead, the institutions in their control sought to dismiss the violence as somehow both a figment of Republican imaginations and an understandable response to the oppressive conditions that prevail in modern-day America.
A September 2020 study of the violence by a group affiliated with Princeton University found that no fewer than 220 American towns and cities were convulsed by “riots” over the course of that summer. But the study blamed this historic outbreak on the “longstanding crisis of police violence and structural racism in America,” attributing the worst of it to covert “white supremacist” agitators and the police’s attempts to “violently disperse peaceful protests.” Indeed, in some cities, demonstrators were met with ever-increasing “state force,” the report observes without ever asking why. We’re left with the implication that such force was gratuitous.
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