The Morning Jolt

This will be the last Jim-written Morning Jolt until June 29. After a long period where travel and contact with senior citizens were discouraged, I’m finally getting to see my folks again — and really hoping the situation in South Carolina gets better. If you’re among the readers I usually see in one way or another down there, I hope you’ll understand if we don’t meet face to face this year.

Democratic Hypocrisy Will Not Protect You from the Virus

It’s not making national news, but local health officials in various cities and towns across the country are reporting that people participating in or working near the recent protests have tested positive for the coronavirus.

Seven Nebraska National Guardsmen who were embedded with law enforcement in Omaha and Lincoln during the protests have tested positive. A Lexington, Ky., police officer who worked at local protests tested positive. Individual protesters in Topeka, Kan., Boulder, Colo., and Charlotte, N.C., tested positive.

But considering the large sizes of the crowds at these protests and how close people were to each other, these are small numbers. This could mean that various factors kept the spread of the virus relatively low — occurring outdoors, enough protesters wearing masks, plenty of sunlight, warm temperatures. Perhaps the protesters moved around enough during the rallies and marches so that few protesters have sustained contact with each other.

It is also possible that some protesters who have not been tested yet are positive but asymptomatic or are suffering from mild symptoms and are hoping it’s just a summer cold. (We know that New York City doesn’t want to know if people who tested positive attended a George Floyd protest.) Most of the protesters were young and appeared to be in good health.

But Minnesota enacted a widespread testing program for protesters in that state, and the results are surprisingly good news:

Of the 3,200 people tested so far at the four popup sites across the metro, 1.8 percent have tested positive for Covid-19, says [Kristen Ehresmann, the Minnesota Department of Health director of infectious disease]. HealthPartners, one of the largest health care providers in Minnesota, also reported to the state that it had tested about 8,500 people who indicated that attendance at a mass gathering was the reason they wanted a test. Among them, 0.99 percent tested positive. These numbers have been one of the few pleasant surprises since the outbreak began, says Ehresmann. “Right now, with the data available to us, it appears there was very little transmission at protest events,” she says. “We’re just absolutely relieved.”

In Boston, “Health officials said 14 out of 1,288 people tested positive for coronavirus at a Roxbury pop-up site that was set up following large demonstrations in Boston calling for change after the death of George Floyd.”

We’re seeing a rise in cases — and more ominously, a rise in hospitalizations — and it doesn’t appear to be driven by participation in the protests. But what is driving it?

We’re still seeing outbreaks among prison inmates and employees. Eleven children and seven staff members have tested positive in Florida’s largest group home for foster children. In Tampa General Hospital, 55 out of 8,000 hospital employees tested positive, and same for 500 of the 90,000 employees of Delta Airlines. Two meatpacking plants in Utah shut down after recent outbreaks. A cluster of cases traced back to a Florida bar.

What do almost all of these locations have in common? They’re situations where people could have prolonged exposure to an infected person, probably not wearing a mask, indoors.

In fact, we’re seeing a surprising number of cases among young people that can be tracked back to parties — a high school graduation party in South Carolina, a college graduation party in Wisconsin, an unsanctioned prom and beach party in Texas, a party in southwest Wyoming.

Boulder County, Colo.: “‘Some of the gatherings had multiple people like 20 people. One was identified as having up to 50 people in those gatherings,’ said Carol Helwig, the communicable disease epidemiology program manager for Boulder County Public Health. ‘It was reported that there was no use of masks and no social distancing. For young people, it’s the most social time of our lives and we understand the need to gather socially but we are hoping that when people gather that they are following the guidelines.’”

Bucks County, Pa.: “Twelve people in Bucks County who attended Memorial Day parties at the Jersey Shore have tested positive for the coronavirus. The Bucks County Health Department discovered this cluster of COVID-19 cases through contact tracing. One positive case led to the 11 others.”

Oxford, Miss.: “State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs blames an outbreak of COVID-19 cases in Oxford on fraternity parties. During Gov. Tate Reeves’ coronavirus press conference Thursday, Dobbs said there were 381 news cases and five deaths. He further stated there had been a cluster of cases in Oxford linked to fraternity parties.”

All over Texas, really: “There are certain counties where a majority of the people who are tested positive in that county are under the age of 30, and this typically results from people going to bars,” Governor Greg Abbott said during the conference. “That is the case in Lubbock County, Bexar County, Cameron County.”

Most of these cases are among young people who will probably only experience mild symptoms and should make a full recovery. But here and there you’ll see young people whose infections are serious enough require hospitalization, like a 30-year-old man in Scottsdale. In Florida, 103 children under the age of 18 had to be hospitalized after infection. It’s a small percentage, but no parent wants to see their child in the hospital.

A common mentality among conservatives these days is that almost all Democratic officials, and certain public-health experts, set their credibility on fire for coming down like a ton of bricks on anti-lockdown protesters but then blessing and in some cases participating in George Floyd protests. (For what it’s worth, Dr. Anthony Fauci said the protests were a “perfect setup” for spreading the virus.) No doubt, we’ve got a supply of hypocrisy that could fill up the underground tanks of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. My governor, Ralph Northam, posed for selfies on the beach without a mask on May 24 and then two days later signed an executive order requiring masks to be worn indoors, with criminal penalties for the establishment.

But the fact that Democrats are hypocrites does not alter any of the facts around the virus. As far as we can tell so far, participation in the protests turned out to be a low-risk activity. But if someone in those 1 percent of protesters who was infected or got infected walks into a nursing home, the consequences could be substantial anyway. Or if one of those 1 percent lives with someone who is immunocompromised.

A lot of people will want to believe that because the coronavirus wasn’t that bad at the protests, the virus is gone, or that everyone’s built up immunity. But every gathering involves some element of risk. Maybe you’ll be lucky.

As noted yesterday, the increase in cases is happening in states such as Florida and Texas and Arizona, but also in California and Nevada and Oregon.

Some governor out there is going to try to put lockdowns in place again, and it is going to go badly. A lot of Americans found the lockdowns economically ruinous, psychologically agonizing, and intolerable, and the government response to the George Floyd protests convinced these Americans that the lockdowns were a bunch of nonsense. Dumb rules such as bans on surfing and drive-in church services; dumb decisions such as the arrest of a dad playing catch with his daughter; and nutty arbitrary restrictions such as permitting drywall but not paint in Michigan convinced plenty of Americans that the lockdowns represented petty fascism and micromanaging governors on a power trip. It is trendy to argue that the coronavirus presented a test of Americans’ patience and self-discipline — and that the public failed. That may well be true, but the coronavirus also represented a test of the seriousness and self-discipline of our elected officials, and a lot of those figures flunked the test, too. The moment called for Abraham Lincoln, and instead we got the gubernatorial equivalent of South Park’s Eric Cartman bellowing “respect my authority!”

We don’t need another lockdown, but we do need a restoration of early-pandemic caution and discipline. (One of the enormous problems in how we’ve been discussing the pandemic is that many lockdown foes see any message of caution as an ipso facto endorsement of the lockdowns, and how they were enforced.)

The recent experiences with infections at parties suggests that it’s probably too early to restore our old habits of large gatherings without social-distancing measures. The experience with the protests and the contrast with workplaces suggests we should wear masks whenever we’re coming within six feet of someone outside our household. We would be wise to minimize our time that we’re indoors with others outside our household and maximize our time outdoors.

Nobody wants to hear this, but life isn’t just about being told what you want to hear.

President Trump wants to move on to his rallies. The Democrats want to move on to ever-intensifying denunciations of structural racism in American society. The Washington media want to move on to the juicy parts of John Bolton’s book.

It’s just a shame the coronavirus isn’t ready to move on.

ADDENDUM: Not much of an addendum today, other than an acknowledgement that a lot of days I write “addenda” which is plural or “addendum” which is singular and use them incorrectly. When this happens, it is often because I started with two ideas and then went back and removed one, or started with one and then added another and didn’t change what I had originally written.

On the menu today: contemplating the relationship between Donald Trump and John Bolton and whether it was destined to end this way; how the mandatory social distancing of the pandemic quarantines set the stage for the hunger for connection met by the George Floyd protests; and data suggests an exodus from America’s biggest cities started before the coronavirus and the protests.

How Did Trump and Bolton Think Their Working Relationship Was Going to End?

In 1987, the infamously temperamental New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner hired Billy Martin to manage the team . . . for the fifth time in just over a decade. From 1973 to 1990, Steinbrenner made 20 changes of manager, and perhaps no relationship in baseball was ever as perfectly toxic, dysfunctional, and volatile as that of Steinbrenner and Martin. While both had achieved a significant level of success in life and the sport, their passions ran hot and neither man was inclined to back down or compromise. What made the on-again off-again working relationship so bizarrely funny was how frequently the two were willing to give it another try, no matter how badly their previous encounter had ended. But the fifth time wasn’t the charm; Martin lasted less than half a season in his final stint as Yankees manager.

With that in mind . . . just how did Donald Trump and John Bolton think their working relationship was going to end?

Donald Trump is a quasi-isolationist nationalist critic of the Iraq War and George W. Bush’s foreign policy in general. He has no interest in democracy promotion and minimal interest in human rights, sees American foreign policy almost exclusively in economic terms, and is a frequent critic of U.S. alliances who is convinced he personally can reach good deals with hostile states like Russia and North Korea. John Bolton is the walking definition of a hawk. He regularly endorses regime change and military action against states hostile to the United States, is a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, and is inclined to believe that negotiations with leaders of hostile states are simply opportunities for American leaders to get taken to the cleaners by con artists.

Sure, you can find agreements here and there — both men criticized the Iran nuclear deal, Bolton has his own skepticism of “the international community” and multilateralism, and both men see themselves as strong friends of Israel. But the two men’s worldviews and values were so different — on precisely the sorts of matters that a president and national-security adviser need to work on! — that not only was conflict inevitable, the pairing was all but guaranteed to conclude with an explosive clash of two adamant personalities. Both men exhibited some hubris in the decision to work together. Trump was unrealistically certain Bolton would stay in line and play good soldier as the administration pursued policies Bolton deemed egregiously consequential mistakes. Bolton unrealistically believed he could steer Trump away from his own lifelong instincts and towards the foreign policy direction he preferred.

Bolton was approaching 70 years old when he took the job as Trump’s national-security adviser. Bolton didn’t need to stay on good terms with anyone for future career prospects.

Four things can be simultaneously true:

One: The anecdotes from Bolton, describing Trump as erratic, uninterested in details, easily flattered by foreign leaders, and far too credulous when listening to their pledges and explanations, are disturbing. Of course, the Trump that Bolton describes is not all that different from what we have seen and heard from him in public. The president has colossal confidence in his own persuasiveness and ability to make a deal, and once negotiations start, Trump always wants to believe that any agreement reached represents a grand step in the right direction.

Two: Bolton’s steadfast refusal or reluctance to testify during the impeachment hearing does not reflect well on him. Bolton apparently believes that what the president says behind closed doors, when the cameras aren’t watching, in negotiations with foreign leaders is vital and shocking information of utmost importance to the future of the country that the American people need to know . . . after they’ve paid $32.50 hardcover.

Three: Bolton’s refusal to testify probably had little or no impact on the outcome of the trial in the Senate. People who believe his testimony would have convinced 19 Republican senators to remove Donald Trump from the presidency are fooling themselves.

Four: A White House national-security adviser writing a denunciatory tell-all book and releasing it the summer before a presidential election, as payback for policy and personal disagreements, sets a terrible precedent for future presidents. Whether or not you think Donald Trump deserves loyalty from his staff, the President of the United States deserves to have his conversations within the White House about policy and decisions — and his conversations and negotiations with foreign leaders! — not blasted out for the whole world to evaluate.

Now the president is predictably furiously denouncing Bolton on Twitter — once again ignoring the fact that he himself chose to hire him — and the worse Bolton is, the worse Trump must be for hiring him. And for Bolton, the more he insists, as he did this morning on ABC News, that Trump is “not fit for office . . . doesn’t have the competence to carry out the job . . . erratic, foolish, irrational, a conspiracy theorist who is stunningly uninformed . . . unable to distinguish between the country’s interest and his personal interest . . .” we are left to ask . . . why did John Bolton agree to work for him?

The Pandemic, the Protests, and Our Much-Needed Human Sense of Connection

For all that’s wrong in this country, and how frustrating the daily news cycle can be, I still believe that most Americans are good people who want to help others, and many are extraordinary.

A new report finds Americans gave nearly $450 billion to charities in 2019, a 2.4 percent uptick from the previous year when adjusted for inflation. And that’s not all big foundations, charitable trusts, and corporations — 70 percent of that sum was from individuals. When faced with a crisis — 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Harvey — Americans want to help.

One of the great frustrations of the coronavirus pandemic was what we as Americans were asked to do, and how insignificant it felt compared to scale of the problem. A contagious virus that could kill someone, particularly if that person was elderly or immunocompromised, had invaded our shores, and we as Americans were asked . . . to wash our hands and stay home. (Everything was canceled anyway.) It was one of the most high-risk moments in modern history, and we were asked to sit on our couches, watch Netflix, and order take-out.

Perhaps some Americans chafed against the lockdowns out of selfishness or shortsightedness, but I suspect a big ingredient is that when a crisis hits, many Americans want to mobilize. They want to do something, to feel useful. Many of us hate sitting around and waiting; for some of us, there is no emotion more painful than feeling helpless.

Also, during and in the aftermath of a crisis, almost all of us experience that human instinct of wanting to come together in groups. This is why every culture on earth has some sort of funeral or ritual for gathering after death. We know we are not meant to go through hardship alone. And we were instructed to social distance when we needed social connection the most.

Unfortunately, the average American can’t research treatments and potential vaccines.

If doing baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano science projects in our kitchens would have helped find a cure faster, finding baking soda and vinegar would become as hard as finding toilet paper earlier this year.

No doubt, the tens of thousands who marched in the streets were genuinely outraged by the police role in the death of George Floyd and widespread lasting tensions between police forces and minority communities. But the protests also represented the lone officially sanctioned or blessed gatherings of large groups since the second week of March. No wonder those protests, demonstrations, marches, and rallies occurred in more than 2,000 cities and towns. They were the only game in town, so to speak. People who had felt helpless in the face of a microscopic virus for months suddenly had an opportunity to do something that they believed, and were told, would create a better world.

Are they creating a better world? Some police forces are altering their policies and methods of subduing suspects, Congress is contemplating legislation, and President Trump signed an executive order that urges police departments to adopt stricter use-of-force standards and create databases to track officer misconduct. Without the protests, it is unlikely any of those changes would have happened.

But along the way, malcontents torched buildings, looted stores, and left graffiti and wreckage all over the downtowns of America’s cities. The National Park Service is still trying to get the graffiti off the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. Destroyed police squad cars, broken glass everywhere, boarded-up storefront windows, the smoldering embers of fast-food joints . . . enraged by the Trump administration and response to the coronavirus, George Packer declared in The Atlantic that the United States was a failed state. Certain protesters seemed determined to ensure that the country looked like one.

Speaking of America’s Cities . . .

Daniel Henninger calls attention to this eye-opening Brookings report by William Frey about population shifts in America’s cities. That exodus from the cities that people, including myself, thought the pandemic would trigger? It many places it started before the coronavirus arrived: “Among the 68 urban core counties with populations exceeding 500,000 people, 30 registered a population loss in 2018 to 2019, and 60 grew less or lost more population than in 2014 to 2015.”

ADDENDA: Kevin Williamson: “The class war in our country is business class vs. first class; in automotive terms, it’s E-Class vs. S-Class. Everybody’s comfortable. And that produces some odd outcomes: Nobody’s going to do one g**damned thing about how they conduct business in Philadelphia or Chicago or any other corrupt, Democrat-dominated city, but there are going to be some “new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars eligibility,” and we are going to be treated to — joy of joys! — a deep national discussion on whether some Broadway stars don’t have it quite as good as other Broadway stars. The bloody-snouted hyenas have looked up from the kill just long enough to announce the creation of the Goldman Sachs Fund for Racial Equity.”

On the menu today: NBC News appoints itself the policeman of political speech on the Internet; Anthony Fauci has some good news to share but alludes to some bad news; and President Trump unwittingly helps his critics make money, yet again.

It Turns Out the ‘NBC’ in ‘NBC News’ Is for ‘Now in the Business of Censorship’

Wow. I guess every day at the “NBC News Verification Unit” is a game of “Two Truths and a Lie.”

Yesterday NBC News, the employer of Brian Williams and former employer of Matt Lauer, Mark Halperin, and Chris Matthews, revealed that it has an obscure self-described “verification unit” that appointed itself to police American political discourse, and initially reported that Zero Hedge and the Federalist had been banned from generating revenue through widely used Google Ads, deeming their content to be racist. The report characterized those sites as “far-right,” even though the Federalist publishes a variety of right-of-center viewpoints and Zero Hedge is an idiosyncratic libertarian-leaning financial and market news site.

Subsequent reporting by AdWeek clarified what Google had actually done:

Zero Hedge will no longer be able to use Google’s ad platform to monetize its content as of last week, and The Federalist was warned about their comments section and was given three days to comply with Google’s rules before the company ceased access to its ad platform.

Google said The Federalist has since removed comments from its website after the company “worked with them to address issues on their site related to the comments section.” Google did not immediately say whether The Federalist was still in jeopardy of losing the platform.

The conservative websites were flagged by Google because of their comment sections, not for any particular piece of content generated by either website. The Federalist did not immediately return a request for comment, and a spokesperson for Zero Hedge could not be immediately reached.

As you may have noticed, few media companies spend a lot of time and effort patrolling their comments sections.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act declares, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider,” and you’ve probably seen increasingly heated arguments about this law. The gist is companies do not have civil liability for something that someone else posts on their website; Facebook is not responsible for what gets posted on its site the way the publishers and editors of the New York Times are for what gets published in their pages. Without this provision in the law, companies would want to run all potential comments by lawyers before letting anything go up online — or at the very least, have someone with familiarity with libel and criminal liability laws review comments before allowing the audience to see them.

Repealing Section 230 would, if not destroy Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, chat boards, comments, and most social-media sites, drastically alter how they operate; the days of users posting whatever they want on platforms with no oversight or review would come to an end.

Keep in mind, Google owns YouTube. It’s not hard to find “Jews control the world along with the Illuminati” videos on YouTube. Is Google responsible for the content of those videos? Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri noticed that Google believes that they cannot be held responsible for what others post on sites like YouTube, but simultaneously declares they will hold other companies responsible for what others post on their sites.

Apparently, Google has decided that the Federalist is responsible for what gets posted in its comments sections. Will any other company be subjected to this standard? Will NBCNews.com be held responsible for comments on that site?

Over on NBCNews.com, Adele-Momoko Fraser’s updated story insists her original reporting was correct and that Google backtracked from its original decision. Apparently, it’s a “Not Much Actual Verification Unit.”

One of the odder sections in that odd, mostly anonymously sourced piece:

Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British nonprofit that combats online hate and misinformation. They found that 10 U.S-based websites have published what they say are racist articles about the protests, and projected that the websites would make millions of dollars through Google Ads.

Just how lucrative do these people think writing for political websites are? Has anyone noticed that we’re always asking for money?

Once again, we see that the default setting for most people in corporate America and establishment media is not support for freedom of expression, but support for freedom of expression of ideas they support, and censorship in one form or another for expression of ideas they oppose. That philosophy is not all that different from the perspective of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un; in Russia, you have unlimited freedom of expression to praise Putin any way you like.

There are certain forms of expression we ban because the process of creating it is inherently harmful — child pornography or animal cruelty. The Supreme Court has upheld a very narrow restriction on speech deemed likely to incite violence against others, but this is often misunderstood and mischaracterized. Explicit and direct threats and announcements of an intent to physically harm someone are crimes; general furious speech is not. In R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, the Court struck down a hate-crime statute, decreeing that the state can restrict speech to a certain “time, place, or manner,” but only if those restrictions were “justified without reference to the content of the regulated speech.” (I.e., the government can ban flag-burning by, say, banning all outdoor fires in certain areas, but not explicitly because it dishonors the U.S. flag.)

Our David Harsanyi, who used to work at the Federalist:

Whatever the case, it’s clear now that NBC News was trying to have the Federalist demonetized. Unequipped to offer a compelling case on her own, Adele-Momoko Fraser appealed to authority by pointing to the alleged expertise of a previously unknown British group calling itself the “Center for Countering Digital Hate.” A quick scan of the site will illustrate that the group relies on unsubstantiated Internet trolling as a basis for its “reports.” It looks as if the site is manned by one person, named Imran Ahmed, who seems to believe that Microsoft and Ford are also part of the white-supremacist conspiracy. It’s embarrassing that NBC News would rely on information given by such a transparently ideological and amateurish organization to censor anyone.

The NBC News Verification Unit is attempting to shut down voices who are as allegedly as controversial as Alex Jones, while relying on sources who are as reliable as Alex Jones.

The impulse to censor, particularly of views deemed controversial, is generally driven by a fear that audiences and the general public cannot distinguish between good ideas and bad ones. It’s rarely put this explicitly, but the impulse is often, “We cannot allow people to see that, because they might like it and support it.” This is not an inherently nutty fear; the world has plenty of twisted ideologies and charismatic radicals that can lead people down the wrong path — Columbiners, Incels, ISIS, that bizarre and disturbing Nxivm cult. The United States has a lot of angry, frustrated young people eager to find scapegoats and lash out about their disappointments in life. (Big theme of the last book!) But the real danger of those groups is what they do, not what they say. Singing “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die” is not the same as actually shooting someone.

I don’t always agree with what’s written at the Federalist or Zero Hedge, but that’s not the point. No one — particularly no media organization that likes to tell itself that it supports the free expression of ideas and free debate — should be trying to put those sites out of business. (I can’t help but wonder if some of this is driven by a seething resentment that big-name media institutions are in financially hard times, and these sites that certain big media company employees deem “unworthy” are still in business.)

Consider this closing quote and link to Christopher Bedford’s lead essay at the Federalist as a bit of solidarity:

Wall Street capitalists and corporate leaders think its better to pay homage to the mob, feeding it employees, executives, and competitors and hoping this will satisfy the demands. It doesn’t, of course, and won’t ever.

Now the mob is both inside the door and at it, its supporters running H.R. departments and manning diversity posts while boycotting, threatening and suing from outside. While they could once count on their friends in the GOP to help them out, they no longer have any real friends in the party. If executives don’t stand up for themselves now, no one will. And the scaffold is calling.

This Just Handed to Me: The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Still Going On

Reassuring news from Dr. Anthony Fauci: He doesn’t think a second lockdown will be necessary, and that any second wave won’t be as bad as the first wave that hit New York City. “I don’t think that could happen under today’s circumstances of our full awareness of the potential of this virus, which is highly transmissible.”

Not-so-reassuring news from Dr. Fauci: He says he hasn’t talked to President Trump in two weeks.

Why Does the President So Consistently Reward His Critics?

It never fails. Someone writes a book about Donald Trump that criticizes him or paints him in a negative light. Standing out in a bookstore or on Amazon is hard; plenty of books come out every week and there’s hardly a shortage of books with the core theme of “Trump is bad” or “Trump is a bad president.” The president could ensure a critical book doesn’t sell many copies by simply ignoring it, and when asked about it, simply replying, “As president, I’ve got bigger things to worry about than what’s in some book.”

Instead, almost every time, Trump denounces the book and the author, and turns it into a news story by threatening legal action . . . and the book surges to the top of the Amazon rankings. John Bolton is the lucky winner this week. Trump’s niece Mary will probably be the next big beneficiary of the president’s lack of impulse control.

ADDENDA: Thanks to Charlie for his kind words on the most recent episode of The Editors podcast.

You thought 2020 was bad so far? Showtime will release its two-night miniseries based on James Comey’s autobiography in November, with Jeff Daniels as Comey and Brendan Gleeson as Donald Trump. It’s enough to make someone yearn for the good old days of Murder Hornets.

On the menu today: Our biggest cities have seen a lot of shootings, stabbings, and violence in the past weeks, a crime surge that appears to be unrelated to the ongoing protests; a look at what the unexpected dramatic reduction in summer jobs means for America’s youth; and the NR crew chews over the surprising — and in many eyes, frustrating — Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County.

The Non-Protest-Related Wave of Violence That Is Plaguing Our Cities

The shooting at a protest in Albuquerque, N.M., between rival groups disagreeing about the removal of a statue of Juan de Oñate, the conquistador of New Mexico, is a big deal, and is getting considerable attention this morning. But you probably won’t hear as much about the ongoing wave of shooting and violence that is plaguing many American cities as they gradually reopen from lockdowns and quarantines, violence that appears to be quite separate from looting, arson, or other crimes connected to the protests against police brutality.

New York City: “Over the month until June 7 — including the crucial Memorial Day weekend — New York’s murder rate more than doubled, to 42 murders, from 18 the year before — a jolt of 133 percent. Shooting victims, including wounded, are up 45 percent. Stabbings are up, too.”

Minneapolis, Minn.: “Investigators say a fight broke out inside the 200 Club on West Broadway Avenue, also known as the Broadway Pub & Grille, at about 2 a.m. It then spilled into the street, with several people pulling out guns and firing at each other. Six people went to the hospital early Sunday morning. One of them, a man in his 20s, died Monday.”

Chicago, Ill.: “While Chicago was roiled by another day of protests and looting in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, 18 people were killed Sunday, May 31, making it the single most violent day in Chicago in six decades, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab. The lab’s data doesn’t go back further than 1961.” That was a few weeks ago; this past weekend, “two men were killed and 31 other people were injured in shootings across Chicago over the weekend.”

Cleveland, Ohio: “The Cleveland Division of Police confirmed seven shootings injured nine people and killed one man within 10 hours.”

Saint Louis, Mo.: “Seven people were shot — two of them fatally — in the City of St. Louis within a 6-hour span on Monday. The shootings come after a violent weekend in the city where 21 people were shot from Friday to Sunday. Six of those people were fatally shot.”

South Bend, Ind.: “Police are asking for your help after at least 5 people were shot and over 300 shots were fired following a violent weekend in South Bend. Patrol Division Chief Eric Crittendon say it is one of the most shots he has ever seen in one weekend since joining the South Bend Police Department nearly 30 years ago.”

Ocean City, Md.: “Thus far this month, the incidents have been decidedly more frequent and more violent involving larger groups of individuals intent on disturbing the peace. In the span of about a week beginning last Sunday, there have been at least two stabbings and several major altercations on the Boardwalk including a major fight last Tuesday that resulted in the severe beating of a young man.”

New Orleans, La.: Fifteen reported shootings have injured 17 people and killed five since Friday.

Baltimore, Md.: “In the first incident in Fells Point, five people were shot on Broadway early Saturday morning . . . The second incident happened around 3 a.m. Sunday in the 2300 block of Winchester Street in west Baltimore. Officers were responding to multiple complaints about a large party in a parking lot. As people were leaving, a Range Rover barreled into the lot, police said. Minutes later, the driver, 30-year-old Christopher Earl from Windsor Mill, shot an officer during a struggle.”

Philadelphia, Pa.: “Two people were slain, five others were shot, and four were stabbed from Friday through Sunday in Philadelphia. The deadly violence pushed the city’s number of homicide victims this year to 182, an increase of 35 victims, or 24 percent, compared with this time last year, according to the Philadelphia Police Department.”

Pittsburgh, Pa.: “Police are investigating after three people were injured from a shooting during a backyard party in Pittsburgh’s Manchester neighborhood. According to investigators, there about 20 gunshots while a backyard party was happening in the area. It’s unclear how many people were there at the time. Three people, including a woman and a girl, were hospitalized after being grazed by bullets. A third victim walked into Allegheny General Hospital after also being struck.”

San Antonio, Texas: “No arrests have been made three days after a shooting at a North Side bar that injured eight people, San Antonio police said Monday. Police are still searching for the man who allegedly opened fire in the parking lot of REBAR, a bar in the 8000 block of Broadway, around 11:30 p.m. Friday. Five women and three men, ages 23 to 41, were shot and hospitalized but are expected to survive, police said over the weekend.”

Houston, Texas: “Children ran for their lives and ducked for cover under vehicles to avoid being hit by gunfire that broke out at a block party in north Houston. Police say at least one person was shot to death. The shooting happened off Chapman Street around 9 p.m. Sunday. There were 200-300 people partying in the street when police say three people pulled out guns and started shooting. One man was shot and killed.”

Union County, S.C.: “A large block party turned violent when attendees started shooting at one another, Union County Sheriff David Taylor said. Seven people were shot and 2 of them died. The coroner identified the victims as Jabbrie Brandon, 17, of Union, and Curtis Lamont Bomar, 21, of Spartanburg.”

These shootings do not appear to be tied to the protests. Some of these shootings occurred at bars (Minneapolis, San Antonio) and parties (Houston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Union County, S.C.), and may well be the participants’ first large gatherings since the lockdowns and quarantines. (Excessive alcohol consumption and firearms is not a good combination.)

How likely is it that this surge of violence has something to do with the 13.3 percent unemployment rate; the closure of all schools in the country since March; the cancelation of summer jobs programs; the closure of basketball courts, gyms, and many other public recreation locations; the lack of almost all athletic events; the lack of movies in movie theaters; and the widespread disruption to normal human behavior since March?

How many of the participants in this almost-entirely nocturnal violence have to get up and go to work in the morning on Monday?

What Are Young People Supposed to Do Without Those First Summer Jobs?

This summer in the United States, there are no major or minor league ballgames, no hot dog vendors walking up and down the aisles of the stadiums. No one is working the soda machine at the concession stand or refilling the ketchup and mustard dispensers. We have few movie theaters with fewer teenagers working the concession stand or selling tickets. We have fewer restaurants, hiring fewer waiters and waitresses and busboys and hostesses. Closed pools have no need for lifeguards. Retail stores are slow to rehire. Many companies canceled their planned summer internships.

Our response to the coronavirus yanked away what was usually a vital first step in young people’s preparation for adulthood:

Riverside Golf Club in Riverside, Ill., normally hires nearly 140 teenaged caddies with roughly 70 working on any given day, said Joe Green, the club’s caddie master. Courses are open but local laws don’t permit caddies to work this summer.

Mr. Green said many of his summer caddies can make between $5,000 and $6,000.

“I don’t see how we’re going to bring them back safe this year,” he said. “To me, it’s the best job these kids can have. It teaches discipline, social skills, networking. It’s a great learning experience.”

Summer jobs are not glamorous and usually don’t pay all that well, but for a lot of people, they’re a key first step on the path of their careers. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz wrote in From the Ground Up, “the value of early work experiences can exceed the amount of a paycheck. Work done well — building a house, helping a customer find the perfect new shoes, earning a promotion by serving cups of coffee — imbues us with a sense of self-worth as well as a sense of purpose. With dignity. And if you’re a lost young person with little proof of your potential, work can provide a window into yourself.”

ADDENDA: I’m no legal scholar, but Michael Brendan Dougherty, Alexandra DeSanctis, Ilya Shapiro, and the Editors all see problems in the Supreme Court decision Bostock v. Clayton County. The editors conclude, “The law is now read to mean something different in 2020 from what even the most liberal Justices would have said in 1964. Congress for years has been debating bills to amend the statute to cover these topics; the Court just did its work for it, and without any of the compromises or conscience protections that legislators typically debate.”

On the menu today: Like it or not, spots in California, Arizona, and some southern states have reason to worry about increasing numbers of hospitalizations; protesters are, so far, rarely testing positive for the coronavirus; and an ignoble and influential Byrd whom you probably haven’t heard much about.

Southern and Western States Get Their Turn in the Coronavirus Wringer

The world may want to move onto yet another police shooting of a black man that appears unjustified, arguments over the president’s health, or Ted Cruz daring actor Ron Perlman to get into the wrestling ring with Jim Jordan.

But the coronavirus pandemic is still going on, and some parts of the country have good reason to be concerned — even though it’s summer, even though we endured ten weeks of lockdowns, even though the national daily death rate has declined to less than a thousand a day, even though the daily rate of new cases has been relatively flat for a month nationwide. Some voices in the media are calling this current increase in the number of cases a “second wave,” but it’s more accurate that this is the first wave passing through communities that weren’t badly exposed in the spring.

An increase in confirmed cases in a region or state is not, by itself, concerning, particularly if that increase is slower than the rate of increase in testing. An increase in the number of hospitalizations is concerning. So a place like Miami-Dade County in Florida can breathe a little easier, because while that county’s number of positive tests is increasing, the number of hospitalizations is dropping.

An increase in a state or region’s hospitalization rate should concern us — and should also have us looking at local nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. In Ventura County, Calif., the number of residents in the hospital being treated for coronavirus infections doubled in a week, from roughly 20 to more than 40. Not all of that rise stems from one facility, but a significant chunk of it does:

A contributing factor to the rise is an outbreak at the Ventura Townehouse long-term care facilities in Ventura that emerged last week and has infected at least 27 residents and 11 employees, according to a facility official. Public health leaders said on Tuesday nine residents from the facility had been hospitalized in acute care units with three others who tested positive at one point held at hospitals as part of a strategy to limit spread in long-term care sites.

The site’s memory care unit, on a separate campus from the rest of the facility, was hit hardest with at least 23 residents testing positive for the virus. Two of the residents died, facility officials said Wednesday.

Early Thursday evening, Ventura Townehouse Executive Director Evan Granucci said a third memory care resident had died from complications of the virus.

Does this mean everyone else in Ventura County can relax? No, they should still be wearing masks in public, social distancing, washing their hands frequently, avoiding crowds, and so on. Those staffers are still going home and going to the grocery store and interacting with people outside of their workplace.

We should also keep in mind that statewide numbers probably aren’t the most useful measuring sticks. Elsewhere in California, Riverside County saw a jump of 55 percent compared to late May, while Los Angeles County saw an increase of 12 percent. But the more sparsely populated counties in the state barely have any cases. Colusa County has seven cases since the pandemic began, Trinity County has three, and Alpine County, the state’s least-populous county, has one.

Because it takes time for an infection and symptoms to develop, and time for those symptoms to become serious enough for someone to go to a hospital, hospitalization rates are showing us how much the virus was spreading roughly two weeks ago. Memorial Day weekend was three weeks ago; this spread is probably not driven by activities that weekend but by the week or so afterwards, as Americans started to enjoy summer weather.

Hospitalizations continue to creep up in certain parts of Texas like Austin, Houston, and Dallas. Alabama’s hospitalization rate is at its highest point yet, and state health officials there attribute it to the post–Memorial Day reopening of society. Washington Regional Hospital in northwest Arkansas announced that they had seen a 350 percent increase in the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in the past week. South Carolina officials are worried that their numbers are all moving in the wrong direction.

This may all seem pretty grim, so keep in mind the good news, which is that the percentage of infected Americans who will need a hospital bed is not as high as doctors initially thought:

A model created by the Harvard Global Health Institute made a different assumption that also turned out to be too high. Data from Wuhan, China, suggested that about 20% of those known to be infected with COVID-19 were hospitalized. Harvard’s model, which ProPublica used to build a data visualization, assumed a hospitalization rate in the United States of 19% for those under 65 who were infected and 28.5% for those older than 65.

But in the U.S., that percentage proved much too high. Official hospitalization rates vary dramatically among states, from as low as 6 percent to more than 20 percent, according to data gathered from states by The COVID Tracking Project. (States with higher rates may not have an accurate tally of those infected because testing was so limited in the early weeks of the pandemic.) As testing increases and doctors learn how to treat coronavirus patients out of the hospital, the average hospitalization rate continues to drop.

People may be thinking, “Aha, this must be the result of the George Floyd protests!” So far, that doesn’t appear to be the case — emphasis on so far. The University of Washington medical school says that so far, fewer than one percent of 3,000 tests of protesters have come back positive. About 528 tests of protesters in Minneapolis and Saint Paul revealed a 1.4 percent infection rate. On Friday, I noted that a handful of protesters, police officers, and National Guardsmen at the protests have tested positive, but we haven’t seen a sudden spike in illnesses among those participating in protests or policing them. A 19-year-old in Portland who tested positive says he protested for seven nights, and that he wore a mask until police used tear gas — or he may have gotten it at his job with Amazon.

Then again . . . some cities may not want to know if the infected are catching it from protests:

Over the two last weeks, Mayor Bill de Blasio and others have voiced concerns that packed police brutality protests across the city could trigger a new wave of COVID-19 infections.

Whether or not that’s the case, however, remains unknown — and de Blasio’s team won’t be directly trying to find out.

The hundreds of contact tracing workers hired by the city under de Blasio’s new “test and trace” campaign have been instructed not to ask anyone who’s tested positive for COVID-19 whether they recently attended a demonstration, City Hall confirmed to THE CITY.

“No person will be asked proactively if they attended a protest,” Avery Cohen, a spokesperson for de Blasio, wrote in an emailed response to questions by THE CITY.

Why would a city program that is designed to prevent the spread of disease have a sudden reluctance to know about whom an infected person has been in contact with?

At this point, someone is probably shouting at their phone or computer screen that they aren’t willing to endure lockdowns again. The argument may be moot; in some places like Arizona, some businesses are temporarily closing their doors again after infections of the staff*:

In the last seven days alone, Chelsea’s Kitchen in Phoenix, The Porch in Phoenix, Hash Kitchen in Phoenix, SanTan Brewing in downtown Chandler and Phoenix, Spirit House in downtown Chandler, Floridino’s Pizza & Pasta in Chandler, The Shop Beer Co. in Tempe, and PHX Beer Co. in Scottsdale have all announced temporary closures, citing individuals or employees who have reportedly tested positive for the virus.

Prior to those, Venezia’s Pizzeria in Gilbert, Oregano’s in Queen Creek, Helton Brewing in Phoenix, Alo Cafe in Scottsdale, La Rista New Mexican Kitchen in Gilbert, and Drawn To Comics in Glendale have also publicly posted about potential positive cases.

Some restaurants have closed and since reopened. Others did not indicate they had closed or not, aside from alerting their followers to the potential exposure. Others remain closed.

(*I nearly wrote “staff infections,” and then realized that would sound like “staph infections” to anyone reading it aloud.)

More Than You Ever Wanted to Know about a Flock of Byrds

Michael Paul Williams, writing in the Richmond Times Dispatch: “Christopher Columbus survived multiple voyages across the high seas. But his Richmond statue met an inglorious end at the bottom of a Byrd Park lake . . . The pervasive mood has shifted from whitewashing history to unmasking travesties, including the torture and genocide of indigenous people in the West Indies by Columbus.”

There’s an irony that Williams didn’t mention. Byrd Park is named after William Byrd II, the founder of Richmond, as well as a viciously abusive slaveowner and confessed rapist. (In addition to the park in Richmond, a high school in Vinton, Va., is named after him.)

For those wondering, William Byrd II is not the ancestor of former West Virginia senator Robert Byrd, who was an “Exalted Cyclops” in the Ku Klux Klan. As many have noted, quite a few bridges, freeways, interchanges, courthouses, academic, government, and community buildings are named after Byrd in the state of West Virginia. His statue remains untouched, as of this writing, in the West Virginia state capitol.

However, William Byrd II is the ancestor of Harry F. Byrd Sr., who was governor and senator of Virginia and promoted “massive resistance” to desegregation, and his son Harry F. Byrd Jr., who retained his father’s segregationist beliefs and served in the state senate and the U.S. Senate from 1965 to 1983. Yes, the elder Byrd was a Democrat; the younger Byrd began his political career as a Democrat, left the party in 1972, won reelection as an independent, and then caucused with the Democrats for the remainder of his time in the Senate. A statue of the younger Byrd stands in Richmond’s capitol square.

Earlier this year, Republican state delegate Wendell Walker introduced legislation to remove the Byrd statue, but apparently intended it as a dare to Democratic lawmakers who wanted to remove statues of Confederate leaders. Legislative Democrats surprised Walker by supporting his proposal to remove of the Byrd statue. Walker withdrew his legislation, but a new legislative effort to remove the statue began this month.

On Friday, many, many progressives on Twitter sneered at me that of course all right-thinking Democrats supported removing the statue of Robert Byrd (and, presumably, renaming all of the facilities in West Virginia named after him as well). A few insisted that Byrd was different from other now-notorious historical figures because he renounced his past membership in the Klan.

I’m fine with bringing down all the statues of all the Confederates and all the lawmakers in either party who joined the Klan. (While we’re at it, how about everything named after Woodrow Wilson, who re-segregated the government and called African Americans “an ignorant and inferior race”? Franklin Roosevelt, who never supported anti-lynching legislation and threw Americans into internment camps based upon their race? Everything named after John F. Kennedy, who some historians now contend was a bystander to the Civil Rights movement for most of his career, who warmly accepted the endorsements of segregationists, and who didn’t want Sammy Davis Jr. performing at the White House because of his marriage to a white woman? History reveres a lot of deeply flawed figures.)

But we have zoning committees and a legal process to remove statues and replace them; any process of removal other than that is rule by mob, the strong enforcing their will upon others because they can.

Let’s check back in a few weeks or a few months and see if anything changes. Right now, Republicans control modest majorities in the West Virginia state senate and house of delegates, and the governor, Jim Justice, switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP in 2017. Progressives on Twitter may want to take down the statues and rename Byrd’s plethora of sites. But Democratic lawmakers don’t appear quite so enthusiastic, and I suspect that the current wave of outrage will pass, leaving the Byrds almost entirely unscathed.

ADDENDA: Apparently believing that everything the public needs to know about the origin of the coronavirus and the Wuhan labs can be summarized in three paragraphs, Jake Bittle of The New Republic declares that I am “the media personality who jumped farthest down this rabbit hole” of investigating the labs. (At least he thinks I have personality.)

Bittle writes, “The virus, they claimed, did not emerge in the Wuhan market where most experts believe it appeared.” Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, declared in late May that the Huanan Seafood market was not the origin of the virus. Try to keep up, Jake.

If you want a really solid and even-handed assessment of the potential origin of this virus — and if I have too much personality for you — check out Ian Birrell over at Unherd: “There is no firm evidence of an accident or leak beyond a set of strange biological quirks and suspicious coincidences. But nor does the alternative hypothesis — that this is a freak event of nature and humans were the perfect host for a new zoonotic virus — have indisputable supporting evidence at this stage. No one has discovered an intermediate host, nor offered credible explanation of how a coronavirus moved from some bats in dank Yunnan caves to infect people hundreds of miles away in the bustling city of Wuhan. Indeed, in many ways this is the more frightening concept: if it has emerged in such natural spillover style, surely next time it will be even more lethal.”

On the menu today: a long look at how much America is wrapped up in fights about symbols . . . and how and why many prefer those fights over ones about policies and measurable real-world effects.

People Prefer Symbolic Gestures . . . Because They Are Easy

You know why people are pulling down statues of Christopher Columbus, right? Because taking action to meaningfully improve the lives of Native Americans today is hard.

Getting some ropes and pulling down a statue in some downtown park or public square is easy if you have enough people and can be done in a matter of minutes or hours. Reducing the number of Native Americans living below the poverty line, the high unemployment rate on reservations, and the high rates of substance abuse; fixing the insufficient and dilapidated housing; upgrading the Indian Health Service; or improving the lower life expectancy among Native Americans . . . that would require time, sustained effort, and actually engaging with Native-American communities. No, it’s much easier to go downtown and cosplay as a Visigoth sacking Rome.

Maybe some of these people genuinely want to help and are just directing their energies in a destructive direction instead of a constructive one. But I think a lot of these people just want to smash things and to justify it to themselves and others as an action in the name of that ever-mutable nebulous concept of “social justice.” (I’m not quite sure what “social justice” is, but because it so often involves people taking the belongings of others and destroying things that don’t belong to them, I know it is distinct from “actual justice.”)

What’s the bigger problem to the Native-American community right now? Some statues in big cities, or the fact that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has turned down tribal epidemiologists’ requests for data that it’s making freely available to states?

And under the Affordable Care Act, the centers are considered public health authorities on a par with state health departments and federal agencies such as the CDC.

But Abigail Echo-Hawk, the director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, told POLITICO that the CDC has so far rebuffed the centers’ requests — telling her only that the data is nonpublic.

Somewhere in the country today, there’s a Native-American epidemiologist reacting, saying, “Wait, the United States made a promise to Native tribes and then broke that promise? Wow, who could have seen that coming?”

Human beings love thinking about, discussing, and debating symbolism. “Can’t you see how that looks?” “It sends a bad message.” “What are people supposed to think when they see that?” On any given day, half of our news stories involve something that is legal but carries some implication or message that stirs objections in others.

Army general Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, regrets the symbolism of his participation of President Trump’s visit at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Trump himself defended that appearance in front of the church as “very symbolic.”

African-American leaders in Tulsa, Okla., contend that there is dark symbolism in President Trump kick-starting his return to public campaigning in their city — the site of an under-discussed vicious race riot and massacre in 1921 — on June 19, which is Juneteenth, a holiday marking the end of slavery in the United States. NBC News’s Chuck Todd declared, “The symbolism looks terrible, unless he’s going to Tulsa to announce he wants to make Juneteenth a federal holiday.”

Almost every four years, impassioned party activists get into Montague-and-Capulet-level fights over the words in the party’s platform, even though the platform carries no legal weight, does not bind any lawmaker to any position, and it is only read by diehard political junkies. Pro-life language in the GOP platform does not bind any Republican lawmaker to vote against abortion; the candidate’s beliefs — and fear of a primary challenge — keeps the GOP an almost entirely pro-life party. Yet ardent political activists, who care deeply about the values and direction of the party, dive into these fights because they see important symbolism in the platform.

I said almost every four years, because this year, with the GOP convention shifting in part to Jacksonville at the last minute, the party had been planning to simply re-use the 2016 platform. Unfortunately, the 2016 platform includes “more than three dozen unflattering references to either the ‘current president,’ ‘current chief executive,’ ‘current administration,’ people ‘currently in control’ of policy, or the ‘current occupant’ of the White House.” Whoops.

You probably saw that video of hundreds of white residents of Montgomery County, Md., gathering in a park, sitting and raising their arms, and participating in a ceremony to formally renounce their white privilege. Montgomery County is the 57 percent white, extremely affluent, highly educated northern suburbs of Washington, D.C., and also home to nine of the top 20 private schools in the state. One can’t help but wonder how many in that crowd who formally renounced their white privilege then walked back to their Priuses, drove back to their spacious homes in their mostly or entirely white neighborhoods, reminded their kids to finish their homework for distance learning for their top-tier private school, and spent the evening thinking about anything other than the fact that other kids in the county have to win a literal lottery to get into the public school their parents prefer.

Sure, none of these happy suburbanites’ advantages in life really changed, but they took the symbolic step of renouncing their white privilege. [Hey, if all it takes to fix racial disparity in American society is a formal renunciation ceremony, solving this is going to be easier than we thought!]

Former Clinton administration press secretary Joe Lockhart offered his own suggestion to help heal the racial tensions in Minnesota:

The situation in Minnesota right now offers a unique opportunity to deal with the symbols of racial injustice. As a small, but important step, the owners of the Minnesota Vikings, Zygi and Mark Wilf, can send a strong message by offering Colin Kaepernick a contract to play with the Vikings. Bring him into camp, treat him like any of the other players given a chance to play the game they love.

It will not solve the problem of blacks and police violence. But it will recognize the problem that Kaepernick powerfully raised, and perhaps show that, with courage, real progress can be made.

Hear that, everyone? Signing Kaepernick represents real progress!

Give Lockhart credit for coming up with a proposal that will indeed unite a lot of people — mostly the fans of the 31 other NFL teams. Despite my opposition to Kaepernick’s fondness for Fidel Castro and other provocative statements, I’ve sort of itched for some team to give him a shot. Let’s see if he can still play. Vehemently disagree with the guy, boo him, cheer every time he’s sacked, but don’t end the guy’s career just because he’s got nutty opinions and makes offensive statements. This league had room for Lyle Alzado, Lawrence Taylor, Jim McMahon, Chad Ochocinco, Pacman Jones, Jack Tatum . . . I’m sure you can think of others. Hell, O. J. Simpson retains his standing invitation to attend the annual Pro Football Hall of Fame enshrinement ceremonies. I guess the league just can’t bring itself to snub Simpson’s unforgettable slashing style.

Right now, in many eyes, particularly African-American eyes, Kaepernick is the martyr, the talented star who had his career derailed by white owners who couldn’t handle him speaking truth to power. If he’s in some team’s uniform, and turns in some preseason performances of going three for eleven for 18 yards, a fumble, two sacks, and an interception, NFL fans of all colors will acknowledge, “okay, whatever he’s saying, teams aren’t playing him for a reason, he’s just not that good anymore.” (When Kaepernick’s tryouts go off the rails, one can’t help but wonder if the quarterback is consciously or subconsciously sabotaging himself.)

This isn’t to say symbolism is never important.

Will Congress force the administration into signing a bill that calls for renaming about a dozen bases named after Confederate military leaders? As noted yesterday, most Americans probably had no idea that John Bell Hood, Braxton Bragg, and Henry Lewis Benning fought on the Confederate side. Clearly, these names haven’t deterred African Americans from participating in the U.S. military; both black men and black women are proportionally overrepresented in the Armed Forces. Nothing about the bases would change, other than the names on the signs. But the symbolism is important to people; it’s easy to picture an African-American soldier wondering why the base he works at is named after a man who fought to ensure he would not be given his full rights as an American.

The world is a mess. Our problems are complicated, multifaceted, interlocking, more tangled up than the Christmas lights in the attic. Racial disparities are most visibly manifested in poverty, which is exacerbated by insufficient opportunity, which is tied into poor education systems, and aggravated by substance abuse, which increases the likelihood of violence and gangs flourishing in African-American communities, which increases the number of confrontations with police, which leads to higher rates of incarceration among African-American men, which leave lots of children without fathers in the home, and when those men are released, their criminal record makes it more difficult to get a job to support a family, which worsens the level of poverty . . .

Every solution requires trade-offs and will have unforeseen consequences. Consensus is difficult to build and delicate when it’s established, enacting a solution requires patience, determination, and willingness to adjust in face of setbacks, and bad faith actors are plentiful.

As Kevin Williamson observed, “everything looks simple when you don’t know the first thing about it.”

But symbolism? Man, that stuff’s easy. No wonder so many people prefer to focus upon that.

ADDENDA: Speaking of renaming things associated with the Confederacy, Justin reminds me that back in 2015, I asked, “Anyone call for the banning of “Lady Antebellum” yet?”

The band itself announced Thursday that they will now be called, “Lady A.”

Your move, Dixie Chicks.

On the menu today: Some of the protesters in the streets seem quite convinced that violence will intimidate the rest of society into giving them what they want. That is as historically ignorant as their decision to deface the statues of abolitionists in the name of racial justice.

The Backlash to Violent Protesters Will Come — We Just Don’t Know What Form It Will Take

The Nineties were a different time, kids. It was the kind of era where, in the aftermath of horrifying riots in Los Angeles, David Alan Grier and Jim Carrey could appear in a sketch on the comedy program In Living Color as beating victims Rodney King and Reginald Denny, and declare, “Staying in school and staying off drugs is fine, but it ain’t gonna do you any good at all if you don’t have sense enough to stay in your car. See, we were stupid! We got out of our car. We didn’t use our heads and look what happened. We may have won the battle, but the early bird got the worm.”

You Millennials and Generation Z kids wonder why we in Generation X can be so tasteless and shocking in our humor and tastes? Try having your formulative years shaped by sketch comedy shows, National Lampoon’s, Gary Larson’s Far Side, and comedians like Sam Kinison, George Carlin, Eddie Murphy, and Richard Pryor, and see how many sacred cows emerge unscathed. I am sure that to the politically correct, my generation looks like it was raised by wolves.

I can’t find it online, but I recall another In Living Color sketch that depicted whites rioting after a jury acquitted the attackers of Reginald Denny. The sketch was funny because of the inherent absurdity: Wealthy, comfortable white people don’t burn down their own neighborhoods, no matter how angry they are about any particular event.

But every group feels anger at some point, even if they don’t express it in an easily visible way.

After the L.A. riots and the O. J. Simpson case, a few cultural observers argued that wealthy, comfortable white people “rioted” in a different way. The late history professor Roger Boesche wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

On a radio talk show shortly after the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case, a caller half-jokingly urged whites to riot. The talk show host and subsequent callers concluded that, of course, white people don’t riot. But in reality, if “to riot” means something like “to wreak havoc on others,” then white Americans have been rioting for some time. But when white people riot, they do it silently, almost invisibly, albeit painfully.

So how do white people riot? They riot by eliminating affirmative action so that jobs and education will be more readily available to whites; by voting to deny services like education and health care to illegal immigrants; by declaring English as the official language and attacking bilingual education; by leaving 38 million people in poverty — 30.6 percent of all African Americans and 30.7 percent of all Latinos.

White people riot by eliminating 50,000 children from Head Start; by cutting money allotted for summer jobs for inner-city youth; by slashing subsidies for the heating bills for the poor; by cutting homeless assistance by one-third; by cutting funds for low-income housing; by ignoring the 2 million children in California alone who go hungry at some time during any given year; by leaving the minimum wage at $4.25, which translates to supporting a family on $170 a week; by eliminating the earned-income tax credit and thereby raising taxes on the working poor; by decreasing taxes for the wealthy, especially by lowering taxes on capital gains; by allowing corporations to pay only 10 percent of all taxes compared to 33 percent of all taxes in the 1940s; by dumping 230 times more toxic waste near low-income and minority neighborhoods than near wealthy suburbs.

(I’m sure in 1995, some people thought, “Well, they’ll probably have all of these issues worked out in 25 years.”)

For the first few months of this year, the overwhelming majority of our political, social, cultural, and medical leaders — and seemingly every commercial featuring images of empty streets and a soft-piano soundtrack — reminded us, “we’re all in this together.” That wasn’t quite true; some people were much more vulnerable to the coronavirus than others. (As I joked on the pop-culture podcast, if celebrities are going to declare that this is a time of unity and shared experiences, they should at least try to make their spacious southern California estates behind them look a little less luxurious.) But just about everyone was at risk of catching the virus and perhaps facing a serious health issue because of it, and even if you weren’t in a high-risk category, you probably cared about someone who was.

“We’re all in this together” isn’t completely true, but it isn’t a complete lie, either. Our ability to live our lives depends upon the judgment and actions of others, and the pandemic illustrated that in surprising ways. Most Americans probably didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about meatpackers or the supply chain of potatoes until recently.

We all need each other to act within certain parameters for society to function, but we are simultaneously deeply divided. We have a deficit of social trust that is as bad as the national debt. We suspect, or perhaps know, that other Americans seethe with contempt for us . . . and some of us also seethe with contempt for them. No community can function if swaths of the public feel contempt for the police, or if swaths of the police feel contempt for the public.

It’s hard to differentiate between cases when groups of Americans can’t hear each other and when we simply choose not to listen to each other. Philadelphia Inquirer sportswriter Mike Sielski wrote a fascinating column about NFL veteran Benjamin Watson, who has been outspoken about the issue of police brutality for years and is the author of Under Our Skin: Getting Real about Race. Getting Free from the Fears and Frustrations that Divide Us.

[Cue many conservatives preparing to feel wariness, and many progressives preparing to nod in agreement.] Sielski writes:

Watson is an activist, all right, and his activism includes extensive work in the anti-abortion movement. He delivered a speech at the 2017 March for Life. He is producing and financing a documentary about abortion. He has taken a strong stand on a subject as fraught and explosive as any in this country, including the matters that have animated these recent protests.

[Cue many conservatives feeling a sudden burst of warm appreciation and kinship with Watson, and many progressives recoiling and worrying about Watson as some sort of dangerous misogynist religious extremist.]

Some Americans are so primed to pigeonhole each other, that learning one fact about someone is enough to define them entirely — even though every human being contains multitudes and contradictions.

We can’t resolve much of anything when we’re kept in a constant state of suspicion, fear, agitation, and anger. Maybe we shouldn’t have military bases named after Confederate generals. How many Americans even knew that Fort Benning, Fort Bragg, or Fort Hood were named after military leaders of the Confederacy? I’m sure if a new base was being built, few Americans would propose or support the honor of a base’s name going to someone who took up arms against the United States of America. (It’s not like American history lacks under-recognized heroes from the military and elsewhere.) But people are used to calling those bases Fort Benning, Fort Bragg, or Fort Hood, and many people are inherently resistant to changing anything they’ve always done. And many people are particularly resistant to someone else telling them they have to change something they’ve done their entire lives.

The discussion about renaming the bases is occurring at the same time as a lot of other arguments that are . . . well, pretty nonsensical: The children’s cartoon Paw Patrol is somehow an enabling force for police violence. Self-described anti-fascists defacing a statute of Winston Churchill. (“Wait until they learn about the guys he fought!”) The establishment of an “autonomous zone” in Seattle, complete with a demand for the abolition of police, retrials for all of those currently serving sentences, and “the abolition of imprisonment, generally speaking.”

It is difficult for an idea worth considering to stand out amongst the noise of nonsense; it’s like trying to find Waldo, or the one person wearing a face mask in President Trump’s entourage. (Hint: It’s Ivanka.)

There are probably quite a few Americans outraged by the sights of statues of Christopher Columbus or other figures from history being beheaded or pulled down, or the defacing of statutes of abolitionists in the name of racial equality. Whatever you think of Christopher Columbus or any other historical figure, we have a legal and democratic process to remove statues from public squares when a sufficient portion of the public deems them no longer acceptable. These communities have zoning boards and local elected officials who can make those choices and be held accountable to the public through elections. Nobody elected those angry mobs to a damn thing. This is rule by force, the strongest forcing their will upon those who are weaker than them. This will not end well for anyone.

There will be a backlash to these actions, but not in the form of the “white people’s riot” that In Living Color imagined. That backlash may come at the ballot box, or it may come in some other indirect form. Some people aren’t interested in direct confrontation in the streets. They may simply prefer to express their opposition in a way that these protesters expect it least — businesses moving out, reluctance to hire, reluctance to visit a neighborhood, effectively abandoning a community. Not every wall that is built is physical and visible. But one way or another, the reaction is coming.

ADDENDA: This lengthy and impassioned essay from retired U.S. Navy commander and scholar Theodore Johnson, here at National Review, is worth reading in full:

The lessons of this history have been painfully clear to each successive generation of black Americans: Policing by agents of the state as well as by private citizens is accompanied by an ever-present risk of violence, perpetrators of the violence often go unpunished, and black citizens’ accounts of the violence are often tossed aside. Altogether, even as the nation made lasting strides in extending the rights and privileges of citizenship to black Americans, the inability to receive justice when wronged by agents of the state or other citizens was a right that remained out of their reach…

The narrative that emerges from this history is not the result of forced connections between unrelated dots scattered in time and space. Rather, the collection of incidents manifests as a clear articulation of the longstanding deleterious relationship between the state and its black citizens. The relationship is characterized by mistrust, conflict, and the sense that law enforcement is free of oversight and consequence when engaging black citizens. This conception is in the ether — few black Americans can remember the exact day it dawned on them that policing is likely going to be different for them than for most of their fellow citizens.

On the menu today: America has largely reopened now, but the coronavirus pandemic is still going on; the dissent and internal criticism at the World Health Organization grows louder; Georgia’s elections are a mess — apparently many people believe their local polling place is run by the Secretary of State’s office; and one Florida city might be getting a sudden influx of visitors at the end of August.

Good Luck, Reopened America!

Ready or not, the country is reopening.

In New Jersey, governor Phil Murphy lifted the stay-at-home order he issued March 21. New York City businesses are opening their doors. And in my neck of the woods, northern Virginia is entering “Phase Two,” meaning restaurants may have indoor dining at half capacity, and gyms and fitness centers can reopen indoors at 30 percent capacity.

Many of us on the right have enjoyed mocking the bejeebers out of public-health “experts” and public officials who argued all the way through the end of May, that any reopening constituted a selfish desire for haircuts and “experiments in human sacrifice” and killing grandma . . . and who then completely changed their tune once the George Floyd demonstrations began. These public-health “experts” and public officials deserve every bit of the ridicule and derision they’re going to get.

The lesson many conservatives took from the sudden about-face was that the threat of the virus had faded significantly, or maybe was never as bad at the government’s warnings made it sound, and that the lockdowns had been driven by power-mad governors who enjoyed the side effect of tanking the economy months before a Republican president sought reelection. If going to a protest was safe, then surely reopening businesses and returning to something resembling normal life is safe.

The possibility that’s getting less attention is that while daily new cases and deaths have declined, the virus is still out there and dangerous and that the protests weren’t all that safe. In addition to the cases discussed yesterday, an unspecified number of National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C. tested positive for the virus, a protester at a demonstration with 1,000 people in Stevens Point, Wis., tested positive, a protester at a demonstration with 800 people in Parsons, Kan., tested positive, a police officer in Lincoln, Neb., who worked the protests tested positive (this is separate from the National Guardsmen in that city who tested positive), a Texas National Guardsman assigned to protect the state capitol during protests tested positive, and a county commissioner in Athens, Ga., tested positive after organizing protest events in her city.

Our daily number of new cases continues to be around 19,000. That’s a smaller sum than most of the days in April and May, but that’s about where we were in mid-to-late March. Our number of active infections has plateaued around 1.1 million since mid-May. Our daily number of deaths has been around 1,000 per day since the beginning of June. These are better numbers than the spring, but not necessarily good numbers.

The above should not be interpreted as “Jim thinks the lockdowns should have continued longer.” Eight weeks was pushing it; I figured public obedience with those sweeping restrictions on public activity would last up until good weather arrived. We put our economy into a coma, destroyed businesses, put millions out of work, and made suffering patients put off important surgeries and other procedures deemed “elective” because they were not life-threatening.

Perhaps the most useful illustration going back to the beginning of the pandemic was this one that appeared in the New York Times: “If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.” Of course, human beings need to move around, they need contact with their families and loved ones, they need to eat, they need to go to the bathroom, they need to sleep, often with each other. Functioning as human beings requires us to work, which requires us to interact with each other. We were never going to achieve that impossible epidemiologist ideal of all-encompassing universal uninterrupted social distancing. But Americans made an unparalleled effort to stay home and avoid interactions, almost uniformly among all states, well before their state governments ordered them to do so.

Most conservatives remember the “fourteen days to slow the spread” slogan. The strictest restrictions on human activity were supposed to buy time for our leaders to come up with a better plan. We needed a way to live and work that would minimize and mitigate the risk of infection, because there was no way to eliminate the risk of infection.

Maximum lockdowns were never a realistic long-term option, but apparently quite a few governors thought they could go on as long as needed. The term “shelter in place” was previously associated with tornadoes and active shooters — the type of threat that is resolved within minutes or hours, not weeks and months.

The end of our patience was never going to coincide with the end of the pandemic. Yes, warmer weather will probably help some, along with more Americans spending more time outdoors. In some parts of the country, lots of people are still wearing masks; in other parts of the country, not so much. Ending idiotic policies about returning still-contagious patients to nursing homes will help reduce the death rate considerably.

But . . . the virus is still out there. The fact that people would rather play out an American version of China’s Cultural Revolution, complete with public “struggle sessions,” or go over footage of a cop shoving a senior citizen in Buffalo like it’s the Zapruder film, or remove the television show Cops from the airwaves — because having camera crews ride along with police officers is somehow enabling police brutality — does not change any facts about the virus and its spread. Ben Shapiro famously said, “facts don’t care about your feelings.” Many people effectively responded, “our feelings don’t care about your facts.”

Arizona’s largest health system said they’ve reached capacity for their lung machines. In South Carolina, six counties have hospital bed occupancy higher than 80 percent, and one is nearing full capacity. (Hospital officials point out some of this influx reflects the return of patients requiring elective procedures that were delayed during the quarantine.) Hospitals in Imperial County, Calif., reached capacity and started transferring patients to other counties. The major hospitals in Alabama are functioning on surge capacity and have two unused ICU beds as of yesterday.

Notice how much you hear about the coronavirus is directly comparable to how severely it is hitting New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.

The Dissent within WHO Is Getting Louder

Did you know that the World Health Organization endorsed wearing masks in public to prevent the spread of the coronavirus . . . just this past Friday? Up until last week, WHO declined to formally endorse that step of disease prevention. (Cue the mask skeptics on the right saying, “Hey wait a minute, maybe these WHO doctors and bureaucrats aren’t so bad after all!”)

Even doctors who like the WHO and oppose ending U.S. funding for the international organization can’t help but notice how frequently WHO is falling down on the job — first echoing China, then being reluctant to endorse masks, and now offering confusing and seemingly contradictory statements about the risk of spread from asymptomatic carriers. Even officials of WHO are wondering what the heck is going on with their leadership.

Lawrence Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, told the New York Times, “When they come out with things that are clearly contradicted by the scientific establishment without any justification or citing studies, it significantly reduces their credibility.”

Who Runs the Election Process Where You Live? 

You’re going to hear a lot about the problems in Georgia’s primary election yesterday, particularly in “largely minority areas” — long waits, poorly trained staff, malfunctioning voting machines, and shortages of ballots.

You’re not going to hear a lot about how the voting hours, voting locations, supply of ballots, voting machines, and staff training are controlled by the counties. The county officials are currently claiming Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, is the problem.

Who is stopping these counties from opening up more polling places? Who is stopping these counties from ordering more ballots, hiring and training more staff, or lengthening their hours for voting?

Elected officials at all levels benefit from the fact that so many Americans have no idea who does what at each level of government.

ADDENDUM: Good news for . . . Jacksonville hotels? The Washington Post reports it’s nearly a “done deal” to bring the 2020 Republican National Convention to the Florida city.

On the menu today: The head of research for a top-ten U.S. hospital offers an update on the state of the fight against the coronavirus; the World Health Organization muddles the answers about the contagiousness of the virus again; an expression of gratitude; and a lament about our ongoing Civil War of Stupidity.

A Top Medical Researcher: ‘If You Have a Loved One in a Nursing Home, Watch Them Like a Hawk’

I had a chance to check in with my reader who is the head of research for a top-ten hospital in this country, getting a sense of where the country stands as we head into summer. This director has been briefing high-level decision makers since the coronavirus epidemic began. He prefers to not to be quoted by name, lest his assessments cause headaches for his institution. (He has not yet said to me, “dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a corporate spokesman.”)

This director’s view is that hospital cases are the best measure of the impact of the pandemic; as death statistics can look higher or lower by how narrowly or loosely authorities define the cause of death, and total number of cases is driven in part by how aggressively a state is testing asymptomatic people — testing that he concludes the country is doing a much better job on now.

The Washington Post noted yesterday that “14 states and Puerto Rico have recorded their highest-ever seven-day average of new coronavirus cases since the pandemic began.” But as observed above, an infection is not necessarily a serious problem, particularly if the patient is asymptomatic. (More on that below.)

This director’s medical center and his home city’s health department have been aggressively going into the nursing homes and testing, so the spread of infection in nursing homes is way down. “The authorities are working smarter, finally. If you have a family member or other loved one in a nursing home or rehabilitation center, I’d still be watching them like a hawk and making sure the staff there are taking upmost precautions every single day, because we know from sad experience that this is where the impact of COVID-19 is going to be most severe.”

This researcher’s home city, one of the country’s larger ones, has seen “a nice steady decline” in hospital cases since hitting a peak or plateau the last week of April and the first week of May. “We’re now below 40 percent of the number of cases we had at the peak, we no longer need the surge facilities, and my hospital is working on resolving the backlog in procedures that are formally considered elective, but laypeople wouldn’t call elective, like cancer surgery. I’m very grateful we can take care of those patients again.”

He notes that he saw an uptick in cases last week in his county and statewide following the Memorial Day holiday. “Small, but real. It didn’t spark any kind of crisis, and it was over three or four days later, but it is evidence that social distancing still is necessary.”

This researcher believes that America’s more rural states will experience a pattern similar to the more rural parts of his state on the East Coast. “They had very few cases in March and early April while the cities were getting hammered, and then you see comparatively large jumps at various times in late April and throughout May. They look big because the baseline is low, but they’re consistent with a little outbreak in one community or nursing home that isn’t spreading any further. In fact, if you track the hospital data, these jumps last around a week, which is about the average length of stay for our hospitalized COVID-19 cases. It’s going to be a long slow burn out there instead of the short-term, and eventually the proportional number of cases in rural areas will be equal to or higher than the city figures. That’s not proof that the blue state governors were right to lock their states down, it’s just basic epidemiology.”

This director acknowledges the advice from CDC has been confusing often and contradictory at times. “They’re being pushed and pulled in all directions. In part it’s political winds, and in part it’s the normal thing that happens when we have to make decisions based on really weak data. People seize upon the most recent data and overreact to it, rather than adding it to the body of evidence and steering a steadier course. Good reason to spend less time with the shouting and overreactions endemic to Facebook and Twitter.”

This director’s advice to others is, “continue to take sensible precautions as you try and resume something like a normal life. Set a good example for your neighbors, and for heaven’s sake, don’t try to make a political statement by disobeying mask and social distancing requests or by calling out your neighbors for going for walks together or playing in the street.”

[Did you get that, Karen?]

He continues, “there will be a few setbacks as the pandemic wanes, but I’m cautiously optimistic we will not see a terrifying second wave. If we continue to act sensibly, the government nannies will look more and more foolish by comparison, and then we can make the case to the swing voters that the American people can and should be trusted with liberty instead of being ruled over by their betters.”

I asked him whether there was a way to determine if any discernible increase was driven by the protests or by the reopening in businesses, or both.

“My sense is that right now is a little too early to see effects in hospital cases,” he replied. “Most of the protestors and virtually all of the rioters are the relatively young and healthy persons who will be outpatient cases if they suffer a coronavirus infection. However, a lot of them go home to parents who are more likely to have one or more conditions that could exacerbate the disease. Allowing for a few days latency from the initial infection to the time the disease becomes symptomatic, we should know in the next few days what the impact of the protests will be (aside from the effect on public trust in institutions, my peers in public health, the media, and elected officials) . . . Separating the effect of protests from the effect of loosened restrictions on businesses won’t be possible in areas where the two coincided, but there ought to be ample data for a natural experiment comparing the disease incidence in cities where restrictions were lifted earlier, cities where restrictions were lifted right around the time of large demonstrations, and cities where the restrictions haven’t been formally lifted yet.”

He concludes the regression analysis to get an answer about the rate of virus spread from protests is simple, but a separate question is how much a researcher is risking a career by reporting the results.

Way to Go, WHO. Way to Go.

Thank you, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, for adding to public confusion by declaring Monday, “from the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual. It’s very rare.” The original headline on CNBC drew a sweeping conclusion: “Asymptomatic coronavirus patients aren’t spreading new infections.”

The problem is the doctor’s statement sounds like if you don’t have symptoms, you’re not contagious. That is not the case. Asymptomatic — infected, but showing no symptoms — is not pre-symptomatic, which is infected, but not showing symptoms yet. If you don’t have symptoms, you may not have the virus, or you may be asymptomatic, or you may be pre-symptomatic. Your only way of knowing is if you take a test. (And that depends upon the test being reliable, and the test can only tell you your condition at the time of testing. You could catch the virus in between the testing and getting the results!)

Doctors warn that a patient’s self-assessment of being asymptomatic may be genuinely asymptomatic, or the patient may be ignoring or downplaying minor symptoms. Doctors and medical researchers sometimes have difficulty measuring the difference between the indisputably asymptomatic and those with exceedingly minor symptoms! And some doctors aren’t even sure that the WHO assessment is as rare as they make it sound, as the studies they’re citing have fairly small samples. One used just 63 people.

Less than a week ago, a different group of researchers published a paper contending that at least 30 percent of coronavirus cases are driven by asymptomatic carriers, and perhaps as many as 40 to 45 percent. Time magazine’s headline declared, “Nearly Half of Coronavirus Spread May Be Traced to People Without Any Symptoms.”

The news, and in particular, medical news during a serious pandemic, is not supposed to be choose-your-own-adventure. (“If you think masks are necessary, turn to page 34. If you think the coronavirus is being spread by 5G towers, turn to page 17.”)

ADDENDA: Our webathon is a tremendous success. If you are one of the more than a thousand donors to NR, thank you, thank you, a thousand times, thank you . . .

. . .You may have heard some people discussing America’s political divide as a “Civil Cold War.” Over on the home page, I see it differently. It feels like every day, we awaken to a new furious skirmish in our Civil War of Stupidity, where every problem is greeted by the two loudest and dumbest hot-take responses, and reverberating waves of outrage echoing between those sides.

On the menu today: The national media begrudgingly acknowledge that the protests over the last ten days probably increased the risk of spreading the coronavirus further; an appeal for help from readers; and the protesters adopt “abolish the police” as a slogan and, apparently, a serious policy proposal.

The Virus Doesn’t Care about the Cause Motivating You to March in a Crowd

This morning, the national media are attempting to delicately acknowledge that the protesters gathering in crowds probably raised the risk of spreading the coronavirus among each other and their families. The New York Times:

In what he called a back-of-the-envelope estimate, Trevor Bedford, an expert on the virus at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, wrote on Twitter that each day of protests would result in about 3,000 new infections. Over several weeks, as each infected person infected just under one other person on average — the current U.S. transmission rate — those infections would in turn lead to 15,000 to 50,000 more, and 50 to 500 eventual deaths. Given the racial disparities so far in the pandemic, he noted, those deaths will be disproportionately among black people. “Societal benefit of continued protests must be weighed against substantial potential impacts to health,” he wrote.

That article continues, “If all communities were performing enough tests and contact tracing to bring down those numbers, fewer of those acquiring infections at protests would infect others, shortening the transmission chain and reducing the number of eventual deaths.” As noted last week, “contact tracing” in a gathering of thousands of people moving around is just about impossible. The only action that authorities can take is to announce when they know an infected person attended a protest and encourage everyone else who attended that protest to get tested.

Thursday’s Morning Jolt noted that a man arrested at a George Floyd–inspired protest in Lancaster, Pa., tested positive for the coronavirus; Columbus Public Health in Ohio announced that someone who was symptomatic attended protests in the past week. Oklahoma State University linebacker Amen Ogbongbemiga announced on Twitter that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, but had attended a protest in Tulsa and taken precautions.

Now in Lawrence, Kan.: “A release sent by the Lawrence Douglas County Public Health Department states that a resident that was downtown at the protest has tested positive for the virus. The Department has stated that it was notified of the positive test on Friday after the test was taken on Thursday. They also say that the person was not wearing a mask at the protest.”

Friday, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned, “I get very concerned, as do my colleagues in public health, when they see these kinds of crowds. There certainly is a risk. I can say that with confidence . . . It’s a perfect setup for further spread of the virus in the sense of creating these blips which might turn into some surges.”

(You noticed that for a long while, the media greeted every statement from Fauci as if he had descended from Mount Sinai with two stone tablets. Somehow, Fauci’s latest assessment just wasn’t as interesting.)

Will there be a discernible spike in cases because of the protests? It’s still a little too early to tell. Those attending the protests may have sufficient protection from their masks, being outdoors, and the high temperatures and sunlight. Some acts that seemed dangerous may not be all that dangerous in the long run. Remember that video of crowds in the swimming pool at Lake of the Ozarks back on May 23? As of June 5, one person in attendance tested positive for coronavirus.

Nationwide, the rate of reported daily new cases has mostly following a weekly pattern since early May, on the higher end of 20,000 to 25,000 on the weekdays, on the lower end during the weekends. Because many parts of the country partially reopened right around the same time as the protests, we are likely to see a lot of protest-defenders insisting any increase in cases must stem from the reopening of businesses, and reopening-defenders insisting any increase in cases must stem from the protests.

Protests in Minnesota began May 28. So far, the daily number of reported new cases in early June is fewer than the numbers in mid-May, but it’s also fair to wonder how complete the numbers from those days are, as people may not be as eager to go to the doctor during violence and unrest.

Protests in Atlanta began May 29 with the vandalism at the CNN center. Since then, the number of confirmed cases in Fulton County has increase by about 300, less of a spike than a continued steady rise. Dallas and Houston also saw spikes in recent days. Utah had its highest number of cases Saturday. (Yes, Salt Lake City had protests with hundreds in attendance and violence on May 30.) South Carolina had a record number Saturday, with Greenville County reporting the most new cases with 80. (Greenville saw an estimated 1,500 people participate in three largely peaceful protests last weekend.)

The virus does not care if you’re acting in the name of a noble cause or a selfish one. It does not draw distinctions between people in a pool at Lake of the Ozarks and people marching down a street. It does not care if you think wearing a mask is a sign of submission or an act of responsibility. It does not care if you’ve researched it extensively or if you think it is connected to 5G cellular towers. The coronavirus is just another one of those facts that does not care about your feelings.

Help Us Help the Country When It Needs Help the Most

You probably saw Rich’s message that we are asking for help from readers again.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the mission of National Review as a form of anti-gaslighting. The term “gaslighting” is used more frequently these days, and the term isn’t quite a synonym for mere lying. It usually refers to when a person tells you something that he knows is not true and tries to make you feel crazy for your innate sense or suspicion that it is not true.

In the last few weeks, we have seen Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer barring people from buying seeds at Walmart, because apparently that was somehow too risky because of the coronavirus . . . and then the governor stood shoulder to shoulder in a group during a protest march, as our Zach Evans reported.

I noted Contra Costa County in California wants no more than ten people to attend a funeral, but if you’re holding a protest, you can get together in groups of up to 100. (Maybe it says something about those protests; there’s so much possibility of it turning into a violent riot or looting that not even the coronavirus wants to show up near them.)

We have seen New York governor Andrew Cuomo blame nursing homes for their admissions of recovering but still contagious coronavirus patients . . . as the state government run by Cuomo required them to do. The order requiring homes to take this action mysteriously disappeared from state websites with no explanation, as our Tobias Hoonhout reported.

Apparently one of the big studies about hydroxychloroquine that influenced the decisions of all kinds of institutions and governments was unsubstantiated; as our Kyle Smith observed, the study was from a medical firm whose employees included a sci-fi writer and an “adult model.”

While broadcasting live in Minneapolis, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi insisted he was seeing, “mostly a protest. It is not, generally speaking, unruly,” as viewers watched a building burn down right behind him.

The New York Times insists that Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed — that they asked him to write — needed more “fact-checking,” but refuses to say what facts Cotton had wrong, as our John McCormack observed. In this tumultuous hour, the Democratic nominee Joe Biden declared that it is wrong for political leaders to divide the American people, adding that “there are probably anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the people out there that are just not very good people.” Our Mairead McArdle called out Biden for this glaring contradiction; few others did.

I can’t recall a time where I’ve seen more people in positions of power and responsibility insisting that you should believe their words instead of what you’re seeing with your own eyes.

At National Review, we’re not perfect. We make mistakes from time to time. Sooner or later you’ll read some article or Corner post and vehemently disagree. But whatever our flaws, we never gaslight you. We never tell you something that we know is untrue because we want you to believe the false version. We never tell you “2 + 2 = 5” because it looks better for us that way. That should not be a rare standard in the world of journalism and commentary, but somehow, it now is. We give it to you straight; you know where we come from, you know what we believe, and you know why we believe it.

The stakes are just too high right now. These are matters of life and death, of peace versus violence, and of order and safety versus chaos and malevolence. I don’t know what’s going on in the minds of those who keep trying to tell you things that you know aren’t true. Perhaps they’ve decided that how they feel is more important than the actual facts and truth of what’s going on. Just know that right now, at this moment, we are taking our stand for what we know to be true and I hope that you will continue to support us as we do that.

‘Abolish the Police! What Could Go Wrong?’

I’m open to the suggestion that there is waste in the budgets of police forces across the country. There’s waste in the budgets of most organizations. Lord knows that settling all of those police–misconduct lawsuits is a giant expenditure that cities and localities would prefer to avoid. Criminologists have argued that police purchase new systems and equipment with little cost-benefit analysis.

But “defund the police”? Why do some people find it so hard to contemplate how a decision like that could backfire?

Nine Minneapolis City Council member — a majority — declared over the weekend that they will “begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department and creating a new, transformative model for cultivating safety in Minneapolis.” The day before, protesters booed and jeered Mayor Jacob Frey when he refused to sign on to abolishing the city’s police department.

Inevitably, we will soon see “explanatory journalism” clarifying that the rallying cry “Abolish the Police” doesn’t really mean abolishing police, just as “Believe All Women” never meant all women had to be believed, and “Abolish ICE” does not believe Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be abolished. Our progressive friends have an amazing habit of adopting slogans that don’t actually match their goals, or at least they claim this is the case.

ADDENDUM: An observation from Austin: “There [are] white parents taking their children to Black Lives Matter protests who refuse to take their children to the predominantly Black schools in their gentrified neighborhood.”

I wonder how many of the people marching this past week support school choice? If we’re talking about systemic injustices and racial disparities in opportunity in American society, wouldn’t the number of African-American children who cannot get the education that will help them rise rank near the very top of the list?

On the menu today: good news for everyone who wanted this newsletter to go back to covering politics and end the all-coronavirus-all-the-time coverage of the past few months. Also, would you believe we actually got some good news regarding the unemployment rate today?

We’ve Got Big Problems, and Joe Biden Isn’t Much of a Solution

Right now, things are looking pretty good for Joe Biden in November. With one exception, the polls in Pennsylvania look solid, and it is a similar story in Wisconsin. Trump has not led a poll in Michigan this cycle. President Trump’s campaign is spending money in Ohio and Iowa, states he won by a wide margin last cycle.

If Biden wins, lots of people will believe, “Finally, we’ve gotten rid of that erratic wealthy white male septuagenarian who just blurts out the first thing that pops into his mind, who walks around in a foggy haze of excessive self-regard, convinced African Americans have always loved him, that he had the right answers on the coronavirus pandemic all along, who makes sweeping pronouncements that indicate he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, who writes off significant swaths of the American people as irredeemable and hopeless, and who can be so thin-skinned and temperamental when criticized. Boy, thank goodness all of that is over!”

If you’ve read this newsletter the past few days, you’ve read my criticisms of and disagreements with the president, and the world of social media has expressed its disputes with my assessments — with all of the characteristic wise insight, keen attention to detail, and appreciation of nuance we have to expect from that realm.

Electing Joe Biden in November would not solve our problems. A Biden victory would trade one set of problems for another.

In 2016, the Democratic Party witnessed its own defeat to a man they deemed spectacularly unqualified for the office, a man they saw as a bumbling, flailing laughingstock, and the distilled essence of everything they see as wrong about America. They could not imagine anyone voting for him, much less sufficient Americans in sufficient states to reward him with the presidency. Some corners of the Democratic Party became quite radicalized by this defeat. It is not hard to find Democrats who openly state Trump’s election changed the way they see their country, and their countrymen.

The end result is a political party that wants a sweeping overhaul of American society and the status quo, and that cannot bring itself to criticize any other faction that claims to act in the name of progress, regardless of what the consequences of their actions are. We now see it in some progressives’ response to the violence that followed George Floyd protests. The hosts of the Slate podcast What Next argued that “non-violence is an important tool for protests, but so is violence.” As even Vox writer Matthew Yglesias concedes, some circles on the Left cannot bring themselves to denounce vandalism, looting, or theft as unacceptable. Some on the Left cannot or will not conceive that unacceptable and unjust actions could taint a cause they support. They cannot draw distinctions and seek to lead society to enact a worldview in which there are no distinctions.

The Democratic nominee’s recommendation for reforming the police is to train them to “shoot them in the leg instead of the heart.” His previous advice on home security in the face of threats was “Jill, if there’s ever a problem, just walk out on the balcony here, walk out and put that double-barrel shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house.” If Joe Biden were not Joe Biden, he would be widely denounced in Democratic circles as just another privileged, out-of-touch older white male who has no idea what he’s talking about, and whose ill-considered advice could get someone killed. But because so many Democrats want to see Biden as a wise oracle — or they hope other people can be fooled into believing he’s a wise oracle — they look at the ceiling or floor and pretend they didn’t hear it. (They’re not alone in this habit; keep reading.)

The Democratic Party believes in the need for higher taxes, except the recent reduction in the state and local tax deduction that hits upper-middle-class and wealthy Americans who live in blue states, which they are determined to repeal. Joe Biden pledges he won’t raise taxes on any middle-class families or individuals making up to $400,000 per year.

The Democratic Party believes in multilateralism or “international cooperation,” but tries not to think much about the absolute dearth of international consensus. They oppose defunding the World Health Organization but have no real plan to make the organization refocus on its core mission or stand up to an uncooperative China. They see the Iraq War as a disastrous failure because of the enormous loss of civilian life and the Syrian Civil War as a success because of the lack of loss of U.S. military lives. (In March, the death toll in Syria was estimated at 581,000 people.) In 2012, they completely believed that worrying about Vladimir Putin was a matter of Republican nostalgia for the 1980s. Democrats believe they are more attentive and engaged in world affairs, but until February, they spent more time at their debates discussing Mike Bloomberg’s soda ban than the coronavirus. Biden’s proposal for dealing with the pandemic at the late February debate was, “I would be on the phone with China making it clear we are going to need to be in your country. You have to be open. You have to be clear. We have to know what’s going on. We have to be there with you and insist on it and insist, insist, insist.”

Joe Biden has great faith that if he calls up Xi Jinping and insists upon something, Jinping will grant him his wishes. Remember, Joe Biden is described as a foreign policy “realist.”

The Democratic Party believes in vague, nice-sounding values but has little idea how to put those values into practice. Democrats believe in forms of “tolerance” and “understanding” that are best enabled by the government forcing people to do things that they contend violates their own conscience and religious beliefs. They largely believe companies should fire employees who make controversial remarks. They believe that statements like “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman” and or being “unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my understandings of the traditional definitions of marriage,” represent intolerable bigotry — even through Barack Obama said those words in 2008 and 2011.

They would vehemently object to any older white man who publicly contended he could judge who was authentically black and who wasn’t, even in jest — unless it’s Joe Biden, and then they will grumble for a bit and then drop the issue. Some Democrats believe that Virginia governor Ralph Northam can earn forgiveness, but that Michael Jordan still deserves scorn for not appearing in a television ad for Harvey Gantt.

The Democratic Party’s leadership has a symbiotic relationship with the structures of America’s largest media institutions, a relationship that only became stronger in the era of “#Resistance.” (Think of our recent frequent spectacle of one Cuomo interviewing another.) This means the media cannot play a useful role in correcting the party when it is wrong and steering it away from bad decisions. This means Beto O’Rourke is hailed as an inspiring and accomplished leader, Kirsten Gillbrand is a sensible centrist, and Elizabeth Warren is a strategic planning genius brimming with foresight. Questioning the carefully crafted image of a rising star in Democratic circles must feel like religious apostasy.

Perhaps most significantly, this perpetually reinforcing symbiotic connection means public attention will not be allowed to focus on something like the decisions of Andrew Cuomo, Phil Murphy, and Gretchen Whitmer regarding recovering coronavirus patients and nursing homes. Matters of life and death must take a backseat to the all-consuming narrative of Democratic superiority.

Recent years illuminated the fact that many powerful men who claimed to be feminist also felt free to seek out sexually exploitative relationships with their employees. A pro-life belief was sufficient justification for someone to be accused of being part of a “war on women,” sometimes by politicians or media voices who themselves were reprehensibly predatory towards their subordinates.

The end result is a Democratic Party brimming with self-regard, convinced it is honorably fighting the good fight for lofty ideals, when in practice, it is the Praetorian Guard of a socially cocooned nepotistic aristocracy. A Biden presidency might benefit certain segments of America, but the way the party currently operates, a return to Democratic control of Washington would not benefit America.

But there’s another side to the coin, of course. It can be fairly argued that the modern Republican Party doesn’t stand for much, or perhaps really anything, beyond a nebulous, childish urge to “own the libs.” The GOP sure doesn’t worry about the debt, deficits, or runaway spending anymore. The relentless blanket excuse-making for Trump’s treatment of people — and in particular, women — indicate that many Christian conservatives no longer mean what they say about “family values.” Republicans who claimed they stood for a strong defense have largely nodded as this administration abandoned longtime battlefield allies, praised authoritarian rulers, and discussed withdrawing from NATO entirely. Even on the administration’s signature issue of border security, progress has been small and slow, but few in the GOP ranks would ever publicly criticize the president over it. Most rank-and-file Republicans begin with the conclusion that the president is right about whatever is being discussed at that moment and work backwards from there.

Republican officeholders may have strong beliefs, but if the president blurts out something that is completely contradictory to those professed beliefs, most in the GOP either nod along or look at the floor and pretend they didn’t hear it.

We have two parties who say they believe in particular policies, philosophies, and values, but they abandon any of those at the slightest inconvenience. We are left with two warring tribes that are now mostly cults of personality.

On that happy thought . . . have a good weekend, everybody!

ADDENDUM: Boy, who ever figured that the May unemployment report might include a bit of somewhat good news? “Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 2.5 million in May, and the unemployment rate declined to 13.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. These improvements in the labor market reflected a limited resumption of economic activity that had been curtailed in March and April due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and efforts to contain it. In May, employment rose sharply in leisure and hospitality, construction, education and health services, and retail trade.”

On the menu today: The coronavirus is not gone, it has already been found in several protesters who attended protests and rallies in the past week, and thus it is time to ask tough questions of whether those who permitted and encouraged these protests and rallies really cared about the attendees as they claim; the detail that Tom Cotton glided over in his op-ed; and the tough questions that will come to James Mattis.

If You Love Someone, You Tell Him the Truth, Even When He Doesn’t Want to Hear It

Our two raging controversies in the country intersect: George Floyd tested positive for the coronavirus in a test taken after his death, according to Hennepin County’s new autopsy report.

Those of us who think of ourselves as Christians are called to love our neighbor. Loving him requires thinking of their best interest. Ask yourself if our elected officials and the people you see on television are acting out of love. Because I think if you loved someone, you would at least try to discourage them from doing things that are potentially self-destructive. I think that speech by Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms Friday night was full of love — for her city, and for people who were doing something simultaneously destructive to others and likely self-destructive as well. And for the past week, she’s been telling the protesters things they don’t want to hear — that violence and looting taints the cause they claim to stand for, and that they are risking their lives by gathering in large numbers and not practicing anything resembling social distancing. She’s also reminded the protesters that they’re gathering in large groups during an outbreak of a contagious disease.

No matter how much the country may want to psychologically move on, there is still an ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The United States has roughly 1.9 million diagnosed cases, roughly 1.1 million active cases, more than 109,000 dead from the virus, still roughly 20,000 new cases per day, and still around 1,000 deaths per day.

And yes, the coronavirus has been present at the protests of the past week. A man arrested at a protest in Lancaster, Pa., tested positive for the coronavirus. Columbus Public Health in Ohio announced that someone who was symptomatic attended protests in the past week. Oklahoma State University linebacker Amen Ogbongbemiga announced on Twitter that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, but had attended a protest in Tulsa and taken precautions.

New York City has nearly 379,000 cases. Do you think none of those people attended any of the protests across the city in the past week?

Minnesota health commissioner Jan Malcolm is calling for anyone who was involved in demonstrations over George Floyd’s killing, or any following cleanup efforts, should be tested for COVID-19 — even if they have no symptoms. In Philadelphia, the city health department is calling for a 14-day self-quarantine or testing for “those who were at or near a protest — even if they wore a mask.”

“Contact tracing” was supposed to be a key element of controlling the spread from here on out. Try to imagine how that is going to work right now:

Doctor: “Whom have you been in contact with, in the past week? Within six feet or less?”

Patient: “Well, there’s my girlfriend, my roommate, the delivery guy, and the couple thousand people in the city square downtown a few days ago.”

Some protesters will contend that being outside mitigates the risk, and masks will as well. Many are wearing masks . . . but some aren’t, particularly when they’re shouting, and it’s not hard to find pictures of some protesters wearing them over their mouths but not their noses, etc.

Then there’s the question of face-touching and use of pepper spray and tear gas:

Rutherford points out that some protesters are contending with an additional risk: the use of pepper spray and tear gas. Those chemicals create tearing, he says, which could make protesters rub their faces more, potentially moving the virus from their hands to their eyes.

Tear gas and pepper spray also make people cough and wheeze, which could further accelerate COVID-19 infection rates.

“It wreaks havoc on the lungs,” argues Cat Brooks, the Executive Director of the Justice Teams Network and a veteran Bay Area activist. “[It’s] not us, really, that needs to change our behavior. It’s law enforcement.”

Oh, there’s plenty of need to change behavior to go around. Keeping arrested protesters together in holding cells is another risky practice.

There are some protesters who tell reporters they are trying to practice social distancing while at these events, and perhaps these particular protesters are. But we’re seeing hundreds or thousands of people gather in places like Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, San Francisco’s Dolores Park, City Hall in Seattle, and Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn.

In San Francisco, “gatherings of individuals with anyone outside of their household or living unit remain prohibited.” Ten thousand people joined a protest march in that city last night.

A fair question to all of these elected leaders who keep insisting they stand with the protesters and support them . . . do you really care about them? Do you love them, as you claim? If so, why are you not emphasizing how much they are risking their health right now? Is it that you are afraid of telling the protesters something they do not want to hear?

Earlier this week, “1,288 public health professionals, infectious diseases professionals, and community stakeholders” signed a public letter declaring “as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission.” They explicitly contrasted the value of the current protests against “heavily armed and predominantly white protesters entered the State Capitol building in Lansing, Michigan, protesting stay-home orders and calls for widespread public masking to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

That letter does urge, “distance of at least 6 feet between protesters, where possible” and “demonstrating consistently alongside close contacts and moving together as a group, rather than extensively intermingling with multiple groups.”

We already know these protesters are not staying six feet apart; we’ve got eyes. How likely is it that those thousands upon thousands of people aren’t mingling?

If these public-health and infectious-diseases professionals really love these people in the streets, why are they playing along with the fantasy that these current protests are somehow less dangerous or lower risk than other protests or gatherings? Why are they encouraging the unrealistic hope that gathering in large groups with intermittent mask use is not likely to increase the rate of infection among minority communities?

The modern Hippocratic Oath includes the pledge, “I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.” Can this letter be fairly characterized as an attempt to prevent disease?

Because if some leaders secretly hated these protesters, and secretly wanted them to come to harm from the coronavirus . . . wouldn’t remaining silent about the risk of infection or downplaying the risk of coronavirus be exactly what they would do? If you hated young people and minorities . . . wouldn’t you be encouraging as many of them as possible to gather in these protests and demonstrations?

If you really care about a person, you will tell that person something he doesn’t want to hear. Maybe especially when he doesn’t want to hear it, because that’s when he needs to hear it the most.

Do We Really Want a President Overruling the Decisions of Elected State and Local Officials?

I notice Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed in the New York Times doesn’t really go into a lot of detail about what should happen if a president wants to deploy the National Guard into a city but the governor or mayor does not. The closing line that “many politicians prefer to wring their hands while the country burns” implies that the president should ignore the objections of local officials. National Review’s editors noted earlier this week, “it’s hard to see how Trump could, as a practical matter, invoke the Insurrection Act over the objections of state and local officials. Having hostile and competing authorities trying to police the same out-of-control streets is not a formula for success.”

The country’s National Guardsmen are terrific, but asking them to restore order against rampaging looters without cooperation from local and state police is simply an unrealistic demand.

Oh, and would we be comfortable with a president using the National Guard, despite opposition from state and local officials, to enforce federal gun-control laws? Because any power invoked by a Republican president will be invoked by a Democratic successor someday.

The Coming Questions for James Mattis

Former secretary of defense James Mattis’s denunciation of President Trump is powerful and compelling. But Mattis is going to face some tough and fair questions, such as what kind of man he thought President Trump was when he agreed to be his first Secretary of Defense, whether he should have resigned as secretary earlier than he did, and whether Mattis’s decision to largely mute his criticism of the president until now was the right one. If Mattis had declared publicly . . .

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.

. . . during the impeachment trial, would the Senate vote have turned out differently?

Mattis is also likely to be asked whom he will be voting for in November, since he pretty obviously won’t be voting for Trump. It’s worth remembering Mattis had some pretty blistering criticism of the Obama administration in his autobiography. He describes being dismissed from CentCom in 2012: “We were offering no leadership or direction. I left my post deeply disturbed that we had shaken our friends’ confidence and created vacuums that our adversaries would exploit. I was disappointed and frustrated that policymakers all too often failed to deliver clear direction. And lacking a defined mission statement, I frequently didn’t know what I was expected to accomplish.”

Do you think Mattis is all that enthusiastic about a Biden administration?

ADDENDUM: Michael Brendan Dougherty: “If the media tries to make the choice this summer one between cops and rioters, the great majority of Americans will choose the cops, for all their faults, because good policemen risk their lives to save others while rioters contribute nothing to society but grief and immiseration.”

Wow, what a morning! Dr. Anthony Fauci has good news on a coronavirus vaccine; the nation’s cities were somewhat calmer and less violent last night — although the decision about deploying the National Guard has now become hopelessly politicized; and one of the country’s least-popular Republicans loses a primary.

Dr. Fauci: We Should Have 100 Million Vaccine Doses by the End of the Year

All right, finally some good news: “The US should have 100 million doses of one candidate Covid-19 vaccine by the end of the year, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, said Tuesday. ‘Then, by the beginning of 2021, we hope to have a couple hundred million doses,’ Fauci said during a live question and answer session with the Journal of the American Medical Association.”

But before we break out the party hats . . . “When you look at the history of coronaviruses, the common coronaviruses that cause the common cold, the reports in the literature are that the durability of immunity that’s protective ranges from three to six months to almost always less than a year,” he said. “That’s not a lot of durability and protection.”

We might need annual coronavirus shots the way we’re supposed to get annual flu shots. Also note that Fauci changed his tune a bit late last month when he declared that a second wave in the fall was “not inevitable.” (So it’s “evitable,” then?)

Actions to Restore Public Order Require a Buy-In from Broad Swaths of the People

President Trump is not interested in listening to state officials who disagree with him, and he has no ability to persuade them to come around to his position. Democratic officials have little or no interest in listening to the president and refuse to take actions that could be perceived as concurring or supporting the president. This has far-reaching, real-world consequences.

On a call with the nation’s governors Monday, Trump seethed with frustration, telling them, “most of you are weak. You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate you’re wasting your time . . . Somebody throwing a rock, that’s like shooting a gun. You have to do retribution, in my opinion.” Trump’s preferred, or perhaps lone, form of persuasion is to berate and insult others until they change their minds.

Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota — who has earned plenty of fair criticism for his response to riots in his state — urged the president “to make clear to the public that the National Guard wasn’t an occupying force and instead consists of people’s neighbors.” Trump responded, “It got so bad a few nights ago that the people wouldn’t have minded an occupying force. I wish we had an occupying force.”

When someone who President Trump doesn’t like says, “I am concerned that this could become X,” Trump’s first instinct is often to say, “This will absolutely be X.” Maine governor Janet Mills, a Democrat, told the president she was concerned about his upcoming trip to Puritan Medical Products, which manufactures swabs for test kits. Trump later said, “she tried to talk me out of it. Now, I think she probably talked me into it. She just doesn’t understand me very well.”

In this sense, Trump is correct. When other people warn him not to do something, he often reflexively does it to demonstrate he won’t be controlled, regardless of consequences. (“DO NOT CONGRATULATE.”)

Unsurprisingly, the governors who did not already agree with the president were not persuaded to change their actions. Some Democratic officials who had activated National Guard units before Monday’s call are now publicly insisting they will not deploy them. Trump’s tone Monday appears to have pushed some Democrats further away from his preferred position.

Calling out National Guard could be step to restoring public order. Despite historically ignorant claims that this hasn’t been done in centuries, California governor Pete Wilson called out nearly 10,000 of his state’s Army National Guard to in Los Angeles after the riots in 1992. There is some debate as to whether the National Guard deployment was the decisive factor in ending the riots; the amount of violence in the city dropped after the third day, and the deployment was largely complete by the end of day four.

As of Monday morning, National Guard units had been activated to prepare to assist law enforcement (but not necessarily deployed) in Arizona, Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. (This is separate from the active and deployed National Guard units assisting with the coronavirus response in all fifty states.) It is worth noting that the National Guard can be used in ways to assist police — communications, directing traffic, simply having a deterrent presence in public squares and intersections, etc. — and not necessarily in a role that puts them in confrontation with protesters or rioters.

Washington, D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser also activated her local National Guard Sunday, but by Tuesday morning she declared, “I don’t think that the military should be used on the streets of American cities against Americans. And I definitely don’t think it should be used for a show.”

What happened in between Sunday and Tuesday? Trump’s conference call to the governors about “domination” and “retribution.” Fairly or not, the president altered the perception of what those troops were there to do with his rhetoric. For the deployment to run smoothly, the public in these cities needed to see the Guardsmen as a reinforcement for local police, ensuring stability and order. Local and state officials needed most of the public to buy-in to the value of the deployment, just as the president needed the state governors to buy into the proposal as well. And then Trump explicitly wished the Guardsmen could function as an occupying force.

Unsurprisingly, since Monday, several Democratic governors like J. B. Pritzker and Andrew Cuomo have publicly declared they not want the National Guard deployed in their states’ cities. Interestingly, Texas governor Greg Abbott also said he doesn’t see a need for National Guardsmen in his state’s cities, and Trump declared via Twitter he agreed with Abbott’s decision because of the border wall. (For those wondering how close the biggest Texas cities are to the U.S.–Mexican border, San Antonio is about 157 miles from Laredo, Austin is 235 miles away, Houston is about 315 miles, and Dallas is about 430 miles.)

There are portions of the District of Columbia that are under the control of the federal government. This is why last night dozens of masked, camouflaged National Guardsmen lined up on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The masks are presumably for coronavirus protection, and the Lincoln Memorial was among several national monuments and sites on the National Mall that were spray-painted with graffiti on previous nights. Nonetheless, it is easy to see why people are unnerved at the sight of masked troops lining up behind barricades at an iconic American structure, after the president yearned for domination, retribution, and an occupying force.

Whether or not you think the people of these besieged states and cities should have elected these governors and mayors, they did. Those state and local officials were as freely elected as the president was; they took oaths of public service upon taking office just like he did. Any successful deployment of the National Guard will require cooperation from state and city officials, and state and local police.

Posse Comitatus is on the books for a reason. Soldiers and police both carry guns, but their missions are distinct. Soldiers set out to neutralize and kill an enemy, usually foreign combatants. Police enforce laws against U.S. citizens. (Yes, military police units enforce laws as well.) There are rare situations where military forces can be deployed to assist civilian law enforcement agencies, but responsible leaders in the civilian and military worlds recognize the two realms ought to be mixed as little as possible.

This is one of the reasons it is also disturbing to hear Defense Secretary Mark Esper say that when he walked with the president Monday evening across Lafayette Park, he believed he was following the president to “see some damage and to talk to the troops,” not to pose for photographs in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. “I didn’t know where I was going,” Esper told NBC News. This is a moment where clear communication between civilian and military leaders is most necessary, and the president is not communicating to his own secretary of defense where he’s going and why.

Esper requested the use of Virginia’s National Guardsmen earlier on Monday, in order to deploy them on the streets of Washington. Governor Ralph Northam denied Esper’s request, and his chief of staff declared in a statement, “we quickly learned it had not been made at Mayor Bowser’s request or coordinated with her, and we have heightened concern based on the president’s remarks that the administration is looking to use the Guard to escalate — not de-escalate — the situation.”

Democratic governors are simply not going to deploy their state’s national guardsmen into cities where Democratic mayors do not want them. Trust is the fuel that moves the engine of any resolution to this violence. Without it, efforts are just going to sputter.

Yesterday I described President Trump’s mentality as one of perpetual conflict “with himself and groups he likes on one side, and others he cannot abide on the other.” The opposition never has a point, there is no honorable concession, all compromises are forms of surrender, and the only objective is complete victory and forcing the opposition to accepting defeat. “No matter the problem, he always finds a path back to his favorite explanation: He is strong and others are weak; if other people were as strong as he was, the problem wouldn’t be happening.” Unsurprisingly, a lot of the president’s fans agree with him.

A lot of options get taken off the table when someone has this mentality. Every conflict can only be escalated. Tensions can only be ratcheted higher. Like a horned ram who likes to bash heads, the president can only charge into conflict and hope that the collision does more damage to his opponent than himself.

This is a situation that requires building consensus, and Trump turned it into another one of his battles of wills.

Perhaps the president’s foes were always going to accuse him of being an aspiring dictator or fascist. But he sure makes their job easier for them.

A King Is Toppled

Good riddance:

Republican voters ousted U.S. Rep. Steve King on Tuesday, delivering an end to the two decades of controversy he brought to his heavily conservative district. The Associated Press has called the 4th Congressional District primary race for state Sen. Randy Feenstra of Hull, who had the backing of many state elected officials and national Republican groups. Feenstra won with 45.7% of the vote to King’s 36%, a margin of just under 8,000 votes, according to unofficial results from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office.

ADDENDUM: A little while back, I had a chat with Oliver North, discussing the actions of the Chinese government and the coronavirus; that interview can be watched here.

On the menu today: how the country is paying the price for a long line of leaders and aspiring leaders who saw public anger as a force they believed they could control and manipulate; why Donald Trump won’t give a unifying speech and has no particular desire to do so; and the protests ended the coronavirus lockdowns, but the risk is still out there.

The Anger of the Public Is a Fire, and You’re Not Supposed to Play with It

Why do we teach kids not to play with matches?

Because if you’re not careful and responsible, once you start a fire, it can be difficult to control. Every fire that ever burned out of control appeared to be under control, right up until the moment it obviously wasn’t. Kids need to be taught to respect fire, to recognize its destructive power as well as its usefulness, and to use it only when they need it.

Everything said above applies to the metaphorical fire of anger in the public, and the power of an angry mob of people. In recent days, social media offered plenty of examples of people who supported the protests, perhaps even when they became violent, even when they warped into looting . . . right up until the moment the violence started to target them or their homes.

Leigh Tauss works at the Indy Week, an alternative paper in Raleigh, N.C., Saturday night, she was forced to hide in the basement as her paper’s offices were ransacked. Afterwards she tweeted, “I’m devastated. We are a progressive newspaper. Last night I was inside when the first brick was thrown.” Take no joy in her terror; no one should go through something like that.

But observe the fact that her newspaper is progressive mattered to her; it did not matter to the angry mob.

On Thursday night, former ESPN reporter Chris Martin Palmer tweeted, “burn that s*** down” in response to an image of a building in flames. (It was low-income housing, but Palmer didn’t know that at the time.)

By Sunday he fumed, “They just attacked our sister community down the street. It’s a gated community and they tried to climb the gates. They had to beat them back. Then destroyed a Starbucks and are now in front of my building. Get these animals TF out of my neighborhood. Go back to where you live.”

Once an angry mob develops its taste for destruction, it quickly loses its interest in drawing distinctions. This is why you’re not supposed to deliberately add to existing levels of public anger, why you’re not supposed to see stoking the rage of your fellow citizens as a useful political tool, and why you’re not supposed to pour metaphorical gasoline on the fire. Angry people are not thinking people.

This is why the news media are supposed to be careful when covering emotionally charged topics and events, and supposed to avoid simplistic narratives that demonize or villainize particular groups of people. This is why news “commentators” and television and radio talk-show hosts aren’t supposed to have their anger turned all the way up to eleven all the time, and why they’re not supposed to keep their audiences marinating in a toxic brew of perpetual outrage and endless grievances. (Last night, Tucker Carlson denounced vice president Mike Pence, former presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, Heritage Foundation president Kay Cole James, and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, asserting, “The message from our leaders on the Right, as on the Left, was unambiguous: ‘don’t complain, you deserve what’s happening to you.’” Sure, sure, I’m certain that’s exactly what the vice president said and intended to communicate.)

This is why activists are supposed to keep their communities focused on solutions and what can and should be changed, instead of just stirring people into a frenzy.

But we have a lot of people who climbed to their positions of power and influence on the backs of public anger, and who may not have many other psychological settings.

Trump Is Not a Unifier, and He Has No Interest in Being One

Apparently, some of President Trump’s advisers urged him to use calming, soothing rhetoric, perhaps in an Oval Office address. After being given that advice, the president pledged on Twitter that “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons” await anyone who tries to jump the White House fence. He quoted the slogan “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” either expecting everyone to understand it’s a reference from the 1960s or simply not caring if anyone does.

Donald Trump has few settings other than confrontation and anger. He sees everything as a perpetual conflict, with himself and groups he likes on one side, and others he cannot abide on the other. No matter the problem, he always finds a path back to his favorite explanation: he is strong and others are weak; if other people were as strong as he was, the problem wouldn’t be happening.

The calls for Trump to give some sort of national address with palliative and unifying rhetoric are leftovers from previous, “normal” presidencies. Donald Trump could go before the country this evening and read “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” or anecdotes of Nelson Mandela or quote Gandhi. Imagine that tonight Trump delivered the best-written speech a president has ever delivered. Would any of the young people in the streets alter their attitudes or behavior because of a Trump speech? Unlikely. There’s a good chance they would decide — perhaps preemptively — that Trump’s speech was so disingenuous, it offered them another excuse to continue the mayhem of the past seven nights.

Keep in mind, many of Trump’s supporters like him precisely because he never calls upon them or anyone else to calm down. Trump never tells them that they have any role in the problem, or that they must take an action to ameliorate the suffering of others. Trump rarely, if ever, cites any sense of obligation to the well-being of others or resisting individual impulses to serve the greater good, even in a crisis. Trump wouldn’t even wear a mask at public events or stop handshakes during a pandemic! This president will never ask you to sacrifice something or change your ways. He will never urge you to ask what you can do for your country. He’s extremely happy with himself just the way he is, and unless you criticize him, he’s not going to tell you that you have to change anything about yourself, either.

Even if Trump somehow did look into the teleprompter and deliver the speech as written — recall that in mid-March, he managed to get several details of the travel ban exactly backwards — after three-and-a-half years in office, we know how he operates. Within a few hours, he would see something on television that angered him and start fuming on Twitter. There is no indication that Trump sees a real problem in the way the police operate in the United States. He still thinks the Central Park Five are guilty. During a speech in front of police in Long Island, Trump urged cops to stop covering the heads of arrested suspects as they get put in the back of a police car. President Trump’s personal contribution to the White House Opioid Summit was to lament that the country doesn’t execute drug dealers.

Trump’s response to every problem relating to law enforcement is that the police need to get “tougher.” He does not see any conflict between this mentality and his statements during the Mueller investigation and impeachment that he was the innocent victim of unfair, vindictive, unaccountable law enforcement. The president is a passionate advocate for the rights of the accused — when he or his allies are the ones accused.

The Coronavirus Doesn’t Care About How Angry the Protesters Are

This column from old friend Robert A. George, pointing out that New York governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have effectively suspended the coronavirus quarantine restrictions for the protests and thus should end them for everyone, ranks among my favorites:

Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio: End it. End it all. Start bringing this city back to life before it’s too late.

End it. Sorry, but your precious metrics and thresholds are as aflame as the average NYPD cruiser.

End it.

Yes, you both expressed worry Monday morning about infection spikes in the coming weeks due to the protesters (though the mayor had to be prompted via a reporter’s question), but you both barely mentioned it in your weekend briefings. By opting not to impose either citywide or statewide curfews over four nights — by waiting to announce a curfew for Monday evening — you essentially conceded the rules do not apply for the marching thousands.

We will know the health consequences of gatherings of hundreds of people within a few weeks. Being outside and in sunlight and the prevalence of masks will help; bunching together and shouting will hurt. We’re probably opening up a little wider and faster than we ought to, but you can’t sustain these widespread restrictions after Americans have seen police arresting a dad playing with his daughter, a mom on a playground, and a paddleboarder off the coast of Malibu. The coronavirus and its need for social distancing was a test of the seriousness and judgment of government at all levels, and while many passed, far too many flunked.

As for the world’s fight against the virus itself, there are some quite encouraging signs. The head of the Milan hospital declaring the coronavirus is effectively gone in Italy is pretty eye-opening. Nationally, the daily number of new cases and new deaths continues to decline, although a little slower than we would like.

But cases are starting to rise significantly in states such as Alabama, South Carolina, and Virginia, and it’s not just a matter of doing more tests. The virus arrived later to these parts of the country, and thus they’re probably at higher risk right now. The Rt number is creeping back up in about a dozen states.

ADDENDUM: You probably received a message from me encouraging you to sign up for NRPLUS — great value, exclusive benefits. The cost for a year was recently 14 cents per day, but just today there’s an offer that comes out to eleven cents a day. That feels insanely low, and so you should probably sign up immediately, just in case someone realizes that price was an error.

And now our publisher is proud to announce that for the second year in a row, NRPLUS has been named a Digiday Publishing Awards finalist for Best Paid Membership Product.

On the menu today: a near-complete breakdown in American leadership, driven in large part by elected officials who cannot bear unpleasant truths that contradict their preexisting worldview; the role and limited culpability of foreign intelligence operations; the coming argument about just who counts as a member of Antifa; and oh yeah, remember that ongoing potentially lethal pandemic?

Our Leaders Fear the Evidence, Even When It’s on Fire, Right in Front of Them

Let’s begin the week with words I wouldn’t have predicted writing a couple of years ago: I really liked a recent observation by Glenn Greenwald: “Until people start forming beliefs based on evidence rather than the narrative that’s most comforting, our discourse will continue to be toxic trash. (Also, as long as media outlets employ people with a documented history of fabrication & fabulism, the media will be unreliable).”

Perhaps all of our problems boil down to an unwillingness to form or adjust our beliefs based upon evidence, and the habits of mono-focusing on evidence that supports our preexisting beliefs and ignoring, downplaying, or seeking ways to refute evidence that challenges our preexisting beliefs.

Greenwald made his comment in response to Saint Paul mayor Melvin Carter declaring Saturday that every person arrested in riots in his city was from out of state, and then amending it to at least 80 percent. (When someone in authority makes a sweeping statement adamantly and emphatically, and then quickly qualifies it, our spidey-sense should start tingling. This is often an indicator that the speaker wants something to be true but realizes that what they said is not quite true.)

Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey made similar comments Saturday morning. But data from arrest reports released later that day indicated that was not the case. “In Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, 47 of the 57 people arrested in protest incidents through Saturday morning had provided a Minnesota address to authorities, according to Jeremy Zoss, a spokesman for the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office.” Surely, there were some non-Minnesotans in the mix of those committing crimes in that area. But Minnesota’s government leaders simply didn’t want to acknowledge the possibility that members of their own communities could do something so destructive and callous. Confronting that problem was too daunting and intimidating to them, so they turned to a more morally convenient villain.

It was not hard to find people, generally on the Left, arguing that the violent rioting, looting, arson, and other crimes were being committed by white nationalists who sought to exacerbate tensions between whites and blacks. Walz told reporters he suspected white supremacist groups and drug cartels were carrying out some of the violence in Minneapolis.

With such widespread urban violence across the country this weekend, it is certainly possible that some perpetrators fit that description. But the vast majority of those were young whites, in anarchist or Antifa regalia, and young blacks and other minorities. (Omar Kelly is correct: Count the number of skateboards you see in those videos. Separately, you can read how Antifa is preparing to hit the streets right on Reddit.) The young people you see in those videos are unlikely to be white nationalists or the pawns of white nationalists.

There was a much simpler and sadder explanation than a vast right-wing conspiracy. A lot of young people saw an opportunity to either steal things or indulge their most destructive impulses without significant consequence to themselves and embraced that opportunity. They may be driven by some sort of left-of-center ideology, but it is likely that many were driven by simpler human instincts: greed, selfishness, malevolence, and a desire to feel powerful, at least for a moment.

Elected officials’ inability to accurately characterize the protesters and their actions was matched by an inability to accurately characterize the government responders and their actions. On Saturday, Walz said the Pentagon was providing “intelligence support of what they’re seeing, what they’re signal intercepting, they have obviously from NSA and others massive support to be able to see who these operators are.” This raised quite a few eyebrows, as the National Security Agency is not a domestic law-enforcement agency; it is focused on intercepting and collecting signals intelligence from foreign sources. Later, the governor’s office stated he had misspoken and there was no NSA involvement. Apparently, the governor just went before the cameras and winged it, saying things he thought were true, or hoped were true.

Every one of these people in elected office asked for their jobs and put considerable effort into telling the public they were prepared to handle the difficult duties that came with it. One of those duties is communicating accurate information to the public. That accurate information may be difficult and painful to hear. Mayors and governors across the country may be pained to declare something like, “Significant numbers of young people of all races are taking advantage of widespread outrage about the police role in the death of George Floyd to commit selfish and cruel crimes.” (If you doubt that these crimes are cruel, listen to Stephanie, a disabled Minneapolis woman.)

But that is a more accurate description of what is happening than the idea that the significant numbers of African-American youth looting the Nike store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago are somehow being manipulated by those losers who marched in Charlottesville. (Even if you contend that the worst of the situation is being driven by “outside agitators,” you are eliding the fact that your local population — the one you want to believe is good and decent and law-abiding and peaceful — is reacting just as the outside agitators desired.)

Not every crime leads back to the suspect you already disliked. Sometimes the trail leads back to the people you thought better of, who you thought were on the right path, the people who you thought weren’t capable of this.

The combination of the coronavirus pandemic and widespread urban violence should be reinforcing to all Americans the hard lesson that elected office is not about being a celebrity. It is not about looking good on television, or an opportunity to manipulate and control the lives of human beings like moving pawns on a chess board. It is not about soaring rhetoric and pretty words.

Leadership in elected office is often about telling people difficult truths that they don’t want to hear, making hard decisions that will fully satisfy no one, and accepting the responsibility for making those decisions. If you are not willing to accept that, don’t run for the job.

We Can Blame Foreign Disinformation Only So Much

Speaking of “outside agitators . . .”

National-security adviser Robert O’Brien, former national-security adviser Susan Rice, and senator Marco Rubio pointed to foreign intelligence operations seeking to exacerbate tensions through disinformation and propaganda on social media. (Great, more foreign competition for jobs Americans traditionally do.) Rice pointed the finger at Russia, Rubio said “at least three foreign adversaries” were at work, and O’Brien named Russia, China, and Iran.

Hostile intelligence services make the decision to lay out the bait, but Americans make the decision to take the bait. Our problem is not that the secret efforts of Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran involve malicious and incendiary lies; they’ve always done that. Our problem is that some Americans want to believe their lies.

Those Labels Come On and Off So Easily, They Must Use Velcro

In the coming days, you’re going to see a lot of semantic arguments about just who can be accurately labeled “Antifa” — just as we saw in previous arguments about which perpetrators of crimes really qualify to be labeled a member of al-Qaeda, ISIS, militia members, white nationalists, incels, and any other violent ideological movement that is tenuously connected to an American community or either side of the aisle in U.S. politics.

To a lot of folks on the Right, a masked young person who is dressed mostly in black, oftentimes wearing an anarchist symbol, and spray-painting a public building is de facto Antifa, whether or not they have a formal membership. To a lot of folks on the Left, that person is just some young punk, with no meaningful connection to the left-wing politics, and certainly not one of “their side” that warrants denunciation from allies.

There is, admittedly, quite a contradiction between statism and anarchy. Quite a few hardline activists on the Left say they believe in bigger, stronger, and more far-reaching government, but act like anarchists. No doubt some progressives look at Trump voters and see a lot of people who say they’re motivated by liberty and fear of powerful government, but somehow they always end up calling for the cops to crack some skulls.

I suppose it’s just a matter of time before Antifa is characterized as having a political wing and a militant wing.

Back in 2014, I discussed that alleged division within Hamas:

From over here, it looks like a public-relations wing and a convenient-scapegoat wing. “Oh, it wasn’t us that fired those rockets! It was our militant wing!” Militant wings are the evil twins of geopolitics. If your organization has a military wing — as opposed to an actual, declared, uniforms-and-everything-military — you’re probably a troublemaker. You notice the good guys in life rarely have a militant wing. “I’m with a hardline faction of the Red Cross.” “I’m with Mother Theresa’s paramilitary branch.”

These groups really seem to think that the political wing can’t be blamed for what the militant wing does. Guys, you’re two halves of the same chicken. Colonel Sanders just sees one bird.

Hey, Remember Coronavirus?

Oh yes, there’s still a pandemic going on, even though apparently large swaths of the public decided to stop worrying about it. Most of the cities that burned this weekend still have various quarantine, stay-at-home, and other restrictions on large gatherings, restrictions that are now effectively suspended — and as Rich observes, barely even mentioned anymore. The good news is many protesters were wearing masks and were outdoors. The bad news is that lots of people were much closer to each other than six feet apart and shouting all day long. (Perhaps the fear of tear gas or being identified in photos can spur mask-wearing when the fear of the coronavirus cannot.)

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio declared Friday, “I want to just say anyone who wants to protest, we’re going to protect your right to protest.” This is the same man who declared in late April regarding Orthodox Jews attending funerals in Brooklyn, “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”

We can all see what’s going on. The mayor fears crossing those who are protesting the police, but he does not fear crossing the Jewish community in Brooklyn.

Varad Mehta observed, “Remember, many local authorities have closed swimming pools, community centers, and other facilities because of the coronavirus. Take one release valve for the summer heat away and the pressure will just vent elsewhere. If this weekend is a preview, the summer won’t be pretty.” Jon Gabriel added, “Add to that the people furloughed, fired, and bored out of their skulls at home. With the only socially acceptable way to go outside is to riot.”

Nearly three months of lockdowns and restrictions didn’t cause this weekend’s violence. But they probably exacerbated it.

ADDENDUM: The editors are correct: “Restoring order should be the first priority. The dynamic of riots is always that if the police don’t show up, if they hold back, or worse, if they retreat, the disorder gets more intense and destructive. Violence must be met with overwhelming (and, obviously, lawful) force.”

A few people with reading disabilities interpreted these tweets as “don’t enforce the law” or “looting is okay.” No. The point is if police are going to use deadly force, they must do so in circumstances to protect human life. My perspective is not some sort of bleeding-heart soft-on-crime idealism. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Tennessee vs. Garner that a police officer may use deadly force to prevent the escape of a fleeing suspect only if the officer has a good-faith belief that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.

This means that if a cop sees that woman walking out of Cheesecake Factory with that whole cake, the cop cannot shoot the woman in the head. I’m such a squish.