The arson, looting, and mayhem that attend these not-so-peaceful protests against law enforcement are violence sanctioned from above. The faculty lounge and the corporate boardroom, the world’s richest man and his newspaper, the Democratic party and the NeverTrump Republicans: they are all sponsors of this program. They know this lawlessness will not harm their interests: quite the contrary, it will help to defeat President Trump by making him look like Lyndon Johnson in 1968. Trump’s talk about economic nationalism and his populist defiance of elite norms, on the other hand, do represent an incipient challenge to the authorities that own America. Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton failed to stop Trump in 2016, the Russia hype and impeachment effort fizzled, but COVID-19 and cities on fire might be enough to guarantee the right result this November. The trick is to spin the narrative so that the arsonists are the heroes — or just the overeager vanguard of the heroes — and the police are the enemy.

This mock revolution marketed by the rich is full of ironies. The purple-haired white ladies and college kids taunting the cops (including black ones) outnumber the actually black members of Black Lives Matter by a perceptible degree: the whole thing is an act of cultural appropriation. And once again, white liberals have taken it upon themselves to approve new designations for the minorities they aim to save (i.e., exploit). Thus, the big media have now decided that black Americans are no longer like white Americans; they are today ‘Black’ Americans, with a capital ‘B’. For the moment, anyway: there was a time not long ago when the elite-approved term was ‘African American’, but the cultural revolution eventually devours its linguistic children. White liberals promoted the homogenized ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’ labels for Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, and others who were happier to identify with specific ancestral nationalities. Then they ran into intersectional identity-politics trouble because ‘Latino’ and ‘Latina’ are sex-specific terms, and so Latinos had to become ‘Latinx’. Lately there have been intense debates within progressive ranks over whether the term ‘BIPOC’ — ‘Black, Indigenous, and People of Color’ — is sufficiently inclusive for all non-whites. We’ll know once Jeff Bezos’s newspaper adopts it.