Reporters standing in front of scenes of arson, flames billowing behind them, not very far from scenes of shooting and murder, insist that the protests are “mostly peaceful.” National Public Radio and a multi-billion-dollar global media conglomerate team up to bring you an illiterate “defense of looting.” The president comes to the defense of a dangerously stupid teenager who went looking for trouble illegally armed with a rifle in his hands and, to no one’s great surprise, found the trouble he was looking for.

The lesson of the summer is that intellectual and moral anarchy eventually bring with them political anarchy, that chaos in the democratic mind unleashes chaos in the streets.

Our friends on the left pirouette from position to position, desperate to please the mob. Consider a point of comparison: Only a few years ago, a bunch of irresponsible people who took out mortgages they could never hope to afford eventually lost their houses in foreclosures. People lost businesses, too. That was, we were assured, a national tragedy, an indictment of capitalism. But now the anointed mob is burning down homes and businesses, and progressives sniff that these losses are “just property.” Sometimes, property losses (those resulting from failure to pay a valid debt) are the cause of lamentation and the rending of garments, and sometimes property losses (those imposed by criminal violence) are no big deal.