Extortion Day
How the Democratic Party and its allies used the threat of violence as a campaign tactic
Via City Journal
In the days preceding last week’s election, the downtown corridors of many American cities resembled coastal hurricane zones. Business owners boarded up their stores, fearing that the election might unleash another wave of destructive rioting. In Washington, D.C., luxury shops and office complexes constructed fortifications with boards, chains, fences, and barriers. In the neighborhood surrounding the White House, the Secret Service, laborers, and left-wing protesters all prepared for Election Night.
Then something miraculous happened. The following morning, as the election returns began to favor former vice president Joe Biden, the fences, boards, and chains came down. Small business owners reopened their shops, and the anticipation of violence evaporated. The national media, which had been stoking fears about Proud Boys and white supremacists flooding the cities with political violence, simply dropped the story—as if it had never been a story.
The rest of us shouldn’t move on so easily. Riot preparations are unprecedented in modern American electoral history. The media have quickly moved to establish a new narrative—the “return to normalcy” under a presumptive Biden presidency—and would prefer to relegate the much-discussed pre-election tensions to the memory hole.
The threat of election violence should be understood in the context of the months-long rioting that began with the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Despite a handful of incidents involving right-wing agitators, most urban unrest has been driven by the activist Left, loosely organized under the banners of Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
While the national media can afford to peddle a largely imaginary narrative about “white supremacist violence,” business owners in New York, Minneapolis, and Portland have no illusions about where the real threats come from: they’ve spent the past five months defending themselves against vandalism, looting, and robbery from black-bloc rioters and criminal opportunists. Across the country, many downtown stores put up signs declaring their allegiance to Black Lives Matter, implicitly saying: “we’re on your team, please don’t burn us down.”
In political terms, the activist Left’s campaign of violent protest provided a convenient foil for the Biden campaign. Biden adopted the high-minded language of racial justice, promising to combat “systemic racism,” while benefiting from the implicit threat of violence from far-left shock troops on the ground. It’s the same logic of extortion that any thug would use—vote for us and things will return to normal; vote for Trump and your cities will burn.
Regardless of one’s preference for Biden or Trump, this dynamic sets a dangerous precedent. Left-wing activists ... operate with impunity: they know that there will be few arrests, few prosecutions, and few consequences; most will be bailed out and back on the streets in a matter of hours Full Article By Christopher F. Rufo @ City Journal
