Since last we met, the revolution foretold this time last year in these pages (see “Revolutionism redux” in The New Criterion of September 2019) has reached its kinetic phase, as everyone except the media can plainly see. Actually, the media can see it too, but, acting on the time-honored Marxist-Leninist principle that “truth” is whatever serves the revolution, they find it expedient to deny that the active revolutionaries in the streets of several major cities are anything but “mostly peaceful” protesters. Who are you going to believe, them or your lying eyes? “Violent protests are not the story. Police violence is,” insisted Vox at the end of May, at the beginning of what we were not to call rioting, originally inspired by the death of George Floyd under the knee of the then-policeman Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis on Memorial Day. And the rest of the media took up the cry: “Two Crises Convulse a Nation: A Pandemic and Police Violence,” wrote Jack Healy and Dionne Searcey for The New York Times, echoing their colleagues Shaila Dewan and Mike Baker who reported that, “Facing Protests Over Use of Force, Police Respond With More Force.”

Clearly, in Times-world, “force” could only be predicated of the police and not of the “mostly peaceful” protesters pelting them with rocks and frozen water bottles, among other things. The pretense that it was all about poor George Floyd and the now rich and powerful “Black Lives Matter” syndicate was kept up