Anarchy in New York

It was eerily quiet in New York City…

On Tuesday night, I didn’t hear a police siren for more than an hour. And unlike in pre-pandemic times, there were no cars honking in the distance. No ambulance wailing pierced the ambient street sounds.

There were some reports of looting down in Soho and a standoff with hundreds of protestors at the Manhattan Bridge, but in my area the scene was calm.

The change is especially welcome because this city is still reeling from the trauma the prior evening.

Monday night in Manhattan’s best-known area – central midtown from Herald Square up to Central Park – was a surrealist nightmare of lawlessness and disorder.

Law-abiding residents across the city remained in their homes, under curfew, hoping for the storm to pass.

I watched online in real-time as news organizations, citizen journalists, and activist live streamers showed footage and photos of the mobs’ rampage.

From my own building, I could hear hollering and yelling from the vandals. Despite what you may have been told by newscasters and the “social justice activists” they put on their pundit panels, the rioters on social media appear mostly gleeful. They must have been having a great time as they smashed into the Verizon store across the street from my home.

I’m not sure how much they were able to steal from the Victoria’s Secret, Rolex, and Ferragamo flagship stores on Fifth Avenue that they broke into a few blocks away from my apartment, but they were clearly singling out high-quality items for their looting spree. Up and down Fifth Avenue, they marauded largely unmolested by the police.

The sound of police cars rushing up and down avenues was almost constant. NYPD helicopters hovered overhead, assisting the 8,000 deployed members of the force to track down the roving mobs who were smashing their way across midtown.

It wasn’t nearly enough. The authorities blatantly failed to protect this city and its people. The fiasco has brought about calls from the president himself to deploy troops to NYC.

The next morning, after a hellish night for New York, I ventured out to see the damage.

It looked like a hurricane had ripped through the most high-end shopping district in the city. Glass covered the streets as store owners scrambled to put up plywood replacements for their shattered windows. Bottles of hard liquor, intentionally smashed on side streets when emptied, made it clear that the looters were having fun. The anarchist revolution may not be televised, but apparently it will be celebrated with Don Julio and Jim Beam.

It was a shameful sight.

Everyone on the streets was appalled by what happened. Hundreds, if not thousands, of rioters ransacked store after store on main thoroughfares. Macy’s, an iconic temple of middle-class consumerism, was pillaged while onlookers videotaped the melee. To say the results were an embarrassment for the mayor’s office – and all the way up to the governor’s office – would be a gross understatement. Both men are grotesque incompetents, and in a sane world, would immediately resign.

Are the riots in NYC done? Will they return with even greater ferocity or spread elsewhere?

Nobody can answer these questions yet. There are still protests – ostensibly about “combatting racism” – in dozens of cities across the country. It is these protests, which begin as legal exercises of free speech, that often devolve into what the media describes as “mostly peaceful” affairs… in which an element breaks off to cause mayhem and destruction.

For New York and the nation, it’s hard to feel like this isn’t a cruel joke.

We’ve been through the (it turns out, unnecessary and catastrophically wasteful) two-month COVID-19 lockdown. Tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs. And the federal government has spent trillions of dollars in emergency funds. We are just now beginning to reopen in New York and get our lives back to something closer to normal… and then we have violent riots that threaten to further weaken our already wounded city.

If nothing else, this has been a wake-up call for many New Yorkers and residents of other large cities across America. Left-wing elected officials cannot protect you, don’t care about you or your property, and are more concerned with using the police to make sure you are “socially distancing” out on a park bench than deploying the full weight of law enforcement against looters and rioters who want to undermine our entire society.

The run on gun buying has already started. Will there also be a run on people leaving our urban centers? American cities have been able to endure a pandemic in 2020, but the risks of incompetence at the hands of liberal administrators and politicians may be just too much to bear.