Consequences Of The Riots?

Will the left have to start being at least a teensy bit honest about Antifa?

   I can't believe many progressives will be able to regurgitate the foreign provocateurs story with a straight face. Nor the white supremacists tale. Though, who knows? No one can be on the PC left without significant powers of self-persuasion/self-deception. And they have plenty of practice squelching the nagging voice of their logical conscience...such as it is.

   But, unless they dream up some baroque alternative, it seems that they'll have to either (a) start acknowledging Antifa or (b) acknowledge the responsibility of BLM and the local black population. And I really can't see them doing the latter. One measure of their absolute horror at the thought of doing (b) is the rapidity with which they began fabricating absolutely daft alternate hypotheses--e.g. It was the Rooskies again! and It was the cartels!! I was sorta surprised that they didn't suggest that it was the Illuminati...well...yet, anyway...

   As the consequences of progressivism / Orwellian leftism spin farther and farther out of control, I predict that they'll have to frantically grasp for more and more implausible straws (if that mixture of metaphor and non-metaphor makes any sense). They might come up with some other bit of make-believe/ They are, after all, adept at fabricating academic-sounding pseudo-hypotheses. Their ability to spit out fairytales puts even the religious right to shame. But if that doesn't work, and they're not finally willing to acknowledge the existence and actions of their Blackshirts...well, their reality-denial options become pretty limited after that. So I predict that they just don't have the political capital anymore to cover for Antifa.

   As for electoral consequences... If it were any Pub but Trump in the White House, I'd be feeling pretty confident about November. The consequences of leftist extremism are so catastrophic that they can only be concealed for so long. This sort of violence in the streets is equal parts feature and bug, I'd say. And a whole lot of low-information swing voters who have been largely oblivious to the crazification of the left will definitely notice this. And mob violence in the streets is not exactly popular with the center. Especially not suburban women. If they swing a little red, that would be huge. 

   I guess we'll be trying to hash out for awhile what portion of the unrest has been protest and what portion riot. Which, I guess, is to ask: to what extent has it been motivated by justified outrage over George Floyd's slow-motion public murder--and to what extent by mere criminality. Oh and: to what extent by Pantifa's general desire to burn America down. Of course these can blur into each other. And there are likely others.

   In crass political terms: blue-team overreaction/hysteria about the latter stages of the pandemic will likely help the red team. Floyd's horrifying murder helps the blue team...but the widespread rioting and nutty blue-team reactions probably hurt them more. And all of this comes before we get the results of Durham's investigation--which I expect to be a bomb dropped on the blues. However, overlaying all of this is the hard-blue lean of the media, which will do its damnedest to downplay anything that helps the reds and play up anything that helps the blues. That's an almost incalculable advantage. Of course if they go too far and swing voters become hip to their cheating, there could be a backlash--though I don't really expect that to happen. And then there's Trump... Too much more hard-core crazy--like the f*cking insane murder accusation on Twitter, and his centrist support might just collapse. And those are just the known unknowns...the whole shebang could end up overshadowed by some unknown unknown still lurking in the remainder of 2020, the shittiest year since at least 2001.