A clear pattern is emerging in the ongoing violent unrest that is currently sweeping the United States.
It starts with a police shooting incident of a black or minority person. So far, it’s all been police, but I suppose it could also happen with a white-on-black shooting as well. Before the facts of the incident come out, a victim narrative gets pushed across all media channels. Within hours, rioters and looters descend on the community where the incident took place and begin to spread chaos and destruction.
If the municipal leaders are Democrats, the police are restrained from defending the community from the riots, and the rioters are released without charges or bail. If the state leaders are Democrats, they do everything they can to obstruct federal law enforcement and refuse to accept federal help in putting down the riots, even as their cities and communities burn.
The mainstream, blue checkmark-verified news sources downplay or ignore the violence. When forced to acknowledge it, they blame it on Trump, whose hands are tied by the governors. But if the members of the local community push back against the rioters, either in self-defense or otherwise in reaction to the violence, it gets covered as an act of “white supremacy” against “mostly peaceful protests.”
If the local community doesn’t push back, and Trump honors the governor’s orders not to send in the feds, then the violence steadily escalates, with Democrats and the news media continuing to run cover for the rioters until the “mostly peaceful protests” narrative can no longer be sustained. But before that happens, a new incident happens somewhere else in the country, the news cycle shifts, and the pattern begins all over again.
Whether or not the shooting incidents that spark these riots are spontaneous (I personally believe that they are), the pattern of events that follows each shooting appears to be coordinated, with the goal of provoking a violent backlash. Once the backlash happens, it will be spun as conclusive evidence that Trump is a fascist and that white supremacy in the United States is widespread, deep, and intractable. That’s exactly what happened with Charlottesville in 2017. It’s a false narrative, of course, but that doesn’t matter to the partisands who are coordinating this violence. The narrative has already been written: they just need to fabricate the evidence to support it.
Thus far, there hasn’t been enough of a backlash to give them anything substantial to point to. Which is remarkable, given that this violence has been happening almost nonstop since the shooting of George Floyd in May. But last night in Kenosha Wisconsin, there was a shooting that gave these people exactly what they’ve been looking for.
I expect that all of the blue checkmark-verified news outlets will give this shooting wall-to-wall coverage until the news cycle shifts, and that the Democrats will play it up the way they played up Charlottesville until the November elections. I also expect that the violence will escalate, and that the pattern of incident-riots-backlash will continue into November, and possibly beyond.
The scary thing is that this pattern could repeat itself almost anywhere in the country at this point. It’s more likely to happen in places where Democrats are in power on the state or local level, but it could also happen in Republican strongholds if the local Republicans are squishy enough. That’s probably what happened here in Provo, where a demonstration organized by Salt Lake City Antifa resulted in a shooting. Thankfully, there was no violent backlash, and the response from the local community was strong enough that the riots did not spread here.
If this pattern continues, I see one of three scenarios playing out in November:
If Biden is elected with a clear majority, the United States will descend into a hot civil war. The Left sees political violence as a dial to be turned up; the Right sees political violence as a switch to be turned on. The only reason that switch has not been flipped is because Trump is still in power. If he were replaced by a moderate or a centrist, things would probably be all right, but the Democrats have moved so far to the Left in recent years that I don’t see a compromise candidate emerging until the DNC goes the way of the Whigs and the Federalists, and is replaced by a third party. But that isn’t going to happen between now and November, so a Democrat victory will trigger the Right to flip that switch and throw the country into a civil war.
If Trump is elected with a clear majority, the Left will double down and the rioting and violence will escalate, at least in the short-term and in Democrat-run areas. With that said, Trump will also have the mandate he needs to go after his political enemies who are coordinating this cycle of violence. The DNC will either go defunct or become the minority party in this country for the next twenty years. Regardless, it will probably take most of Trump’s second term for the violence to abate.
If there is no clear winner in November, there will be absolute chaos in Washington. The Democrats will attempt to take power, Trump will refuse to give it up, and the violence sweeping the country will escalate until it is indistinguishable from a hot civil war. There may also be a secession crisis and a high profile political assassination or two.
Regardless of what happens in November, I don’t see any scenario where this pattern of violence de-escalates anytime soon.
