"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."

I've cited that quotation from Ian Fleming in the past, and I'll do so in future whenever necessary, because it's as true today as it ever was.  We can apply it at present to the parlous state of our nation - particularly our larger cities.  When we see almost all America's big cities dissolving into crime, violence, rioting and anarchy, we can be sure it's not an accident, and isn't merely a social upheaval.  It's planned.  It's deliberate.  It's enemy action - and we, the law-abiding citizens of this country, are the target.

I'm grateful to Andrew, an Australian correspondent, for pointing out this string of tweets from "Mike" on Twitter.  I've edited it for layout, and removed one F-bomb.

I've been exchanging messages with friends about what what's happening in our cities: NY, Philadelphia and LA especially. A lot of disturbing things are not making the news. Even Republicans aren't drawing attention to it. Here's a message from a friend about life in NY today:

"Here's my neighborhood, Mike: An elderly man, enjoying dinner w/his wife at an outdoor restaurant, punched in the face. A woman waiting for the subway to come stabbed in the back. An older neighbor pausing to catch his breath told to pay two dollars in protection money or get the **** off that particular street corner. This is just the ten block radius from where I live in the last six days."

Other friends from NY talk about shattered business districts, drugstores with locked shelves, and hundreds of homeless people and parolees, including sex offenders, being moved into hotels on the Upper West Side adjacent to schools and playgrounds, which are filled with needles again like in the 1970s.

Friends in Philadelphia report large homeless encampments in the city center and being robbed at gunpoint.

Friends in LA talk about squatters taking over empty homes in professional class neighborhoods whose residents fantasize about emigrating to Canada.

Friends in all three cities have seen police officers refuse to get out of their cars while large-scale lawbreaking takes place in front of them. That’s in addition to the obvious mayhem being perpetrated on a nightly basis in Portland, Seattle and Chicago. Estimates are that up to one million people have already fled New York City — meaning nearly everyone who has the means to leave has left.

Minneapolis is a smoldering ruin that has sustained untold damage to its immigrant neighborhoods. This is not what I am reading. This is what I am hearing from people directly.

Make no mistake about it: America is now in the middle of a 70s style urban crisis whose root is a well-founded fear of violent crime and social collapse in the midst of a pandemic. The destructive spiral that has been unleashed by leftwing play-acting at revolution and pursuit of stupid fantasies of abolishing the police is destroying our greatest cities.

As urban residents vote with their feet, we are being left with empty urban shells with no tax base and no meaningful employment. The fact that the business of Washington DC is the Federal government and the national media is now centered here is blinding our society to what’s actually happening in other big cities across the country.

What’s happening is this: Thirty years of very meaningful social and economic progress in our cities — which has hugely benefited minorities — is being undone by a toxic coalition of professional ideologues and “organizers,” rich kids in Che t-shirts, well-coiffed Mayors, and a National Democratic Party that pretends that the ongoing destruction of minority owned businesses and the social and economic infrastructure that is a primary engine for raising African American and immigrant families into the middle class is somehow about “civil rights” or “racial inequality.”

It is not.

It is about a war on the American middle class being waged from above and below by people whose response to the values and the struggles of average American families is hostility and contempt — and who imagine that the threat of further violence is a crowbar they can use to get Donald Trump out of the White House. Sacrificing America’s cities on the altar of their political cause may seem bizarre, because that’s where so many of their voters live — but it’s not. Who else are urban liberals going to vote for?

Suburbanites can’t help but see the destruction of the cities as a harbinger of what could be next for them.

That's well and concisely put.  News reports every day bear out the truth of Mike's observations.  Consider, for example, the recent murder of a 5-year-old boy in North Carolina.

That sort of barbarism isn't new;  it's just becoming more widespread.  It's not confined to black-on-white crime, either - it's very much black-on-black as well.  In fact, the majority of such crimes are black-on-black, as the crime statistics from our major cities every week illustrate very clearly.

Remember Demetrius Griffin, Jr.?

That meme isn't inflammatory - it's the exact and literal truth.  Demetrius was burned alive.  His screams of agony must have been heart-rending... yet nobody in the surrounding area saw or heard a thing.  To this day, no witnesses have come forward, and his family is still waiting for closure.

Consider the fatalities from crime in every major US city so far this year.  Consider the race of the victims, and (where known) the race of the perpetrators.  Why isn't there many times greater an outcry against their pointless deaths than there is over the death of George Floyd?  The answer, of course, is that there's no political capital in their deaths to be exploited.

I've said many times that I'm neither Republican nor Democrat in my political sympathies.  I vote for the individual, not the party.  I'll vote for a good person who's a Democrat just as quickly as I'll vote for a Republican or an Independent or any other shade of political opinion, because I firmly believe you can't judge from the group to the individual.  There are good and bad Christians, good and bad Americans, good and bad Democrats, good and bad Republicans.  The label you apply to someone is almost meaningless.  What counts is their heart and soul, their conscience, the way they've lived their lives.

Nevertheless, there comes a time when the overwhelming preponderance of evidence forces one to confront reality.  I offer our big cities as an example.  See for yourself:

• Ballotpedia's "Party affiliation of the mayors of the 100 largest cities".
• Wallethub's list of the "Best- & Worst-Run Cities in America".
• Finally, "NeighborhoodScout’s Most Dangerous Cities – 2020".

None of those sources are partisan;  none of them have any political axe to grind about what they're reporting.  What's more, none of them have taken the most recent rioting and politically-inspired unrest into account, proving that the deterioration in urban security is both widespread and of long standing.  Recent events have merely speeded up the progression.

Correlation may not imply causation:  but when the correlation is that strong, it speaks volumes.

As for where this is going, I'll let Abe Greenwald sum things up.

If it wasn’t clear in late May and early June, it should be well understood by now that we are in the throes of a genuine revolution of the most extravagant sort. Like messianic revolutionaries of the past, the revolutionary mob of the 21st century is out to “remake the world.” Their compass is “no longer pointed at one thing.” It’s aimed in all directions at once. As Thomas Paine said approvingly of France in 1791, “it is the age of revolutions, in which everything may be looked for.” A mission so grandiose demands the most radical assault on the current order, and changing the world begins with changing one’s country. So it was in France in 1789, Russia in 1917, and China in 1949. And this is especially so if one’s country is seen as the seat of the present evil and is also the most powerful nation on the planet. This is, then, most fundamentally a revolution against the United States of America and all it stands for.

. . .

We tend not to recognize the revolution for what it is—first of all because it seems to lack a proper paramilitary element. Popular notions of insurgency involve images of AK-47s, organized bands of armed men, and the general flavor of war. But in truth, the current revolution has drifted much further into this territory than the media care to admit. The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), the anarchist territory formerly established in Seattle, boasted a provisional armed “security” force. Weeks after CHAZ was dismantled, Seattle police responding to a riot uncovered a cache of weapons including explosives, bear spray, spike strips, and Tasers. Antifa members not only routinely dress in similar black garb but have come to rely on a crude but dangerous arsenal of improvised fire bombs, fireworks, rocks, bricks, and frozen water bottles. In New York, three rioters were arrested for throwing Molotov cocktails at police vehicles. Revolutionaries in cities around the country have shown up to “protests” with rifles and assorted arms.

The revolution lacks martial discipline but not a body count. Three weeks in, some 20 people had been killed during riots alone. The number has climbed steadily since. Within the brief life of Seattle’s CHAZ, there were four shootings and two deaths. You can add to these the hundreds dead (overwhelmingly African-American) in major cities due to new policing restrictions. And this is to say nothing of the multitude of nonfatal injuries, including hundreds suffered by law enforcement. Among these is the likely permanent blinding of three federal agents in Portland whose eyes were targeted with high-power lasers.

. . .

Opposing the revolution will necessarily be a slower, more considered process than that which brought it into being. Revolutions are sparked into existence and take off at full gallop. They are born reckless and their nature doesn’t change. This is part of what makes them detestable to the civil-minded. Thus, putting down a revolution isn’t a matter of mirroring its recklessness from the opposite direction; it’s a sober process of reasserting prudence and order. The counterrevolution will not be won in the streets.

It will be accomplished, if it is to be accomplished, as Americans outside the revolution’s burning core come to grips with what it is; as its wreckage exceeds its justification; and as the gap between revolutionary claims and reality becomes too great to ignore.

There's more at the link.

All aspects of American society, every political party, our entire political, social and cultural framework, are threatened by this revolution.  It's up to us to stand firm against it, now, and at the ballot box in November.

Peter