Some 40 million Americans have lost their jobs. Thousands of businesses are bankrupt. It’s hot. The pools are closed. The parks are closed. The schools are closed. Churches are closed. Playing basketball can get you arrested. Hundreds of millions of Americans have been on home confinement with its attendant social and emotional isolation for months. Stress levels are at unimaginably high levels — a nation pushed to the breaking point by draconian lockdown policies and their economic consequences.
We have been predicting for weeks that this was a prescription for social chaos and we would see rioting in the streets of our major cities if this persisted.
The murder of a black man in Minnesota lit the fuse, and far-left Antifa agitators brought logistical support — but these are fundamentally the lockdown riots. A tragic but predictable consequence of throwing out everything we know about infectious disease and adopting an unprecedented policy of indefinite quarantine of the low-risk, healthy population — especially young and angry males.
Lockdowns have destroyed trillions of dollars of wealth, tens of millions of jobs, millions of businesses, and now the very social fabric of our country, with rioting and looting spreading in American cities. Businesses that only just recently opened — or were still preparing to open — after suffering forced closure have had bricks thrown through their windows and their facilities looted.
The media and the left intelligentisia stoked the panic and demanded lockdowns yet now take no responsibility for what they wrought – or blame Trump. -Steve Moore