#The perilous sanitization of looting and other commentary

In June, several NYC stores in Soho were looted under the cover of Black Lives Matters protests.
for the NY POST

Culture critic: The Perilous Sanitization of Looting

“Until recently, looting was seen as a symptom of community decay” and “condemned as sickening anti-social behavior,” laments Frank Furedi at Spiked. He has “vivid memories of the outburst of violence that accompanied the 1956 Hungarian Revolution,” when he was 9. “I saw shopfronts where the glass had been blown away by gun- and tank-fire. Yet nobody thought of helping themselves to the easily accessible goods” inside — proving “poverty and oppression do not turn people into looters.” Today, “the idealization of looting fosters a climate that cultivates people’s worst instincts.”

Media watch: Activists Distort Portland Reporting

“ ‘YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM!’ is a cry you hear incessantly” at Portland protests, “shouted at close range to your face by after-dark demonstrators,” recounts Nancy Rommelmann at Reason. It’s how activists “shape the narrative,” which, “after many weeks covering street clashes in a city where I lived for 15 years,” is “90 percent bulls - - t.” Reporters “not sufficiently sympathetic to the cause” are “followed, harassed” and have their phones stolen. Meanwhile, media recycle footage of a “group in league with the activists,” showing “mostly innocent protesters being harassed and beaten by police.” Less “prominently” featured are activists “menacing and setting fires to police stations and other institutions.” The result: coverage that’s “predictably distorted and dangerous.”

Riot journal: The Fallout in Kenosha

“Large swaths” of Kenosha, Wis., “are indistinguishable from a war zone,” reports The (London) Times’ Josh Glancy on Twitter. “The destruction in places is total, the locals dazed, shocked and trying to be brave.” The “beating heart of the city’s black community” uptown was the “worst hit” after rioting following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, with countless buildings — “shops, nail salons, faith missions” — now “smoldering husks.” At a car dealership, “you could still taste the smoke,” its lot filled with burned-out vehicles. “Pretty much every boarded-up shop has a mural or painting on it,” some with “plaintive requests to prospective fire starters: ‘Kids live upstairs.’ ”

Progressive: Xi’s Fatal Urge To Purge

“History, especially Chinese history, is full of examples of omnipotent rulers whose unchecked behavior led to disaster,” writes Simon Tisdale at The Guardian, and “comrade-emperor” Xi Jinping “is a modern-day case in point.” His “authoritarian, expansionist policies” have landed “China in a ring of fire,” all its “borderlands ablaze with conflict and confrontation.” Even with the pandemic further sinking Beijing’s global reputation, Xi is “doubling down” on “indefinite one-man rule and ideological conformity” — with rumored plans to “declare himself ‘Chairman Xi.’ ” Last week, he ordered renewed crackdowns in Tibet — where past “crimes against humanity” were the template for current oppression in Xinjiang. Facing unrest from Mongolia to Hong Kong, Xi nonetheless is “steadily increasing military pressure on” Taiwan. Yet “there’s nobody to stop him, nobody to say ‘no.’ ”

From the left: ‘Confirmed,’ My Behind

Remember when CNN and MSNBC breathlessly reported Donald Trump Jr. had advance access to a WikiLeaks tranche of Democratic Party emails — only to have the story fall apart spectacularly? The episode, charges The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, is a striking example of a “highly corrosive tactic”: the claim of supposed “independent confirmation” when a story is anything but confirmed. That same technique is “driving the supremely dumb but all-consuming news cycle centered on whether President Trump, as first reported by The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, made disparaging comments about The Troops.” AP and Fox News claim to have “ ‘confirmed’ the Atlantic story. But if one looks at what they actually did . . . it is the opposite of what that word . . . should mean.” Both outlets cited unnamed senior officials, meaning “all that likely happened is that the same sources who claimed to Jeffrey Goldberg, with no evidence, that Trump said this went to other outlets and repeated the same claims — the same tactic that enabled MSNBC and CBS to claim they had ‘confirmed’ the fundamentally false CNN story about Trump Jr.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board