#De Blasio fiddles while NYC burns and other commentary

Mayor Bill de Blasio helped to paint “Black Lives Matter” on 5th Avenue in front of Trump Tower.
Gregory P. Mango

“New Yorkers sense the city, already reeling from the virus and the economic effects of the lockdown, is sinking into lawlessness,” warns National Review’s Kyle Smith. Since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, “angry mobs” have taken to the streets and, as a result of this sort of lawlessness, homicides, burglaries and shootings are all up significantly. And yet Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “answer has been not to make amends with the police but to send crime counselors out into the street to advise people not to do bad things.” As his term peters out, expect Hizzoner to “continue to antagonize the cops.” The rest of us will have “to deal with the fallout.”

Culture critic: The Theory Behind Woke

A “curious new vocabulary began to unspool itself in our media” a few years ago, observes Andrew Sullivan on his blog, with “all the appearance of a top-down re-ordering of language, rather than a slow, organic evolution from below.” Terms such as “non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining” came “out of nowhere to reach sudden new heights.” They’re the product of critical theory and its “applied” version, social justice. Forget diversity of ideas: “What matters is a diversity of identities that can all express the same idea: that liberalism is a con-job.” That’s why every New York Times op-ed now “reads exactly alike.” Liberalism, with its “non-zero-sum pluralism,” is a threat to “wokeness,” because it shows progress is “possible in a liberal democracy.”

Iconoclast: Misunderstanding Our Wild Ancestors

Left and right are raging over the historic figures we honor, yet the oft-violent debate “leaves out an essential factor — the sheer weirdness of the New World,” Michael Lind contends at Tablet. To wit, “we in the countries of the Western Hemisphere, North and South, are living in the ruins of various ambitious projects undertaken by long-dead people, many of whom were bats - - t crazy.” Take Christopher Columbus, a figure reviled for committing atrocities that were common to his age — and were committed by Columbus’ Native-American victims, too. No, “what makes Columbus memorable is not his all-too-common brutality but his epic confusion. Euro-American civilization began with a mistake.” The explorer, after all, “went to his grave stubbornly believing that the Americas were islands near Japan and China, like Taiwan or the Philippines.” Our past is full of wild visionaries like him, from the Puritans to positivists, which suggests “the future may believe we were bats - - t crazy, too.”

Student: Don’t Blame SHSAT for School Failures

At Gotham Gazette, Amir Davis, a 2020 African-American graduate of Brooklyn Tech HS, is troubled by the “misguided arguments” against the Specialized High School Admissions Test, which is used to screen enrollment into schools like his. Though “disheartened” by these schools’ lack of “racial diversity,” Davis blames elementary and middle schools, rather than the test itself, for not giving kids “adequate tools to succeed.” Indeed, some kids don’t even have “simple multiplication and division skills.” Meanwhile, officials like Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Richard Carranza ignore “the drastic consequences of abolishing the test” and are pushing for a far more unfair system. They need to stop using it “as a scapegoat” for their own “inadequacies in providing a strong education to elementary and middle-school students.”

From the left: Screw Kansas

“In 2016,” Matt Taibbi recalls at his blog, “it was clear only a few people in the lefty media world understood what [President] Trump was up to, and why he was a real threat to win.” The few exceptions included “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” author Thomas Frank, whose books blamed the left for abandoning the white working class. Yet “Frank seemed to be put into deep-freeze . . . largely, I think, because he was telling a truth no one wanted to hear about the difference between the way the New York Times saw America, and how, say, Iowans or Nebraskans saw it. Trump, meanwhile, constructed his argument for the presidency atop that difference.” Warning to liberals: Trump is still doing the same today.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board