“It doesn’t matter who we are, what matters is our plan.”
—Bane, “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012)
Have you noticed what’s happening in Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Baltimore, New York, and so many other cities around the country run by Democrats?
Just a few months ago, America enjoyed one of the longest spells of low violent crime rates in our history. Nearly every major city (other than Chicago) had seen violent crime steadily drop from its historic, terrible high in the mid-1990s. By 2018 (the last year for which full violent crime statistics are available) violent crime—murder, assault, rape, muggings—had dropped about 71 percent from the bad old days.
America had defeated Islamic fascism and tamed violent crime, while the rising tide of a historically strong economy was lifting all boats. Full employment had finally reached all sectors and all demographic groups. America was at peace heading into a pivotal election year.
All of that is gone now. Perhaps peace has cost us our strength and victory has defeated us?
Portland, Oregon has endured nearly 80 straight days of riots. Seattle gave up a vital slice of its downtown to Communist insurgents, offshoots of the villainous ideology that has racked up the world’s highest body count. Chicago has become a war zone. Murder, mayhem, and revolution abound.
At the beginning of 2020, New York could still claim to be one of the safest large cities in the world. But now the NYPD says the city that never sleeps never stops bleeding:.
Between June 1 and June 30, there was a 130% increase in the number of shooting incidents across the city (205 v. 89) as the number of shootings rose in every borough of New York. The number of people murdered citywide increased to 39 v. 30, (+ 30%) for the month, while the number of burglaries increased to 1,783 v. 817 (+118%) and the number of auto thefts increased to 696 v. 462 (+51%) citywide.
This has been a strange year, with the coronavirus outbreak and the rolling business shutdowns and personal lockdowns. But that alone doesn’t explain the spike in violent crime. In fact, non-violent crime overall is down just about everywhere across America. It’s mainly the crimes that end in bullets, blades, and blood that are spiking so sharply.
Why? And why does so much of the violence—most conspicuously, the Portland riots and Antifa’s rolling attacks on the local and federal courthouse—seem politically motivated?
Because it serves a political agenda.
That’s not to say that every criminal out there is a field operative for some political campaign. But the chaos enabling these criminals to prey on Americans and attack our institutions, in an election year that started out in peace, is very much part of a political campaign. Bane, the fictional villain from the Batman universe, has risen from the darkness and stands atop the 2020 ballot. He has a D after his name.
In Christopher Nolan’s 2012 film, “The Dark Knight Rises,” Bane the mercenary revolutionary emerges from the shadows after Gotham City has been at peace for eight years with a clear agenda: Destroy Gotham. He cannot abide seeing Gotham thrive.
A master of psychology and deception, Bane does not just ride into town with an army of evil henchmen. He does do that, and he even robs Gotham’s Wall Street, but mere financial gain is not his motive. He wants to turn Gotham inside out so that it devours itself, discrediting everything Gotham once stood for in the process.
Bane cloaks himself in the enticing language of social justice: “We come here not as conquerors but as liberators, to return control of this city to the people.”
He says this after commandeering a football stadium full of terrified citizens he is “liberating” from their freedom, after he has already murdered the mayor: one noble-sounding sentence in a paragraph of threats. He intends to liberate nothing, and destroy everything. He knows the language of social justice will fool enough gullible people long enough to keep them from stopping him.
Social justice language is powerful because it tugs at our human desire for fairness. It’s also a terrible lie. Selina Kyle—Catwoman—is initially won over by Bane’s tricks. At a lavish Wayne Manor party at the beginning of the film, Kyle tells billionaire Bruce Wayne whose side she is on. “There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne,” she says seductively. “You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”
Kyle could have been a speechwriter for the Democratic Party. So could Bane. They both sound like a pastiche of Antifa, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and socialist Bernie Sanders, who lost the Democratic primary battle but has won the ideological war for the party’s soul.
Bane at least had opponents in the Gotham government, and a superhero opponent who saw through him. The trained Marxists who run the Black Lives Matter organization, and the Portland rioters who are shining industrial lasers into police officers’ eyes—blinding some of them—and setting strategic fires to the symbols of jurisprudence, and “liberating” citizens of their private property and jobs—do not.
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler marched with rioters. He ordered police to pull back, giving space to the chaos. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan called the little Communist hamlet in her city a “summer of love” until the riot turned up on her lawn. They still count Oregon Governor Kate Brown and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio as their allies.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) describes federal protective service officers sent to restore some order as “stormtroopers.” Joe Biden has hinted he supports defunding police even while the bodies pile up in deep blue cities. The Democratic Party owns the riots and chaos because, like Bane, they believe the violence will destroy what they hate the most: free America under President Donald Trump.
The Democrats’ rioters also have the New York Times, with its heinous “1619 Project” and its pseudohistory providing ideological leadership. When the New York Post argued that they should be called “the 1619 riots,” the author of the “1619 Project,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, beamed with pride on Twitter. She ripped off her mask in that tweet, exposing the fact that she simply despises America and deliberately twisted history to achieve her political ends. Which are the same as Bane’s ends in “The Dark Knight Rises”: chaos and destruction.
The riots have claimed nearly 30 lives, most of them black, and done billions of dollars in damage so far. They have torn apart a nation that the Left hates and always has.
Why?
Because America’s success discredits collectivism and Communism. Because America stands in the way of the Left’s misguided sense of its morality and self-importance. Because America’s success is the Left’s ultimate failure.
Bane couldn’t stand to see Gotham at peace. Neither can Democrats abide America at peace, without them in control. They stand with Bane and violence and have exalted that spiritto head their party in 2020.
To paraphrase Bane, they will destroy America, then when it is done and the USA is ashes, we will have permission to die.