Many cities in the United States are burning. Ostensibly they are burning because of an alleged incident of police brutality in Minniappolis, Minnasota which resulted in the death of a Black American called George Floyd who died after being allegedly brutalised by a police officer. The police officer has been arrested and is facing charges that would in the United Kingdom equate to manslaughter.

In the circumstances, it would be reasonable to expect that this incident would cause local protests in the city that the death of George Floyd occurred. But the riots, not protests but riots, that have occurred have spread to other cities and other states so quickly that it’s difficult to not consider whether or not there has been some organisation behind them? There have been lots of claims on social media that the far Left thugs of Antifa have played a big part in spreading and exacerbating disorder. How valid these claims are is difficult to say but President Trump has, after many years of conservatives pushing for this to happen, at last declared that the US government will designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organisation. This gives some credence to the idea that Antifa, who are the Left wing analogue of Hitler’s pre-war Brownshirts, have been involved at least to some extent in turning what should have been a peaceful protest about the death of a man at the hands of the police, into full scale civil disorder. My own view of Trump’s decision on Antifa is that he is correct, they’ve been a terroristic pain in the arse for decades. They’ve caused problems in Germany, Britain and most notably in the United States. Antifa have moved on from torching rubbish bins and breaking the windows of banks, as they did in Berkeley, California a few years back and have become full-on insurrectionists. They need and deserve to be treated as terrorists.

Without a doubt, based on what I’ve seen so far, the Far Left has been encouraging protests that quickly turn into riots and the moderate Left, in the form of Presidential candidate Joe Biden, has only recently condemned the rioting, something he should in my view have done as soon as the initial violence started.

The American Left have also created the conditions necessary for these riots to occur. For decades the American Left have encouraged a victim culture among Black Americans and encouraging Black Americans to see themselves as people with no agency who cannot get justice or fairness for themselves by following societies rules. The Left’s dominance of the US education system has also robbed Black Americans, especially in urban areas, of the sort of decent education necessary for individuals to rise out of poverty and succeed in life. The Left’s welfare system has created hundreds of thousands of unstable single parent families yet at the same time has failed to provide these families with the sort of social support that they need to overcome their inherent difficulties and has also failed to encourage Black American men to be responsible and stand by the children that they create.

Many, although not all, of the cities that have been afflicted by both police violence towards Black Americans and these recent disturbances are places that have been run by Democrats for years if not decades. These Democrats control and govern the police forces that are alleged to behave with brutality towards Black Americans on a regular basis. You would think wouldn’t you that with such political dominance these Democrat cities would have reformed their police forces, weeded out the racist and trigger happy officers and built confidence in them that both Black and White Americans could share? Unfortunately they did not. I suspect that allowing the bad apples, the racialist and brutalising police officers fitted in with the Left’s narrative of seeing Black Americans as victims, victims who would continually return Democrat Mayors, Governors and Congress representatives, in the vain hope that voting Democrat would make the lives of Black Americans better. In a way what the Democrats have done in America is similar to what the Labour Party did in the UK. Labour failed to make the lives of ordinary working class Britons better yet relied on rhetoric blaming others such as the Tories, to keep getting elected in seats by the very working class electorate who was suffering from Labour policies and Labour mismanagement in both local and national government. Thankfully this tactic may have failed in the UK as millions of once staunch Labour voters decided that Labour wasn’t representing their interests and instead bit the bullet and voted Tory.

Maybe it is just such a change that needs to occur in the United States? It’s pretty obvious even to this observer thousands of miles away, that the Democrats have played a large part in the failure to make Martin Luther King’s dream of a land where people were judged by the content of their character not the colour of their skin, a reality. The Left in the USA has failed to treat Black Americans as individuals and instead has treated them as a bloc vote and also with contempt. Some evidence of that contempt for Black Americans recently came from the mouth of Joe Biden when he told an interviewer that ‘you ain’t black’ unless you are a Democrat.

Whilst I admit that many Black Americans have been very hard done by, you only need to look at America’s crime, violence and poverty figures to see evidence of that, they have been hard done by not by ‘White Supremacists’ or ‘White Racists’ but by the Left who have failed to reform police forces, failed to provide decent education, failed to encourage family stability and failed to provide the conditions where the economy in Black areas could grow and thrive. Black Americans have become a captive market for the Left and the only group that has benefited from this situation are leftist political leaders.

For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that the American Left from the street level, through academia and in the higher levels of politics itself, makes about Donald Trump, I believe that these riots rather than damaging Mr Trump, may aid him. Riots have a tendency to make those who don’t riot more right wing because ordinary people, you know the ones who work hard, do the right things and have aspirations for their children, get scared of what they see when rampaging mobs occur.

Such people are likely to vote not for the politicians who make excuses for riots, as we’ve seen on numerous occasions in the past few years when US cities have gone up in flames, but for those politicians who promise to restore order and justice. If the Left think that turning American cities into flaming torches will aid their cause then they should think again. Even if the disruption does cause Mr Trump to lose in November and be replaced by Joe Biden, something I think is increasingly unlikely, it’s possible that the damage that Biden would do to America could cause ordinary Americans to reach for some sort of strongman in desperation either at the 2024 election or by individual states choosing local demagogues. The sort of street violence that we’ve seen recently never brings anything good. It never brings proper change or justice. America could end up with a leader far far worse than Mr Trump after 2024 if the Democrats win in 2020.

When the flames die down the situation for the areas in which the violence has occurred will find themselves in a worse position than before. The areas afflicted will be economically devastated, less cohesive and more poverty stricken than they were before. Those ordinary Black Americans who are mistakenly supporting these protests and by extension the riots, could find themselves the losers whilst the instigators of the disorder, the leftist activists, the rabble rousers and the academic left, will be still sitting pretty on the ashes of a pyre that they lit but which will not burn them.

The violence needs to stop, the exploitation of tragedies such as that of George Floyd need to stop and calm needs to prevail.