"What about the “harms” of destroying other people’s property or bashing in their heads with a skateboard?"

Roger Kimball writes in Epoch Times,

...Many of the thugs looting and destroying property are white. So what we are witnessing is not a battle between black and white. It is a battle between the forces of civilization, on the one hand, and the forces of anarchy, on the other.

...It is curious that the most egregious scenes of violence are taking place in blue states in cities run by left-wing mayors. Many of the mayors and chiefs of police are themselves black. In many locales, the police have been told to stand down as the mob rampages. The mayor of Minneapolis blamed “white supremacists” and “outsiders” for the violence.

Unfortunately for that assertion, there are no white supremacists to be found, only members of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and kindred groups. An analysis of the zip codes of those arrested shows that they are overwhelmingly from the Minneapolis area.

Meanwhile, various celebrities are encouraging lawlessness by cheering on the malefactors, publicly promising to post bail for them.

Justin Timberlake, to take but one example, encouraged his fans to join him “in supporting the Minneapolis protestors” by donating to a “freedom fund” to combat “the harms of incarceration.”

What about the “harms” of destroying other people’s property or bashing in their heads with a skateboard? Ultimately, as Calvin Coolidge observed, “property rights and personal rights are the same thing.”

...There is some macabre irony in the fact that while most of the country is “locked down” by the diktats of the health police, enforced by power-mad governors and those aspiring to power in city councils and mayors’ offices throughout the country, abetted by virtue signaling sheep who scream at their neighbors if they get within six feet of them or appear in public without a mask, thousands of vicious criminals are given leave to loot and burn and pillage. The rules about “social distancing” are suspended so long as people are bent not upon making their living but destroying the livings of others.

...Many if not most of the violent hooligans defacing our cities today are young beneficiaries of the richest and most generous society the world has ever seen. At school, they were taught to despise their country as racist, sexist, colonialist, and exploitative, attitudes that were reinforced in college and from the megaphones of the media, Hollywood, and our elite universities. How thin is the line between civilization and violent anarchy!

Read more here.