Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

If Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender didn’t exist, Portlandia would have had to invent her. After a degree from UC Berkeley, Bender worked for a New York City bike lobby, then did a stint in San Francisco, before she went back to Minneapolis to work for Minnesota’s DOT on bike lanes while running the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition whose burning passion was putting bike lanes everywhere. Militant bike activists are the dumbest and most loathed figures in urban civics. No group of people is as entitled, obnoxious, or clueless as a bunch of white hipsters in lycra shorts out to convince city officials that giving them more bike lanes will end wars, eliminate racism, and save the planet. There was only one possible career pathway for Bender in Minneapolis. Urban planning through politics as a DFLer. Once in office, Bender began transforming entire streets into bike lanes. The plan was to have 60% of the residents of Minneapolis using bikes, walking, or taking the bus by 2...

"We're All In This Together," the sappy title of one of several bad songs, has become the Ministry of Information slogan of the pandemic. You hear it while shopping for groceries at the supermarket, see it on billboards that tell you to social distance your way off the street, and in every single ad on TV. And then, after months of being locked indoors and that we were out to kill grandma if we left the house, the same media lauded massive numbers of rioters crowding together to curse the cops. The political fiction of the pandemic died once its administrators found a shiny new fascist object. Mayor Bill de Blasio went from threatening the Orthodox Jewish community for holding a funeral to appearing without a mask at an anti-police rally even as much of New York City is still shut down. "Mr. Mayor, are we in a pandemic or not? And do we have one set of rules for protesters and another for everyone else?" Hamodia, an Orthodox Jewish publication, asked...

The NFL is testing face masks, not for the fans in the stands, but for the players. Is there a face mask in the world that will stop virus particles from being inhaled when the players are inches apart and slamming into each other at high speeds? Probably not. But masks have become a cultural symbol. That’s why masks are being deployed in environments where they’re ridiculous and useless. A strip club in Wyoming reopened with mandatory masks. At restaurants in Atlanta, waiters wear face masks. Both are equally silly. Non-medical masks might stop large droplets, but won’t stop small ones. People interacting at close range will be producing small droplets that a cloth mask won’t stop. When everyone is inches away from each other, talking and exchanging money, the masks are just a fetish. What a mask says is more important than what it does. That's why it's the symbol of the rioters who flock in hundreds and thousands, screaming and yelling, while wearing masks to cover thei...

New York City released over 2,650 criminals from prison to protect them from the pandemic. But they didn’t stay home or wash their hands. They went back to their old jobs and 100 of them accounted for 190 arrests for crimes like burglary and robbery. A rapist was released and he went back to raping. One of the freed criminals was responsible for 18 burglaries at closed eateries. And when he was arrested, the end of bail meant that he was set loose. This looting was going on long before the riots. Now as the rioters and looters rule the streets of Manhattan, when the police manage to arrest them, they have to quickly let them go. "When it comes to a burglary, a commercial store, which is looting, they’re back out," Chief Terrence Monahan said. "Because of bail reform, you’re back out on the street the next day. You cannot be held on any sort of bail." Of the 650 thugs arrested, almost all will be released back on the street to riot and loot again. Los...

This is a classic that I wrote back in 2013 when New York voters first elected Warren Wilhelm Jr. To be fair to the lazy Marxist, he exceeded my expectations in that he didn't burn down New York City until his time in office was ending. And Islamic terrorists didn't manage to pull off a major attack. Beyond that, it's looking a lot like De Blasio time.  Do you miss the old New York City? Remember when subway trains were covered in graffiti, a news hour began with six shootings and everyone who lived in the city had been mugged at least once? Remember when Times Square had more strip clubs than theaters and when you could afford an apartment in the village because it was a drug infested mess? Remember when the city and everyone living in it were on the verge of bankruptcy and the only people who had money lived upstate or in a small cluster of Manhattan? Remember when everything was grimy and had a layer of filth, when people moved to the city because they wante...

The assault on St. John’s Episcopal Church by radicals and racists was the ugliest moment of the D.C. riots. Not only was the famous 204-year-old church, which every president since Madison has attended, sprayed with graffiti, but some of the thugs even tried to burn it down by starting a fire in its basement. The attack and President Trump's subsequent visit to the 'Church of Presidents’ captured the attention of a nation. But what happened to St. John's was not an aberration. The Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots have been associated with attacks on churches and synagogues across the United States. The victims of New York City’s leftist riots included St. Patrick’s Cathedral as the venerable 142-year-old building was defaced with obscenities and the three letters BLM for Black Lives Matter, along with “George Floyd” and “No Justice, No Peace”. In Richmond, Virginia, Beth Ahabah, a 225-year-old Reform Jewish congregation, had the windows in its grand 116-year-o...

After the end of Shavuot, the holiday in which Jewish people joyfully commemorate the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, the Jewish community of Los Angeles concluded it by the new ritual of going to clean off the hateful graffiti from their houses of worship while picking up the broken glass from the black nationalist and radical leftist night of broken glass in Los Angeles. One small business owner described a "late Saturday night with people driving down the Fairfax district streets screaming, 'effing Jews'". At the latest count, at least 5 synagogues in the area were vandalized, as were three Jewish schools. One would think that the hateful vandalism of 8 Jewish institutions and a mob screaming slurs after trashing Jewish businesses would lead to some sort of meaningful response. But that would be the optimistic perspective of people who haven't experienced the unmitigated level of cowardice and appeasement that comprises Jewish institut...

America's political system is coming apart. Cities are once again burning because of the plight of what an older class of liberals used to call the underclass. They don't use that term anymore, and not just because lefties have to refresh their terminology to keep the educated class they have wrapped around their media outlets from realizing that the ideology they treat as progressive is older than the telegraph, but because the underclass consists of ghetto kids making nothing and NBA players. When the star of an HBO series is out there protesting on the front lines, when the sons and daughters of millionaires go to war with cops who couldn't afford to buy their shoes with a week's salary, when Black Lives Matter, an organization backed by the Ford Foundation, one of the country's wealthiest institutions, organizes the burning and looting of family shops, the underclass is a laughable term. The uber-underclass acts as if social mobility doesn't exist when i...

Race riots usually begin with criminality and end with criminality. They're protests by criminals on behalf of a dead criminal. The stores with smashed windows aren't a means of expressing outrage, but the end. The purpose of criminality is criminality. The police exist so that stores can remain unrobbed and random pedestrians can remain unbeaten. The protests express opposition to that policy by robbing stores and assaulting random people. Riots and looting are not a distraction from the protests. They are the essential point of the protests and the radical movement that they represent. The police were never the problem. The looters and rioters were. The riots drawn in the disaffected upper middle class ideological white and black youth and lower class non-ideological black youth. Neither the middle class leftist nor the lower-class rioter is invested in his society. The former are globalists, and the latter are outsiders. Neither are invested in the city and country...

The angry rioter is a sacred figure in the progressive pantheon of social justice. But the saint of the looted convenience store is as mythical a figure as the selfless community organizer. The race riot isn’t a bubbling stew of outrage out of which wounded souls emerge to cry out for justice. It’s a complicated criminal conspiracy in which the perpetrators rarely suffer any consequences. Here’s how a race riot is actually put together. 3. Riots aren’t fed by outrage, but by opportunism The rioters aren’t outraged, they’re usually bored young men, frustrated and lacking in empathy. Many of them have gang ties or a criminal record stretching back to kindergarten. They’re the same people who commit crimes in any other non-outraged context. The rest are there to get some attention while providing them with protective coloration. 9 out of 10 people screaming frenziedly while holding up “Black Lives Matter” signs would eagerly scream and hold up “Tiger King 4 President” or “...