Last October, Minneapolis Police Union president Bob Kroll appeared at a Trump rally. Clad in his red “Cops for Trump” T-shirt, Kroll (who has been alleged to be affiliated with white supremacists) gloated that the president had unshackled his officers from the restraints imposed by Trump’s predecessor. “The Obama administration and the handcuffing and oppression of police was despicable,” he told the crowd. “The first thing President Trump did when he took office was turn that around, got rid of the Holder-Loretta Lynch regime and decided to start takin— letting the cops do their job, put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.”

We will never know if that unshackling emboldened Derek Chauvin to murder George Floyd.

Before it was anything else, the neoconservative movement was a theory of the urban crisis. As a reaction to the urban riots of the 1960s, it put an ideological and social-scientific veneer on a doctrine that called for overwhelming force against minor infractions — a doctrine that is still with us today, as people are killed for walking down the street in Ferguson and allegedly selling single cigarettes in New York. But neoconservatives also sought, rather successfully, to position liberalism itself as the cause of the urban crisis, solvable only through the reassertion of order through the market and the police.

In Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, as in many other big cities, the gap between liberal mayors and police officers has become especially pronounced.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells @ NewYorker.com, May 29

I lived in Baltimore during the Freddie Gray protests in April, 2015. My apartment was in a brownstone next to a small park in a pretty neighborhood called Bolton Hill, which sits on the border between downtown and the West Baltimore neighborhoods where the upheaval was centered. A central image of those riots was a burning CVS at Pennsylvania and North Avenues; that store was about ten blocks from my house [....]

Eventually, I decided to write about the uprising, and met a senior figure in the Baltimore Police Department named Melvin Russell. He is as vivid in my memory as anyone I’ve written about, perhaps because it is rare to see a powerful person be so hugely sad [....]

A whole generation of Democratic mayors have seen their reputations defined by their inability to manage the aftermath of police killings: Rawlings-Blake in Baltimore, Rahm Emanuel in Chicago, Bill de Blasio in New York, Pete Buttigieg in South Bend. (Political pundits often wonder why the “bench” of Democratic Presidential candidates is so thin; looking at that list, it doesn’t seem like such a mystery to me.) One reaction, in some of the most progressive cities, has been to elect new leaders who champion activist causes, especially reform-minded prosecutors: Larry Krasner in Philadelphia; Kim Foxx in Cook County, Illinois; Rachael Rollins in Suffolk County, Massachusetts; Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. This, in turn, has kicked up so much resistance from law enforcement that, in many cases, reforms have been smothered, in a more pitted battle between progressive elected officials and the rank-and-file cops whose behavior they seek to change [....]

The campaign to remove Michael Moore’s new documentary from the Internet – led by Moore’s erstwhile progressive “allies” – is a significant advance in the censorship revolution.

As a teen in the early 2000s, I spent a lot of time on online message boards. They were funny, chaotic places where my fellow nerds and I spent hours arguing about everything under the sun: sports, music, video games, the latest episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

No matter the topic, there was one universal experience: On every board, some divisive issue would inevitably erupt into conflict, and an angry group of users — often led by a single, vocal one who felt they were being treated unfairly — would lead a rebellion against the “mods,” the moderators who had the privileges to delete posts, ban unruly users, and set the rules of the board.

Sometimes, the mods quelled the fight or struck a compromise, and brought the board back into harmony. Other times, the angry users broke off and started their own forum, or the board simply became so intolerable that everyone left.