My memes from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram yesterday:

“Juneteenth”: A holiday to celebrate the end of slavery for blacks as we now impose socialism–slavery for all.

Resist.
Just resist.
They feed off validation. And intimidation.
Resisting will make them INSANE.

DEFUND THE SCHOOLS.
Forcing people to finance collectivist, racist propaganda is NOT a Constitutional right.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

For the past year, liberals unleashed on the nation an avalanche of ideological nonsense, coupled with brutal pressure to conform. Those who bucked the party line found themselves canceled and unpersoned and had their opinions subjected to mockery and claims of delusion and “anti-science” prejudices.

Until now. Because the tide is turning. And sometimes the break from the party line comes from surprising places. 

Late-night comics are usually reliable parroters of the message of the day. So it says something that last week, Bill Maher launched an impassioned critique of “woke” culture, while this week, Jon Stewart went on Stephen Colbert’s show to say in no uncertain terms that it looks like the Wuhan coronavirus came from . . . the Wuhan lab.

Using a term from Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, Maher accused liberals of “progressophobia” — “a brain disorder that strikes liberals and makes them incapable of recognizing progress.”

That is, they’re unwilling to admit that things have gotten better. To hear them talk about race, you’d think we were still in the era of Selma and Bull Connor. (My dad marched with Freedom Riders and at Selma; trust me, things have changed.) To hear them talk about women’s rights, you’d think it was still 1958. And gay activists, despite “Pride Month” being celebrated by pretty much every corporation, are still somehow stuck in the pre-Stonewall era.

Maher’s right.

The HBO satirist also slammed President Joe Biden’s free-college plan, characterizing higher education as “a racket,” which it is. “I know free college is a left-wing thing, but is it really liberal for someone who doesn’t go to college and makes less money to pay for people who do go and make more? Especially since colleges have turned into giant luxury daycare centers with overpaid babysitters anxious to indulge every student whim?”

Stewart went further. To Colbert’s horror, he targeted the Wuhan virus’ likely origins in the Wuhan virology lab. Observed Stewart: “I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science. Science has, in many ways, helped ease the suffering of this pandemic . . . which was more than likely caused by science.”

He noted the coincidence: “‘Oh my God, there’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China! What do we do?’ ‘Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab.’”

And he mocked the Chinese response: “And then they ask those scientists, ‘So wait a minute, you work at the Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. How did this happen?’ And they’re like, ‘Hmmm, a pangolin kissed a turtle? . . . Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey, and then it sneezed into my chili, and now we all have coronavirus!’”

AOC praises mayoral contender Maya Wiley, touts her left-wing cred in new ad

All of this makes sense, and there have been people trying to point it out for more than a year. But until a few weeks ago, those people were mostly called kooks and silenced by Big Tech oligarchs. But now the truth is leaking out on Colbert’s show, one of the cathedrals of the woke.

It isn’t just late-night comics who are pushing back. It’s also local politicians and ordinary people. After a year of bullying, they’ve had enough.

The death of George Floyd has been used to push a vast array of unrelated racial policies, including the defunding of police and the teaching of left-wing critical race theory that blames every ill in society — even violence by blacks against other minorities — on “white supremacy.”

In Baltimore, defunding police has led to an outright tax revolt among businesses, which see no reason to pay good money to a city that doesn’t consider them worthy of protection. Businesses in the historic Fells Point district have written the city, demanding the return of basic services like law enforcement and trash pickup before they pay any more taxes. 

Meanwhile, at famed Thomas Jefferson High in Fairfax County, Va., a slate of parents opposed to critical race theory won election to the board. One of those candidates, Harry Jackson, the first black man elected to the board, denounced how CRT is “teaching that white people are inherently racist.” Yes. 

Fight the power. It’s easier than you think.

Glenn H. Reynolds

This week, a video from a San Francisco Walgreens went viral on Twitter. The video depicted a man standing next to his bicycle, loading up a garbage bag with products. The man then rides his bicycle down the aisle, past a security guard, who limply throws out a hand to try to grab the bag; the shoplifter simply brushes past him, then rides out the door.

This sort of thing has become exceedingly common in San Francisco. In late May, Thomas Fuller wrote in The New York Times, “At a board of supervisors hearing last week, representatives from Walgreens said that thefts at its stores in San Francisco were four times the chain’s national average, and that it had closed 17 stores, largely because the scale of thefts had made business untenable.” Employees at Walgreens had been told to stand aside as shoplifting took place because security officers had been assaulted repeatedly.

All of this is the result of a 2014 California ballot measure that reclassified nonviolent theft as a misdemeanor, so long as the thief took less than $950 worth of material. Thieves quickly hit on a strategy: Hit up different stores for less than $950 worth of stuff. Then, amid the Black Lives Matter protests and riots of 2020, San Francisco decided to crack down on the police. Mayor London Breed announced that booking photos would no longer be released, lest the prevalence of Black and brown faces lead to stereotyping; she announced a $120 million cut to the police and sheriff’s department over the next two years, in the interest of “prioritizing investments in the African American community”; in the first six months of 2020, 23 officers resigned from the force.

Property crime has skyrocketed. It’s not just shoplifting: burglaries increased nearly 50% year-on-year in 2020, and car theft jumped 34%. Meanwhile, the streets are littered with garbage, and have been for years thanks to lax law enforcement. In 2018, a survey of 153 blocks in downtown San Francisco showed trash on every block, 41 blocks “dotted with needles” and 96 blocks with open human feces.

This form of governance has become all too common. Los Angeles, my former hometown, has steadily declined in terms of livability. Suburban areas have been inundated with homeless vagrants, often openly shooting up, while the police have been directed to do nothing; Venice Beach has become an enormous open-air homeless encampment. Seattle has morphed from the Emerald City into a refuge for those living on the street, regardless of the risks to other citizens.

There is a reason why Americans are fleeing America’s major cities. The problem predated COVID-19, and it will post-date it, too. Americans like having a Walgreens in their neighborhoods. They enjoy being able to walk down the sidewalk without severely mentally ill homeless people — who should be in institutions where they can receive actual care — urinating on curbs. They should not have to instruct their children to hop over used needles on street corners.

Yet the governance of “compassion” continues. So does the migration away from such foolhardy policy. The top outbound states in America, according to North American Moving Services, were all deep blue: Illinois, New York, California, New Jersey and Maryland. The top inbound states were all red or purple: Idaho, Arizona, South Carolina, Tennessee and North Carolina.

At some point, there will be no more Walgreens in San Francisco. Then we will undoubtedly hear about how this is the product of systemic racism and white privilege; we will hear tell of the brutality of American capitalism. The truth is far simpler: Where Leftist governance reigns, criminality thrives. And where criminality thrives, Americans flee.

Ben Shapiro