But by emphasizing certain distorted facts and hiding others, our media transformed that event into a symbolic flashpoint and thereby ignited a political and cultural revolution that swept across America and much of the Western world.

As a result, we experienced the greatest wave of urban unrest since the late 1960s, with massive protests, rioting, and looting across many dozens of our major cities. Even as our homicide rates showed the sharpest one year rise in history, vocal portions of our political elites responded to this crisis by demanding that our urban police forces be "defunded."

Meanwhile, acts of racial recompense, symbolic or otherwise, became the center of our politics. Although President Donald Trump was widely portrayed as an extreme, nearly fascistic rightwinger by his media and political opponents, his 2020 reelection campaign emphasized elevating Juneteenth as another national black holiday overshadowing the Fourth of July and offering a $500 billion Platinum Plan of financial benefits to blacks, while he even accepted replacing Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on our currency, all proposals that would have been dismissed as ultra-leftist lunacy just a few years earlier.