Democrat nominee Joe Biden is tragically suffering a mental eclipse and sliding away at a geometric rate. Understandably, his handlers have kept him out of sight. He stays off the campaign trail on the pretext of the virus and his age-related susceptibility to COVID-19 morbidity. In the chaos of July, Biden’s handlers have been acclaimed geniuses for anesthetizing him. But in the different season of October, he may finally be forced out from his lockdown, in the wild manner that soon-to-be looters and arsonists at last emerged from quarantine in June — pent-up, angry, incoherent, and self-destructive.

New York has had its share of corrupt and incompetent mayors, but never has it had both of those and also a lazy bum. These are extraordinary times and there is a real risk de Blasio is digging the city’s grave. With mobs assaulting the foundations of our republic and terrifying otherwise-sensible people into silence or assent, the police are declared Public Enemy No. 1 — and de Blasio joins the Amen corner. He no longer defends the NYPD, and one by one, the anti-crime programs that made New York miraculously safe are being thrown out with the trash. The collapse is happening under the worst mayor ever.

Everything about the Tuesday press conference with Democrat Joe Biden underlines how the snarling, vicious watchdogs of the Trump administration will transform into cuddly little lapdogs if Biden is elected president. Biden began with a 20-minute speech, and CNN and MSNBC ran the whole speech live. These networks often refuse to air White House press briefings and try not to give free air time to President Donald Trump. The elite media pretend it's preposterous that there's a vast difference between their treatment of Republicans and Democrats. They need to watch this puffball press conference again.

What we’ve had so far is not quite real civil unrest. So far the action has been one-sided, with Marxist revolutionary agitators attempting to provoke a response and getting little in return, which is why Mr. and Mrs. McCloskey brandishing shootin’ irons at the mob generated so much attention. It will turn American cities into Baghdad. It’s time for law enforcement to rediscover its teeth, and for the pathologically feckless, if not treacherously hostile, urban Democrat leadership, to stop persecuting their own protectors. Or if they won’t, it’s time for states and the federal government to do the job.

The radicals behind this movement don't just tweet about abolishing the police. They also talk about abolishing prisons. If violence is the problem, how is emptying prisons the solution? What next? Abolish the courts? These activists seem to think only police officers commit the kind of violence worth protesting. Conversation about black-on-black crime is treated like a distraction employed by racists. One has to wonder if this is really the kind of stance people will support at reelection time. But it seems the pendulum only swings further to the left. Democrats have gotten reelected for decades to run big cities.

New cases are rising in red states that have opened up for business faster than in blue states that have remained mostly closed. And we will have to see how this pans out. But the deaths, especially in nursing homes, remain much higher in the blue states. Moreover, studies are now finding that the adverse health effects from the lockdown (suicide, delayed treatments for cancer and heart problems, depression, spousal and child abuse, alcoholism, and drug overdoses, to name a few) could easily match the saved lives from lockdowns. These “lockdown deaths” are far more prevalent in blue states that shut down.

America’s original progressives went by a more honest name: puritans. Their moral crusades, witch hunts, and cruel banishments of Anne Hutchinson, William Blackstone, and others who believed differently provide a neat template for what we currently witness nearly four centuries later. Singers wear their scarlet letters and comedians stand in the pillory. A Cotton Mather lives in our heads censoring our thoughts expressed in our speech. Those puritans smashed stained glass and statues, and these ones do, too. In this sense, progressives never progress. How can one learn from mistakes who never makes them?