The New Self-Appointed Aristocrats
My friend Helen Dale writes at The Spectator about what she calls Newton's 3rd Law of Statues:

Many people -- and especially those who live in Bristol -- have discovered Newton's Third Law of Statues. Put crudely, it amounts to 'you wreck one of ours, we wreck one of yours.'

Last weekend, Black Lives Matter and Antifa knocked philanthropist and slave-trader Edward Colston from his plinth and dumped him in Bristol Harbour. This weekend, persons likely affiliated with far-right National Action poured a bleach-based reagent over Bristol's statue of Alfred Fagon -- a son of the city and distinguished British-Jamaican playwright -- turning him white.

...I also think we need a new category of 'Darwin Award by Proxy'. Because in turning up to a BLM, Antifa or National Action demo in the midst of a pandemic, you risk spreading coronavirus, particularly to the elderly. That is, you indulge in a woke virtue-signal or pretend to defend Winston Churchill and in doing so end up killing grandpa. Bonus points for sheer stupidity if gramps migrated from the West Indies or lives in a remote Aboriginal community. After all, Covid-19 kills older black men at a rate that dwarfs deaths among other groups.

From the beginning, any protest outside the US reeked of entitlement and thrill-seeking. Everyone involved desperately needs to look up 'negative externalities' in the dictionary, although 'doing something you like while shitting on other people' is a useful definition. Antifa especially combines monstrous privilege with what philosopher John Gray calls 'the problem of being lightly educated'.

...This is a new aristocracy of the spirit. An aristocracy in the proper sense is based on the idea that people should have power because they have virtue -- it's 'rule by the best'. Historically, it was tied to landowning and 'a stake in the country'.

But we have a rising generation of young people who have little in the way of assets and are not likely to acquire any soon; stagnant earnings, and a lot of (superficial) education -- more than any previous generation. This means the idea that moral virtue equals status -- even an expectation that one's views will be given weight in public policy -- is seductive.

There is also a deeply Protestant tendency to be so anxious about the strength of your belief that you must continually declaim it from the rooftops. What you do doesn't matter as much as what you believe. Life in 2020 is a bit like the 17th century: plague sweeping the land and marauding Puritans destroying icons, except the Puritans had cooler hats.