Christopher Bedford of the Federalist urges readers to take seriously the threat posed by unruly mobs on American streets.

For millennia, King Mob has targeted societies’ icons with varied goals and to varied ends, and few things are more foreboding than his desecration of civic art. Just as the targets have ranged from rulers to clergy, from tyrants to helpless, and from the guilty to the innocent, the outcomes have ranged from victory to defeat depending on the society’s strength and will. The promise of bloodshed coming alongside or following shortly after, however, is an historic certainty. The symbols of a people never satisfy: People themselves must always come next.

In 1790, mobs looted and pillaged Paris’s treasured Notre Dame. To the revolutionaries, the cathedral symbolized everything that was wrong with France’s history and society — a history of kings, tradition and religion, and a society beset by royal injustice and systemic inequality. …

… As the destruction of religious art unfurled, priests who did not swear allegiance to the new order and those who aided them were sentenced to death. …

… Seventeen hundred years before, Pliny the Younger described Emperor Domitian’s golden statues “rudely battered down, and made a sacrifice to public joy” amidst his toppling and assassination. …

… A society that believes in itself builds monuments, a sick society does not, and a dying society watches as they are torn down. While Roman kings, French monks, American Tories, and Russian tsarists were unable to defeat the revolutions that first tore down their symbols, today in the United States we are simply unwilling.

Blood is already spilling, with civilian defenders, bystanders, workers, and rioters killed and seriously injured in cities all across the country. Without a committed and targeted crackdown on this disorder and its leaders, the committed and targeted killings of their opponents and critics will come next.