Although the protests and riots in the wake of George Floyd’s death are now nationwide, Ground Zero is still Minneapolis. It was in that Democrat-run city that Floyd met his end. Since then, Mayor Jacob Frey, a 38-year-old Democrat, has been trying to surf the wave of protests without wiping out and drowning.

On Saturday, Frey wiped out when the mob literally booed him off the street for displaying some residual common sense by refusing to do away entirely with the police department. Whether Frey drowns remains to be seen. The wokesters may be mad at him now, but unless there’s an open communist on the mayoral ticket in November, he’s the best they’ve got.

Wearing his little “I can’t breathe” mask, but making no effort at social distancing, Frey appeared at Minneapolis’s latest leftist street theater to confess his and his city’s race-based sins. It’s part laughable, part nauseating to watch him confess his guilt to his Maoist interlocutors.

The saddest thing of all is that he genuinely believes his confession. Their protest is forcing him to say it, but he’s speaking from the heart.

At the end of Frey's self-abasement, the woman moderating asks him if he’s going to protect Minneapolis from its gun-toting policeman by defunding the police department entirely. She also makes it clear that the wrong answer means no one will vote for him in the next election.

Frey, showing some vestige of common sense, reluctantly says “no,” he will not defund the police department. He knows that, without a police department, Minneapolis will be the worst of all worlds, a combination of anarchy and vigilantism. The mob boos him and forces him to retire:

Frey then literally does a walk of shame, for the assembled mob shouts “shame, shame, shame” as he slinks away:

One of the most tragic things about Frey is that he graduated from the College of William and Mary, which was founded in 1693, making it the second oldest college in the United States. Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and John Tyler attended William and Mary, as did U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, sixteen members of the Continental Congress, and four signers of the Declaration of Independence. George Washington received his surveyor’s license at William and Mary and was the college’s first American Chancellor.

That this miserable, mewling socialist represents modern American government, tells us how far we’ve fallen from those men’s grand constitutional dream of a nation dedicated to individual liberty. It does not matter that the founding generation fell so short of its ideals, whether by owning slaves or allowing slavery. The ideals were the right ones and apply to all people, regardless of race, color, creed, sex, and so forth. America's virtue lies in the fact that we've figured that out over the past two-and-a-half centuries.

Meanwhile, the feckless Frey has given his allegiance to an ideology that is rooted in slavery and violence. Since the French Revolution, its relentless focus on collectivism and the state has devolved into soft or hard tyranny wherever it’s been applied. Frey may survive Saturday's wipe-out and win the election, but the mere fact that he exists on the political scene shows that America is losing.