Not too long ago, Democrats were touting the race riots and celebrating the destruction in America's bluest cities.

Today, they are calling them President Trump's fault.  And that's quite a hairpin turn of narrative, done swiftly, in response to falling poll numbers, as if by some campaign strike team.

How is it they can shift so fast?  We've never seen this in past presidential campaigns.

The best answer is that they control the press.  The press is entirely corrupted.  It's no longer a press; it's a Democratic Party campaign strike team of impeccable reliability.

Exhibit A is this brilliant column written by Amber Athey at Spectator USA describing the chronology. It's so good that she's on my radar now as an always-click byline:

After months of trying to spin the nationwide unrest as 'mostly peaceful' or ignoring it entirely, Democrats have discovered some fresh messaging: the riots are violent and they're Trump's fault.

Joe Biden seized on this new storyline during a campaign speech in Pittsburgh on Monday, telling voters that Trump is 'stoking violence in our cities.'

'This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can't stop the violence — because for years he has fomented it,' Biden asserted.

This is one of the most dastardly and dishonest schemes the Democrats have ever cooked up.

She's right.

Her chronology is sharp, logical, and distilled.  I'll give a backwards telescope summary:

The riots began as anti-police brutality protests in Minneapolis, following the death of George Floyd in police custody.  Led by Antifa and Black Lives Matter, they spread to other cities, and then a second police incident in Atlanta led to additional destruction.  After that, they became calls to "defund the police."  

Protesters and rioters may have turned their sights on Trump because they view him as the leader of a broken system, but he certainly wasn't the impetus for their rage.

By July, these riots had become "peaceful" protests ("fiery but mostly peaceful protests," as CNN later put it by the time the riots got to Kenosha).  It was against the evidence of their own camera shots of cities full of flames and shops smashed in a miasma of shattered glass that these claims were made.  The cameramen risked their lives to get the fiery photos to grip viewers, and the narrative strike team simply denied that the violence was happening.  Democrats followed suit, with Jerry Nadler calling any talk of violence in Portland "a myth," despite his own New York City he represents being looted in plain air.  Seattle's mayor called it a "summer of love."  Washington's mayor painted a "Black Lives Matter" banner across a major street visible from the White House, honoring the very people perpetrating the riots.  These events became calls for whites to virtue-signal in ecstatic communion with the protests, while looters were routinely either ignored by police ordered to stand down or else let out after they were picked up, sending a message to other would-be looters that looting was good and nobody would be held accountable.  Kamala Harris and Joe Biden's staffers contributed cash to rioter bailouts and encouraged others to do the same, because the police were such bad guys, it seems.

Corporations, hoping to be seen as woke, and more importantly, not the next target, announced big funds for Black Lives Matter and other radical groups perpetrating these riots.  More riots and lootings followed.

Then the statue-toppling started, beginning with easy-to-topple Confederates but rapidly moving on to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Winston Churchill, and abolitionists of slavery.  These are people who fought tyrants, destroyed fascists, and crushed slavery.

Democratic governors and mayors were explicitly offered National Guard aid by President Trump to put down the fiery assaults.  Continuously, they refused.  Looting, meanwhile, was openly defended by many on the left.

By the time this all got to voters, and voters responded by ending support for Democrats in the polls, the narrative had suddenly shifted.  Democrats now say they're against violence.  Pay no attention to the toppled statues and looter bailout funds.  And to the extent that there is violence, the violence is all the doing of President Trump.  Just Trump's existence makes radicals violent, they can't help themselves.  It was no longer all about getting rid of the police, it was about getting rid of Trump, so the hairpin curve against violence narrative call went out.

How can they shift on a dime so quickly?  It's because they have the press in their tree, their backseat driver, their obedient stenographer as they drive the political narrative.  Journalism's changed since I went to journalism school, today the press is not the press, it's the public relations agency of the Democrats, unmoored by any guiding principle other than preserving Democrat power.  They would not be able to shift narratives so quickly otherwise.

Here's the other thing: It's cynical. The Democrats are cynically assuming that voters cannot remember any news not 24 hours old. That's why they can say one thing one day and the opposite the next. They assume voters will remember nothing. The old 24-hour news cycle has mated with the 24-hour narrative turn.

That might explain why they're doing it, but it's not working. Voters can remember those calls to defund the police and those Democrats supporting looters just a few weeks ago, and now can see that they're being fed the claim that Trump did the riots. Trump had nothing to do with the riots, Trump exists, and they're reacting with violence. Normal people don't do that. As for Biden's sudden change of party line, well, as Sean Hannity noted on his broadcast, it's a day late and a dollar short.' 

Were the press a collective body of any integrity, none of this would be possible. The Democrats would have to think their positions over before jumping in because the press would call them on it. The press is like a bus without brakes, and as it stands, it looks to be taking Democrats off the cliff.

Image credit: News2Share shareable YouTube screen shot, enhanced with FotoSketcher.