I'm about to once more take my place as RedState's resident stormy petrel. 

In three days and a few hours, we ring in 2024. In New York City, as per tradition, there will be an event in Times Square, including the famous "ball drop." But this year, things are liable to be different. The NYPD is mustering what strength it has left, and there's a report that Mayor Eric Adams is "sure" pro-Palestinian protestors will try to disrupt the event. He's not wrong about the disruption part. He is wrong about the "pro-Palestinian" part.

Mayor Eric Adams said he is “sure” pro-Palestinian protesters will try to interrupt the New Year’s Eve ball drop in Times Square after already disrupting the annual Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

“We’re sure there’s gonna be some type of attempt this year,” the mayor said at a Tuesday news conference.

“Everyone looks for events like this if they want to do bad things, and the police department is on top of it.”

To prevent any sort of disruption, the NYPD is deploying thousands of officers to the area — both in uniform and in plainclothes.

Given the scale of some of the protests we've seen, it's questionable whether the NYPD has the manpower to stop the protests - or the riots - if things really get out of hand. 

Mayor Adam's statement, while probably carefully prepared and vetted by media consultants, nevertheless shows very clearly that he is unable to come to grips with the problem. These are not "pro-Palestinian" protestors. They are pro-Hamas protesters and anti-Israel protestors, and their intentions are not peaceful. If a protest starts, and the police are unable - or unwilling - to quell it quickly and decisively, it's not at all unlikely that things could spin out of control. And New York isn't the only place where these things are going on.

Could this end up being the black swan event that Catherine Herridge recently warned us about?

Other city officials are talking tough. Times Square Alliance president Tom Harris said:

If you’re going to come and try to disrupt the event, you’re probably not gonna be successful, and if you are, you’re going to be arrested. So stay home and protest someplace else.

This statement, frankly, smacks of empty bravado. It is, as Shakespeare put it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Oh, I'm sure that some of the brave men of the NYPD will do their best to maintain order, but if things blow up, they may well be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. New York is a big city, and if you look at some of the videos of these "protests," in New York and elsewhere, the numbers of miscreants involved are daunting. And the NYPD is already coming apart. The reaction to the very credible threat here has been, in a word, underwhelming.

The department agreed to abandon “kettling” — the crowd-control tactic of herding and confining protesters to a small area before making arrests as part of the settlement announced in September.

“The Police Department … [has] to be extremely more hesitant in actions that they would have carried out in the past to keep the peace,” Hizzoner (Mayor Adams) warned.

“I did not agree with the concept of those changes,” he continued. “I pushed back hard … I thought it put us on a very troubling direction.”

Troubling is something of an understatement.

Those who are supporting these pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, anti-Jew "protests" will sooner or later have to be called to account for that support. At this juncture, I’m not sure what form that will take; the bulk of the protestors and rioters in American cities are, after all, people whose mouths are writing checks their butts can’t cash against any real opposition, and while they talk a big game they aren’t acting, other than shouting and waving signs.

Yet (and think about this), as far as we can see at the moment, they don't have any real opposition. Our city, state, and national officials seem unable to address the problem, any more than they can address the mass influx of unidentified people over our southern border. And yes, the two are related.

In 1733, the Augustinian satirist Alexander Pope, in "An Essay on Man," wrote:

The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today,

Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?

Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flow'ry food,

And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.

Western civilization cannot afford to lick the hand just raised to shed its blood. It's no longer the time for lambs. It is the time for lions.

We are engaged in a major conflict of civilizations. Israel is on the front line, but America is in the second echelon. Barbarians are already inside the city walls. The conflict is fundamentalist Islam vs. civilization. That is what it is. Europe may well already be lost. Our own government has been compromised. Our educational institutions have failed us. The next decade or two may be very uncomfortable – but they may also be the hard times that bring us strong people.