The excitement of the posturing Antifa or the needs of the black middle class - pick a side.

Having pulled a neck muscle, I was up much the night due to the pain. Sitting upright without moving my head up or down, left or right, was the best I could do. Not easy to read a book in that position.

I ended up scrolling through Twitter in the small hours of the morning. I don't know whether the uniqueness of the experience was due to a perhaps less moderated feed at 2-4am or whether it was courtesy of the faux protests in cities all across the nation.

Dozens and dozens of videos shot by individuals. Little news reporting. Lots of first hand accounts.

What I observed in the dark hours of the night:

Widespread across dozens of cities.

Highly concentrated in a few downtown neighborhoods of those cities.

Only the most tenuous connection between the protests and anything specific such as George Floyd.

Majority seemed, by their own self-reports, to be there just to be a part of what was going on.

All the cities are Democratic administrations, usually for decades.

A persistent conflation in official news reports of protesting and rioting. Citizen reports were almost consistent describing rioting.

Many of the affected cities have minority Mayors and/or Councils and/or Police Chiefs and/or police forces. These were Left or Black government structures trying to address black youth rioters. Frequently without success.

A bifurcation between kowtowing and leadership. For example, in Minneapolis, the Mayor's words and actions were deferential to the rioters and they ignored him. In Atlanta, the Mayor acknowledged anger and then said something along the lines of "This is not how you express that anger. This is not in the spirit of MLK. Behave. Go home." She then deployed the police and the National Guard to enforce that recommendation.

Riots had two distinct elements. The much larger, generally young black youth inclined to follow invitations to destroy, riot and loot. The much smaller number, but critical to turning a protest into a riot, of white Antifa thugs all masked up and breaking windows and dispersing cash to the rent-a-mob.

The blatant lying of some Mayors was astonishing. The attempt to claim that the provocateurs were obviously white supremacists trying to stir up young black protesters into rioting was laughable on its face. Video after video of masked white Antifa driving the chaos did not juxtapose well with the desperately quixotic mayoral claims that this was all the work of Nazis and the Aryan Bortherhood.

I have to wonder, is this the wedge that cracks the coalition?

The black middle class, businessmen, and celebrities, seemed reasonably of one voice - "Quit destroying things."

Black politicians ranged from "I empathize, please be nice" to "Not on my watch."

But that very apparent dichotomy of masked white Antifa provocateurs trying to wind up the youthful black "protesters" was very striking. Antifa being the far left element of the Democratic Party who have historically been useful but are, by their own anarchic nature, unpredictable and uncontrollable.

The DNC depends on the black coalition but also responds to the emotionalism and radicalism of the hard left Antifa. Last night's videos demonstrated that the hard left and the black establishment middle class do not share much common ground.

Will the DNC shake hard left radicalism in order to better answer the needs of the black establishment middle class or will they continue to enjoy the titillating pleasure of the mob at the expense of the black establishment middle class? The moral answer should be obvious but so far there is a lot of ambivalence of making that choice. I don't know how much longer that avoidance of decision can last.