Savages with Cell Phones
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Race riots usually begin with criminality and end
with criminality. They're protests by criminals on
behalf of a dead criminal.
The
stores with smashed windows aren't the means to
express outrage, but the end. The purpose of
criminality is criminality. The police exist so that
stores can remain unrobbed and random pedestrians
can remain unbeaten. The protests express opposition
to that policy by robbing stores and assaulting
random white people.
The police were never the problem. The looters and
rioters were.
The counterculture has not changed dramatically
since the 70's, but it has tossed aside any
appearance of idealism. The new counterculture draws
in two groups, disaffected upper middle class white
youth and lower class black youth. Their goals are
purely materialistic, looted iPods and government
subsidies for housing, education and anything else
they can think of.
Divestment is the common denominator. Neither the
white leftist nor the lower-class black rioter is
invested in his society. The white rioter is a
globalist, the black rioter is an outsider. Neither
are invested in the city and country they are busy
trashing.
These are the children of the welfare state with
little in common except a rejection of the
commercial way of life. Neither the entitled white
university brat or the posturing ghetto teenager has
any interest in working. The businesses they smash
are an alien thing to them. Small businessmen do not
go about smashing stores. The people who do think of
commodities as something they trick or intimidate
others into giving to them. And that covers everyone
from municipal unions to thugs driving around BMW's.
This lawless materialism is the essence of the
welfare state. "Loot as much as you can, or someone
else will." If you don't grab government benefits or
sneakers in store windows, someone else will. The
rich are grabbing, the pols are grabbing-- time to
queue up and loot your share. Communism made this
way of thinking so commonplace that all of Russia
became one black market. And we are not far behind.
What kind of people behave this way? Those who have
come to think of wealth as an infinite pile from
which everyone grabs as much as they can. This is
where the ethos of the socialist left and hip-hop
comes together. Obama gleefully spending millions on
himself and trillions on national giveaways for his
donors and supporters is the most obnoxious fusion
of this phenomenon.
The angry rioter is a sacred figure in the
progressive pantheon of social justice. The
shirtless men in bandanas carting away cell phones
are so outraged by injustice that they are willing
to take to the streets and do what progressive
hipsters taking social justice selfies of themselves
in souvenir t-shirts plastered with the face of the
latest victim of “white supremacism” can only dream
about.
The race riot isn’t a bubbling stew of outrage out
of which wounded souls emerge to cry out for
justice. It’s a complicated criminal conspiracy in
which the perpetrators rarely suffer any
consequences.
The rioters aren’t outraged, they’re usually bored
young men, frustrated and lacking in empathy. Many
of them have gang ties or a criminal record
stretching back to kindergarten.
They’re the same people who commit crimes in any
other non-outraged context.
The rest are there to get some attention while
providing them with protective coloration. 9 out of
10 people screaming frenziedly while holding up
“Black Lives Matter” signs would eagerly scream and
hold up “Justin Bieber 4 President” or “Baltimore
Loves the KKK” signs if it got them positive
attention and a shot at being on television.
Technological savvy melded with barbaric behavior,
the 21st century mobile devotee turned raider is a
wake up call in more ways than one. These are not
mere race riots, they are the self-organization of
the end of our civilization.
The classic raid has come to the cities of West, its
hallmarks are not frustration but careful planning,
followed by a violent rush. They are the reemergence
of an old way of life that most people think died
with the Vikings.
The law banished the raider back into the dim pages
of history, but law depended on a civilization
which is now collapsing. Police officers need the
support of the public to hold the line. And the left
has now openly reverted to its pro-criminal advocacy
while elements of the right, particularly those
funded by the Koch Brothers, advocate for criminals.
The traditional raider saw himself as part of an
outside group. The modern raider has global
identities that are at odds with the country he
lives in. When he joins a raiding party, it is as a
member of one of those groups looting a society
whose welfare is of no interest to him.
The left's motives for rebelling are different than
those of minority looters. But the end result is
similar enough. A disregard for the civilization
becomes a disregard for its laws. And that leaves
self-interest as the only hedge against anarchy. But
what interest do people who do not work for a living
have in preserving the businesses of others? None at
all. As far as they are concerned, smash a store, it
will collect the insurance, and reopen, or another
will open up in its place. And even if it doesn't,
then so what? It's not "our businesses" anyway.
The commercial tribalism of the rapper who conflates
casual violence and criminality with honor follows a
pattern of glorifying crime that predates and
postdates race, its ubiquity dating back centuries,
from the highwayman to the 1920's bank robber, and
is almost as socially disruptive and even more
contagious.
The narrative is the same. Its idealism and honor
covers up the blatant materialism and greed that its
lawbreaking enables. And the message is also the
same. Civilization's end.
The return of the raider as an instant message
enabled gang is a phenomenon at odds with progress.
It is a warning that darker times are returning,
that while everyone may pack phones that have more
processing power in one inch than a room of
computers did 30 years ago, the march of progress is
moving backward.
But the real purpose of a riot isn’t to benefit the
rioters. It’s to benefit those who incite the riot.
The rioters and looters react in response to
riot-friendly conditions created from above. If you
build the political infrastructure for a riot, the
rioters and looters will come.
The
#BlackLivesMatter riots are the product of a new
generation of Sharptons, ambitious activists feeding
hate, of the New Black Panther Party’s obsession
with becoming relevant, of the ragged hipster ends
of Occupy Wall Street drifting from occupation to
occupation, of Muslim agents dreaming of turning
African-Americans into a fifth column and of Obama’s
clumsy efforts to keep on playing community
organizer by feeding racial grievances and then
pretending to rise above them.
Those who gain from unleashing chaos and violence
are not the powerless, but the powerful. Sharpton
rose to his important role as Obama’s liaison on a
trail of bodies. Someone operating here hopes to be
the next Sharpton. Meanwhile Obama is playing a
perverse fusion of Sharpton and MLK, amping up a bad
situation and then telling blacks and whites that
they need to rise above it.
As always, the ringleader tries to keep his hands
clean while convincing the establishment that he can
turn the violence on or off any time he wants to.
Obama exploits the riots he cultivated for his own
political ends. The looter at the top is not through
looting yet.