Thursday, June 4, 2020

Don’t Mistake Rioters for Protesters, Part II


Yesterday, there was this news: “This is the greatest 50-day rally in the history of the S&P 500.” You didn’t hear that? Hmm. 

It was good news. When there’s a sudden drop, you can expect a sudden recovery—unless interference keeps the bounce back from happening.

Some people don’t want a bounce back.

That’s why you’re not hearing about it. And maybe that’s why you are hearing about what is in the news.

In Part I we started talking about the difference between the protesters and the rioters. Let’s cover three related things today.

·       Your house is not on fire (unless the rioters have gotten to you).
·       Riots are not a reaction to racism; they are a reaction against freedom, free markets, and civilization.
·       Chaos, like other forms of tyranny, brings oppression, poverty, and savagery.

Your House Is Not on Fire

cartoon frame, by chainsawsuit.com
found on Facebook
There was a cartoon meme going around, attempting to describe what people mean when they say “black lives matter” and won’t accept “all lives matter” as a response. There are two people, each with a house behind them. The first one’s house is burning down. The second guy is holding a hose, spraying his own house, because “all houses matter.” He seems unaware of how useless that statement is when clearly his neighbor’s house is on fire and could use the hose.


The metaphor works only if there’s a house on fire. In this case the fire is purported to be “systemic racism.” Not just an occasional isolated incident among 325 million people, but a problem so pervasive that the house is burning down.

What is wrong with the metaphor? The house isn’t really on fire. There’s as much “fire” as you might have from lighting the occasional birthday candle in the house; you can easily blow it out and get along with living in the house in complete safety and comfort.

The counter to the metaphor is two people in front of two houses. One is screaming that his house is on fire, and the other one, who has looked, examined, checked inside, and verified that the house is not actually on fire, tries to calm the neighbor. Yes, all of our houses matter; we would not want a fire in anyone’s house.

To which the first screams again, in agony and frustration, “You don’t understand. My house is on fire!”

But it isn’t.

The narrative—the house-on-fire story—is that blacks, particularly black men, are in danger of being killed by racist police every time they leave their homes. Their mothers worry for them. Some people even call it a genocide happening right before our eyes.

If this were happening, we would all be alarmed—the way we would be if our neighbor’s house actually were burning. We’d call for the fire department and use our water hoses to help in the meantime.

But where do you spray if there’s no fire?

Yesterday, Tucker Carlson on Fox News, went through the entire list of deaths of unarmed blacks in the US in 2019—data maintained since 2015 by The Washington Post. In 2019 there were ten: nine men and one woman. By Carlson’s count, in five of those cases, the suspect attacked an officer just before the shooting. In one, the discharge of the black police officer’s weapon was accidental during grappling with the suspect, and the officer was not charged.

That leaves four. In two of these cases, officers were not charged, because circumstances showed they had reason to believe they were being threatened. In two cases the officers were charged. One was of the female black woman. One was a case in which the officer claimed he had seen a gun pointed at him during a car chase; a gun was later found in the car. The officer was nevertheless charged.

By my count, that is one killing of an “unarmed” black man—who had a gun—and the police officer was charged. The case of the woman was a clear fatal error by the police officer, who was charged.
The black population in the US is 13%, roughly 42,250,000. Of these, 6% are male: 2,535,000. Even if you counted all nine of the unarmed black males killed in 2019, that’s 0.000355%. Not a genocide by any definition of that word. It is certainly not evidence that police are “hunting” black men, as Joy Reid recently claimed on MSNBC.

In fact, police officers of any race are less likely to shoot a black suspect than a white suspect, even though blacks are more likely to be committing crimes. Why? Most likely because of fear of being called racist. That fear is great enough to discourage officers from being willing to patrol predominantly black neighborhoods.

Killings by police continue on a downward trend for all races.

As for police officers, Carlson said,

At the same time, this country remains a dangerous place for police officers; 48 of them were murdered in 2019, according to FBI data. That’s more than the number of unarmed suspects killed of all races.
When the house-is-on-fire crowd are asked to give evidence, it’s usually anecdotal. Typically they refer to a traffic stop in which the person claims they were targeted because of their race—even though traffic stops mostly happen before the police officer knows the race of the driver. In other words, in our analogy, the smoke detector was set too sensitive and went off when the toast got slightly brown. We do not help by buying in to something that simply isn't true; we do better service by helping the panicked person see that there's no fire.

However, in 2018, the last year of complete data, killings of blacks by someone else happened about 7400 times more often than killing of blacks by a police officer. Most often this is black-on-black crime. If this were the house-on-fire, maybe we could talk. Maybe it’s a foundation problem—maybe it’s fatherless homes.


Riots Are Not a Reaction to Racism

Shop owners have been hurt and confused as they put up signs that say, “Black Store Owner,” or “We’re on your side,” to try to persuade the destroying rioters to pass them by. The rioters go right ahead and attack. It might even be that most of the looted businesses have had minority owners. These are people who were struggling to stay afloat during the coronavirus shutdown, and then this happens. Five minutes of rioting may have destroyed their entire life’s work and investment. Why would protesters do that? 

Trevon Ellis, barbershop owner in Minneapolis, lost all when rioters burned
down his shop. Image by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for NPR, found here.

Because they’re not protesters getting carried away in the anger over the unjust killing of George Floyd. They are domestic terrorists using that moment as an opportunity for their own purposes. Those purposes are to destroy civil society. That is not an exaggeration; that is essentially what they say is their mission. They want to create so much chaos that business can’t be conducted—because they want to stop business exchanges of any sort.


You store owners—you are their enemy. They don’t care what color you are; they hate that you are making money in a free-market economy.

A Washington Examiner editorial put it this way: 

The senseless and callous police killing of George Floyd inspired peaceful protests at first, but now, it has become an excuse for a troupe of professional revolutionaries and marauders. They use these incidents in order to flex their muscle and test how far their impressionable recruits are willing to go in breaking the law.

An Antifa rally in Manhattan last year.
Image by J.C. Rice, found here
I doubt you could say these revolting terrorists are deep thinkers. Have they thought through to the logical end how tearing down civil society will mess up their lives as well as ours?

It might be that they have in mind some imaginary fantasy utopia that they can create from scratch—once everyone is reduced to eking out their survival in some post-apocalyptic wasteland. Picture New York City as imagined in the movie Escape from New York. Or maybe like in Mad Max. Or possibly a more widespread 9/11. It doesn’t look like people comfortably housed and fed and enjoying the internet and their cell phones.

How do societies really look after their demise? Do they rise, Phoenix-like from the burning cinders? No. Archaeologists look for them where they rotted and got overgrown by trees, if they were in that kind of climate. Or beneath blowing dust or sand, if they were in that kind of climate.

The closest you might see, historically, is Europe following the Black Plague. Such a large percentage of the population was wiped out that many areas were faced with starting over—without the brainpower or resources that they’d recently had. It took centuries to build back up to the Renaissance. But even they didn’t have to start completely from scratch. There were still governments and property ownership, and people buying and selling their goods.

The bad guys always assume all will go better with them in charge? Why? Because they’re prideful enough to believe they’re so much more brilliant and advanced than any others who have tried it. And what is the evidence of this brilliance and goodness?

They’re delusional, and they’re power hungry. They’re not attempting to wipe out civilization so that a brilliant Thomas Jefferson can combine with a golden-hearted George Washington. They’re not even going to be looking for such minds and hearts. Nor would they submit to them if they arose. These are power mongers.

Someone is organizing them. I think we’ll be learning more about that in coming days—if there are any news media that do their job, but I wouldn’t expect to learn anything from the New York Times (a former newpaper[i]), CNN, or MSNBC, none of which have been seen seeking truth for a very long time.

There are likely to be multiple shadowy figures, George Soros types (possibly including him personally). It looks like a James Bond story. There’s a big bad guy, who plans to destroy the world for reasons that have meaning only to himself, but will, he thinks, result in his ultimate control of everyone and everything. And he’s surrounded by minions. So many minions that it keeps all the Hollywood wannabes employed for the filming of the climactic scene.

Did you ever think, “Why would somebody choose that life? Out on some obscure island, away from family and comforts of home, to work for this madman, who has no regard for them? They get paid, we assume. But enough for that? Do they all buy into the madman’s mission, thinking, “Once he’s in charge, he’ll put people like me in an important position”?

Those real life minions are out on the streets throwing bricks at Mom and Pop stores, and anything else with a window—playing their role in some evil villain’s master plan that includes destroying everything you value: your beliefs, life, liberty, property, family, and truth.

In the movies, James Bond or some other hero comes to the rescue and foils the plans. But, without a scriptwriter, we need that hero to be the rest of us: police officers, national guard troops, civic leaders, and ordinary everyday truth-telling citizens.


Chaos, Like Other Forms of Tyranny, Brings Oppression, Poverty, and Savagery

If you’ve got a civic leader saying, “We need to give them our sympathy, because their anger is justified,” that’s not a leader willing to use government for its proper role: protecting life, liberty, and property. They're telling you they don’t want you to enjoy freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

They're telling you they think violent damage to people and property is OK, if the perpetrator just claims to be angry about the accepted narrative. And that accepted narrative is that America is racist—and always has been; America is irredeemable.   

Ben Shapiro asked (and answered) the question on his show yesterday: What is the logical next step of someone with the belief that America is irredeemably racist and evil? That America must be torn down, totally destroyed. You can’t have something that you claim is rotten to the core and always has been, and then say, “But it will all be better if we just elect a Democrat as president again.” You can’t claim that systemic evil will be cured by a bit of tweaking.

You either have to be in favor of conserving, preserving, restoring our Constitution and the civilization it has nurtured; or you are in favor of overthrowing America and oppressing its people with some form of tyranny, with its attendant poverty and savagery.

What did Barack Obama mean by “fundamentally changing America”? He meant that the constitutional republic should be destroyed—and something else, something Marxist, should be put in its place.

What did Maxine Waters mean recently when she said, “I don’t want to see these establishments opened back up”? Why not? 

The Political Sphere of the Spherical Model
We know what it takes to move up north, on the Spherical Model, to Freedom, Prosperity, and Civilization. 

Killing, looting, pillaging, destroying, hating, taking, controlling—those are all behaviors of tyrants, who bring oppression, poverty, and savagery, located far down south on the sphere.

These people are telling you what they intend. They want to take away your freedom, your earnings, and your civilization, and replace these with oppressive tyranny, enslavement and poverty, and the savagery left to humans without civilization.

Maybe it’s time to stop believing the false house-is-burning narrative and start believing those who say they are determined to burn down all our houses.


[i] Andrew Klavan has made it his personal policy, every time he refers to the New York Times, to add “a former newspaper.” I agree with him that that is appropriate.

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