Black Lives Matter’s Goal to ‘Disrupt’ the Nuclear Family Fits a Marxist Aim That Goes Back a Century and a Half

Black Lives Matter's goal fits a Marxist paradigm that stretches all the way back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

By Jon Miltimore of FEE.

"The organization Black Lives Matter has removed from its website a page that included language condemning America’s "Western-prescribed nuclear family structure."

The page, titled "What We Believe," included various public policy positions unrelated to police brutality and police reform. The Washington Examiner discovered on Monday the page had been removed.

"Page Not Found. Sorry, but the page you were trying to view does not exist," the page now reads.

The Wayback Machine archived the page, however, and it contains a lengthy description of the organization’s tenets and objectives. Among the views expressed is a desire to “disrupt” the traditional family structure.

“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”

According to the Examiner, BLM did not respond to the paper’s request for comment, so it’s unclear if the page was deliberately removed.

Whatever the case, BLM’s endorsement of this language should come as little surprise. As Brad Polumbo has shown, there are effectively two Black Lives Matter phenomena: the Black Lives Matter™️ organization and “black lives matter” as an informal movement.

The latter involves people fighting in good faith for police reform who believe African Americans suffer disproportionately from police violence. The former, Black Lives Matter™️, is an organization co-founded by Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi that has roots in Marxism.

“We actually do have an ideological frame[work],” Cullors said of her organization in 2015. “We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories.”

As I pointed out in a 2017 article, Karl Marx was interested in abolishing much more than just private property. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and his associate Frederick Engels defend attempts by Communists to abolish the traditional family.

“Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists,” Marx wrote. “On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie.”

Marx and Engels proceeded to compare the nuclear family to public prostitution, before explaining why it was natural and desirable for the institution to “vanish.”

“The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital,” Marx and Engels wrote. “The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.”

From where does this hostility to the family stem? Marx and Engels offered clues.

“The modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus), but also serfdom, since from the beginning it is related to agricultural services,” Engels wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, quoting Marx. “It contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state.”

The hostility to the traditional family did not die with Marx and Engels, however. One of the first steps the Bolsheviks took after seizing power was to begin a decades-long struggle to abolish marriage and weaken the traditional family.

“The issue was so central to the revolutionary program that the Bolsheviks published decrees establishing civil marriage and divorce soon after the October Revolution, in December 1917,” writes Harvard historian Lauren Kaminsky. “These first steps were intended to replace Russia’s family laws with a new legal framework that would encourage more egalitarian sexual and social relations.”

A 1926 article from The Atlantic, written by a woman living in Russia at the time, describes these efforts in detail. The term “illegitimate children” was abolished, and a law was passed that allowed couples to divorce in “a matter of a few minutes.” Legislation was introduced to eliminate distinctions between legal wives and mistresses, including granting property rights to the unmarried consorts.

“Chaos was the result,’ the Russian woman wrote. “Men took to changing wives with the same zest which they displayed in the consumption of the recently restored forty-per-cent vodka.”

About a half century later, the Chinese Communist Party introduced a different version of state-enforced family orchestration. It’s “one-child policy” (1979–2015), the most extreme population planning policy in world history, placed limits on the number of children Chinese families could have.

Decades before the policy went into effect, Party Chairman Mao Zedong (1893–1976) famously explained why it was necessary for the state to manage family procreation and the labor stock.

“(Re)production needs to be planned. In my view, humankind is completely incapable of managing itself,” Mao said. “It has plans for production in factories, for producing cloth, tables and chairs, and steel, but there is no plan for producing humans. This is anarchism—no governing, no organization and no rules.”

Even today the aversion to the traditional family remains strong in socialists. A 2019 article in The Nation titled “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family” offers a glimpse of the modern socialist critique of the institution.

“We know that the nuclear private household is where the overwhelming majority of abuse can happen,” author Sophie Lewis explains. “And then there’s the whole question of what it is for: training us up to be workers, training us to be inhabitants of a binary-gendered and racially stratified system, training us not to be queer.”

For true believers of collectivism, there’s little question that private family matters are also state matters. Socialism requires collective control of resources, and humans are the ultimate resource. This is why the traditional nuclear family, which places authority in the hands of parents rather than the community, is an affront to so many socialists.

The scholar Robert Nisbet has explained that the family is one of the three pillars of authority outside the state, along with the church and civic organizations. All three of these institutions offer humans something essential to the human experience: community.

Nisbet believed all three pillars served as important checks on centralized political power, which is why Nisbet saw the decline of the family, church, and civic organizations in America as an ill omen for liberty.

“...the quest for community is an impulse that stems from human nature. All yearn for participation and for a sense of belonging within a cause or body greater than the single person,” Nisbet wrote in The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics and Order of Freedom (1953). “If the desire for community cannot be filled in church, in family, in neighborhood, or in locality, then it will be filled instead by the central State.”

It’s unclear why Black Lives Matter™️ scrubbed the anti-nuclear family language from its website. What’s clear, however, is that its previously stated goal to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure” fits the Marxist paradigm that stretches back a century and half.

Perhaps the removed page reflects a change of heart. On the other hand, it could simply be a tactic to conceal its Marxist roots. As Dan Sanchez and I wrote in a recent FEE article, in recent decades purveyors of socialism have shown a tendency to shun the Marxist label even while embracing its ideals.

''There are a lot of people who don't want to call themselves Marxist,” Eugene D. Genovese, an eminent Marxist academic, told The New York Times in a 1989 article on the mainstreaming of Marxism in US universities.

We don’t know for certain why many individuals and groups advocating doctrines rooted in Marxism tend to reject the Marxist label—Cullors’s 2015 confession that she and Garza are “trained Marxists” appears to be a mistake of candor—but it seems likely adherents have gleaned a basic truth once observed by the writer Upton Sinclair.

“The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label,” Sinclair observed in a private 1951 correspondence with fellow socialist Norman Thomas.

Many people and organizations of good faith support the black lives matter movement because they believe all people deserve equal treatment and due process before the law.

But Americans should be careful to not confuse the broader black lives matter movement with Black Lives Matter™️, an organization whose goals may be antithetical to freedom and family—even if they no longer say so."

Kenosha Riots Hit Minority Communities Hardest

Callous disregard of property rights creates long-term instability that scares away business investment and reduces economic opportunity

By Brad Polumbo of FEE. 

"On August 23, the police shooting of an African American man named Jacob Blake sparked national unrest yet again, in a pattern that has become all too common. Blake survived the shooting, and the incident was murky—not a clear-cut injustice. Yet rioting and looting broke out in Kenosha, Wisconsin, nonetheless.

Now, as the dust settles and locals begin to sort through the rubble, the scale of the destruction that rocked the city after Blake’s shooting is becoming clear.

At least 56 businesses were damaged or destroyed by looting or arson, according to the Wall Street Journal. Current assessments report more than $50 million in damage.

“The destruction has left shop owners in one of Kenosha’s oldest business districts grappling with why their businesses became casualties of the destruction that has followed protests against racism and police brutality, and whether they will have the money to rebuild and stay in the neighborhood,” the Journal reports. “While Kenosha’s population is 79.5% white and 11.5% Black, according to census data, locals say the Uptown neighborhood is one of the city’s most diverse areas, with a majority of minority-owned businesses.”

It appears that in Kenosha, just as in Minneapolis and Chicago, the fallout from rioting and looting will disproportionately harm minority communities.

“I always think that people have the right to protest—to peacefully protest—but this goes beyond that,” La Estrella Supermarket owner Abel Alejo said. “They were destroying the neighborhoods that they want to protect.”

Even a local Black Lives Matter leader denounced this destruction, saying “We’re not into doing anything to damage our community… it waters down our message.”

This damage is significant, but defenders will no doubt seek to downplay it, explaining that “businesses have insurance.” Yet the damage goes beyond cold cash. There is also the enormous human and emotional toll involved in having your property destroyed and having to pick up the pieces that even a premium insurance plan can’t account for. What’s more, lost income and unpaid labor inevitably await any entrepreneur victimized by vandalism.

Plus, many small businesses don’t have insurance or are underinsured. They will have to bear the costs themselves.

Ultimately, the destruction in Kenosha and its disproportionate impact on urban, minority communities reminds us of a timeless lesson: Property rights are the fundamental basis of a market economy. Yet, despite how critics often portray them, property rights are not simply a matter of protecting the wealthy and big corporations. The protection of private property is what ensures immigrants, minorities, and poor people are not derailed on their climb up the economic ladder in pursuit of the American dream.

Moreover, the protection of property rights uplifts everyone by setting the stage for long-term economic success that benefits all. It is the engine of our prosperity and is integral to freedom.

Nobel laureate economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek once wrote that, “The system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.” Similarly, the economist Thomas Sowell has said that property rights, “belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.”

What this means is quite simple: Callous disregard of property rights creates long-term instability that scares away business investment and reduces economic opportunity. Often, this manifests itself in the form of lower property values, higher insurance rates passed on to consumers, reduced tax revenue, and fewer jobs in an area.

You don’t have to just take my word for it. Studies examining the long-term economic impact of the 1960s Civil Rights Era riots and the 1990s Los Angeles Rodney King riots document these exact effects.

So, when looters descend on urban communities like Kenosha in a wave of destruction, even liberal supporters of criminal justice reform shouldn’t fall for the narrative that rioting is harmless, justified, or helpful. The evidence is clear. “Social justice” agitators who cross the line past peaceful protest and engage in violent vandalism are only sabotaging the same minority communities they claim to care about."

Police say 'autonomous zone' blocked emergency response to brutal assault; citizens’ group disagrees

By Jay Kolls of KTSP in Minneapolis.

"5 EYEWITNESS NEWS obtained surveillance video that captures the owner of a small business on Chicago Avenue being assaulted in the heart of a four-block area often referred to as an “autonomous zone” near George Floyd Square.

The barricaded zone is a one-block radius from the intersection of Chicago Avenue South and East 38th Street, flanked on the north and south by 37th and 39th streets and on the east and west by Elliot and Columbus avenues.

The owner of Mill City Auto Body, who asked to only be identified by his first name, Dan, was knocked unconscious during an assault and robbery at his business on Aug. 5.

“I had a broken cheekbone, teeth missing, stitches in my head and I was knocked out,” Dan said. “It took police and the ambulance a very long time to get here because they had a hard time getting inside the barricades.”

An internal Minneapolis Police Department report obtained by KSTP said, “The crowd from the George Floyd Memorial began moving toward us and people were hollering that they were going to kick our asses and that we would have to kill them.”

Marcia Howard, who works with a citizens’ group to help keep order in the autonomous zone, told KSTP the internal police reports are misleading at best and false at worst.

“They came in unimpeded, unfettered with EMS,” Howard said. “They are not being met with violence or hostile crowds and any suggestion otherwise is a blatant lie.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and City Coordinator Mark Ruff declined interview requests, and Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender didn't return a message seeking comment.

A city spokesperson did issue a statement that said, in part, “There is no autonomous zone in the area of 38th and Chicago Avenue, or anywhere else in the City of Minneapolis. Laws and enforcement responsibilities have not changed for any part of the city.”

The statement also said the city is in negotiations with people occupying the zone and is working toward a phased reopening of the area sometime “before winter.”"

Minneapolis Won’t Let Riot‐​Battered Stores Install Security Shutters

By Walter Olson.

"In the destructive riots that hit Minneapolis this summer — riots I’ve argued libertarians should be in the forefront of condemning — nearly 1,500 businesses were heavily damaged or destroyed.

For many of these businesses, the Minneapolis city government adds a special insult: it won’t let shop owners install exterior shutters to protect against break‐​ins, a common practice in other cities. The Star‐​Tribune reported on the resulting frustration:

In a report justifying the rule change, Minneapolis officials argued that external shutters “cause visual blight” and create the impression that an area is “unsafe” and “troublesome.”

After looters crashed through his floor‐​to‐​ceiling windows and stole $1 million worth of booze in May, Chicago‐​Lake Liquors owner John Wolf wanted to protect himself from a repeat occurrence. … The [forbidden] investment [in security shutters] would not only prevent rioters from entering his store, it would protect his windows — which cost $50,000 to replace.

It reminds me of the controversy I wrote about in 2017, in which the Philadelphia city council moved to ban the see‐​through partitions that many corner stores install in order to deter robberies, especially of the strong‐​arm variety.

The councilwoman who sponsored that bill said that transparent partitions caused “indignity,” only happened in some neighborhoods, and “conditioned” children’s thinking in bad ways.

Notice, as with the Minneapolis worries about security shutters and property values, that the objection is not to a neighborhood’s being physically dangerous, as to the display of visible cues that might alert people to that fact. Make the visible cues go away!

Both cities’ measures show a contempt for the natural human right of self‐​defense. Some expect us to pool this right with our neighbors collectively and vest it in the authorities — even though these same authorities in practice take no legal responsibility for defending us.

Compare: gun control advocates often argue that law‐​abiding individuals must not be left with the means of self‐​defense because when guns are widely distributed, there will inevitably be some instances of misuse or accident that harm innocents.

However strong or weak you see that argument as being, it’s absent here. Metal shutters on store fronts don’t misfire and hurt anyone by accident. Acrylic partitions in sandwich shops aren’t something criminals might steal and use in later crimes.

Bans like the ones in Minneapolis and Philadelphia make the logic starker and clearer than usual: we, the authorities, hold your interest in self‐​defense, no matter how peaceful and passive the means, to be of so little worth that we will let even street aesthetics and concerns about neighborhood image override it.

The primary task of government is that of protecting individual rights. Cities like these are failing at that task."

With violent crime on the rise in Mpls., City Council asks: Where are the police?

By Brandt Williams of Minnesota Public Radio. Excerpt:

"The meeting was slated as a Minneapolis City Council study session on police reform.

But for much of the two-hour meeting, council members told police Chief Medaria Arradondo that their constituents are seeing and hearing street racing which sometimes results in crashes, brazen daylight carjackings, robberies, assaults and shootings. And they asked Arradondo what the department is doing about it. 

"Residents are asking, ‘Where are the police’?” said Jamal Osman, newly elected council member of Ward 6.  He said he's already been inundated with complaints from residents that calls for police aren’t being answered.

“That is the only public safety option they have at the moment. MPD. They rely on MPD. And they are saying they are nowhere to be seen,” Osman said.

Just months after leading an effort that would have defunded the police department, City Council members at Tuesday’s work session pushed chief Medaria Arradondo to tell them how the department is responding to the violence.  

The number of reported violent crimes, like assaults, robberies and homicides are up compared to 2019, according to MPD crime data. More people have been killed in the city in the first nine months of 2020 than were slain in all of last year. Property crimes, like burglaries and auto thefts, are also up. Incidents of arson have increased 55 percent over the total at this point in 2019.

For his part, Arradondo told council members that the department has instituted several measures, including adding more officers to patrol and investigative duties and cracking down on robberies. 

But council members told Arradondo that residents are hearing a different message from officers. 

Council President Lisa Bender, who was among those leading the call to overhaul the department, suggested that officers were being defiant. Her constituents say officers on the street have admitted that they’re purposely not arresting people who are committing crimes.

“This is not new,” Bender said. “But it is very concerning in the current context.” 

Arradondo told Bender this was “troubling to hear,” and that he would raise that issue with commanders and the heads of each precinct. 

“We need to make sure that our communities know that we are going to be there,” said Arradondo. “That we’re going to be responsive. We’ve taken an oath to do that.”

Other council members said officers are telling residents that they are overworked and understaffed. 

Arradondo said around 100 officers have left the department or have taken leave since the beginning of 2020. That’s more than double the usual number of officers who either step down from the department or who are inactive each year.

Council members in wards which usually don’t see high levels of violence say their constituents are feeling “terrorized.” 

Jeremy Schroeder represents the 11th Ward, which covers a section of far south central Minneapolis. He said a recent spate of robberies of businesses at 48th Street and Chicago Avenue scared and frustrated residents and business owners.

Arradondo said the suspects are a group of high school students. He said beat officers were assigned to the area and were able to arrest the teenagers. Another group of juveniles has also committed carjackings in that area, Arradondo said.

“Arrests have been made,” he said. “There are still some pending charges. Both our juvenile units are pursuing those.”  

Much of the violence has been concentrated in neighborhoods on the city’s north side. Council member Phillipe Cunningham represents the 4th Ward, where a 17-year-old boy was shot and killed Monday afternoon. Cunningham said two of his constituents were also recently wounded by stray bullets while sitting in their home."

What Islamists and ‘Wokeists’ Have in Common

Adherents of both pursue ideological purity, refuse to engage in debate and demand submission

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Excerpts:

"But the power of the illiberal elements in the American left has grown, not just on campus but in the media and many corporations. They have inculcated in a generation of students an ideology that has much more in common with the intolerant doctrines of a religious cult than with the secular political thought I studied at Holland’s Leiden University.

In the debates after 9/11, many people sought materialist explanations for the attacks. American foreign policy in the Middle East was blamed, or lack of education and employment opportunities in the Arab world. I argued that none of these could explain the motivations of the plotters and hijackers, who in any case were far from underprivileged. Their goal was religious and political: to wage jihad against their kin if they didn’t accept a literal interpretation of Islam, to denounce Arab governments as corrupt and their Western allies as infidels, and ultimately to overthrow the established order in the Middle East and establish a caliphate.

American policy makers preferred the materialist explanations, as they implied actions to solve the problem: invasion, regime change, democratization. It was unpopular to suggest that the terrorists might have unshakable immaterial convictions. 

Nineteen years on, we see a similar dynamic, only this time it is within our borders. Naive observers explain this summer’s protests in terms of African-Americans’ material disadvantages. These are real, as are the (worse) socio-economic problems of the Arab world. But they aren’t the main driver of the protests, which appear to be led mainly by well-off white people.

Their ideology goes by many names: cancel culture, social justice, critical race theory, intersectionality. For simplicity, I call it all Wokeism.

I am not about to equate Wokeism and Islamism. Islamism is a militant strain of an ancient faith. Its adherents have a coherent sense of what God wants them to achieve on earth to earn rewards in the afterlife. Wokeism is in many ways a Marxist creed; it offers no hereafter. Wokeism divides society into myriad identities, whereas Islamists’ segmentation is simpler: believers and unbelievers, men and women.

There are many other differences. But consider the resemblances. The adherents of each constantly pursue ideological purity, certain of their own rectitude. Neither Islamists nor the Woke will engage in debate; both prefer indoctrination of the submissive and damnation of those who resist.

The two ideologies have distinctive rituals: Islamists shout “Allahu Akbar” and “Death to America”; the Woke chant “Black lives matter” and “I can’t breathe.” Islamists pray to Mecca; the Woke take the knee. Both like burning the American flag.

Both believe that those who refuse conversion may be harassed, or worse. Both take offense at every opportunity and seek not just apologies but concessions. Islamism inveighs against “blasphemy”; Wokeism wants to outlaw “hate speech.” Islamists use the word “Islamophobia” to silence critics; the Woke do the same with “racism.”

Islamists despise Jews; the Woke say they just hate Israel, but the anti-Semitism is pervasive. The two share a fondness for iconoclasm: statues, beware.

Both ideologies aim to tear down the existing system and replace it with utopias that always turn out to be hellish anarchies: Islamic State in Raqqa, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle. Both are collectivist: Group identity trumps the individual. Both tolerate—and often glorify—violence carried out by zealots."

Black Cops Don’t Matter

Democrats are driving African-American police chiefs out of their jobs

WSJ editorial.

"As the Democratic Party moves to the left this year, it is spending time and energy hoping voters don’t notice the consequences of progressive policies. The party famously rolled through its convention across four days without mentioning the violence gripping U.S. cities. Now another hard-to-miss phenomenon has emerged: African-American police chiefs are being forced from their jobs by the party’s protesters.  

In one day this week, two black police chiefs resigned under pressure—Renee Hall in Dallas, the first black woman to head that city’s force, and La’Ron Singletary in Rochester. Last month Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, a three-decade veteran of the force, quit in protest over the progressive City Council’s plans to defund the police.

Rochester’s Chief Singletary didn’t go quietly. In a bitter statement Tuesday, he said: “As a man of integrity, I will not sit idly by while outside entities attempt to destroy my character.”

In anything resembling normal times, the ascent of black cops to the top of these urban police forces would be seen as substantive racial progress. What has become hard not to notice is that these black officers, not to mention black cops on the street, are getting no support from prominent Democrats—not Joe Biden, not former California Attorney General Kamala Harris, not anyone but Donald Trump.

Perhaps the most prominent African-American police chief resisting the progressive offensive against cops is Detroit’s James Craig.

Earlier this week a group of Democratic politicians, including Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, sent a letter to Chief Craig and other city officials urging an outside investigation into Detroit police tactics. Chief Craig fired back.

“What really disturbs me,” he said in a statement, “is that when the protesters assaulted Detroit police officers with rocks, railroad spikes and fireworks, never once did these representatives ask for an independent investigation into their violent criminal activity.”

Let it be noted that Chief Craig has something rare—the support of Detroit’s Democratic mayor, Mike Duggan. Not so fortunate are the black men and women elsewhere whose chosen profession was providing security for their cities. They are now, apparently, dispensable."

Why Violent Protests Backfire

Martin Luther King explained why they are "socially destructive and self-defeating."

By Zach Weissmueller of Reason.

"The writer and activist Vicky Osterweil is the latest and most strident defender of the violence and destruction that have accompanied some of the protests following the death of George Floyd.

Osterweil argues in her new book, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action, that in the last years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, as his focus moved beyond desegregation and voting rights and toward promoting socialism, he had a change of heart about looting and destruction as a tool for social change.

"Though he wasn't calling for violent revolution," she writes, "neither was he chastising or rejecting rioters anymore."

Others have pointed to the famous King line, "A riot is the language of the unheard," as a moral justification for the riots of the 1960s.

In reality, King was unwavering in his commitment to nonviolence.

"My hope is that we are going to have a protest like this every summer," said in a 1966 interview with 60 Minutes' Mike Wallace, referencing protests in Chicago that turned violent. "My hope would be that they are nonviolent, because riots are self-defeating and socially destructive."

He tried to make his position crystal clear in that same that interview, saying, "I will never change in my idea that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom and justice."  

And less than a year before his death, King delivered a lecture addressing skeptics of nonviolence following the 1967 riots.

"Many people feel that nonviolence as a strategy for social change was cremated in the flames of the urban riots of the last two years," said King, before re-iterating his call for massive, sustained, nonviolent civil disobedience.

"In this world, nonviolence is no longer an option for intellectual analysis; it is an imperative for action."

Violent protests were self-defeating, King argued, because, "every time a riot develops" it makes "a right-wing takeover more likely," helping segregationists like George Wallace gain political power and influence.

Osterweil writes admiringly of the nationwide riots that followed King's assassination as "an act of pure mourning, grief, and rage" that perhaps "felt so natural, so immediate, so appropriate, even those who would normally marvel at their scale fell quiet."

These uprisings are "wildly understudied, theorized, or historicized," she writes, and, "the silence on the part of historians, scholars, and activists has been deafening."

But the Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow has studied the '68 riots in detail and argues that they helped Richard Nixon to beat Democrat Hubert Humphrey in that year's presidential race. As King understood, media coverage was why looting and violence backfired.

"A nonviolent protest today produced a headline about civil rights tomorrow. Whereas when protesters engage in violence that predicted a headline about riots tomorrow, a headline that was much more likely to focus on crime and disorder, and public opinion moves very closely with that," Wasow told Reason's Nick Gillespie in a podcast interview. "The tactics that are employed by protesters can really make a powerful impact on how the media tell the story, which in turn shapes public opinion."

Some media outlets have at times appeared to downplay some violence and destruction, but King's warning and Wasow's research still resonate today as polls show a sharp downward turn in approval ratings of the Black Lives Matter movement in recent weeks—including in Wisconsin, even before riots hit Kenosha.

And Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden seems to fundamentally understand that.

"Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting," said Biden in a speech in late August.

That might help explain how he's maintained a lead so far against an incumbent who's fanned the flames with his rhetoric, threatening to send the military into the streets to crackdown on protests and riots in early June.

King wasn't excusing riots by describing them as the "language of the unheard." He was imploring observers to acknowledge the unjust conditions that contributed to their emergence in the first place.

The paths forward to social change couldn't be more clear. Persistent, nonviolent resistance tied directly to concrete policy demands, as practiced by Martin Luther King, Jr., who helped achieve historic civil rights legislation; or rioting and looting promoted by activists who believe, "We need to argue for and defend every tactic that might help us to overturn this miserable world of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, empire, and property.""

 

 

Not everyone is for defunding the police. Especially those in communities that would be most affected.

See For Biden to Win, Listen to Minneapolis by Thomas L. Friedman. Excerpt:

"On one side are the super liberals on the Minneapolis City Council. They voted in June, after George Floyd’s death at the hands of the local police, to begin a process to remove the requirement of the City Charter to maintain a police department. It would be replaced with “a department of community safety and violence prevention,” with a director who would have “non-law enforcement experience in community safety services, including but not limited to public health and/or restorative justice approaches.” A division of “licensed peace officers” would answer to that director.

Among those opposing this change is a budding coalition of Black and white community leaders from North Minneapolis, the historical home of the Minneapolis Black community. (I was born in the Northside in 1953 when it was also the home of the Jewish community.) They are unnerved by the notion of dismantling the police force for a vague alternative at a time when their neighborhood has experienced a surge in gang shootings, lootings and drug dealing — all exacerbated by the pandemic, spiraling unemployment and demoralized police officers, who, after the Floyd killing, don’t always have the numbers or the will to show up.

On Aug. 18, this coalition — four Black and four white families from North Minneapolis — filed suit against the City Council and the mayor, Jacob Frey, to compel them to maintain the legal minimum of police officers on the Minneapolis force. The families contend that the Council’s actions have driven out too many police officers and curtailed the hiring of replacements, endangering their neighborhood.

Don’t get them wrong, the plaintiffs argue, they want thoughtful and deep police reform. But they want both a better police force and enough police officers to protect their kids and their streets — not either the present unreformed police or a disbanded police department and an uncertain replacement.

The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported on Aug. 1 that since the killing of George Floyd in late May, the city’s police force is down at least 100 officers, more than 10 percent of the force, “straining department resources amid a wave of violence.” The department, the newspaper added, is budgeted for 888 officers this year, but could lose as much as a third of its work force by year’s end — through resignations, firings and medical leave for post-traumatic stress from the violence that followed Floyd’s death.

In an Aug. 24 op-ed in The Star Tribune, Sondra and Don Samuels, two of the Black plaintiffs, explained why they are suing. I know them both, and they are deeply involved in improving their Northside neighborhood. Sondra is the chief executive of the Northside Achievement Zone, and Don, her husband, is a former City Council member, former Minneapolis school board member and chief executive of Microgrants, a local nonprofit.

“We want radical police reform, where all citizens are treated as fully human by all cops, and not just by the ‘good ones’ we all know well,” they wrote. “We support the reform moves of the mayor and chief, which include community alternatives to policing that work hand-in-hand with our police force.”

The State Legislature, they also argued, “must change arbitration rules that too often demand bad cops be rehired after being fired for abusive policing.”

But, they added: “We will not sacrifice the safety of our community in the pursuit of the City Council’s lofty goals with no plan to back them up. In the months since George Floyd’s murder, we have seen an explosion in crime and homicides. Five of us live just a few houses apart. Four of us have children in our homes. Here’s what we’ve experienced on our block alone over the last two months:

“A mother’s car was shot up with eight bullets, with her infant on board. Another car was shot four times. A bullet went through the front door and a wall of our neighbor’s home. A woman was kicked and stomped within inches of her life in the middle of the street. The drug trade has been revived in two homes, to unprecedented levels, with conflicts resulting in fights and shootouts.”

Their neighbors, they warned, “are leaving their Northside homes to stay with relatives to keep their children safe. Neighbors have put their house up for sale and others are considering it for the first time.”

This is the bottom line: “By charter the Council must maintain a per capita force in the mid-700s of active duty officers. While this is not enough for our needs, we worry that the Council’s naïve intent is to take us well below this number. And we are not having it. If the leadership of the city cannot muster the wisdom to keep us safe, it must muster the compliance to obey the law that is designed to do so.”

Besides big stores, like Saks and Nordstrom, which were vandalized last week in downtown Minneapolis — after rumors spread that the police had shot a Black man, who, it turned out, had actually committed suicide — a slew of Northside businesses owned by people of color were looted or vandalized during the George Floyd protests, and many owners are now afraid to rebuild.

Think about the Northside Achievement Zone that Sondra runs. It’s working with parents, students and local partners in predominantly Black North Minneapolis to end multigenerational poverty through education and fostering family stability. It’s been a real engine for building healthy community and enabling Black Americans to realize their full potential. But it can’t work in chaos.

“We have to be able to say both that Black lives matter and that protests that turn violent cannot be allowed to tear up our city,” Sondra said to me."

Debunking NPR’s Bizarre ‘In Defense of Looting’ Interview

In a controversial NPR interview that quickly went viral, author Vicky Osterweil attempted to recast property crime as nonviolent and morally good.

By Brad Polumbo of FEE.

"Most listeners tune into NPR to catch up on the news on their commute home in the afternoon. But, increasingly, the state-run media outlet’s audience is instead being treated to far-left political arguments—sympathetically aired and left unchallenged.

On August 27, the public radio station aired an interview with the author of the book In Defense of Looting, Vicky Osterweil, on the popular Code Switch podcast and published it on NPR.org. Journalist Natalie Escobar opened the ostensibly objective interview by dismissively citing “hand-wringing” about the ongoing violent unrest, rioting, and looting. The havoc has destroyed thousands of businesses and left at least 15 people dead.

In the controversial interview, which quickly went viral, Osterweil attempts to recast property crime as nonviolent and morally good.

“When I use the word looting, I mean the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot,” Osterweil says. “That's the thing I'm defending. I'm not defending any situation in which property is stolen by force. It's not a home invasion, either. It's about a certain kind of action that's taken during protests and riots.”

“[Looting is] taking those things that would otherwise be commodified and controlled and sharing them for free,” she continues. “[Looting] demonstrate[s] that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.”

Contempt for looting, meanwhile, is driven by “anti-Blackness and contempt for poor people who want to live a better life,” Osterweil claims.

Before going any further, it’s worth pointing out the glaring holes in these arguments so far.

For one, Osterweil’s definition of looting is inconsistent. She defines looting as “not any situation in which property is stolen by force.” But then she also says it is “the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot.” By definition, the mass “expropriation of property” during a riot is stealing property by force.

When a mob tears through a mall, shatters windows, fills their pockets, and lights the place on fire, they are using force to take what they want in violation of others’ rights. This is obviously done with force.

After all, what happens if people do not allow the mob to take their property?

They end up like David Dorn, a former police officer who was shot and killed by rioters while trying to protect a pawn shop from looting. Or, they end up like one elderly business owner who was caught on camera trying to protect his store and beaten to a pulp by rioters for his troubles.

If looting wasn’t done by force, people would simply tell the mob “sorry, you can’t do that.” It’s the threat of force and use of violence that allows the mob to proceed anyway.

Moreover, despite Osterweil’s protestations, looting in no way demonstrates that we can have things for “free.” Everything that is taken through looting imposes costs onto others.

The stolen property by no means comes “free”: shop owners pay for it in their lost livelihoods, untold hours spent repairing their businesses, and in many cases, the destruction of their dreams when their stores are never able to reopen. Meanwhile, the community bears costs in the form of higher insurance rates, reduced economic opportunity, and the destruction of the grocery stores, pharmacies, and other institutions they rely on.

The inescapable reality of scarcity means there is no such thing as “free” loot.

As far as the opposition to looting being driven by “anti-blackness,” this is a false smear. In fact, rioters are destroying many minority-owned businesses. And many of the most prominent voices to speak out against the destruction are African Americans themselves, such as the parents of Jacob Blake, the man whose shooting by police prompted the latest rioting in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

“If Jacob knew what was going on as far as that goes, the violence and destruction, he would be very unpleased,” his mother said. “Please don’t burn up property and cause havoc and tear your own homes down in my son’s name. You shouldn’t do it.”

Yet Osterweil’s real ideological message—which NPR is uncritically promoting through its massive, taxpayer-backed platform—is the Marxist argument that property destruction is nonviolent because property rights are invalid. (Unfortunately, Osterweil is by no means the only left-wing voice making this argument.)

“In terms of potential crimes that people can commit against the state, it's basically nonviolent,” Osterweil offers in the interview. “It's just property. It's not actually hurting any people.”

Wrong on every count. Attacks on property are themselves aggressive forms of violence. (As opposed to, say, self-defense).

But why should we consider property destruction violence?

For one, the widespread destruction of property inevitably involves endangering human life. Because of the inevitable tendency of force to escalate into more force, it’s impossible to loot or riot without endangering people.

Consider the fact that, at minimum, 15 people were killed during the initial months of rioting after George Floyd’s death, and that more have died in the unrest since. Or, just remember how Minneapolis police discover a torched corpse in a burned-down pawnshop days after arsonists and rioters had come through that neighborhood. Osterweil might have believed these looters were “just destroying property”; in reality, they allegedly murdered someone.

But even when looting entails no direct physical harm to any person, it is still violence. Why? Well, an attack on someone’s livelihood is still an attack on their life. A small business owner relies on their property to pay for food on their family’s table. To pay for their child’s healthcare. To put a roof over their head.

This is why famed economist and political theorist Murray Rothbard insisted that property rights are human rights:

“Much is heard these days of the distinction between human rights and property rights, and many who claim to champion the one turn with scorn upon any defender of the other. They fail to see that property rights, far from being in conflict, are in fact the most basic of all human rights.

The human right of every man to his own life implies the right to find and transform resources: to produce that which sustains and advances life. That product is a man’s property. That is why prop­erty rights are foremost among human rights and why any loss of one endangers the others.”

No matter how much propaganda state-run media publishes or how desperately leftist authors attempt to argue otherwise, the truth is clear. When rioters destroy livelihoods in a fit of political rage, it is violent, destructive, and wrong."

 

 

 

 

The Pinnacle of Looting Apologia: If the real, lasting change you wish to effect is burning society to cinders, then perhaps looting is the right tool

By Graeme Wood of The Atlantic.

"Last week, NPR’s Code Switch published an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. NPR summarizes the book as an argument that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.” If the real, lasting change you wish to effect is burning society to cinders and crippling for a generation its ability to serve its poorest citizens, then I suppose I am forced to agree. Osterweil sees an upside. Looting is good, she says, because it exposes a deep truth about the great American confidence game, which is that “without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.” She came to this conclusion six years ago, and in her book, which is written “in love and solidarity with looters the world over,” she defends this view as ably as anyone could.

Osterweil’s argument is simple. The “so-called” United States was founded in “cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist” violence. That violence produced our current system, particularly its property relations, and looting is a remedy for that sickness. “Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living, and the ‘justice’ of law and order,” she writes. Ownership of things—not just people—is “innately, structurally white supremacist.”

The rest of the remedy is more violence, which she celebrates as an underrated engine for social justice. The destruction of businesses is an “experience of pleasure, joy, and freedom,” Osterweil writes. It is also a form of “queer birth.” “Riots are violent, extreme, and femme as fuck,” according to Osterweil. “They rip, tear, burn, and destroy to give birth to a new world.” She reserves her most pungent criticism for advocates of nonviolence, a “bankrupt concept” primarily valuable for enlisting “northern liberals.” Liberal is pejorative in this book. Martin Luther King Jr. is grudgingly acknowledged as a positive figure, but not as positive a figure as he would have been if he had kicked some white-capitalist ass and put a few pigs in the ICU. The “I Have a Dream” speech was, Osterweil writes, “the product of a series of sellouts and silencings, of nonviolent leaders dampening the militancy of the grass roots” and “sapping the movement’s energy.” More to her taste is Robert F. Williams, who practiced armed resistance, and Assata Shakur, who murdered a New Jersey police officer and remains a fugitive in Cuba. The violence needn’t be in self-defense—Shakur’s certainly was not. Osterweil quotes the “wisdom” of Stokely Carmichael: “Responsibility for the use of violence by black men, whether in self-defense or initiated by them [emphasis mine], lies with the white community.”

By now you have guessed that I am not the audience for this book. I have a job, and am therefore invested in building a system where you get paid for your work and pay others for theirs, and then everyone pays taxes to make sure that if these arrangements don’t work out, you can still have a dignified life. (Easily my favorite line in the book was written not by the author but by her publisher, right under the copyright notice: “The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property,” it says. “Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.”) My job sometimes entails traveling to countries recently or currently destroyed by civil unrest, and that experience has made me appreciate the fragility of peace, and has not made me eager to conduct a similar experiment in my own city.

I am also from recent-immigrant stock. Osterweil euphemizes looting as “proletarian shopping,” and no one from a place that has recently experienced this phenomenon can take seriously her assurance that it can happen justly and bloodlessly. When I think of riots and smashed storefronts, I think of Kristallnacht. I think of American businesses built by penniless immigrants who preferred to forfeit their vacations and weekends for 30 years rather than see their children suffer as they did; I think of these businesses ransacked in 30 minutes and left in ruins. Osterweil at least has the psychology right when she says that looting can be “joyous and liberatory.” I have never seen a sullen looter, but I have seen plenty of shop owners crying next to the smoking remains of their children’s future.

Absent from this book is even fleeting recognition that anyone (or nearly everyone) might prefer the current nonrevolutionary arrangement. Osterweil does not say what property-less system of government or anti-government she prefers, but I suspect it is not democracy, a term she uses only sneeringly. Nor is it clear how she intends to move from the past disgraces and present unrest to her goal, whatever it is, other than by rioting and stealing things until morale improves. What do you do when the free stuff runs out, the businesses and ordinary people who invested in your city decide not to make that mistake again, and—oops!—a few shopkeepers get beaten to death? This messy process is the “new world opening up, however briefly, in all its chaotic frenzy,” she writes. To me it sounds like a prequel to The Road.

Osterweil is unable or unwilling to relate to anyone at all with anything resembling a sense of humanity. Comrades and enemies alike are described without compassion, emotional detail, or distinction as people endowed with feelings or moral complexity. Once cast as a villain, a villain one remains, with no intricacies of the human condition explored under any circumstances. In the NPR interview, Osterweil describes the Los Angeles convenience store where Latasha Harlins was shot to death in 1991 as the location of “white-supremacist violence.” That shooting, which came two weeks after the beating of Rodney King and contributed to riots that killed 63 people, was perpetrated by the store owner, a female Korean immigrant—an irony that surely deserves probing. But Osterweil’s great class war has only two sides, so a working-class Korean woman is effortlessly enlisted on the side of the white-supremacist cisheteropatriarchs. Osterweil quotes a communist magazine: “Just as Jews were in 1965, Koreans in 1992 were ‘on the front-line of the confrontation between capital and the residents of central LA—they are the face of capital for these communities.’” As explanations of communal violence go, this is contemptibly inane.

Her conviction that her opponents deserve violence would be easier to abide if it were not obvious that nearly everyone counts as an opponent. Up against the wall are members of the media; “liberal commentators, de-escalators, nonprofiteers, right-wing trolls, vigilantes, and, of course, the police”; clergy who physically intercede between cops and protesters; and Nation of Islam members whose crime was to “broker a peace between gang leaders” and “chase looters” from neighborhood stores. You are not safe, at least not forever, even if you yourself are a victim of racism or capitalism. Perhaps you think that Dr. King’s speeches were more inspiring because he did not deliver them with a rifle in his hand, like Saddam Hussein. People like you are not part of the real civil-rights movement. “They must allow the real movement to change them,” Osterweil writes, “or they can only live to see themselves become its enemy.”

Happily I see very few people sharing Osterweil’s NPR interview approvingly, and nearly everyone consuming it in that joyous and liberatory mode known as “hate reading.” I haven’t yet encountered anyone who has read the actual book, which combines tedium and indecency in ways I had not previously contemplated. America is, after all, the country that nominated Joe Biden, who said that looters and rioters “make a mockery” of Black Lives Matter and “should be tried, arrested, and put in jail.” The consensus, especially among Donald Trump supporters, seems to be that NPR must be beyond salvage if it uncritically distributes sophomoric agitprop. (A sample question: “A lot of people who consider themselves radical or progressive criticize looting. Why is this so common?” I might have led with: “What do you think will do more for your community—a store that employs six people, or in that same location, a pile of bricks and broken glass?”)

Instead of writing off NPR or Code Switch, I prefer to think of them as coming very close to doing excellent journalism—and indeed I am jealous that I did not think of conducting this interview first. Since looting became widely reported in this season of protest over police violence, the reaction has split among those who do not support the protests or the looting, those who support the protests but denounce the looting, and those who support the protests and consider the looting a condign response to systemic injustice. Osterweil is enthusiastically in the last category and has given voice to a view that has heretofore been only gestured at. Good journalists find such voices and interrogate them roughly and fairly. The roughly part could, in the case of the NPR interview, have used a little work.

In a funny reversal of the normal polarities of “cancel culture,” conservatives might object to NPR’s decision to give Osterweil a platform at all, given that her defense of looting is a call to criminal behavior likely, even if not intended, to cause death and impoverishment. Should NPR also interview Nazis? Yes, actually—if the year is 1933, and most Americans don’t know what Nazis believe. Osterweil is not a Nazi (I have even sweeter compliments for her where that came from), but she has taken up a position that others espouse implicitly. A full exploration of that position is exactly what we need, and Code Switch found its best defender. If Osterweil’s defense is a bad one, she has now given other pro-looters a chance to reply to it and say why. If they do not, we can assume that they agree with Osterweil, and her argument is the pinnacle of looting apologia. A week ago, you could have said that looting might not be so bad, and I might have wondered what you meant by that. Now I will ask you if your reasons are the same as Osterweil’s, and I will make fun of you if you say yes. This is progress. For that, thank Code Switch."

Bourgeois Libertarianism Can Save America

Reliance on persuasion, freedom, property, and markets might deliver both peace and justice where "No Justice, No Peace" has so far failed.

By Brian Doherty of Reason.

"As various American cities descend into weeks or even monthslong street disorder, launched by anger and anguish over police brutality, standard American political ideas and groups seem equally powerless to preserve the domestic tranquility for which Americans theoretically give over large chunks of our fortunes and our choices to government. Many of these protests have evolved into generalized orgies of destruction and even arson, which is the most fiendishly destructive thing the average person can do in dense cities and which has been done with careless glee dozens of times.

In the places Americans gather to publicly reason with each other via awkward two-sentence chunks and snide insults, a disturbingly large number of people are insisting we recapitulate the stark choices that Germany seemed to offer its citizens a century ago between the world wars: a controlling, decadent left out to destroy private property, and a right that embraces a harsh, violent authoritarianism suspicious of outsiders of all stripes. 

Both sides' appeal is energized by the existence of the other, and both seem so obviously intolerably evil to each other that they agree on one thing: that no moral or prudential choice exists other than to join one of those two sides and come out swinging. 

The blood on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin (Kenosha, Wisconsin!) this week is a small preview of where that path leads.  

Traditional American libertarianism, to the extent either side acknowledges its existence, is seen by both leftists and rightists as either supporting the Evil Side or, at best, a pusillanimous, pie-in-the-sky distraction from the necessary business of seizing state power to crush the enemy.

But that old school, non-revolutionary, bourgeois American libertarianism, if actually embraced by most Americans, remains the only peaceful way out.

That it's a mistake—both morally wrong and likely ineffective—to use government force to solve most social problems is one of libertarianism's staid tenets. As the past months should have made evident, police power in the conventional sense can't keep cities secure if even a small number of people are unwilling to live and let live. State power simply cannot rule a people if even a small, energized minority refuses to let it. If you actually care about a functioning civilization, it is never enough to have the state controlled by the "right side." 

What makes civilization work, when it does, is people roughly hewing to libertarian principles, which, fortunately for Western civilization, most people do even when they are not being governed in a libertarian manner. 

What makes civilizations collapse, as we are now seeing, is people relentlessly seeking state or state-like solutions to their perceived grievances, particularly the kind that threaten your fellow citizens' liberty to live, think, express, work, save, and do business in peace, even if you have a good reason to be angry and feel a burning, even justified, need to see things change. 

To begin at the root of the current unrest, a more libertarian world would not have a police force engaged in continual series of overaggressive assaults on citizens, whether or not suspected of crimes. We suffer that now because police, as representatives of the state, are not subject to the same discipline for their crimes that most citizens are. 

At that same time, a more thoroughly libertarian world would not see certain tactics pursued by some on the progressive left who agree with the libertarian goal of reducing police's unjust spasms of "authority." For instance, that world would not have angry mobs insisting threateningly that random fellow citizens join them in some public expression of political piety, however noble the cause. It would also lack roving mobs setting fire to buildings and breaking windows. 

Those actions, unchecked and continual, tear at the roots of civilization that have made us as wealthy as we are—the relatively free and unmolested ability of people to possess wealth and space and use it to offer goods and services to others for a price. 

American movement libertarianism was revolutionary—but only intellectually so. Most American libertarians, even in the face of continual obscene injustices on the part of the state, never figured that reducing the civic order to a violent battlefield was the just or prudent response, especially in a world where most fellow citizens didn't want libertarian governance. The mission has always been selling people on the idea that they would benefit from more libertarian governance.

Thus, the notion of "no justice, no peace" that animates both angry anti-police-brutality progressives and major aspects of historic American foreign policy doesn't quite ring true for most American libertarians. Another country's criminality has often been insufficient to convince many libertarians that the mass life and property destruction of war were justified. Likewise, even though they are inspired by justified anger at recalcitrant and evil government policy, the weeks of property destruction and occasional attacks on bystanders are perhaps not the just or effective response.

Libertarians have a narrow sense of when and how force can be justly brought to bear to right wrongs. When it comes to either overseas war or domestic battles to change government policy or public attitudes, most libertarians can't agree that the lives and property of those innocent of committing the crime should suffer, especially when the connection between the violence or destruction and righting all relevant wrongs is tentative and uncertain.

The standard American libertarian has been traditionally and boringly bourgeois. Many think that while preserving life is indeed a higher priority than preserving property, property's vital role in human flourishing and happiness both individually and socially means that one cannot blithely treat it as sacrificeable to make some point about how angry you are or to pursue a vaguely seen path to "justice" for others.

The fanaticism of seeking to bloodily right all the world's wrongs, then, was never really the libertarian thing. The love of peace and prosperity that motivates libertarians to embrace liberty inclined them to think that truly effective and secure social change came not from violence, chaos, and force, but from treating fellow human minds and bodies with respect, as ends not means, and attempting to persuade them that libertarian ideas ought to shape human social life. 

The fanatical pursuit of "no justice, no peace" makes any reasonable civic life impossible. In a polity where agreement from a critical mass of your fellow citizens is necessary, certain sacrifices of peace in pursuit of justice will likely damage your chances of getting the kind of justice you say you want.

Such possibly counterproductive sacrifices include large scale denials of the right to use public streets unmolested and the idea that the livelihoods and savings of people with no direct connection to the wrongs can be justly ruined, most especially given what we know about how weeks or months of urban violence destroy prosperity for decades 

Those craving hope for America's near future might take small comfort in the fact that, as newsmaking as they rightly are, as fascinatingly grim as they are to discuss, as much as they dramatize in a colorfully violent way real fault lines in the beliefs and hopes of America writ large, the number of people so far fighting in the streets, breaking windows, and setting fires is very, very tiny in comparison to the vast number of Americans who do in fact, consciously or unconsciously, live their lives according to the tenets of bourgeois libertarianism.

That is the lived philosophy of the peaceful enjoyment of life and property, mostly minding one's own business, living and letting live, not enforcing orthodoxies of thought and expression no matter how good the cause, or treating other people's lives and property as sacrificable for a political goal. We are seeing that even a small number of people choosing to not live in accordance with those libertarian principles creates civic spaces in which no one can thrive—not even, in the long run, the people choosing to create chaos in the name of justice."

Minneapolis Law Preventing Business Owners from Protecting Their Own Property Backfires Horribly

It’s no surprise that preventing business owners from protecting their own property hasn’t beautified the streets of Minneapolis 

By Brad Polumbo of FEE. Excerpt:

"Yet even in the face of wanton destruction and violence, city ordinances are preventing Minneapolis business owners from protecting themselves and their property. As reported by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the city currently bans exterior security shutters. These are the type of shutters they pull down over a mall storefront when it closes, that would make it much harder to break in and loot it. They also prevent windows from being broken, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars to replace.

Why are security shutters banned in Minneapolis? Because city officials say they “cause visual blight,” and “create the impression that an area is ‘unsafe’ and ‘troublesome.’”

Now, many business owners are running up against this regulation as they seek to protect their reopened stores from future flare-ups of violence. (The earlier riots destroyed at least 1,500 Minneapolis businesses.) Liquor store owner John Wolf saw his store looted after rioters broke in through his windows and stole more than $1 million in alcohol. He’s fuming at the city regulations that stop him from protecting his property.

“Times have changed," Wolf told the Star-Tribune. "I am going to spend millions of dollars to bring my business back, and I don't want to buy 20 window panes and have them broken the first day. Property owners should have options on how to protect themselves."

Technically, business owners can apply for an exception to this rule. But it is incredibly difficult to get such a variance approved.

A city spokeswoman acknowledged as much, reportedly saying that “while someone is authorized to file a variance, it is challenging to meet the legal findings that are necessary to grant a variance from this type of provision.” The city says it has only ever received one request—which it rejected.

"I have never felt so vulnerable,” car repair shop owner Mark Brandow told the paper. He wanted to install security shutters on his property in July but was told by city officials he was ineligible to even apply for an exemption. They are only now letting him appeal. In the meantime, his storefront remains boarded up.

"People in the neighborhood have asked me to take the boards off because it is ugly," Brandow said. “But I don't need to be pretty. I'm going to leave it ugly until I get some satisfaction.”

This predictable consequence is part of the irony of the law's justification. The city’s anti-blight measure created more blight.

Well-intentioned Minneapolis officials banned security shutters, because they wanted their streets to be more visually appealing. Yet they failed to consider that store owners would only seek to install security shutters for a good reason—that is, if they were necessary.

We now see the results of this folly. Boarded-up stores, shattered windows, and permanent “closed” signs are far more likely to “cause visual blight” than security measures. The results of rioting run unchecked surely do far more to make an area seem “unsafe” and “troublesome” than metal security shutters.

So once again, we see sweeping regulation backfire and have unintended consequences that achieve the exact opposite of their original goals. This is what FEE’s James Harrigan and Antony Davies dubbed the “Cobra Effect.”

They told the comical yet revealing tale of how an Indian city placed a bounty on cobras to try and solve their infestation problem, yet achieved the opposite result. Why?

At first, more people hunted cobras to get the bounty, and the cobra population decreased. Yet then individuals started breeding and raising cobras at home in order to get the bounty again. When the government cancelled the bounty because the population had seemingly declined, citizens released all the cobras they had been raising in their homes into the wild.

The end result was a worse infestation of cobras than the city had to begin with.

“Human beings react to every rule, regulation, and order governments impose, and their reactions result in outcomes that can be quite different than the outcomes lawmakers intended,” Harrigan and Davies wrote in explaining why the regulation failed.

So, it’s no surprise that preventing business owners from protecting their own property hasn’t beautified the streets of Minneapolis—it has left them in shambles."

Mayhem Continues, Protest Narrative Crumbles: Looters rampage in Chicago and arson returns in Portland

WSJ Editorial.

"The press has been playing defense for Portland anarchists for weeks, suggesting riots and arson against a federal courthouse were provoked by federal agents protecting it. When the Trump Administration lowered the profile of its agents in an agreement with the state government, the media’s protest cheerleaders were eager to report that the real cause of the violence had gone away. “Trump ordered federal forces to quell Portland protests. But the chaos ended as soon as they left,” said a July 31 Washington Post headline.

So much for that. Over the weekend Portland police were forced to declare two riots. On Friday police said “people defied orders to disperse and threw rocks, frozen or hard-boiled eggs and commercial-grade fireworks at officers,” the Associated Press reports. Rioters also “filled pool noodles with nails and placed them in the road, causing extensive damage to a patrol vehicle.” On Saturday night, arsonists set a fire inside the Portland police union building and rioters outside landed two officers in the hospital. Rioting continued late Sunday, injuring more police.

The narrative of peaceful protesters set upon by bloodthirsty law enforcement officers in Portland is becoming unsustainable even for progressives. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, who ostentatiously denounced the Trump Administration’s efforts to protect the federal courthouse, had a rendezvous with reality after people tried to set ablaze a police precinct on Wednesday night. “When you commit arson with an accelerant in an attempt to burn down a building that is occupied by people that you have intentionally trapped inside,” he said, “you are not demonstrating. You are attempting to commit murder.”

Meanwhile in Chicago on Sunday night, hundreds of looters ransacked stores along the Magnificent Mile, one of America’s premier commercial streets. The Chicago Tribune reports that some looters “could be seen throwing merchandise into rental trucks and other large vehicles before driving away.” The city pulled up drawbridges to control entrance to the downtown, and 13 cops were injured.

Homicides in the city are up 52% compared to last year, and Alderman Brian Hopkins told CBS local news on Friday that “If people are afraid to come downtown, they fear for their life, they’re not going to want to shop here.” He said a greater police presence is needed to protect Chicago’s downtown and that he “tried to impress” the gravity of the situation to the mayor and police superintendent. “We’ll see if they respond,” he added. Judging by the mayhem of Sunday night, they did not.

All of this raises the question of how long the mainstream press and Democratic politicians can publicly maintain the fiction that violence surrounding “mostly peaceful” protests is a nuisance of little consequence and that the real villains are the police. The longer this willful distortion continues, the longer the economic immiseration of places like Chicago will persist even after the pandemic ends."

What Happens When Suburban Police Departments Don't Have Enough Money?

By Patrick Smith of NPR.

"In suburbs just outside the city of Chicago, some police officers are paid fast-food wages; they work part-time patrolling high crime areas, just so they can use their badge to get better paying security jobs. 

Many police chiefs say the low-wages and part-time positions are consequences of inadequate funding. That means departments can't pay for ongoing training, can't afford to fire problem officers and don't have the capacity to investigate police shootings.

Experts say it's created a system where there's often no accountability for bad actions, and no real effort to learn from policing mistakes.

Lack of resources leads to lack of accountability

Two years ago, Robert Collins took over as police chief in the Chicago suburb of Dolton — population 22,000.

"When I first came aboard, one of my first things to do was to look at the history of the department," he says. "And I did notice that there were quite a few officer-involved shootings."

Dolton has had nine police shootings since 2005 — tied for the most in suburban Cook County.

"To be honest with you, I don't know how we would explain it to people," Collins says.

One explanation could be who Dolton hires for its police force, and how they're trained and monitored once they join the force. Experts say in many budget-strapped towns such as Dolton, a lack of resources leads to a lack of accountability for bad actions.

There's one officer on the Dolton police force who has killed one man and wounded three others in separate shootings. Before he was hired by Dolton, that officer had already been suspended by one department for a shooting, and fired by another for misconduct.

For most police forces, that background would raise a red flag. But for cash-strapped suburbs like Dolton, it made him affordable.

The Chicago Police Department estimates it costs $140,000 for the first year of hiring a new recruit — that's money many suburbs just don't have — so they'd rather take a fully-trained up officer with some baggage, than pay to put someone through the academy.

Chief Collins says since he's taken over in Dolton, he's raised the department's standards, but he's quick to acknowledge the struggle between budgeting and policing.

"Unfortunately, sometimes there's not a lot of money to hire what you need, you just have to make do with what you have," Collins says.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart spends a lot of his time working with distressed suburban police departments and says, departments having to make do means "you get officers bouncing around the departments, and it's not good, it's not good. I just don't know what the mechanism is to stop that."

Fewer opportunities to learn from mistakes

One town just outside Chicago — the village of Robbins — has almost all part-time police officers. The pay there is $10.50 an hour. That's less than the starting rate at Walmart.

The pay for a Robbins cop was $10 an hour in 2008 when a part-time officer accidentally shot an innocent 13-year-old in the back.

Nothing happened to the officer involved, or to the officer in Dolton who's been involved in five shootings since 2005.

In fact, according to an investigation by WBEZ and the Better Government Association, there are rarely consequences for suburban officers after questionable shootings.

Out of more than a hundred shootings since 2005, no officer has been charged with a crime for any of them. No officers have been disciplined in any way or even ordered for re-training.

Our investigation found only a handful of instances in which a department even did a review.

"The reality is that in a lot of these different towns that you named, they have a hard enough time getting officers to patrol the town, let alone to have a separate part of their office set aside that just analyzes police-involved shootings," Sheriff Dart says.

Peter Moskos spent a couple years as a cop in Baltimore, and now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He says in suburbs and small departments throughout the country, these issues often get overlooked.

"And so we just don't know because there's no account," he says. "And yeah, if there is shady stuff going on I think it's much more likely to happen in small towns where there's no oversight."

In the Chicago suburbs, that means the departments struggling with high-crime and low-budgets can miss out on opportunities to learn from mistakes and improve training or policies.

It means residents who most need help from police often have to deal with poorly trained officers — some who can stay on patrol despite numerous shootings.

That Dolton officer involved in all those shootings was recently promoted to detective."