Henry Dampier

I’ve spilled a number of pixels already on the political dynamic that’s been at work in some of the urban riots over the last year or two. My observations aren’t particularly unique on this topic, either.

One of the interesting dynamics at work is that many of the radial leftists in print, at websites, and on TV have tended to put more hopes into these protests than the facts themselves would warrant. Characters like Matt Bruenig, the rest of the staff at Gawker, the new staff at the New Republic, some choice Atlantic columnists, and others from more radical venues like Jacobin, have all downplayed some of their more characteristic cultural and economic issues for whatever grievance at the moment is being wailed about by the urban protest machine.

In most leftist revolutions, the people doing the writing are also willing to do the killing. Trotsky, Lenin, Mao, and the rest of the gang were happy to have a lot of people killed themselves, even if they weren’t always holding the pistol.

The real Jacobins weren’t exactly field marshals, but they were happy to preside over executions and to sign away the lives of people themselves. They were willing to whip up mobs personally, rather than at a distance, and sometimes place themselves in the line of fire. The contemporary ones, not so much. They prefer to use proxies of a foreign ethnicity to their own, similar to the way that America often fights wars abroad since the enormous windfall that it enjoyed in 1945.

Facing danger, suffering, and dying — especially since the Korean War — has been something that Americans have tended to outsource to others as much as possible. That parts of the American elite would find and use angry tribes locally for such purposes is not all that surprising. It’s just doing to its domestic enemies what it tries to do to its foreign enemies. Fortunately, the terrible American track record in recent wars gives us all some cause for optimism.

They come to see these Black mobs as a sort of wish fulfillment for the revolution that they themselves are unwilling to lead or fight in, because, constitutionally, they’re so feeble, non-aggressive, and disproportionately female or androgynous. They dream of cities on fire and headless enemies, but they lack the gumption — or perhaps the cardiovascular capacity — to clamber up the barricades themselves.

In today’s slow-rolling urban revolution, the leftists provoking them stay comfy in their Herman Miller chairs, for the most part, typing away, lending their support to the interference operation being run by the Department of Justice and other characters on the National Guard and urban police units to prevent them from using appropriate levels of force to curb the riots.

Further, the press itself runs disinformation campaigns on behalf of the rioters, excuses their actions, and obstructs the process of justice.

In the recent failed war in Iraq, the American military considered ‘radical clerics,’ in many cases, to be valid targets, considered just as dangerous as the fighters whom they inspired, if not more so. While the war ultimately proved to be useless (for a variety of reasons), the principle already affirmed by all branches of the American government is a relatively sound one, even considering the idiocy of the wars themselves from a strategic point of view.

Certain members of the press, working with parts of the Federal government, are taking actions that are destroying American cities, causing billions or trillions of dollars in damage to property, and are harming what’s left of the Republic, using the usual means that such subversive cells are fond of using. This is obviously also harmful to the tax base, America’s profile in international relations, and is damaging to America’s credibility in all things.

Going back to the failure of the American military to understand that radical meant something rather different for the Iraqis than it meant for the Americans, we should also consider whether or not it actually makes sense to consider the consensus opinion on the Eastern seaboard to be ‘radical’ at all, because America’s most prestigious religious institutions all believe exactly what all of these people believe, and advocate for the same destructive actions, with lockstep opinion.

In this way, conservative hopes for ‘reform’ for the government are as profoundly misguided as hopes for Islam to ‘reform.’ Conservatives (along with some others) want to turn the ongoing revolution into something that it’s not — to save liberalism from itself, when it has no desire to be so saved, and is eager to physically exterminate all of its competitors as soon as it has the capacity, as such groups have attempted to do in countries ranging from Spain to France to Russia to all of Eastern Europe. This is the ordinary, normal course of action for leftists. They’re also not usually all that amenable to rational deterrence through speech.

Conservatives hope to persuade, or perhaps merely to survive without being bothered, when they should be concerning themselves with counter-revolution in the territories in which it might be feasible, while ceding entirely those that can’t be.

Considering the mistake of assessing clerics as ‘radical’ when they actually represent the indigenous belief system, people who care about civilized life in North America should also consider how much of the continent is actually possible to rescue from degeneration and destruction, given a dominant religious-ideological orientation towards this sort of self-annihilation and bloody sacrifice.

The answer is likely to be ‘not all of it,’ because the belief system that feeds the revolution now has deep roots in the population — particularly in the elite — and the cultural change can’t be forced by handing soldiers packs of playing cards with journalists’ names on them.

There’s another riot today in what was once a major American city, but is now a backwater comparable to some third world cities based on economic, criminal, and social metrics. It doesn’t really matter which city it is, because just about all the cities have the same problems.

Here’s the big lie: “the drug war is about keeping drugs off the streets to promote public health and protect American children.”

Here’s another big lie: “people of all races are equal in intellectual and moral capability. We should treat everyone as if they’re the same value.”

Here’s the half-truth: “the drug war is about locking up black people and other racial minorities.”

Here’s the full-truth: “the drug war is a corrupt excuse to lock up black people and other racial minorities who commit a lot of violent crime, lower property values by their presence, and commit countless minor crimes against the peace and our sense of aesthetics.”

Here’s the fuller-truth: “there’s no more money to pay for any of this.”

Trying to square all these lies and truths together is impossible, so there must be chaos in the streets. No one is willing to tell the truth, and no one is willing to do what’s necessary to restore order to the cities. Because this is the case, just about all of these cities will be destroyed from the inside, as many of them already have been to some extent or another.

For a brief period of time, it was possible to essentially jail enough young men from these minority populations to keep them off the streets for long enough until all the aggression was out of them in prison. Locking up large portions of the entire male population of various minority demographics may be somewhat effective in the short term, but it’s also extremely expensive, with inordinate unintended consequences.

The destruction will continue to get worse until a military intervenes in a decisive way, in the typical manner that ends these sorts of disturbances definitively. This probably won’t happen until it becomes much worse, which it will.