Sunday, July 5, 2020

We’re Experiencing an Attempted Revolution by Entitled, Privileged Snobs but How Will It Play Out?

streiff writing for RedState

I usually don’t post on this kind of viral video because while it is amusing, in a sad and pathetic kind of way, the plural of anecdote is not data. Watch this whole video because it is a metaphor for what I think is going to happen in America:



This is breathtaking in its arrogance and lack of introspection. A whiny-ass white boy lecturing a black working man about what it means to be black in America. This sh**stain’s diatribe is the second most amazing thing in this video. The most amazing thing is that he didn’t get pounded to a pulp by an actual man who knows how to carry himself.

Unless you’ve missed it, we’re seeing the formation of what could become an active insurrection. A lot of it is straight out of the unconventional warfare classroom. The radical Marxist group Black Lives Matter provides the direction. There are establishment figures, like Nancy Pelosi, like Chuck Schumer, like Rachel Maddow, like Jake Tapper, who think by mouthing correct slogans they will buy influence and loyalty, but, if this project succeeds those folks and their face-diaper wearing colleagues will be among the first to the scaffold (assuming anyone in BLM has the mechanical skills to erect one). The rent-a-mobs are composed of three easily identifiable segments: the provocateurs and street soldiers composed largely of antifa and black bloc stooges; the ‘mostly peaceful’ protesters who think they are participating in a legitimate act of protest; and the opportunists who show up to carry off big screen televisions, throw bricks at cops, and commit vandalism for the sake of destroying stuff. The general strategy in this kind of movement is that the provocateurs try to create acts of violence directed against law enforcement and security forces. They are aided in this by the opportunists who often have a large number of actual criminals in the ranks. The idea is to provoke the security forces into an act that leaves lots of bodies in the street, ideally bodies belonging to the ‘mostly peaceful’ protesters. This, in turn, recruits more people to the cause as the dead are deemed martyrs and recruiting tools.

It doesn’t always work.

In the aftermath of the Ohio National Guard visiting the Kent State University campus (May 4, 1970) and the Jackson (MS) city police and Mississippi highway patrol dropping by Jackson State College (May 14, 1970) the violent protests on college campuses came to a screeching halt. Being a martyr loses a lot of its appeal when it stopped being coffee house bullsh** and started really involving being dead. And even Neil Young couldn’t get people to sign up to get shot:




The irony is all that was that virtually no one protesting the war in Vietnam was actually in danger of going. By 1970 so many exemptions to the draft existed that in order to get drafted you really had to cooperate. It was working class kids, not their upper middle class contemporaries, who fought and bled in Vietnam and enormous numbers did so voluntarily.

There are some misconceptions about the nature of the violent demonstrations…and anyone who tells you ‘most’ of the demonstrations have been non-violent is simply lying to you or is a slobbering moron. There seems to be a perception that the BLM street soldiers are disadvantaged black Americans who are trying to achieve some measure of normalcy in lives that are characterized by systemic racism and police brutality. In reality, any video of a BLM organized demonstration will show you that the people breaking the law, engaging in direct action, and attempting to provoke authorities are anything other than disadvantaged or black. This is from a demonstration in Raleigh, NC, two days ago. As a point of reference, Raleigh is 53% non-Hispanic white.



This is not unusual. Rarely is a revolutionary movement led by nor does it involve large numbers of lower socio-economic status. Poor people, middle class people, have a vested interest in stability and in the social status quo. The working class will take to the streets over specific injustices (see, for instance, the Pullman strikes and the West Virginia mine wars and the Civil Rights marches before 1968) but they are a trailing indicator and by the time they become involved something is definitely wrong.

If you look at the major social upheavals you find they are led by members of the privileged classes who feel they are being screwed. One of the big knocks on the American Revolution by lefty history professors going back to when I was an undergrad is that is was fomented and led by the leadership class in the colonies. In fact, in those colonies where the upper classes were rather lukewarm to the Revolution, the middle class and the yeomanry and the laborers tended to stay loyal. This was true even among people who you would have expected to be the first to sign up for independence, such as the Scots communities in North Carolina who arrived courtesy of being exiled for participating in the 1745 uprising or were the victims of the clearances of tenant farmers to make room for sheep.

The French Revolution was kick started by the not ennobled but fairly financially secure. The same for the revolutions that swept Europe during 1848. The leadership of the Russian Revolution did not come from the working class and peasantry. The leadership of the Spartacist movement that culminated in the 1919 uprising against Weimar government was not working class. In fact, something failed revolutions have in common is that they are unable to ever spread their anarchy beyond the rather comfortable drawing rooms of the upper classes. For instance, when British intellectuals tried to import the French Revolution to Britain, they were told by British working men that their ideas weren’t welcome. The Spartacists were put down by German Freikorps militias composed mostly of demobilized veterans who were opposed to the revolutionary ideas about to be imposed upon them.

Ed West, writing at Unherd in Why the rich are revolting makes some very good observations about who are the people on the streets inciting violence today.

That noble tradition of haute bourgeoisie revolution continues today, especially in the US. The Occupy movement, for example, is deeply opposed to the 1% but largely because they come from the 2-5%; Amy Chua cited figures suggesting that in New York, more than half it members earned $75,000 or more while only 8% were on low incomes, compared to 30% of the city. They also have hugely disproportionate numbers of graduates and post-grads among their members.
The wider Great Awokening, of which the 2020 disturbances are a part, is a very elite phenomenon, with progressive activists nearly twice as likely as the average American to make more than $100,000 a year, nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree, and only one-quarter as likely to be black. Likewise with the radicalisation of American academia, with the safe spaces movement most prevalent at elite colleges, where students were much more likely to disinvite speakers or express more extreme views.
…
Meanwhile, the expansion of the university system has created what Russian-American academic Peter Turchin called ‘elite overproduction’, the socially dangerous situation where too many people are chasing too few elite places in society, creating “a large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable… denied access to elite positions”.
So while around half of 18-year-olds are going onto college, only a far smaller number of jobs actually require a degree. Many of those graduates, under the impression they were joining the higher tier in society, will not even reach managerial level and will be left disappointed and hugely indebted. Many will have studied various activist-based subjects collectively referred to as ‘grievance studies’, so-called because they rest on a priori assumptions about power and oppression. Whether these disciplines push students towards the Left, or if it is just attending university that has this effect, people are coming out of university far more politically agitated.

I think this is completely correct. What the BLM movement is capturing in its street fighting ventures is not oppressed striking out for freedom and equality. What it embodies is a temper tantrum of a lot of overly educated but quite stupid young adults (I use the term chronologically, not behaviorally) who are angry that they are not being treated by the world with the same deference Mommy and Daddy (assuming they knew him because it is very clear that a great number of these goons do not come from a home with an actual father) showed them growing up. There are no participation trophies. There are no automatic A’s from professors who were worried about self esteem. All the games keep score. No one cares about your feelings. Add to that a dead end job and a mountain of student loan debt and you have a lot of spoiled brats who believe that being in charge is owed to them seeing their miserable piss-ant lives slip away into the abyss of irrelevance and a pauper’s grave.

West makes a much more succinct observation than I’m capable of by quoting someone much smarter than me:

The rich have always paradoxically been radical, something G.K. Chesterton observed over a hundred years ago when he wrote “You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists: they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.”

This is where I think the BLM revolution in making breaks down. Most Americans are against anarchy. Most Americans are against meaningless violence. Most Americans don’t want statues torn down. Most don’t want the nuclear family to be destroyed. Most are not in favor of 50+ sexual deviances being recognized as normal. I would submit that most of the BLM agenda is completely out of touch with what is believed in any normal neighborhood in America:

We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.
We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.
We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered.
We practice empathy. We engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts.
We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.
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.
We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).

Where does this all lead? More likely than not this movement burns itself out when the welfare doled out to compensate for the Wuhan virus ‘pandemic’ goes away and these louts have to get jobs somewhere. If it doesn’t, then it won’t end well. There is nothing these people are selling that the average American wants to buy. As the days go by, those of us who were leaning towards a serious look at the use of force by our police are being drawn more and more to the “I want to see some heads busted” point of view. When a car plowed through some imbeciles blocking a freeway in Seattle (see Video: Man Drives Through Seattle Protester Blockade Set Up on Highway, Hits Two People At High Speed), Kurt Schlichter summed up my feeling perfectly:


It is no coincidence that the BLM protests, particularly the occupation of the so-called CHAZ in Seattle, contributed directly to this:


And all it will take is one skirmish somewhere, with law enforcement or with an ad hoc militia or even with a private citizen affirming their right to not be assaulted and the rest of these useless people will melt away.


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