Statues being torn down, mobs of unemployed youth taking over entire city blocks, the looting and burning stores, incoherent demands being made of government and society, all of this has become an enormous distraction from what should be the primary focus of the protests: dismantling the privileges afforded to police. Qualified immunity, unionization, prosecutors unwilling to prosecute bad cops, outrageous cop pensions, military gear, et cetera, these are all things that could be realistically dismantled in the current climate. It’s the perfect moment, when the entire world is giving its undivided attention to this issue. But the chaos of the mob is clouding this momentum.
Of course, the mob riots are an inevitable evolution of naive lock-downs: the older generation, in their fear, demanded the lock-down of society, which spawned massive unemployment and social fracturing. This essentially generated a dense sawdust cloud of unemployed young people, one waiting for a spark. That spark came in the form of the widely-publicized murder of George Floyd. Too many people are surprised by what has happened, but that is merely because they never fully understood the consequences of shutting down a developed, complex economy. The unemployed youth have nowhere to turn for real leadership, not their political leaders, nor their elders, and so they are turning to chaos. It’s a recipe for a revolution of the French variety, not American. It’s a revolution intent on bringing out the guillotine, for erecting a totalitarian State. It’s a revolution of re-barbarization, whether the participants realize it or not.
