I've written before of the contraction of the right to self-defense over the past several decades, so I was pleased to see Kurt Schlichter's article on the same issue. Key bit:
There’s a war going on against our sacred right to self-defense, and we need to defend that right, ruthlessly and vigorously against the communists who want us living in fear. And they do want us living in fear – sheep are easier to shear than sheepdogs. If you look what happened in New York City, where some mutant bum decided to threaten a bunch of people on a subway car, and then some heroes subdued him, and then he vapor-locked, and then the usual cast of liars and race-pimps screeched, you can see what they are doing – not merely trying to disarm us but trying to make us fear to defend ourselves at all. They want you terrified and impotent in the face of their unofficial militia, the criminals. The right to keep and bear arms means nothing if you are going to get jammed up whenever you have to use hot lead to stop the latest trans shooter, or junkie with a knife, or carjacker, or schizo hobo, or whatever. Which is the idea.
Most of the rest of his article is on how to stop the spread of this disease--mostly by paying attention to the elections of district attorneys and prosecutors for our particular city and county. Read the whole thing.
The reason for all of this is two-fold: to make the populace dependent on the government and, perhaps more importantly, make the populace helpless in the face of the urban mobs. Fred Siegel, writing in the fall of 2015 at City Journal, warned of what he termed "The Riot Ideology, Reborn."
In the summer of 1966, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach warned that there would be riots by angry, poor minority residents in “30 or 40” American cities if Congress didn’t pass President Lyndon Johnson’s Model Cities antipoverty legislation. In the late 1960s, New York mayor John Lindsay used the fear of such rioting to expand welfare rolls dramatically at a time when the black male unemployment rate was about 4 percent. And in the 1980s, Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry articulated an explicitly racial version of collective bargaining—a threat that, without ample federal funds, urban activists would unleash wave after wave of racial violence. “I know for a fact,” Barry explained, “that white people get scared of the [Black] Panthers, and they might give money to somebody a little more moderate.”
This brand of thinking, which I have called the riot ideology, influenced urban politics for a generation, from the 1960s through the 1980s. Perhaps its model city was Baltimore, which, in 1968, was consumed by race riots so intense that the Baltimore police, 500 Maryland state troopers, and 6,000 National Guardsmen were unable to quell them. The “insurrection” was halted only when nearly 5,000 federal troops requested by Maryland governor Spiro Agnew arrived.
In the years since 1968, Baltimore has proved remarkably adept at procuring state and federal funds and constructed revitalization projects such as the justly famed Camden Yards and a convention center. But Baltimore never really recovered from the riots, and the lawlessness never fully subsided. What began as a grand bargain to avert further racial violence after 1968 descended over the decades into a series of squalid shakedowns. Antipoverty programs that had once promised to repair social and family breakdown became by the 1990s self-justifying and self-perpetuating.
In the wake of the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 2015 West Baltimore riots, a new riot ideology has taken hold, one similarly intoxicated with violence and willing to excuse it but with a different goal. The first version of the riot ideology assumed that not only cities but also whites could be reformed; the new version assumes that America is inherently racist beyond redemption and that the black inner city needs to segregate itself from the larger society (with the exception of federal welfare funds, which should continue to flow in). This new racial politics is not only coalescing around activists claiming to speak for urban blacks—represented publically by groups like Black Lives Matter—but is also expressed in the writings of best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates. And Baltimore is once again center stage.
He then explores the grift and corruption that resulted from the money extorted--that is the correct word--from whites ostensibly to keep blacks from burning down the city. Then, he continues:
The riot ideology of the 1960s had been about cadging federal funds under threat of violence; the riot ideology of 2015 is about the smoldering resentment that led the underclass and its media and political enablers to argue that racist cops produced depraved urban behavior. David Simon, the idiot-savant creator of HBO’s award-winning The Wire, which glamorized Baltimore’s black drug “crews,” blamed the legacy of O’Malley’s quality-of-life policing for the riots. Simon described Baltimore police officers as “an army of occupation.” He unintentionally had a point. The police, despite their vices, impose a modicum of conventional values on a polity where the culture of gangsta rap projects the illusion of a revolutionary alternative to “bourgeois white values.” An MSNBC host plausibly compared inner-city Baltimore with the Gaza Strip, where the failure of repeated self-destructive assaults on Israel hasn’t diminished the illusion that the Jewish state is but a passing phenomenon of settler-colonialism.
After the Ferguson riots of 2014, disdain on the street for Baltimore’s integrated but often less than professional police department became combustible, and Gray’s death lit the powder keg. Economically marginal residents—in a city home to Johns Hopkins University and financial firms Legg Mason and T. Rowe Price—perpetrated Baltimore’s spring 2015 riots, which destroyed 200 businesses and injured 98 cops. The trouble began at the James Rouse–constructed Mondawmin Mall. Students, angry at the way they were “disrespected” and inspired by the sci-fi movie The Purge, which described a day of seemingly emancipatory anarchy, gathered outside the mall’s transportation hub. Flyers called for the Crips, the Bloods, the Black Guerrilla Family, and the Nation of Islam to unite and join the action. Students cornered by cops reportedly began taunting police, who had gone on alert after receiving what the department called “credible information” that a coalition of gangs wanted to “take out” law-enforcement officers. Rioting ensued.
Reporters took little notice of these gang elements, since the liberal media operated on the principle of “implied suffering”—that is, people acting badly is de facto proof that they have been mistreated. The persistence of poverty in West Baltimore supposedly demonstrated pervasive white racism and black powerlessness. Yet the same Black Guerrilla Family was powerful enough to have run the Baltimore City Detention Center until Maryland governor Larry Hogan shut it down.
As the violence unfolded, Mayor Rawlings-Blake told police to stand down. “I’ve made it very clear that I work with the police and instructed them to do everything that they could to make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free speech,” she explained. “It’s a very delicate balancing act, because while we tried to make sure that they were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.” And, she said, “we worked very hard to keep that balance and to put ourselves in the best position to deescalate, and that’s what you saw.”
He wrote this in 2015, and it has only gotten worse. We saw countless examples of people prosecuted for trying to defend themselves during the riots under the absurd theory that a person can't display a firearm against a mob of rioters because there might be some in the mob that weren't technically threatening that person.
The ultimate goal is to make the populace at large (and we know of whom we are talking) defenseless against the mobs intended to strike fear into the population and, thereby, more willing to cough up more money to appease the angry blacks (or other so-called victim groups). Our only collective self-defense is to defend the individual right to self-defense.
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