Democrats and the media claim that they only support peaceful protesters, and the idea that they support violence and looting is a right-wing conspiracy theory.
And, helpfully, NPR decided to run a piece touting looting as a force for social change.
No really.
Writer Vicky Osterweil’s book, In Defense of Looting, came out on Tuesday. When she finished it, back in April, she wrote (rather presciently) that “a new energy of resistance is building across the country.” Now, as protests and riots continue to grip cities, she argues that looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society. The rioters who smash windows and take items from stores, she says, are engaging in a powerful tactic that questions the justice of “law and order,” and the distribution of property and wealth in an unequal society.
Much like NPR redistributes money from the taxpayers who earned it to its executives and propagandists. If there were ever an inciting incident that should see NPR stripped of taxpayer funding, this is it.
Often, looting is more common among movements that are coming from below. It tends to be an attack on a business, a commercial space, maybe a government building—taking those things that would otherwise be commodified and controlled and sharing them for free.
Commodified and “sharing them for free”.
Much like a mugger hits you over the head and shares the money in your wallet for free.
So yes, the Left, and we are talking the mainstream Left, it doesn’t get more mainstream then NPR, is coming for you, and defending the idea of robbery as social change.
And here’s more of the benefits of looting…
It gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage
At which point the business providing this stuff is out of business and nobody in the area is able to obtain what they want except perhaps by ordering it on Amazon.
Mission accomplished.
It also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed. It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions. It points to the way in which that’s unjust. And the reason that the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories. So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.
We can have things for free. Seriously.
By “we”, Mr. Osterweil means random thugs and looters, while the actual “we” lose everything unless we’re ready to defend it.
Anyway, speaking of having things for free, Mr. Osterweil’s book is available at Amazon for $21 bucks via a Hachette imprint. That’s a huge mega-publisher.
Or I guess you could just loot a copy from an NPR office.
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