FEE:
Chaos is consuming Portland, Oregon.
Local police declared a riot on Saturday evening after rioters once again tried to burn down a federal courthouse and launched mortars and fireworks at police officers, several of whom sustained injuries. Similarly destructive unrest has unfolded each night in the city for weeks now, with rampant vandalism, arson, graffiti, and more becoming commonplace as protests over the death of George Floyd morphed into riots over President Trump’s controversial decision to send federal officers to Portland.
Yet Portland is by no means the only city gripped by unrest and violence.
Riots have also rocked cities such as Austin, Texas, and Seattle, Washington. In Seattle over the weekend rioters reportedly set fires, vandalized businesses, smashed car windows, and assaulted a court building. NPR reports that 21 police officers were injured while trying to contain the chaos.
And this is just the most recent wave. In May and early June, rioting broke out in cities from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Dallas, Texas.
We’re witnessing a breakdown in the rule of law. In many cases, city officials have enabled or encouraged rioting while law enforcement stands down and allows wanton property destruction. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler even joined rioters and participated in the same demonstrations that were spiraling out of control. MORE
Just property damage isn’t vandalism is a lie the same way mostly peaceful isn’t a riot.
Without property rights there are no rights.
And in the WSJ today this ridiculous headline: Portland Leaders Hope for Less Violent Weekend Following Drawdown of Federal Agents
Where would one get the kind of “fireworks” those protestors are using in the riots?
Aren’t those illegal to import, possess, or sell in the United States to anyone except licensed professionals?
…my property is tied to my life. After I left my parent’s house no one GAVE me ANYTHING. All I’ve had since has come only through giving up the larger part of every day I’m alive to toil in the service of others, and all of it was purchased by my sweat, my blood, my youth, and my physical well-being, all so I could lawfully carve out a place to safely raise a family, feed, clothe, and house them, dutifully pay my taxes, and support my community with my care of my property and my dollars spent locally over and above my taxes.
And YOU, BLM, Antifa, Democrats, say that I deserve NONE of it. That it’s not violence to pillage MY neighborhood, destroy MY security, loot MY house of EVERYTHING I gave MY life to EARN for MY family in the service of others, INCLUDING Black people, burn MY house down to destroy the place in the world that my youth bought for MY family, ruin the food I bled for to put in MY family’s bellies, and threaten to murder MY now-dispossessed family for their race, and you justify this with inconsistent and inchoate reasons from something someone I am not even related to did 170 years ago to something a policeman in a Democrat city in a Democrat state 700 miles away did wrong while arresting a Black man who was high and engaged in felonious activity, NONE OF WHICH I HAVE ANY CONTROL OVER.
And then you’re going to tell me that ruining my life, my livelihood, my ability to feed my nearest and dearest, dispossession me, and intimidating my wife and children s NOT violent as long as you don’t ACTUALLY rape or murder anyone at the time?
No.
You ARE committing violence. You are destroying not only MY years of labor, not only MY ability to support my community, not only MY ability and even my very REASON to do a job that supports OTHERS INCLUDING people with skin blacker than your OWN, you are destroying the very FABRIC of society, the social contract that keeps us from shooting each other over parking disputes, any semblance of Rule of Law and, ultimately, you are killing the ONLY nation that actually has equality before the Law engraved in its charter, the ONLY nation that fought a war with itself over slavery, and the ONLY nation that creates the conditions that allows enough personal wealth per capita that makes it POSSIBLE that YOU can buy the chintzy vest that YOU riot to destroy it in.
Worse STILL, you show NO respect for God’s law, humiliate HIS children, attack HIS ministers, burn His houses, and prevent HIS people from worshipping HIM so you can pull them down to YOUR level.
…and THAT is the worst violence of ALL.
…my life has been dedicated TO life. I spent 10 years formally saving lives without regard to race, creed, or color, and have done so on an informal basis many years since. Every other job I’ve ever worked I have done work for and supporting work for people of every possible persuasion and all the world’s languages. I have done violence, have trained for violence, and have met violence WITH violence on occasion, but I am NOT by nature a violent man.
But if you come for the property I spent my life EARNING, that I protect my FAMILY in, that I support my COMMUNITY from, and attempt to force me FROM it, I WILL consider that violence.
And in THAT, I will respond in kind.
…and you have NO idea how prepared, how equipped, how trained I REALLY am to do so.
And you should also consider that, since I am intimately familiar with how to TREAT pain and death, that it ALSO gives me detailed knowledge of how to CAUSE both, right down to the six places I can kill you with a one-inch cut, and if you knew my background you’d better BELIEVE I am well-supplied with edged weapons too…
“For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.”
Hosea 8:7
…come for me and mine, and I will be your whirlwind tonight.
That’s just a fact.
Your violence will bring on mine.
And I’ve had three more DECADES that you to prepare…
When these pieces of shit communists call themselves anarchists they are lying. An anarchist is against government in any form. These “peaceful protestors” want total government with them in control. Pundits only fall into their disinformation scheme when they call them anarchists.
Supernightshade, evil stalks the earth.
So they can set a home or office building on fire and their conscience is clear, they’ve committed no real wrong, no violence, so their argument goes. It’s just “property.”
But then fire consumes the building they set ablaze and people inside the building are burned alive. Still, Antifa is not to blame for their deaths; they were only setting fire to property. Antifa didn’t kill them, the fire did.
Is this what we’re to accept as we evaluate the argument that destruction of property is not violent?
I concur. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
MJA, Excellent article. Now if only a couple of my activist nieces would read and agree.
Vandals, rioters, peaceful protesters, whatever you want to call them, jettison their rights when they take up bottles, molotov cocktails, rocks, stones, bricks, fire, and knives.
This is all part of an elaborate and sinister plan to nationalize the costs of destruction of these shit-holes through Federal “grants” and other assorted payments through the Federal Government. It is a massive wealth transfer that will pull the heartstrings for the “people who were burned out through no fault of their own” and must be rebuilt at taxpayer expense (even though the economy’s in the toilet). $Trillions will flow into the cities and states that have proven the more corrupt – the more accepting of the shit-weasel rioters and anti-America parasitic maggots of BLM and ANTIFA.
There is nothing “random” or “spontaneous” in this concerted effort to destroy us.
Well planned and executed by the totalitarians and their slaves.
izlamo delenda est …
PJ tell your activist nieces they may provoke someone who will defend their life and property with deadly force. They are playing a dangerous game that could cost them dearly.
@MJA — 1st rate FEE article. Thanks for showing it to us.
Well said, SNS!
@Supernightshade — I always appreciate and enjoy your long form comments, and I think this one is your very best ever. Well said, my friend.
Few understand consciously that every piece of property has been created by a person or persons investing time, energy, skill, and wealth. To destroy property is to steal that from them. It is tantamount to fractional slavery: to take the productive effort of someone else by force and without mutual agreement much less compensation.
Property is the physical body of our lives-as-lives. Without property we cannot build ourselves as human lives. Without property we can’t govern our lives as our own property.
At the very root of the destruction of property is the destruction of our freedom to possess our own lives and to live like human beings.
And that is the essence of the entire Leftist project: the denial of self-governance in themselves and in everyone else. It is a denial of the very human project itself of rising above living like animals.
@Braden Lynch:
Good advice! That game could cost them everything.