By Keith Preston, January 23, 2023
I can only give this video a partial endorsement because the framing of the narrative needs to be revised. Revolts against state, economic, and cultural oppression are as old as human societies. Thinking our own society is or should be exempt from that is close to the ultimate in “American exceptionalism” or utopian thinking. Many of the issues raised by the rioters and protestors were/are real, though at times exaggerated or lacking focus and context. During uprisings, there is always a wave of opportunistic criminality. These things happen.
Rebellions typically happen when a liberalization process begins after a long period of repression, for which there is much historical precedent. The anti-police uprising was a response to decades of police state repression (Yes, it was). The totalitarian left always tries to coopt popular uprisings to ride the wave of popular discontent to power. Examples of this can be found in the entirety of modern history, and prototypes for it can be found in pre-modern history. Antifa doesn’t do anything that Communists, Fascists, Islamists, Puritans, and others haven’t done before. Many examples of elites attempting to coopt popular rebellions, often successfully, can be found as a manifestation of intra-elite and counter-elite conflict.
Elites can respond to popular uprisings with brute repression (e.g., the Tom Cotton position) or through cooptation (the general US ruling class position, e.g., ESG, Woke CIA). The latter response is far shrewder than the former. In response to an anti-police state uprising, it is within the strategics interests of the ruling class and the state to temporarily pull back on policing, and allow crime to proliferate, at least in certain geographical locations.
The strategic goal is to increase crime in minority communities in order to make policy reforms look like a failure, and to make the middle class afraid and insecure, resulting in renewed popular calls for “law and order.”While claims of a massive crime wave are exaggerated, crime has indeed increased in the past few years but this is just as attributable to the impact of the pandemic and general declining economic conditions as it is to police reform efforts which have actually been fairly modest.
The proliferation of homelessness and drug addiction in US cities reflects that the US society and class system is moving toward Third World conditions with Third World effects. That kind of thing is normal and pervasive in poor countries. The hostility to the homeless is partly rooted in the conflict between the rising lumpenproletariat and the gentrification of cities by the professional-managerial class.
This process is being played out in cities worldwide as global class divisions widen parallel to the rise of the new middle class. The same thing happened in the 19th century. The objective of anti-homeless rhetoric is for the state to secure the loyalty of the middle class in exchange for supposed protection from crime and disorder.The political strategy of the state is to discredit proponents of police/criminal justice reform and generate renewed calls for law and order (“Fund the police”-Joe Biden).
The state is pursuing a dual strategy of discrediting police reform with anti-crime hysteria while using J6 as a pretext for incorporating the “war on terrorism” into domestic policy. The new middle class is the primary target audience for both. The state says to the rising middle-class sectors, “You wanted police reform. Well, now you’ve got violent crime. Meanwhile, we need police state powers to fight right-wing terrorism and hate crimes.”
Amazingly, conservatives are falling into this trap, thereby strengthening their enemies in the process. Conservatives disdain local “progressive prosecutors” and call for federal intervention, not recognizing that these same federal prosecutors will eventually target them. The woke ideology is now the dominant ideology of the ruling class. The criminal justice system will be used as an instrument of its enforcement. Conservatives calling for renewed law and order are digging their graves in such a climate.
Advocating federal intervention in local law enforcement under such circumstances is a remarkably short-sighted idea. The long-term authoritarian progressive plan is to replace local criminal justice systems, and local police with a nationalized woke police and woke prosecutors. The distribution of police power over 50 states, 3100 cities/counties, and 18,000 police forces check central government power, which is the last thing the totalitarian Left wants. Conservatives who want to nationalize law enforcement because Larry Krasner and Alvin Bragg are just so scary are shooting themselves in the ass.
It is about how Woke ideology can ruin cities, which is what has happened to Portland since 2020 and beyond.
