A cleverly presented video by the Daily Caller succeeds in driving home an important truth: Oftentimes, when it comes to riots, privileged outsiders are a lot more supportive than the locals who suffer from them.
The Daily Caller’s Lisa Benattan ran a series of compare-and-contrast comments from apparently working-class black people in the Minnesota community affected by “racial justice” riots in recent days and from obviously wealthy young white women in Washington, D.C. Again and again, the locals criticized the riots.
“If you are being violent, if you are destroying property, I don’t think that’s cool,” said one local, in words repeatedly echoed by others.
Meanwhile, from her perch in the nation’s capital, likely from a highfalutin college, a yuppified philosophe said, “Like, change needs to be made, and if it’s not being done in the traditional avenues, then rioting is a good option.” Another said, “If rioting is what gets people’s attention, I think that’s necessary.”
And so on.
These girls — one hesitates to call them women because their minds clearly haven’t matured — sound embarrassingly vapid. So-called “valley girls” of the 1980s showed more substance and human decency than these pop-psychology princesses.
“All violence is bad violence,” one says, “but in the case when systems aren’t responding to any other kind of change, I can understand people getting frustrated to the point where they take other avenues.”
(By the way, what is with the use of the word “avenues”? Maybe if “avenues” for change won’t suffice, they’ll graduate to highways for change, or something.)
It’s easy to make such pronouncements from on high when it isn’t your windows, your neighborhood’s corner markets, or your cars being randomly broken, looted, or burned. It’s easy to speak like these girls when you not only don’t need to deal with actual violence yourself, but your college provides “safe spaces” any time you get upset by the existence of opposing viewpoints.
Granted, it’s usually not fair to draw sweeping conclusions from one set of interviews, as if one small sample represents the whole. Still, the reason the Daily Caller mashup hits home is that it rings so true. For example, polls show that while media mavens and academicians wax eloquently in favor of nonsense such as “defunding the police” so as to fight racism, most black Americans consistently favor a greater police presence in their neighborhoods.
These children need to emerge from their coddled cocoons and go out into the real world. As one black man in an Army veteran hat said, the outsiders’ facile answers “dehumanize” the actual people affected by riots. Those people have no benefit of safe spaces. They have real lives.
