Mob Justice for Jacob

My sister sends me a video pointing out that Jacob Blake, the man shot in the back seven times by police in Kenosha, was a serial rapist being arrested in the middle of a crime. Who was resisting arrest and seemed to be lunging for a weapon. 

It is indeed weird how so many―the mobs―seem to ignore the facts of case after case in order to scapegoat police. And will not tolerate due process if it does not instantly deliver the verdict they want. These are eerily like the lynch mobs that used to terrorize and murder blacks; except now they want to string up police.

To be fair, some folks have pointed out that if you look at the videos, most of the rioters seem to be white. You cannot lay this at the doorstep of “black people.”

Then is it because we resist accepting that some people, like Jacob Blake, simply choose to do bad things?

No, because then we would not blame the police either.

Then is it a case of black privilege?

No, because nobody gives a sweet d**n about Blake's victim, who is also black.

I think it is because the people rioting do not see blacks as human, as moral agents, responsible for their actions. They cannot be blamed for their choices, and so do not deserve punishment. They are only following instinct. They are animals.

The outrage at the police looks a lot like the outrage over the killing of Harambe at the Cincinnatti Zoo. The outrage over the American dentist who shot an African lion who had been given a name. The outrage if a crew of game wardens killed an animal in trying to sedate it.

I notice with a wince that commentators invariably note when speaking of any prominent black figure that they are “smart” or “really smart.” They never seem to make the comment about a prominent white person—that would be patronizing. It sounds like Fredo Corleone talking about himself. The tacit assumption is that a smart African is newsworthy, like a man biting a dog; or it is a knowing wink to the audience.

This is actually the form that anti-black discrimination has always taken: the idea that blacks are not moral agents capable of thinking for themselves. This is how slavery was justified. This is now how the welfare culture is justified, and a cycle of dependency that keeps black people on the bottom while one immigrant group after another rises past them.

Maybe the average black is not as smart as the average non-black; IQ results suggest this is so. This of course means nothing in the case of individuals. And this does not matter to their human dignity. They have the right to run their own lives, and not to be treated like children or wards of the state. You do not need to be smart to know right from wrong. And you actually do not need to be smart to succeed. You need to be responsible; you need to see yourself as a moral agent, and act accordingly.

A Long Hot Summer?

I see a difficult situation emerging in the US. The left has become completely lawless—I say the left, not just a faction of the left. On the other hand, the right has been entirely passive, giving the impression that they have collapsed. This further emboldens the left, and matters keep escalating.

I suspect the problem is that Trump has committed himself, for his reelection, to lure black votes over to the Republican side. It was a good strategy, and could have changed the game; but events have made it difficult. Now, if he acts decisively against the rioters or in support of the police, he risks being accused of being anti-black, and the left will start screaming “racist” and “fascist.”

Trump was elected by people on the right who were already deeply angry and wanted to poke the system in the eye. He looked to them like the most radical choice. Now he begins to look to these same people like an origami Bengal. They no doubt begin to think they can trust no one in politics, no one in the “elites.” They are liable to decide, now, to take matters into their own hands.

The middle is only too likely to dissolve, the violence to get more serious, and actual civil war to begin.

There is also the danger that, craving peace and order at any price, ordinary people will turn to any strongman; from either the left or the right. Someone may, as they say in Paris, pick up the presidential sash in the street.

Iconoclasm

They have pulled down a statue of Thomas Jefferson in Portland.

I am fundamentally opposed to pulling down any statues. The world has too little art, and too little history. Pulling down any statue is a crime against our children and grandchildren; while any sentient being should be able to understand it does no harm to the historical person we are trying to insult. It is an act of despicable cowardice to assault the dead.

Statues of Churchill and Lincoln are also being defaced in London, and statues of Gandhi removed.

There are, of course, known arguments for each; arguments made by people trying to have such statues removed legally. Jefferson was a slaveowner. Churchill was callous in his dealings with both Ireland and India; he believed in the British Empire. Gandhi was racist towards Africans. Lincoln? I’m sure there must be something.

The comment often heard, at least concerning statues of Confederate generals, is “After all, we don’t have statues of Hitler.”

For what it’s worth, I have never seen a photograph of any statues of Hitler actually being pulled down. Perhaps there simply weren’t any?

I recently learned that there is a mural featuring Mussolini on horseback in a church in Montreal. Nobody has been troubled by it, apparently, even in the 1940s. Moreover, it is meant to honour him—it is a commemoration of his signing of the Concordat with the Vatican. The Ontario town of Swastika never changed its name. 

For the record, I would be utterly opposed to defacing the Mussolini mural, or renaming Swastika, or pulling down any statues of Hitler. None of this would do anything but harm.

We did see many pictures out of Eastern Europe, when the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union dissolved, of mobs pulling down statues of Stalin. This was perhaps in reaction to that dictator’s tendency to put up statues of himself everywhere; in such a case, it might be aesthetically justified. It was also a bit of payback, perhaps, for the modern tradition of pulling down statues of former rulers seems to have begun with the Russian Revolution of 1917.

A common claim made against the statues of Confederate generals is that it is wrong to erect statues of traitors. They fought against their own government.

This is historically false: from their perspective, and according to the US Constitution as written, sovereignty was retained at the state level. The Union forces were an invading army; just as if the EU landed a force at Dover today. The moral duty was to take up arms to defend their homeland—regardless of what they felt about slavery.

And as to slavery, it seems to me unfair to blame Jefferson, or Lee, for owning slaves. The problem was systemic. Had they, as southern landowners, gone without slaves, it would simply have meant surrendering their livelihood. They could not compete against their neighbours. Perhaps they should have, but it is a lot to ask.

Let’s allow that logic, that traitors should not be honoured. That does justify tearing down statues of Jefferson, and Washington, for they too, at least as much as Lee or Beauregard, took up arms against the government. But then Canada should also not feature a statue of Louis Riel in front of the Manitoba Legislature. He rebelled twice, and was actually convicted and executed for treason. None of the Southern generals honoured were ever so charged. Because they were not in fact guilty of treason in US law. The government considered charges, and realized they would be unable to convict, and would only end up justifying their enemies. 

We also have numerous statues and commemorations of William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau, both of whom rose in arms against the Canadian government. 

We are obviously being inconsistent.

There is a fundamental error in supposing that, if we erect a statue of someone, or just leave it standing, it means we endorse them. Explain then, if you can, the many carvings of demons and gargoyles that adorn medieval cathedrals, or stand at the entrance of any Buddhist temple. It is remarkably simple-minded to suppose remembering someone means honouring them.

And it is a second error, as bad as the first, that you must not honour anyone unless they are without sin. No one, it should go without saying, is without sin. If you think your own heroes are, you are yourself guilty of the sin of idolatry.

This is a common misunderstanding, by the way, among non-Catholics, regarding the saints. The standard of sainthood is not, and has never been, sinlessness. We could not have statues or paintings of anyone, on that basis. The standard is a display of heroic virtue. Virtue, sadly, is a concept we seem to have lost.

Jefferson, Churchill, or Gandhi obviously pass that test. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Bill Establishing Religious Freedom, and was prepared then to stake his life on defending them. Churchill saved the world from Nazism, for a time standing almost alone against Hitler. Gandhi stood against the British Empire, and ended the era of European Imperialism.

If anyone is worthy of a statue in their honour, it is one of these three.

But if we are going to tear down statues and commemorations, let’s at least be even handed. Martin Luther King Jr. has to go too, right? We have credible reports that he was present at a rape, and even urged it on. His womanizing was well known even at the time.

How about Canada’s “Famous Five,” prominently displayed in downtown Calgary, on Parliament Hill, and in Winnipeg—not to mention on the currency? 

Emily Murphy was a genuine white supremacist. It was at least as prominent a theme of her writings as women’s suffrage.

She wrote: "One becomes especially disquieted -- almost terrified -- in the face of these things for it sometimes seems as if the white race lacks both the physical and moral stamina to protect itself, and that maybe the black and yellow races may yet obtain the ascendancy."

She wrote an entire book, The Black Candle, about the threat of the Chinese.

All five were aggressive advocates of eugenics and forced sterilization, in defense of the ethnic purity of an imagined Anglo-Saxon race. They got a forced sterilization act passed in Alberta, which seems to have been used predominantly to sterilize Indian (First Nations) women.

There are really only two defensible positions here: the traditional Jewish or Muslim one, to tear down all statues and paintings of anyone, or the traditional Christian one, of support for the visual arts.

The Tumbrel Passes

Execution of Robespierre

I had suggested this COVID-19 pandemic was sent by God to straighten us out, and discredit false ideologies. Now it looks like the opposite has happened: the craziness, in the US and perhaps also in Western Europe, is getting rapidly worse. And it looks as though the US is closer to collapse than Communist China.

Yet it may be that things are the opposite of what they seem. It may be that in the streets of the US now, we see a cornered animal. The instinct may be to take with it as much as it can on the way down.

The twin pillars of the postmodern left have been the education system and the media; the indoctrination system. Both seem to be under existential threat. The mainstream media has been dying for years; the coronavirus crisis has now caused surviving newspapers to shutter across the country. Suddenly there is no advertising revenue. Even leftist new media is failing.

The educational establishment probably faces a similar crisis now that everybody has learned how to study online. For universities, their main source of income has long been foreign students. COVID has arrested that flow, and if there is recession or worse in China and in Saudi Arabia, it may not revive for the foreseeable future. At the same time, the COVID crisis has not generally helped the reputation of “the experts.” They stand to lose much of their authority with the public as a result.

If Antifa is largely behind the rioting, the typical Antifa member seems to be an academic or a school teacher. These are the desperate ones about to lose their prestige, their power, and perhaps their livelihood. And they are being supported openly by the media.

Beyond these centres of power, the power of the left has been based on controlling information. They have of course tried to maintain their control by openly censoring and “deplatforming” any new sources of information for the general public. As and if they are losing control over information in spite of this, it seems obvious enough that they would now be resorting more dramatically to trying to scare everyone into submission.

It is obviously working with a lot of people. Prominent people are especially vulnerable, since they are easy to single out as examples, and they have the most to lose. Bill Cosby comes to mind.

Yet this form of control is extremely fragile: it depends on maintaining the impression of power. Lose that impression, and things can collapse very quickly. I think of the old Soviet Union. Or, for that matter, the British Empire.

For a time, leaders and the general public will take the cowardly path, try to keep their heads down, and hope the mob or the elite does not target them. Yet as everybody, especially in leadership, sees the odds increase that they too could be next, perhaps despite their best efforts, the safer bet will at some point be to stand and fight. Things may start happening even faster then, but in the opposite direction.

Wild in the Streets

Napoleon emerges: 13 Vendemiaire; the "whiff of greapeshot"

Good luck, all my fellow superannuated hippies. You know that revolution we were all calling for in the Sixties? Looks as though we might finally get it.

What we are seeing in the US is starting, I think, to look like a revolution in progress.

We are at that inflection point at which nobody seems to be in charge, and events move so quickly that it is like a spinning wheel—the basic image of the “revolution”—and you cannot guess where that wheel will stop. The situation seems to change daily. Now we seem to be in the Jacobin phase, when everyone is rushing to the most extreme position they can think of to try to stay in front of the mob—and to seize control, which seems up for grabs, for themselves. Rioting? Defund the police!

How will it end? Actually, we can guess pretty easily where the wheel will stop. Revolutions almost always end in a more authoritarian government: a Napoleon, a Hitler, a Mao, a Lenin, a Cromwell, an Ayatollah Khomeini. A few revolutions that do not: those with a generally recognized leadership from the beginning, who can impose some order. That is something we conspicuously do not have here: who are the leaders of Black Lives Matter? Do any names come to mind? Who are the leaders of Antifa?

Archbishop Vigano has written a letter to Trump, claiming that the “Deep State” is behind all this, and behind them, the Freemasons. I do not believe in such conspiracy theories. There is nobody in control. It all looks planned for destruction because there is a Devil—evil itself has an independent intelligence, a Logos, and works in transpersonal coordination towards its purposes.

When things devolve into chaos, the common man then craves nothing so much as order. From any quarter. This is a golden opportunity for any prospective dictator.

No, if it comes to that, it isn’t going to be Trump. If this is the revolution, the dictator is almost always someone insignificant in the eyes of the world at this early stage. Nobody knew much about Stalin in 1917; or about Hitler, a mere corporal, in the Great War; or Napoleon, in 1789.

First, the revolution devours all existing leadership. Then it devours its children.

Nothing seems more pathetic than, yesterday, images of a worried-looking Mitt Romney leading a march declaring “Black Lives Matter.” Or police chiefs lying prostrate, or washing the feet of the nearest man with dark skin. They imagine this will save them. Whatever happens now, such people will never again hold positions of leadership. The revolutionaries will want someone uncompromised. And so will the reactionaries.

With any luck, the machinery of civil society that the founders set up, that has withstood everything for perhaps two hundred and fifty years, will weather this tempest too. With any luck, Trump is the man who can hold things together. If he just stands absolutely firm in his rhetoric—only his rhetoric--and things hold together well enough to hold a real election in November, things can still work out. Democracy is designed to inoculate against revolution and mob rule.

But we are suddenly remarkably close to the breaking point.

Extraordinary Academic Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

That Shakesperian rag--
Most intelligent, very elegant,
That old classical drag
Has the proper stuff
The line, "Lay on MacDuff"
Desdemona was the pampered pet
Romeo loves his Juliet
And they were some lovers
You can bet, and yet
I know if they were here today
They'd Grizzly Bear in a different way
And you'd hear old Hamlet say
"To be or not to be"
That Shakesperian rag...

The New York Times published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton suggesting President Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act if the rioting continues. An obvious point. Other Times columnists immediately branded the piece “Fascist,” there was apparently a general staff insurrection, and the paper apologized for allowing it into print. They promised never again to host such reprehensible opinions. In Canada, Stockwell Day, former leader of the Alliance, patriotically insisted on a CBC panel that there was no systemic racism in Canada. He was apparently promptly thrown off several corporate boards for this heresy.

If opinions someone in power disagrees with are going to be aggressively censored like this, democratic government will not be possible, because political discourse will not be possible. Especially if it includes opinions, like those of Day or Cotton, that are held by a majority of the people; especially opinions expressed by active politicians.

Tim Pool seems convinced this must now end in civil war; that civil war has already begun. It seems to me that is an optimistic scenario. It is more likely, at least in Canada, to end in either totalitarian government or social chaos and a “failed state.”

A bit more hopefully, it also seems to me likely that this latest extreme intolerance is a matter of mass hysteria. Calls to defund the police? That seems almost self-evidently irrational. That means, in effect, no government, and social chaos in one easy step. And how about this for tight reasoning: a week ago, it was deliberate murder to allow businesses to reopen. But now it is Fascist to break up gangs of tightly-clumped people getting physical and touching things in the streets. Words are violence, just as they were a week ago, but looting and destroying property is not violence?

War is peace? Assault is “peaceful protest”?

This is hysteria. People are acting out of blind emotion, without thinking things through.

Everyone saw the video of George Floyd being killed. Anger is a natural reaction. I felt it too. Finding someone to blame and punish is also a natural reaction, but an unworthy one. That is how scapegoating starts. A large proportion of the population is now a lynch mob looking for someone to hurt. Many others are going along and miming the slogans, spraypainting “BLM” on their boarded-up storefronts and publicly kneeling, for fear of the mob turning on them.

But here’s the big new problem: this time around, the mob isn’t only in the streets. It has taken over the newsrooms, the boardrooms, the government offices, the legislatures, even, it seems, the military. There is almost no leadership left taking that sober second look, weighing the facts, keeping it all within the established systems, and urging the mob to calm down. Only a small and embattled minority, themselves in danger of being lynched: the Tom Cottons, the Trumps, the Rand Pauls, the Candace Owens, the Stockwell Days.

The Ralphs are dangerously outnumbered by Jack and the choir.

This is what we have leaders for; this is the justification for elites. To see above the crowd and its passions. With their greater education, intellectual training, and demonstrated mental gifts, they are supposed to be able to deal with such matters calmly, without becoming hysterical.

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs, and blaming it on you…

Somehow, but for the odd seemingly self-educated exception, we have stopped producing such leaders, such an elite.

I think this general failure has to be traced back at least in part to the education system. It is the education system’s job to give us such leaders. Inculcating such a capability was always the essential aim of being schooled: to develop character and the ability to deal calmly and justly with whatever befell. In Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Tom’s father says this explicitly: he does not send his son to Rugby to learn to read Greek, but to become a decent Christian gentleman.

We lost this core of education at about the beginning of the 20th century, when the progressive ideal became instead to turn out useful employees in large numbers for industry. We have accelerated this emphasis over time, to the present concept that STEM is what education really should be all about. This was always in direct violation of Confucian principles: “a gentleman is not a tool.”

Over time, perhaps also in reaction to larger social pressures, we abolished religious and ethical education, those things that give the mind a reliable navigational system. We stopped teaching the humanities, the wisdom we had accumulated over the millennia. We say we still do in places, but instead, we teach “social science,” and simply call it the humanities. Social science produces nothing, and does not teach you how to think.

And now we are reaping what we sowed. We have no leadership, no elite, left. There is no one on the bridge. There is no one at the helm. Everyone is running around the decks waving their arms. And perhaps imagining someone else is in charge.

After a hundred years, after perhaps four generations wrongly educated, it is going to be magnificently difficult to rebuild amidst what is likely to be growing social chaos. Western Europe did it once before, in the medieval monasteries. Perhaps it is time for the Benedict option.

Or perhaps new light may come from the East, perhaps from East Asia or Eastern Europe. They too have been devastated by modernism; but at least, having recently known true hardship, having already hit bottom, they may be prepared to make the sacrifices and do the hard work of rebuilding civilization.

The Real World of Discrimination

During the current rioting over the death of George Floyd, every government at every level seems to be in loud agreement that anti-black racism is a problem in America. Many actually support the riots. Governments of other countries have quickly made the same claim regarding their own jurisdictions: everyone hates blacks, and this problem must urgently be addressed.

It should be obvious to anyone that, if government claims that a certain group is discriminated against, this cannot in fact be true. That group instead has the government supporting it. Moreover, in a democratic government, this proves they also have widespread popular support: politicians do not go out of their way to express unpopular opinions.

Can you imagine Hitler declaring anti-semitism a grievous problem in Germany? Or southern Democratic lamenting anti-black discrimination as a serious problem in the 1950s?

If the government is backing you, and giving you special advantages, you are being discriminated for, not discriminated against. If you can riot, and many or most people applaud instead of firing on you, you are being indulged to an extreme degree. Like the great nobles who once had free rein to hunt foxes over anyone’s ploughed fields.

Candace Owens cites the stats: in fact, white males are far more likely to die in the hands of police than blacks.

A group that is genuinely being discriminated against is probably not going to riot. They are probably not even going to complain loudly. To do so would take exceptional courage: they are going to bring the hammer down on themselves. A Gandhi or a Martin Luther King or a Nelson Mandela or a Patrick Pearse will do it: but will face execution or a long prison term or some other serious punishment.

If you do not and do not expect to, if you are shocked and offended if you are simply told to go home, you are not discriminated against.

In other words, the reality of discrimination is necessarily the opposite of what is publicly claimed.

N all the evidence, especially on the evidence of the current and recent rioting, one group we can be confident is not discriminated against in contemporary America is blacks; “African-Americans.”

Their ancestors of course were very much discriminated against, enslaved and then later segregated in the US South. But that is now distant history. If a black slave had merely spoken up in protest, he would no doubt have been flogged or worse. When, in the Sixties, an “uppity nigger” might get lynched.

This is notably not happening any more. Currently, black-led mobs seem instead to want a lynching of a white-skinned police officer. He is charged with murder; that is not enough. He might, after all, be found innocent. They want to string him up.

It’s not just blacks, of course.

By this same principle, “First Nations,” Indians, are not discriminated against in Canada. That the public has accepted the term “First Nations” makes this self-evident. It is dubious that they ever were, in Canada. Everything has been structured for their advantage, by men of good will toward them. Unfortunately, the sense of entitlement this has produced has ended up harming them—just as overly indulging a child can make them end up helpless

Nor have women ever been discriminated against in Western civilization. There was never any “patriarchy.” Since at least the medieval tradition of chivalry, women have instead always been given precedence over men, given mostly the same privileges extended to royalty. Every little girl grows up imagining herself a princess; a young boy who imagined himself a prince would be handled roughly.

So when women in the West decided their lives were too boring, that they wanted to work outside the home, there was no opposition from government or from men. Quite the reverse: society as a whole was turned upside down within a few years to accommodate their wishes.

It should be equally obvious who is really discriminated against. Who is it socially acceptable to publicly complain or joke about? In Nazi Germany, of course, the Jews. Today, in America, blondes, whites, men, straights, Christians, Catholics, business owners, perhaps especially the white rural working class. These are the people Hillary Clinton, while running for president, saw no possible cost to referring to as “deplorable,” that Obama thought he could safely call “bitter clingers” without any political fallout.

For comparison, just try to say anything critical of blacks as a group, or women as a group, or Indians as a group.

Just don’t tell anyone I advised you to do so. The consequences may be dire.

Some Straight Talk from Candace Owens

Sword, Famine, Wild Beast, and Plague

The Four Horsemen

The apocalypse still gathers momentum; like a handcart on the downhill slope. Rioting continues across the US. Meantime, the pandemic still rages. Not only that: the president of the US has walked across the street to hold up a Bible in front of a burned-out church.

And the media and the chattering classes erupt in rage and unbelief. Not about the rioting; they keep referring to it with the euphemism “peaceful protests,” and carefully select their coverage; the truth emerges mostly on Twitter. Not about the complete disregard of quarantine, likely to result in many deaths. Even though they were insisting only days ago that it was madness for businesses to be allowed to reopen. No, they are beside themselves over the president walking to the church. Even the bishop of the diocese promptly issued a statement condemning Trump’s show of support for everything she is supposed to stand for as “the very opposite of what Jesus taught.”

That is madness on the plain stark staring face of it. I did not believe it when I saw it first. Not the Babylon Bee?

Quite simply, the clerisy, the class generally in charge of everything in the US, is or long has been insane in the proper sense of the term: they are not acknowledging reality. Trump’s specific gesture here, and the reaction, hints too at where this insanity comes from. Indeed, where insanity generally comes from. True madness is usually a moral issue; as often as not, it is denial of reality due to a guilty conscience.

The ruling class has gone mad because it is corrupt. Anecdotally, murderers on death row are almost always delusional; although they almost could not have been as a practical matter when they committed their crime. The ruling class is mad, and they see their end coming.

I don’t know if or how Trump knows; perhaps he is just incredibly lucky. But he seems to have chosen an image that would most enrage them: visible support for traditional Judeo-Christian ethical values. It is surely for this same reason that the clerisy, and all the mainstream scribes, are so fierce in their support of “peaceful protesters” looting and killing. Nothing so salves a guilty conscience as seeing another behave badly. They will want to abet in any way they can. There is, to this extent, honour among thieves. Real foxes hate tails.

To be fair, the clerisy will say that at least some of their rage, although even they say it is a purely secondary element compared to the offensive display of piety, is that Trump had the park between church and the White House cleared of “peaceful protesters” to take this walk. Supposedly cleared using tear gas.

But it is obviously only an assumption on anyone’s part that Trump gave the order to clear the park. That would be micromanaging. The chief of the park police says Trump did not. The police moved in because the “peaceful protesters” had started throwing things at the police, bricks, rocks, and bottles of frozen water, and had climbed on monuments that had previously been the targets of vandalism. The police had found caches of weapons nearby. The rioters had set fire to the church the previous evening, and had forced the White House into lockdown.

Some parks need clearing. With or without a pandemic.

If, as almost universally reported, the police had used tear gas, how was Trump and half the cabinet able to walk through with no discomfort a few minutes later? Why, in the video, were the police not themselves wearing gas masks?

They gave everyone fair warning to leave three times through a loudspeaker. For those who did not clear the area, they used smoke canisters, which do nothing more than confuse, and horses trained to apply steady pressure to force a crowd back. Then they put up a new barrier.

Is there a better way to do it?

The mad elites further complain that Trump threatened to bring in the military if state governments cannot get the rioting under control. This, they say, is something a president cannot legally do; it is fascism; it is a totalitarian coup. It is “using the military against US citizens.”

Yet it was done in the Rodney King riots in 1992; many times during the Civil Rights struggle, in defiance of Southern governors; and many times before that. Protecting us from riots—from the capricious violation of our life, liberty, and property by fellow citizens—is the job of government, and the US is explicitly founded on this premise. That means protection from things like looting, arson, assault, and murder.

All common law jurisdictions—all liberal democracies—traditionally have a “riot act,” that can be publicly proclaimed if civil order has broken down. It prohibits all assemblies, including supposed “peaceful protest,” which of course cannot be distinguished or treated separately during a riot or insurrection.

The Canadian version goes like this:

Her Majesty the Queen charges and commands all persons being assembled immediately to disperse and peaceably to depart to their habitations or to their lawful business on the pain of being guilty of an offence for which, on conviction, they may be sentenced to imprisonment for life. God save the Queen.

The penalty for remaining in the streets was reduced fairly recently from summary execution.

This sort of thing is not a joke; this is not a drill. This is for very high stakes. It is a certainty already that many more people will unnecessarily die. Those promoting the riots have much blood on their hands.

A Season in Pandemonium

Pandemonium, the capital of Satan and his subjects.

It looks as though George Floyd may have killed himself after all. Autopsy has shown he had fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system. We do not know how much; but an overdose of fentanyl is deadly on its own, and causes death by asphyxiation. It is possible the officer was just following standard procedure, a procedure regularly used by Minneapolis police without serious consequences, but there were unknown additional factors in this case. This would explain why none of the other officers seemed concerned.

If so, it is awful to think of the poor officer, who is as much a victim in all this as Floyd himself. Even if he is acquitted of murder, he has lost his job, career, and marriage, and his face is known and hated worldwide. How can he live? And he might have only been doing his job.

A lot of people are publicly endorsing the “justified peaceful protests” since the killing. Police officers themselves have joined in. Slate magazine has run a piece helpfully advising on how you can demonstrate—or riot—without being identified by the police.

I think peaceful protests are illegitimate here, even without the rioting. What are they protesting against, or for? Against the killing of Floyd? But the policeman responsible is already charged with murder; the matter will be dealt with by the courts. They can only, then, be protesting this process; which is dangerous. Getting your day in court, and a fair, unprejudiced trial before a jury of one’s peers is a foundation of our freedom and our system of government. Mob rule and lynchings are unlikely to be an improvement. The very act of protesting publicly subverts the possibility of a fair trial.

Are they protesting police racism more generally? It seems hard to make the case that the Minneapolis police force is anti-black, since the police chief is black. Are there statistics showing that black suspects are treated more roughly than white? If so, that needs to be demonstrated by reasoned argument, not imposed by shouting in the streets, let alone threats of force.

And it seems incumbent on anyone making that charge to also offer specific solutions. It is hard to make proposals by shouting in the streets; but even given that, has anyone shouted or spraypainted any workable ideas for improvement? I’m not sure “down with capitalism” or “abolish the police” counts.

So long as we have freedom of speech and a free press, there is scant justification for taking any protest to the streets in any case. If you had a good argument, you pretty obviously wouldn’t. And while we can certainly criticize the media for limiting the opinions “given a platform,” it is still more possible to be heard now, with the Internet, than ever before in anyone’s history.

And the present context is not peaceful protest. That is an egregious lie. It is unrestrained looting, rioting, and what indeed looks like terrorism, violence directed at a political purpose. Trump is right about that, and whatever the practical consequences, it is essential to call a spade a spade. Anyone who sincerely believes in peaceful protest would nevertheless stay home in this case until and unless the rioting ends. Anyone present at a riot, even if they are not themselves engaged, unless they are trying to stop it, is aiding and abetting that riot. None so guilty as the innocent bystander, at least in this case; they serve as human cover. They grant the terrorists their opportunity and their anonymity.

Not to mention the obvious fact that milling about in crowds right now is likely spreading a deadly pandemic, and delaying the day when desperately poor people can again make a livelihood. If you sincerely care about the death of George Floyd, why would you immediately do your best to cause the deaths of more innocent people?

Those of us who genuinely care about George Floyd will stay home, light a candle, and put it in our window to express our concern and solidarity. Then we will pray for his soul’s repose.

Maybe It Really Is the Devil's Work

Just when I was going to say Antifa...

Who the Devil is Behind the Riots?

NYC Draft Riots, 1863.

The current mad rioting across the US seems to demonstrate the reality of the Devil. It looks as though it is organized; yet it cannot be easily accounted for by any human agency. Therefore, the hypothesis that there is some independent malicious spiritual consciousness interfering in affairs. 

There are reports of mysterious pallets of bricks left in prominent public places for mob use; of masked men with umbrellas smashing windows to encourage looting. There is a mysterious gap in the original video that triggered the protests…

The nominal cause for all the unrest is that apparent murder of George Floyd, captured on video. It is supposedly Black Lives Matter, or the black community more generally, demanding justice.

But justice was already apparently being served. The policeman seen killing Floyd had already been arrested and charged with murder. Moreover, the violent protests that we are now seeing are probably ending more black lives, devastating black neighbourhoods, reinforcing police presumptions that black people are violent and lawless, and suggesting to the public the need for more police and greater police powers. If the black community is doing this as a community, they are working against their own interests.

This is itself a hallmark of Satan’s work; that his followers work to their own destruction. But we also see videos online of blacks loudly protesting the looting and violence. And many if not most of the rioters have white skin.

A more plausible explanation is that the rioting, whatever happened to spark it, is driven by general frustration at the long lockdown, desperation at loss of employment, a feeling that the experts and the government have messed up and behaved callously during the epidemic. Yet if this is the impetus, the rioting and looting are again counterproductive. They are perfectly calculated to cause a new outbreak of the virus, forcing us all back into lockdown for longer. And justifying the government in not trusting the people to make their own decisions.

Some of the news media are apparently blaming it all on “white supremacists.” It might indeed fit their agenda, by discrediting blacks. But this presumes a massive, coordinated false flag operation, involving moving large numbers of people into places where they do not live, and having them all chant and spray-paint only slogans they disagree with—an improbable conspiracy theory, and certainly vastly beyond the capabilities of any existing “white supremacist” organization to pull off all across the country on a day’s notice. At least as any kind of organized group, they number only a couple of thousand at most, and these riots are breaking out in cities all over the country.

Some, including the governor of Minnesota, suggest foreign provocateurs are behind it all. This sounds reasonable to some, no doubt, because of current tensions with China. But as with white supremacists, the numbers of foreign agents and resources likely available seems beyond the realm of possibility. As a general principle, I doubt foreign intelligence services really account for much. By their nature, they amount to a group of bureaucrats operating without supervision. What happens when you put together a large group of bureaucrats and remove any supervision?

Nothing.

If individual agents or cells ever do get up to anything, the secrecy generally means they end up operating at cross-purposes, most often for their own narrow self-interests.

And “provocateurs” can only ever be a partial explanation. People must have a predisposition to be “provoked.”

Some, of course, blame the police for it all—it is all, including the killing of George Floyd, an assertion of police bullying. If they only kept the police away from the protesters, similarly, all would be well. Police themselves have not been helping this perception—at one point, they arrested a black CNN crew member on camera.

Yet policemen and police chiefs across the country quickly condemned the original killing. If some policemen have an attitude problem, it does not seem to be an organized or coordinated thing.

The likeliest explanation seems to be that Antifa are behind this. If Antifa is, as claimed, an anti-fascist organization, this would again be counter-productive. Chaos in the streets is a demand for Fascism. But I think it is clear that Antifa is not now, and has never been, an anti-Fascist organization. Rather, it is a Fascist organization seeking power.

If Antifa is behind the curtain, this too would involve moving people in large numbers into neighbourhoods where they do not live—Antifa’s membership is white and middle class. But they at least seem large enough, wealthy enough, and organized enough to make this possible.

It would not be surprising, either, if Antifa were getting funding from some foreign power.

Perhaps the upshot of these riots needs to be a concerted investigation by the FBI into Antifa.

Uber Uber Alles

Riot on Nevsky Prospect, Petrograd, 1917.

Richard Fernandez writes, for PJ Media, that the MSM are missing the big story while they fixate on Trump’s impeachment. The world is on fire: rioting in the streets of Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, Spain, France, Iraq, Sudan, Russia, Uganda, Peru, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Iran. Something is going on.

Fernandez does not say what it is, other than the people being fed up with the establishment. What I say is going on is the democratization of information flow thanks to the Internet. The ability of folks to organize through social media, and to access information online, makes the traditional establishment largely redundant. We have gone, for example, from the rigid organization of the traditional taxi company to the free form flow of Uber.

Structures are now more often than not getting in the way. Accordingly, people are less inclined to listen to their authority, to defer to them, and to pay for them.

The initial reaction of the establishment has been to try to batten down the hatches, and expand the role of government in order to squelch this perceived disorder. This, I think, is suicide.

The future is for less government. Whatever jurisdictions first realize this shall inherit the earth.