Opinion Pieces

The following op-ed appeared at The American Mind on July 2, 2020.

Let’s quit pretending that the riots which swept the country this June, and the ongoing mob assault on statues of our natural heroes, have anything to do with George Floyd or even race. The chaos in our streets is emblematic of something much deeper happening in our society. America is clearly undergoing an existential struggle. The important question we need to ask is: What is that struggle?

The struggle is designed to appear like good old-fashioned class warfare. But is it? Are oppressed, working peoples who live in squalor revolting against their oppressors?

Take a closer look at the mob. A new study by Pew research says only 1/6 of the protesters are Black. Four out of five are Democrats. This is not the poor working class fighting for a livable wage. It’s an act of performance art staged and underwritten by our nation’s elite, in the tradition of Woodstock or Occupy Wall Street. A viral video was shared recently of a white woman clad in $300 worth of Lululemon designer yoga apparel yelling at a Black male police officer and an Asian female police officer that they are “part of the problem.” She’s not fighting for justice. She’s fighting to quiet her own conscience.

This isn’t a proletarian revolution. This is a generational fight within our ruling elite class.

For decades, the elites have taught their children that America is a bad place. It’s an evil country, they say: To be patriotic is to be ignorant about America’s many sins. Be woke, the upper classes bark at their kids! Open your eyes to all that is wrong with the U.S. and its history.

Well, the children have internalized their parents’ messages. And they’ve come to this conclusion: If you’re not actively revolting against “the system,” i.e. destroying America’s institutions, you’re enabling it. And so they’ve taken to the streets to chant “Defund the Police,” tear down our statues, loot our businesses and vandalize our churches.

The irony is that these people are “the system.” You’ve probably received dozens of emails from multinational corporations promising to fight injustice or “systemic racism” in recent weeks. Silicon Valley executives have become quite transparently hostile toward prominent figures for failing to share the accepted talking points. The New York Times staff led a mutiny against their own opinion editor for allowing a conservative voice to have a platform in their pages. America’s elites are scrambling to find ways to show they’re on the side of the oppressed so that they, too, can be considered victims.

They don’t care about producing real change—they just want to be last one in line for the guillotine.

One writer put it this way: This is a revolution that comforts the comfortable.

Meanwhile, the Democrat mayor of Minneapolis is still in office. The Minneapolis chief of police still has his job. Minority-owned businesses are being destroyed. Democrats stalled the best effort in Congress to deliver police reform. And George Floyd is still dead.