https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-nothing-matters-rioters/
It was a funny thing over the weekend. You could turn on CNN and find officials deploring the violence in Minneapolis. You could hear rapper Killer Mike exhorting his fellow Atlantans “to be better than burning down our own homes.” You could listen to George Floyd’s girlfriend, who said that seeing Minneapolis in flames would have devastated her slain beau.
And then you could log on to Facebook and find people lionizing the riots as the next Boston Tea Party.
It’s hard to think of anything more privileged than social media armchairs excusing violence against our poorest and most vulnerable neighborhoods. But so it goes in the Nothing Matters quarter of America. This weekend saw the unrest that began in Minnesota spread across the country. In Louisville, vandals smashed windows and attacked restaurants and hotels. In Washington, D.C., the White House was briefly locked down amid rowdy protests outside. In Oakland, two federal officers were shot; one died. And in Minneapolis itself, the arson and looting continued, drawing out the largest National Guard mobilization in Minnesota history.
All this was done ostensibly to express fury over the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman, as well as other episodes of brutality against African Americans, the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville and the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. Yet there was something else at work too. Officials estimated Saturday morning that only 20 percent of the rioters in Minneapolis were actually from Minnesota, and while that was later walked back, reporting confirms that the city has become a bug light for out-of-state anarchists and agitators. Pittsburgh’s police chief, meanwhile, said protests there had been hijacked by “white males” dressed in black. And in Rochester, where cars were flipped over and set ablaze, police blamed “anarchists” and “paid protesters.”
