In a Twitter discussion back in July, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) was all too eager to jump on the police reform bandwagon with his promise to address all of the “systematic inequities that exist in our societies. And they are massive. And they are prevalent. And they’re in every institution that we know.” He egged the protests on and perpetuated the police brutality myth. Meanwhile, black businesses burned as anarchy was overlooked, and what before was viewed as “peaceful protests” by Wheeler are now seriously violent situations that he must escape from. That explains why he decided last week to hightail it out of his apartment building and permanently relocate. Steering clear of the incensed mobs outside his condo, busy lighting fires and breaking windows, was top priority. The President’s offer to send federal assistance was met not only with Wheeler’s vehemently arrogant refusal, but his ludicrous suggestion that the violence is treasured by Trump as his “only ticket to reelection” through the fear it evokes.
Portland’s floundering mayor is not the only one of the elites who does not understand the meaning of safety, security, or how to go about enshrining the property rights of the general public. Other leaders hypocritically chose to shield their own skins when the going got tough, including St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson (D), who temporarily vacated her home last week, and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D), who when faced with threats, ordered police to lock down her block and to stop even peaceful protesters from entering.
To protect one’s own property is understandably instinctual. The problem is that the only way to truly uphold this ideal is to protect everyone else’s property rights as well. Across the burning plain from Minneapolis to Kenosha, property demolition became widely acceptable, while leaders were all talk but no action when it came to sustaining law and order. The Democratic mayors’ main goal was to mollify the mobs, and so millions in property damage was the result.
The devastated owner of a Kenosha office furniture business that was burned to the ground by the latest anarchist crusade, sobbed, “I don’t think it’s justifiable for anyone to destroy anybody else’s property.” If only her innocent certainty could be confirmed by the left-wing consensus. A most disconcerting NPR interview of the author of the book In Defense of Looting (no, it’s not a satire), published last week, is a rude awakening into a terrifying reality not that far from actualizing itself. In the words of the writer, Vicky Osterweil, the rash looting of the past months is an inspirational indicator of what is to come:
“It also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed. It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions. It points to the way in which that’s unjust. And the reason that the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories. So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free…Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police. It gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected. And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t really get talked about — that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.”
As this writer profits from the privileges that enabled her to spread this copyrighted, Marxist manifesto through a publishing company, black-owned businesses are going up in flames. Private property rights are the bedrock of the economic freedom that bears fruit to all Americans willing to put in the effort. Yes, the concept of private property is actually a systemic one in the execution of capitalism, believe it or not. Accordingly, the knowledge that a police force is the necessary ingredient to protect our God-given property rights is what infuriates the left-wing mob to the point of insanity. The thin blue line really is what stands between them and the total annihilation of this most basic of civil liberties.
