Riots makes good TV, but what's really going on?

FPI / June 3, 2020

"The riots didn’t happen because of outrage, but because the gathering mobs were told by everyone from CNN right up to their local Democrat politicians that angry protests were expected and would be tolerated. That was as good as throwing a match into a spreading pool of gasoline," Daniel Greenfield wrote via the Sultan Knish blog.

Greenfield outlined the top three ways a race riot is actually put together:

1. Riots are about power, not for the rioters, but for the establishment: In the aftermath of the murder of a Jewish student by an angry black mob, Al Sharpton said, "We must not reprimand our children for outrage when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system."

Sharpton's rhetoric is still being used by the inciters of the violence around the country today "and has been used in similar riots going back generations," Greenfield noted. "Its major theme is that the rioters are free to do whatever they want. They carry no moral responsibility for their actions."

"The last decade of riots are the product of a new generation of Sharptons, ambitious activists feeding hate, of the New Black Panther Party’s obsession with becoming relevant, of the ragged hipster ends of Occupy Wall Street drifting from occupation to occupation, of radical white lefties and groups like Black Lives Matter that exist to suck up funding and sympathy from their white lefty allies," Greenfield wrote.

What the rioters are projecting "isn’t outrage. It’s textbook amoral behavior. The riot doesn’t release anger; it frees the perpetrators of their morality," Greenfield wrote.

"The real purpose of a riot isn’t to benefit the rioters. It’s to benefit those who incite the riot. The rioters and looters react in response to riot-friendly conditions created from above. If you build the political infrastructure for a riot, the rioters and looters will come.

"Riots are about perception, not reality. The ringleader tries to keep his hands clean while convincing the establishment that he can turn the violence on or off any time he wants to. It’s an old and cynical game that has been played in and around the Democratic Party for too long."

2. The rioters and looters aren’t burning their own community: "A riot has two components. There are the bored and irritated locals who begin swarming streets because they have no jobs, it’s hot outside and there’s nothing good on television. They will loosely agree with whatever issue is on the table, but they aren’t all that worked up about it," Greenfield wrote.

The second component. The outsiders.

"Before the riot, community organizers, citizen reporters and assorted activists show up to coordinate, spread slogans and justify the coming violence. They want violence far more than the locals do and they taunt police and try to create incidents, but they often avoid personally engaging in violence," Greenfield wrote.

"In the early twentieth century the group stirring up riots was usually some arm of the Communist Party. Later a variety of leftist groups, like Antifa, many closely entangled with the Democratic Party took over. Most of the damage is done by looters and rioters from other areas looking for an opportunity to burn and steal. Some locals will tag after them, but they are usually responsible for the worst of the violence. Some of the looters are from out of state, others from different neighborhoods.

"Being outsiders they’re unknown to the police and rarely have to worry about being identified afterwards. And they don’t care about burning down someone else’s community."

The major media, meanwhile, "usually sticks to its narrative of an outraged community that engages in excesses, especially when it can’t tell apart the locals from the outsiders. Local cops can, but no one in the media listens to them. Arrest records often show that most of those charged in the more violent crimes aren’t locals, but the media remains immune to facts that conflict with a favorite narrative," Greenfield wrote.

3. Riots aren’t fed by outrage, but by opportunism: "The rioters aren’t outraged, they’re usually bored young men, frustrated and lacking in empathy. Many of them have gang ties or a criminal record stretching back to kindergarten," Greenfield wrote. "They’re the same people who commit crimes in any other non-outraged context."

The rest are there "to get some attention while providing them with protective coloration. 9 out of 10 people screaming frenziedly while holding up 'Black Lives Matter' signs would eagerly scream and hold up 'Tiger King 4 President' or 'Minneapolis Loves the KKK' signs if it got them positive attention and a shot at being on television."

Greenfield continued: "Everything else you need to do know about why riots happen out can be read on a thermometer. Weather breaks up a riot faster than appeasement. It’s hard to riot when your teeth are chattering. There’s a reason that riots usually happen in the summer. The same viral video that sets a nation on fire would have been met with shrugs in the winter."

The answers to the ongoing rioting "can’t be found" in the streets, Greenfield wrote. "The problem didn’t come from there. It came from a corrupt political establishment that lights the fuse for its own power and profit.

"The angry rioter is a sacred figure in the progressive pantheon of social justice. But the saint of the looted convenience store is as mythical a figure as the selfless community organizer. The race riot isn’t a bubbling stew of outrage out of which wounded souls emerge to cry out for justice. It’s a complicated criminal conspiracy in which the perpetrators rarely suffer any consequences."

Free Press International