On June 9, I tweeted out the following: Seattle’s East Precinct has fallen, as Police Chief Carmen Best orders Seattle Police to evacuate. The occupiers, aka the ‘peaceful protesters,’ declare victory. ‘They’ve given us the precinct,’ they boast. Not even in South Africa. A mere day on, and the City of Seattle was de facto occupied territory, fallen to the “peaceful protesters”—the same counterculture media darlings who’ve been sacking cities across America. The rabble—Black Lives Matter sympathizers, which, as police arrest records show, is almost entirely local—was further roused by Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, formerly of Mumbai. Most reprehensibly, pied piper Sawant led the “peace makers” to occupy City Hall in downtown Seattle, on Tuesday, June 10. The altercation between Council Member Sawant and Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan gives new meaning to the “broad” sweep of ideas in this dysfunctional city. Sawant, a socialist, called on Mayor Durkan, a progressive, to resign over abuse of power (what power?) and systemic racism (a meaningless abstraction). This, as the city was being sacked. Surrender MonkeysAs of this writing, the Seattle Police have surrendered without defeat. Seven blocks of downtown Seattle, renamed the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ), have been appropriated by the Peaceful Ones, with the imprimatur of the mayor and her police chief (Carmen Best aforementioned). Now loosed on the public, these buccaneering entrepreneurs are reported to have set up checkpoints to shake down local residents who imagine they may come and go. Not in this satrapy. On the positive side, Seattle now has that shithole-country vibrancy. President of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, SPOG, penned an open letter to lunatic Mayor Durkan, pondering how he would fulfill his sworn oath of office to protect lives and property without so much as tear gas. He got his answer. America did. Across the United States, the message to law-abiding Americans, from city, town, county council members and other legislators came loud and clear: You’re on your own. Neither police nor politicians are coming to protect what’s left of your businesses or your banal, bourgeoisie little life. Last I looked, there were 400,000 “guardian angels” in private security toiling to make up for the South African state’s failure to protect its people. Every year, millions in taxpayers’ money are forked out to private security firms to protect the new South Africa’s police stations. “South Africa’s protectors, in other words, can’t protect themselves.” Will Seattle’s neutered policemen be investigating this option? Is it time for them to cut the shafted taxpayers loose? Let us go private? When all is said and done, the George Floyd riots are a law and order event. Nothing else matters in the overarching context of a failed state, in which ordered liberty is dead, and the law-abiding are utterly forsaken, even vilified. Yes, victims are now villains and villains are martyrs. Unbeknownst to Nikolas Fernandez, a gainfully employed security guard, the Capitol Hill district of Seattle now belongs to the “peaceful protesters.” Fernandez dared to drive down it, only to be mobbed by the barbarians and forced to shoot an attacker possessing of animal-like agility. Legacy media quickly turned the narrative on its head. Fernandez, whose brother is a policeman, had invaded “peaceful protester” turf. His attacker took a bullet for peace. The attacker is now a hero. Kneeling NinniesNext came the national kneeling. Once again, Washington State led the way. On June 1, after hundreds of looters ransacked major shopping malls in Bellevue, including the spectacular Bellevue Square, that city’s police chief, Steve Mylett, knelt down like a girl, instead of standing tall like a man for law and order. “That was a scary scene in ‘Deliverance,’” someone quipped on Twitter. That was it. There was no stopping the kinky trend. Soon, Chief Brian Manley of Austin, Texas, broke down in tears for … the protesters, not for property owners robbed. Real manly. It’s almost as though WASPs get a homo-erotic sexual charge out of prostrating themselves in front of The Evil Other. The camera panned out across the country to reveal policemen and guardsmen caving. Against the backdrop of “Mad Max”-like dystopian destruction, men in uniform all collapsed to the pavements like yogis to the command of their black tormentors. One after another. Here is Santa Cruz Police Chief Andy Mills. Kneeling. The forces, police and paramilitary, all squatted like sissies. Isn’t there some code of conduct preventing uniforms from groveling? Police acquit themselves honorably by doing the job ethically. Activism is not in the job description. In Parker, Colorado, masses assumed the postures of ordination: prostration, lying prone, limbs splayed. Congressional Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), did the same. Is twerking next? Finally, we have a man in the house! “Georgia State Trooper O’Neal Saddler, who is black, refused to kneel during a Black Lives Matter protest in Hartwell. Quite rightly, he said he “only kneels for God.” And what a hot, decadent mess was this National Guard bump-and-grind in Atlanta: men, women, and everything in-between, mostly fat, hips swaying as they give themselves over to Dionysian urges. Cops can’t be responsible for every misstep a feeble-minded protester takes. An elderly geezer, Martin Gugino, in Buffalo, New York, came right up to a cop’s face when the latter was on the march. Cop pushed the git to get past him. The geezer was expecting a group hug and wasn’t prepared for a shove. He lost his balance and fell backward, bending like a twig. I saw no excess force, rather a “get out of my face” shove. But the cops were hung out to dry, anyway. Frey the FakerAs to Jacob Frey’s schtick: His was total grief appropriation. Frey is the mayor of Minneapolis, where George Floyd, in whose honor the global orgy of abreaction and destruction is being carried out, died by cop. Only people who knew an individual can legitimately have a Frey-like grand mal when mourning him. Otherwise, Frey’s performance at the casket was farcical, inauthentic; histrionic. The advice of Humphrey Bogart, playing Rick Blaine in “Casablanca” (channeled by Woody Allen in “Play It Again Sam”), should have been considered: “I never saw a dame yet that didn’t understand a good slap in the mouth …” The spectacle of mass contagion, where members of the public turn into professional mourners, flocking to funeral happenings for victims they never knew—this is warped. Grief is not a tribal affair. Communities don’t grieve; individuals who incur loss do. These are professional pornographers, not mourners. These phony displays among regular folks are at the root of our festering cultural commons. As kids, we knew our local policeman by name. He patrolled our neighborhoods regularly and joshed around with us. He lived among us. Community policing, however, is a thing of the past. Former Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson—notorious for shooting Michael Brown—gave a clue as to why. Wilson told the New Yorker that while he didn’t want to work in a white area, liked the black community and had fun there—he had experienced “culture shock.” Wilson described venturing into a “different culture”: a “pre-gang culture where you’re just running in the streets, not worried about working in the morning, just worried about your immediate gratification.” For his candor about an alien culture overtaking America, Wilson was called racist by CNN’s Boris Sanchez and Kate Bolduan. “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely,” said Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Darren Wilson’s words suggest a variation on Burke’s theme: To make cops love the communities they police, the communities they police ought to be lovely. Burke further reminded us in 1790 that, “To love the little platoon we belong to is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.” But what happens when those little platoons are not so little and not so lovely? A country that is without a modicum of cohesion and is, by D.C. design, comprised of ever-accreting, competing factions—this kind of country cannot be lovely in the Burkean sense. In fairness to law-enforcement, communities in America must be damn difficult to police. This piece was originally published at IlanaMercer.com on June 11, 2020.
1 Comment
Anthony Powell
6/20/2020 09:34:23 am
Thanks for this excellent essay, Ilana Mercer. Now the nation's attention is on what? The $26 trillion debt? Military still policing the globe? Nope....got to deal with those intractable Mississippians (of which I am one) and their despicable flag! Even though 64% of us voted in 2001 to keep our current flag, the spineless politicians, in conjunction with social justice warriors, are taking matters into their own hands, the will of the voters be damned.
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AuthorIlana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She is the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa”(2011) & “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Facebook, Gab & YouTube Archives
March 2024
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