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- Thread starter CdnGuy
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One of the most common messages repeated by prominent figures inside and outside of government is that riots serve no social purpose. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo claimed that property destruction “accomplishes nothing, because we’re losing the moment and we’re not even making the political point that the protesters want to make, which is a good point.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott similarly claimed “the destruction of property is unacceptable and counterproductive.”
This bipartisan consensus is familiar, yet strange. For starters, the United States was famously founded by rioting, violent white men. They tarred and feathered political officials, destroyed buildings, looted property (throwing some of it in Boston Harbor), and ultimately shot and killed British soldiers in large numbers. As professor Kellie Carter Jackson brilliantly stated in her Atlantic essay, “The Double Standard of the American Riot”:
When our Founding Fathers fought for independence, violence was the clarion call. Phrases such as “Live free or die,” “Give me liberty or give me death,” and “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” echoed throughout the nation, and continue today. Force and violence have always been used as weapons to defend liberty, because—as John Adams once said in reference to the colonists’ treatment by the British—“We won’t be their Negroes.”
In comparison to American patriots, modern-day looting of largely corporate retail chains by a minority of protesters is practically tame. Readers may be inclined to dismiss this point as a historical curiosity, but it serves to reinforce a historical truth: Rioting has often worked in North America, and petitioning political elites usually doesn’t.
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