It’s been a while since we’ve had a good old-fashioned national riot wave. But in the wake of the police killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, that might be what we’re due for. Protests have already turned violent in Los Angeles and New York. Businesses in Memphis and elsewhere have already begun boarding up their windows. In Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp declared a state of national emergency, as the national restlessness over Nichols’ death intersected with the police killing of a climate activist. Ari Blaff reports:
Georgia governor Brian Kemp signed an emergency order Thursday declaring a 15-day state of emergency and mobilizing up to 1,000 National Guard troops in response to leftist violence that gripped the city over the weekend.
“Georgians respect peaceful protests, but do not tolerate acts of violence against persons or property,” Governor Kemp asserted in the order.
Protests “turned violent in downtown Atlanta as masked activist threw rocks, launched fireworks, and burned a police vehicle in front of the Atlanta Police Foundations office building,” Kemp’s added in the executive order.
Six Antifa extremists were charged with counts of domestic terrorism by the Atlanta police following Saturday’s riot…Protesters were originally drawn to Atlanta to march in memory of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán (“Tortuguita”), a climate activist killed earlier in the week.
Terán was part of an environmental outfit seeking to block the construction of a new $90 million Atlanta police training facility in a wooded area of DeKalb County. The group dubbed their campaign “Stop Cop City.”
The events surrounding Terán’s lethal encounter with police remain contested. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation asserts that Terán shot at law enforcement, prompting police to return fire and kill him.
The national desensitization to all this — the fact that we all expect, as something akin to a new social norm, periodic outbursts of violence and destruction as the necessary and inevitable response to videos of police killings — is palpable. No one is surprised anymore. Even the media elite’s brazen efforts to legitimize the civic disorder feels stale and played-out. “Mostly peaceful protests held across the U.S. after release of Tyre Nichols footage,” an NPR headline reads today. Mostly peaceful protests. Right. We know what that term actually means.
The toleration of these riots and the social mores that enforce that tolerance are both conditional. If attacking cops, destroying government property, smashing and looting private businesses, and generally doing one’s level best to dismantle the public order that makes civilization possible are all done in service of the “right” political cause, we are sagely informed that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” It’s just property anyways, they tell us; and the principle of justice requires respecting the right of certain marginalized groups and “allies” to express their righteous anger by terrorizing every corner-shop jeweler and electronics-store clerk in a ten-mile radius. If destruction and riots are performed by the “wrong” people, in service of the wrong cause, progressive criminal-justice reformers morph, magically, into frothing-at-the-mouth tough-on-crime prosecutors.
Pointing this out, of course, is often met with the progressive objection that January 6 was worse than the riots of summer 2020. Color me skeptical. But we do agree, at least, that January 6 was bad. So let’s pick a more innocuous right-wing example — say, the anti-lockdown protests. When the right-wing base, from the Ottawa trucker convoy to California, erupted in protest against pandemic-era closures and mandates, it was met with horror by the same sources that would have so different a reaction to BLM a few months later. “The language of the unheard” the anti-lockdown protests were not. “The whiteness of anti-lockdown protests,” a Vox headline read. “How ignorance, privilege, and anti-black racism is driving white protesters to risk their lives.”
The next retort is that one genre of riots — those originating from the Left — has a good and just cause, whereas the other genre — those originating from the Right — do not. But as William Voegeli noted in a City Journal essay on the topic:
Both contrast BLM’s genuine and urgent grievances with the spurious ones about vote fraud that fueled the MAGA riot. Even if one stipulates the point, however, the problem with saying “but these are not reasonable times,” as Hannah-Jones does, remains. Because there is no injustice-validation tribunal to predetermine whose complaints merit suspending the ordinary strictures against rioting, the question is crowdsourced. People will decide for themselves about taking it to the streets. And once they do, there is no guarantee that MAGA will be unique in abusing this prerogative. Looters tore apart Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue shopping district in August, resulting in 13 police officers being injured and the arrest of more than 100 people, because of rumors spread on social media that police had shot an unarmed 15-year-old on the South Side. What actually occurred was that a 20-year-old convicted felon, subsequently charged with two counts of attempted first-degree murder, was wounded after he fired on police officers.
We may be on the cusp of the third or fourth wave of riots in about as many years, and if we are, we will certainly encounter the subsequent onslaught of riot apologism that inevitably follows. It is no longer plausible to wave this away as “whataboutism.” It’s a two-tiered standard of justice, with implications that are far larger than mere allegations of hypocrisy.