Coercively subsidized NPR gives us more than liberal spin for our tax dollar. It provides validation for the farthest extremes of the lunatic left. Cities throughout the country have been engulfed in riots for months. Meanwhile, NPR effectively validates looting:

Writer Vicky Osterweil’s book, In Defense of Looting, came out on Tuesday. When she finished it, back in April, she wrote (rather presciently) that “a new energy of resistance is building across the country.” Now, as protests and riots continue to grip cities, she argues that looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society. The rioters who smash windows and take items from stores, she says, are engaging in a powerful tactic that questions the justice of “law and order,” and the distribution of property and wealth in an unequal society.

Reportedly, Vicky Osterweil is actually a man, formerly known as Willie Osterweil. Be forewarned that the following excerpts from NPR’s interview with Osterweil offer a disturbing glimpse into an abyss of malign lunacy.

Osterweil starts by defining the word “looting”:

“When I use the word looting, I mean the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot. That’s the thing I’m defending.”

Unsurprisingly, even to call looting “looting” is racist:

“Looting is a highly racialized word from its very inception in the English language.”

Here’s why looting is good:

“It tends to be an attack on a business, a commercial space, maybe a government building—taking those things that would otherwise be commodified and controlled and sharing them for free.”

In utopia, we will gather the fancy sneakers and jumbo televisions that grow freely in the fields, and share them benevolently amongst each other.

COVID-19 comes in handy for leftists once again:

“[Looting] gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage—which, during COVID times, is widely unreliable or, particularly in these communities is often not available, or it comes at great risk.”

In contrast, meeting your basic needs by taking part in a violent mob as it loots high-end stores on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile is risk-free.

“[Looting] 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.”

Working for a living is oppression. Having to pay for your purchases is unjust. Without police oppression, everyone could have everything they want for free, and no one would have to work.

Who would manufacture products and provide services in world where no one has to work? Why would stores restock shelves knowing that the goods would be stolen? Being a left-wing intellectual means never having to think things through that far.

Another reason Osterweil likes the ongoing mayhem is that it is being inflicted by or in the name of blacks. In the “antiracist” scheme, everything boils down to blacks good whites bad:

“Importantly, I think especially when it’s in the context of a Black uprising like the one we’re living through now, it also attacks the history of whiteness and white supremacy. The very basis of property in the U.S. is derived through whiteness and through Black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler domination of the country. 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.”

America, white people, property rights — they are all the same thing, which should be rejected in favor of the liberatory joy that can be experienced by stealing or destroying what belongs to someone else.

Some liberals still understand that looting is wrong. That’s because they are racists who hate the poor. Osterweil explains:

“[T]here’s also another factor, which is anti-Blackness and contempt for poor people who want to live a better life, which looting immediately provides. … It’s just money. It’s just property. It’s not actually hurting any people.”

Actually, in addition to the many lives ruined by the Black Lives Matter riots, a rising number of people have been killed.

How wiping out local businesses makes for a better life beyond the immediate gratification of the stolen goods is left unexplained.

Regarding the small businesses that are destroyed, many of them owned by the minorities who are supposedly being championed by the rioters,

“It’s actually a Republican myth that has, over the last 20 years, really crawled into even leftist discourse: that the small business owner must be respected, that the small business owner creates jobs and is part of the community. But that’s actually a right-wing myth.”

To comply with Osterweil’s ideology, which must be correct or it would not be showcased by NPR, you have to believe that small business owners must not be respected, they do not create jobs, and they are not part of the community.

Osterweil then denounces businesses that cannot recover after being looted and/or burned down, as if failing to reopen could only be interpreted as an act of malice.

The interview reaches a climax with this open endorsement of political violence:

“Ultimately, what nonviolence ends up meaning is that the activist doesn’t do anything that makes them feel violent. And I think getting free is messier than that. We have to be willing to do things that scare us and that we wouldn’t do in normal, ‘peaceful’ times, because we need to get free.”

In the olden days, people who are conspicuously malevolent and insane were locked up in rubber rooms. Now they are provided a megaphone at taxpayer expense so that they can incite other maniacs to riot.

On tips from Varla, Dragon’s Lair, and Lyle.

One Response to “NPR Publishes Defense of Looting”

1. NPR Publishes Defense of Looting - The Rabbit Hole says:

   August 31, 2020 at 6:00 am

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