In August 2014, in the immediate aftermath of a violent incident wherein police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot a young black man named Michael Brown, outraged and agenda-driven agitators — many from out of town — seized on the news as an excuse to run wild, steal, destroy property, and more. Businesses were burned to the ground and looted. Even a local church was not spared by the frenzied and violent mob. According to news reports, more than 160 gunshots were fired by “protesters,” too. At least one man died amid the chaos. Pictures that emerged after the late 2014 round of rioting and looting revealed an American suburb that looked more like a war zone.
In response to the tragedy, Time magazine published a pro-rioting piece by Darlena Cunha, who also serves as a contributor to a wide array of other establishment media, including the Washington Post. “The violent protests in Ferguson, Mo., are part of the American experience,” reads the sub-header for the Time “Ideas” column promoting riots and senseless violence as a proper and effective means of achieving political goals. “Peaceful protesting is a luxury only available to those safely in mainstream culture.” Cunha then goes even further: “Riots are a necessary part of the evolution of society.” To defend her thesis, she even cites the Boston Tea Party, equating it with the current mayhem enveloping Ferguson.
Since the grand jury’s decision was announced, Ferguson faced even more violence, which was stirred up by many groups and organizations, although the looting and burning merely makes life more difficult for local residents who the media say are already oppressed. Media, such as Time and the Washington Post, that sympathize with and encourage the destruction in majority-black neighborhoods ironically at the same time chastise efforts of political groups that push voter registration initiatives because those initiatives supposedly create hardships for poor minorities, making their lives more difficult. It’s very questionable about whether those initiatives make minority lives harder, but it is undoubtedly a fact that burning local businesses makes minority lives more difficult. Yet the encouragement to loot goes on.
The agenda to foment racial unrest and rioting as a means of achieving “change” is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the establishment press. Recently, more than a few news outlets have dropped every pretense of neutrality and started to openly advocate rioting and looting. And the trend is accelerating.
After months of fomenting strife, hate, and unrest surrounding the fatal shooting of Brown by Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, for example, Time magazine and others took it to the next level. On November 25, Time published Cunha’s incendiary opinion piece headlined “Ferguson: In Defense of Rioting.” As the title suggests, the commentary defends the perpetration of violence following a grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Wilson on charges of murder or manslaughter. But the piece goes even beyond that, calling riots “necessary” to the “evolution” of society.
“Because when you have succeeded, it ceases to be a possibility, in our capitalist society, that anyone else helped you,” Cunha continues, dismissing the explanation offered by one critic of the rioting who blamed the violence on the mentality of “blaming everyone else” for one’s own failures. “And if no one helped you succeed, then no one is holding anyone else back from succeeding. Except they did help you, and they are holding people back. So that blaming someone else for your failures in the United States may very well be an astute observation of reality, particularly as it comes to white privilege versus black privilege.”
Before saying blacks are more apt to riot, race-obsessed Cunha insists that she is not racist, styling herself a “realist” instead. “Until I have had to walk in a person of color’s skin, I will never understand, I will always take things for granted, and I will be inherently privileged,” she claimed. “But by ignoring the very real issues this country still faces in terms of race to promote an as-of-yet imaginary colorblind society, we contribute to the problem at hand, which is centuries of abuses lobbied against other humans on no basis but that of their skin color.” Nowhere does Time or Cunha point out that the allegedly racist American people twice elected Obama, who is half black, to be president.
“I would put forth that peaceful protesting is a luxury of those already in mainstream culture, those who can be assured their voices will be heard without violence, those who can afford to wait for the change they want,” Cunha writes in her widely criticized and ridiculed defense of rioting. “Blacks in this country are more apt to riot because they are one of the populations here who still need to. In the case of the 1992 riots, 30 years of black people trying to talk about their struggles of racial profiling and muted, but still vastly unfair, treatment, came to a boil.” Of course, countless black Americans — including many whose businesses were looted and burned down in recent days — would likely take offense at the bizarre notion that their “population,” which in Cunha’s world is apparently defined solely by melanin content, “need” to riot.
Concluding the bizarre argument, Cunha goes on to defend the individuals involved in the violence, looting, and rioting, suggesting they are merely “angry” at “the system” and that stealing and destroying other people’s property while shooting randomly may be justified responses. “Instead of tearing down other human beings who are acting upon decades of pent-up anger at a system decidedly against them, a system that has told them they are less than human for years, we ought to be reaching out to help them regain the humanity they lost, not when a few set fire to the buildings in Ferguson, but when they were born the wrong color in the post-racial America,” she said. It was not immediately clear who told blacks they were “less than human for years” or how having slightly more melanin content made somebody the “wrong color.”
Cunha’s argument was promptly attacked by critics as absurd. Rick Moran at American Thinker, for example, pointed to the business owners (“almost all of them minorities”) who watched helplessly as their lifetime dreams went up in smoke. “There are, indeed, justifications for breaking the law. But there is nothing ‘political’ about destroying property not your own, injuring people, and taking what you want without payment,” he wrote, ridiculing the notion that burning, smashing, and looting could be legitimized as some sort of “political statement” that Americans had better submit to.
“Even if you buy into the dubious ‘white privilege’ sociological crap, you must recognize that when law and order break down, we are left with the rule of the jungle. And in a jungle, only the strong benefit from mayhem. The victims are those who can’t or won’t fight back,” Moran concluded. “So Ms. Cunha is actually supporting jungle law vs. civilization — a civilization that makes possible her freedom to publish nonsensical screeds like this without worrying about anyone setting her house on fire or looting her belongings. Wouldn’t that be a ‘political’ statement, too?”
Cunha was not alone in openly defending rioting. Gawker, a widely read website that largely peddles celebrity gossip, even published a piece purporting to make the “economic case” supposedly justifying wanton destruction of property and violence. “There is, of course, the historical case to be made for rioting: the past is replete with examples where rioting gets the goods,” the piece argues. “But there is also, I’d submit, an even more straightforward case for rioting: at the right levels, rioting is economically efficient.” According to Gawker’s commentary, by rioting and looting, Ferguson residents are teaching authorities a lesson while making future shootings of citizens by police less likely through the imposition of heavy “costs” on taxpayers, businesses, and residents.
This May, Time was at it again, running a piece by former NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar promising that the anti-police riots this year in Baltimore were “just the beginning,” while comparing the violence and looting to the “Boston Tea Party.” Repeatedly referring to what happened in Baltimore, a city with a black mayor and a black police chief, as an “uprising,” Abdul-Jabbar insisted it was about more than Freddie Gray. It is apparently about “systemic injustice,” which he views as applicable to blacks only. As The New American’s Selwyn Duke recently documented using objective data, that race-obsessed “blacks as sole victims” narrative fails spectacularly, with more whites being shot by police than blacks, though blacks are far more likely to shoot an officer than whites — yet it continues to be parroted by the press and establishment lackeys with an agenda to push.
Abdul-Jabbar had some colorful analogies, too. “For African Americans, it feels as if we are all gathered together in the path of giant steamroller. We shout up at the driver to put on the brakes, but he keeps shouting for us to get out of the way. But there’s no place to go,” complained multimillionaire Abdul-Jabbar, who was appointed by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as “cultural ambassador” for the U.S. government, adding that 70 unarmed blacks had been killed by police over a 15-year period. “We keep backing up and backing up. In Baltimore, it felt as though everyone’s back was against the wall, and there was no place to back up to anymore. If shouting doesn’t get the driver’s attention, maybe something more drastic will.”
Other race-obsessed voices were also given a media platform to promote racial strife and unrest. “More and more urban uprisings will take place in the future as long as political puppets, social opportunists and embedded informants masquerading as leaders call for peace, while the poor, the Black, the denied, the exploited and the oppressed masses are calling for equal rights and justice!” argued Lucius Gantt in the Florida Courier, with its motto “Sharing Black Life, Statewide.”
While careful to say he does not think destroying businesses and institutions is a “good idea,” Gantt quickly proceeds to explain why he believes it is. “If you look at past riots in Los Angeles, in Detroit, in Atlanta and urban uprisings in hundreds of other cities, when the skies light up and costs go up, things begin to happen,” Gantt wrote. “Compare Central Florida, New York City, Ferguson and other areas to Baltimore. In those cities, nothing happened after the non-violent marches called by so-called and politically endorsed Negro leaders. But when flames can be seen from miles and miles away, every resource a city has is put into action immediately!” He also suggested people should “die fighting for equal rights and justice” rather than be killed by police.
Even after the flames had died out in Baltimore and Ferguson, the establishment press was whipping up mobs to keep destroying cities to achieve “change.” On August 5, for instance, the far-left media organ Huffington Post was telling readers that their violence had paid off. “The Ferguson Protests Worked,” reads the headline. The sub-header: “Were the riots costly and destructive? Yes. But reform never would have happened without the unrest.” The BBC and other outlets published similar claims, quoting a rap star in the headlines saying “riots work.” Get it? Next time you think you want some “change,” burn down your city, attack police, loot your neighbors’ businesses, and you’ll get it — all with support from the press.
Since the media pushing this line of thought is left-leaning (Big Government promoting) and their answer to the riots has been calls for more federal control of local police functions, it should at least be considered whether their callous disregard of minority property, livelihoods, and lives in promoting rioting has mainly been little more than a cynical ploy to gain a political objective. While the anti-capitalist screed last year in Time defending and promoting rioting drew swift condemnation and ridicule from the alternative and conservative-leaning press, such half-baked agitation and promotion of unrest and division has actually become a staple among the mischaracterized “mainstream” media — though perhaps not quite as openly as Cunha’s piece.
From giving respectability and credibility to race-mongers and profiteers to wildly sensationalizing stories that help advance the Big Government/nationalized police agenda, the increasingly discredited establishment press appears to be becoming more and more brazen in its efforts to distort the facts and foment chaos for less-than-idealistic purposes. And it will continue as long as it is effective.
Photo at top: AP Images
