Fred LaSor: What do they want?

The world watches in disbelief as cities across America burn every night and people who were elected to take care of their citizens continue to ignore the criminality right before their eyes. For more than 100 days now, Portland has experienced nightly rioting that Mayor Ted Wheeler in a press conference this week blamed on President Trump, while at the same time turning down Trump’s offer of federal troops to assist overwhelmed city police.

Former Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have also said that Trump is responsible for the rioting and burning. This theme has turned out to be a useful fund-raising call for the Democrats, so it continues.

It is no secret who is behind the rioting on the streets of Portland. A so-called anti-fascist group that calls itself “Antifa,” but appears reminiscent of Mussolini’s Black Shirts (hardly anti-fascist) has taken credit for what is happening nightly in Portland, while another group that calls itself Black Lives Matter also shows up nightly, claiming they are protesting police brutality against African Americans all over the country.

If you find it counterproductive to burn a city as a means of protesting fascism or racism, I’m with you. It makes no sense. Let’s call this violence what it is: radicalized youth bent on destruction. And they happened on the scene at just the right time to become a useful part of domestic politics as the Mueller report sputtered and died. George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis Police became the new anti-Trump meme.

I have written before about the misdirection of BLM – how its founders profess Marxism and claim to value black lives. But they repeatedly ignore hundreds of black victims of inner-city gang violence. A quick calculus in America’s newsrooms follows the death of every African American: victim of gang violence? Ignore it. Killed by a black policeman? Ditto. Shot by a white cop? Capitalize on it, and make the victim out to be a loving father who was brutally murdered by a racist cop.

I don’t pretend there is no racism in America. I have been sensitive to it since college, when my roommate was the first black admitted to that university. But he was much more than that: he was a good friend, a hard-working student who got better grades than I did, and an Eagle Scout.

And we talked honestly about racism in America — me blissfully ignorant, he pointing out daily examples. He worked to overcome it, and was, I think, largely successful. Without burning anything. I don’t see BLM doing that. I only see them picking at the scab of our national shame, making it worse, offering no solution. “No justice, no peace,” they chant, but it is not justice they want and not peace they’re offering. It is money and power, and their own enrichment.

So too, Antifa isn’t working to cure what ails the system, they’re bent on destruction and now death. Has anyone in Antifa ever said what their vision is for a “reimagined America?” We know they don’t want police or courts, but what do they want instead?

I was taught in high school that governments are instituted primarily to guarantee the safety of its citizens. Nowadays, government is being expanded to include healthcare, housing and free needles. These people don’t want to be your government, they want to be your mommy and daddy.

When Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan ceded seven blocks of the city to Antifa, it became a garbage-strewn wasteland, with violence, shakedowns and squalor. If that’s all they have to offer to America, they’re not going to get many takers.

Fred LaSor has lived in the Carson Valley since 2015.