Anger Is Justified, Riots Never Are

Sometimes a responsibility falls to you that you never anticipated. Sometimes history just demands that someone should say it: Riots are bad. Riots are never a coherent or moral response to injustice, they just multiply injustices and the rioters themselves often suffer more in the long run.

Unfortunately it must be said, because absolute morons who would call the cops without hesitation if there were an unruly loudspeaker or birdwatcher in their nice neighborhoods are cheering on and excusing rioting — rioting that is destroying businesses, livelihoods, and even a community center for Native American youth. The apologists for rioting and arson accuse people who are appalled by these acts of not caring about injustices. It cannot be said emphatically enough: This is the precise opposite of the truth.

People who apologize for rioters say that rioting challenges the system. But of course it doesn’t. Robbing and shooting at Korean immigrants in Los Angeles, or nearly killing a random white truck driver, did not get anyone a tenth of an inch closer to justice for Rodney King or reform of the LAPD; these were just other barbarous crimes.

Indistinct blathering about “the system” is an attempt to smuggle away the reputation of revolutionaries and bequeath it to rioters. But revolutionaries join targeted violence to a political rationale. If the rioters are revolutionaries, they should tell us their grievances, describe their dreamed-of settlement, and show us they are burning down the right buildings and happy to shoot the right people. They haven’t done so, of course. But if revolution is unattractive in the absence of such a rationale, or inadvisable because it is futile, certainly a campaign of disorganized violence at whatever targets seem juicy in the moment is just mayhem for its own sake.

We must distinguish rioting and looting from protesting. People do not loot seeking justice for George Floyd, they loot for the loot. People don’t commit arson to make a political statement. What does burning an AutoZone even communicate if it could be translated into politics? People don’t assault those citizens standing in the way of looting and arson as a cry for help or to draw attention to social problems, they do so because looting and arson offer satisfactions to a reprobate will.