HOW THE LEFT’S LOVE OF RIOTS LED TO KYLE RITTENHOUSE: When You Condone Chaos, You Condone the Consequences of Chaos.

At the time of the Kenosha riots, many many people along the left-of-center, including otherwise reformist liberals, endorsed riots to some degree or another. I know quite a few people who were willing to say that riots were just good on the merits, and there were also many saying in some terms or another that these particular riots could not be judged by progressive people due to what had inspired them. This sentiment stretches back a long way but has picked up steam in the last decade and the past year and a half particularly. Here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-rioting interview and here’s a pro-looting interview and here’s a riots-aren’t-necessarily-good-but-they-do-good-things piece and here’s a both-sidesy rioting piece and on and on. (And this is merely hilarious.) Pro-rioting sentiment is perfect for our edgelord media; it makes for good, click-farming headlines and engages in the kind of moral simplicity and righteous hectoring that defines our current culture.

Well, look: chaos is chaotic. Bad shit happens when people riot. When you create environments where anything can happen… anything can happen. Some people are going to take advantage of that opportunity to do things that you don’t like. You can’t endorse spasms of directionless violence and then complain when some of it plays out in a way that you hadn’t intended. This seems totally obvious to me, and yet so many out there want to both condone riots and condemn their chaotic outcomes. It’s like putting on music and getting mad when people dance.

Plus: “The left-liberal stance towards political violence, at present, is beyond confused. . . . For many posers on the left antifa is less the expression of authentic political strategy and more a tool to define oneself as an aesthetic radical. If you go to various protests and riots and encounter the self-defined antifascists there, I can assure you very few of them will be remotely interested about what happens in the courts at all. Because – and I’m sorry to break this to you romantic types – most people who self-select as antifa in 2021 are just bored white people attracted by the possibility of an excuse for mindless violence.”