Seattle

Riots for thee, but not for me

A funny thing happened on the way to the riots. Left-wing revolutionaries discovered ‘NIMBY!’ — Not In My Backyard.The first hint came in May when the sports reporter Chris Martin Palmer tweeted ‘Burn that shit down!’ cheering on low-income housing in Minnesota being set ablaze. But then the rioters came for him. Distraught, Palmer tweeted out an SOS.‘They just attacked our sister community [note the woke gender designation] down the street,’ he furiously typed. ‘It’s a gated community and they tried to climb the gates.’ A mysterious ‘they’ then had to ‘beat them back’. And it got worse. ‘They destroyed a Starbucks.’ The audacity! The impudence!

riots

Do all black lives matter to BLM?

‘I understand black lives matter. But that’s not my movement, right now. My movement is to let them know that was my son. Horace Lorenzo Anderson was my son.’ And his son is dead. In a gripping, gut wrenching, heartrending, half-hour interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, Horace Lorenzo Anderson, Sr tearfully beseeched social justice warriors and anyone watching that his son’s black life mattered, too. Horace Jr. was just 19 years old when he was shot and killed at Seattle’s Capitol Hill Ongoing Protest (CHOP), the police-free, six-block city encampment created with the blessing of Democratic officials.

lives

What’s it like in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone?

SeattleAh, Seattle, that environmentally obsessed city where all is decorous, the sidewalks immaculately swept, the parks rigorously trimmed, proverbial for its snow-capped mountains and sparkling lakes, and now, too, for its riotous Capitol Hill residential neighborhood where free spirits roam with their feral dogs and semi-automatic weapons. Their little community survives — even flourishes — by handing out free stuff like gas masks from the back of trucks, eating lentils cooked over an open fire, and sustaining each other’s morale by peak-decibel showings of the racially-themed movie 13th. Apparently they’re in it for the long haul.

capitol hill autonomous zone
anarchy

How do you enforce anarchy?

I had an argument once, in a pub, with an anarchosyndicalist. We’d both been on the same protest march so we started from a position of, at least in some respects, presumed sympathy. I asked him how on earth a large society could hope to run itself without rules or institutions at all (this may have been a slight under-reading of this distinguished political philosophy, but he didn’t correct me). Anyway, he got jolly cross and did a lot of shouting about how the post office was anarchosyndicalism in action. But what about pedophiles, I yelled (we’d had a lot of cider). How does the post office deal with them, eh? There was some answer to do with communal social exclusion as an alternative to the industro-carceral complex.

CHAZ capitol hill autonomous zone

In defense of CHAZ

It is easy to laugh at the young people who have built the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle. A group of anarchists and leftists collected in Capitol Hill, known for its hipster and LGBT scenes, they have barricaded themselves into a small area and established an anarchic intentional community, modeled, perhaps, on the work of Hakim Bey — known for his endorsement of ‘temporary autonomous zones’. Bey is also known because of unfortunate links to the pederast group the North American Man/Boy Love Association, but let’s leave that aside for now.

Antifa’s American insurgency

We are witnessing glimmers of the full insurrection the far-left has been working toward for decades. The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis was merely a pre-text for radicals to push their ambitious insurgency. In a matter of hours, after the video of Floyd began circulating the internet, militant antifa cells across the country mobilized to Minnesota to aid Black Lives Matter rioters. Law enforcement and even the state National Guard have struggled to respond in Minnesota.Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta are just some of the other cities waking up and finding smoldering ruins where businesses once operated. Nearly 30 other cities experienced some form of mass protest or violent rioting. At least three people have been killed so far.

insurgency

Do progressive municipal leaders want their cities to fail?

In 2017, Seattleites nearly elected a slam poet as mayor. The 31-year-old biracial, queer, poetry artist and community organizer named Nikkita Oliver came in a close third to be the city’s top executive. While on the campaign trail at a slam poetry club, Oliver said the best way to push back against the Trump administration and to achieve a ‘real sanctuary city that is about equity,’ voters in Seattle must cast their ballot for her genitalia. ‘When you go into a community that is struggling and you put the money in a woman’s hands it’s more likely to benefit the community as a whole. This is science, y’all,’ she said being interviewed on a dimly-lit stage by a Gargantua of indeterminate sex or ethnicity sporting a bowtie and trucker hat.

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