Privileged Marxist rioters useful idiots of Corporatist attack upon small businesses

 by Sean Jobst

17 September 2020

(Updated with some additional information, 25 September 2020)

Months of well-financed riots and State-imposed Covid-19 lockdowns have placed a vice grip around small businesses nationwide. Given the destruction wrought by these elite-sanctioned events, a concerted effort to destroy small businesses seems to be one of several motives. Its no accident the same media and political elites promoting the riots as "peaceful protests" in their media and think-tanks - despite all the death, violence and destruction - have been the same authoritarian hypocrites who imposed lockdowns for any other social and personal gatherings and forced small businesses to close for the sake of a virus whose fatality rate at its worse is no more than 0.10%. A majority of these businesses closed for good, to the glee of privileged elites free from any personal responsibility for their policies.

Promoted by National Public Radio (NPR) and other mainstream media, the book In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action was published earlier this year to provide a pseudo-intellectual justification for the indefensible. In an interview with NPR, its author Vicky Osterweil seemed to direct her main ire against small businesses: "When it comes to small business, family-owned business or locally owned business, they are no more likely to have to provide good stuff for the community than big businesses. It's actually a Republican myth that has, over the last 20 years, really crawled into even leftist discourse: that the small-business owner must be respected, that the small-business owner creates jobs and is part of the community. But that's actually a right-wing myth. A business being attacked in the community is ultimately about attacking like modes of oppression that exist in the community." 

Osterweil is a self-professed "queer Jewish anarchist", but her ideology and the inspiration she cites in her various articles are blatantly Communist. Her idolizing violence for violence's sake is antithetical to the firm Anarchist principle that opposes the initiation of violence except in self-defense, and consistently upholds non-coercion in social interactions. Likewise, her attack upon the basic property rights of individual business-owners (nothing about her own property or those of her associates) is part of the Marxist ideology that wants to see all centralized in the monopolistic hands of the State - behind which stands Big Bankers and Corporatists. Its little wonder Corporate media outlets have given her a platform to espouse ideas they want to legitimize as a bludgeon against the working- and middle- classes and small businesses. For the Marxists and their Corporatist backers see them as enemies to their "revolution" that wants to centralize even more power for the managerial class.

Already in 2014, Osterweil was promoting the same line of "In Defense of Looting" in an article on two separate platforms, one under the name Vicky and the other under Willie. The cross-reference between the two articles indicates this is the same individual. As Willie Osterweil, this hypocrite wrote an opinion piece lamenting how "democratic governments are rolling back traditional rights", directing all his(?) ire against the United States and other Western countries, on behalf of a media corporation owned and financed by those paragons of human rights, the Qatari oil sheikhs. Willie Osterweil also wrote several articles on global issues for an outfit called the Post Carbon Institute, which appears to be well-financed and repeats Globalist "climate change" and "sustainable" (in the vein of Agenda 2030) slogans.

This pattern demonstrates someone who is perhaps not at peace with their own identity, so projects their internal conflict in ways that are destructive towards other communities - always hiding under claims of "anti-racism" but actually presuming to know what is best for those communities. My point is this could explain such a willingness for one who confesses a "personal aversion to violence" to so staunchly advocate it in other people's neighborhoods. Investigative journalist Matt Taibbi in his review of In Defense of Looting calls it "a 288-page book written by a Very Online Person in support of the idea that other people should loot, riot, and burn things in the real world." Not surprising given the blatant hypocrisy of such privileged agitators, Osterweil's book itself includes the stern notice: "The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author's intellectual property." We wouldn't expect any different from the privileged child of a professor and producer, born in a well-to-do Boston suburb detached from the world of working-class people.

Throughout the article, Osterweil presents opposition to looting and rioting as "anti-Blackness" and "white supremacist", seeming to imply that those are innate to "Blackness" since she like other Marxist critical theorists, hide their own racism under claims of being the paternalistic paragons of "anti-racism"; and project their own feelings of guilt upon working- and middle-class Whites whom they want the former to hate. Absurdly, she mentions the Korean-owned shop owner whose shooting of a 15-year-old Black girl sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots, as an example of "a family-owned, immigrant-owned business where anti-Blackness and white supremacist violence was being perpetrated." This inverted reality is perhaps the same justification used by BLM rioters who recently vandalized a Cuban restaurant in Louisville whose immigrant owner refused to give in to their extortion racket against local businesses. His experience under a regime praised by BLM leaders allowed him to stand firm where others caved.

Nebulous buzzwords "libertarianism" and "fascism" are used in a very loose sense for everything Osterweil opposes, with no concrete meaning beyond her Marxist dogmas. Her partner, "feminist thinker" Sophie Lewis, advocates a "utopian" future where both "motherhood" and the "nuclear family" is to be abolished, replaced by a communal "surrogacy". This sentiment happens to be shared by the BLM movement's own desire to "disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure", which lines up with Karl Marx's own call for  "abolition (aufhebung) of the bourgeois family" in Chapter 2 of The Communist Manifesto. Osterweil justifies looting small businesses as "mass expropriation of property", but as noted by Marx these resources would simply be stolen by this privileged class once they seized power: "Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly." It is the State control of all the means of production and resources, the control being exercised by a privileged elite of financiers and Big Business.

They hide their subversion under clumsy theories and emotional platitudes, but their policies damage the people for whom they claim to fight. Their privileged Leftist media backers often justify looting of small businesses with such claims as "their insurance will compensate them", detached from how the world operates outside their bubble. An elderly Black woman confronted looters who destroyed her business in Manhattan. Rioters in Minneapolis destroyed a startup sports bar of a Black entrepreneurial couple, whose dream was already on hold with the lockdown. Riots in that city destroyed various Black, Latino and Native American-owned businesses - all in the name of BLM. Civil rights veteran Ron Herndon called out the "99% white" Antifa rioters vandalizing Black businesses in Portland under the banner of "Black Lives Matter". Such lives as David Dorn - who died at the hands of rioters in St. Louis - simply don't "matter" to BLM.

None of this should surprise any honest observer to their Communist hatred against family and property. Intersectionality gives the likes of Osterweil a cover to pontificate about "racial justice" and being the inherent racists they are, she assumes it takes her and others like her to "move" Black people's world for them. Perhaps its for this reason that she took special offense at the fact pointed out by many of the apparent predominance of non-Black faces and voices within the riots, as she defensively says in her NPR interview: "It both creates a boogeyman around which you can stir up fear and potential repression, and it also totally erases the Black folks who are at the core of the protests." Yet the fact remains that these have proliferated using the slogan of "Black Lives Matter" as the mere excuse, and that such a recurring number of rioters prove to be from privileged backgrounds that its become a cliche.

Among the high-profile rioters are actor John Malkovich's son Loewy, caught in Portland riots, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's daughter Chiara, arrested for blocking traffic at a rally in Manhattan. Two wealthy lawyers (including a corporate lawyer) were arrested throwing Molotov cocktails as part of their would-be Communist revolution. A rally organized by the maoist New Afrikan Black Panther Party in New York City on 9 September included seven rioters, who were found to come from privileged backgrounds, having "took a break from their yacht club lives and modeling careers to be a part of the mayhem." One of these, 20-year-old Clara Kraebber, is a wealthy student from Upper-East-Side Manhattan whose parents - a child psychiatrist and an architect connected to the city's most prestigious universities - own multiple homes. "The family paid $1.8 million in 2016 for their New York City apartment and also own a home in Connecticut with four fireplaces," writes Zachary Yost for the Mises Institute. One story of Portland rioters described a well-paid paralegal at one of the city's leading law firms.

Privileged celebrities actively engaged in publicity stunts at these various "social justice" efforts, bailing out rioters as have staffers for the presidential campaign of Joe Biden, perhaps to whitewash the appalling record of that lifelong establishment politician. In Minneapolis, former ESPN NBA sports writer Chris Martin Palmer took to Twitter with a picture of low income housing being burned by rioters, gloating "Burn that shit down. Burn it all down", until riots showed up to his own wealthy neighborhood: "Get these animals TF out of my neighborhood. Go back to where you live." Even in a wealthy area such as Soho in New York City, riots hurt the working class more than the wealthy. Quite simply, these rioters see more wealth and attend Ivy League universities, privileges not enjoyed by the people they dare to lecture to, justify looting and accuse of "privilege". They have no grievances beyond their fringe theories from academia. 

Far from being the voice of the "marginalized" as presumed by Osterweil and other proponents, the riots are sanctioned by one dialectic of the American political system - the one whose current discourse has little principles aside from their own Trump Derangement Syndrome. There are State Senators actively involved in acts of iconoclasm. Many District Attorneys and prosecutors have refused to pursue any charges against rioters, even while expanding their police powers against other people. Big Tech and media firms have openly aligned themselves with rioters. All of these acts from the elites have given carte blanche for BLM and Antifa rioters, assured now of a high-placed political and moral cover for their actions which have far more to do with subversion than any "social justice". 

Marxist "revolutionaries" - most often from privileged backgrounds themselves - are the useful idiots of Corporatist elites who look down upon the masses as plebs. Their policies have bred the environment against workers and small businesses, special ire against those who have any semblance of independence from their structure. These elites want a public dependent upon the State; a consumer class whose interactions are wholly online and electronic, easily tracked and monitored, as per the communitarian "Smart Cities" digitized world they envision. A "diversity of tactics" means that the rioters are shielded by the "peaceful protesters", with whom they are united in this subversive religion of the Woke. To criticize the rioters and the destruction of small businesses is considered a heresy to their Critical Theory, cooked up in the privileged universities and think-tanks of their ideological founders rather than truly organic. And as I will show in articles to come, even their slogans are manufactured by elite Globalist institutions, making these unoriginal "revolutionaries" useful idiots of systemic manipulation.