This Funny or Die production is an interesting attempt to be both relevant and funny. Interesting — because it’s an astounding failure. It only succeeds in being an object lesson in ideological witlessness:

There is no mystery about the difference between a protest and a riot. A riot inflicts violence and damages property. A legitimate protest does neither.

Or, more properly, a protest may or may not include rioting and a riot may or may not include protest. Riots can happen for reasons irrelevant to politics or any attempt at persuasion or pressure. Some riots happen because the participants just want to engage in mob mayhem. Sporting events have spurred mob violence, as have sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.

David Alan Grier, here, engages in a weird pretense that blacks during the BLM riots were the same as the Charlottesville tiki torch guys in terms of rioting activity — or that the 2016 Charlottesville event was more a riot — only (it is more than merely implied) anti-black racism prevents people from recognizing this putative deep truth.

But the real truth is that this is a blinkered falsity, and probably a lie. (I don’t really know what Grier believes. I can only guess. I think he’s a liar, but he may be just another bigoted race hustler or witless anti-white leftist.) The tiki torch parade of neo-Nazis did not engage in mayhem — I can remember no instances of it. They had gone through a (tumultous and duplicitous) permitting process, as is required by law. The only violence I saw was initiated by leftists protesting the neo-Nazi “protests.” I don’t remember what the pathetic neo-Nazis were trying to prove, but I do remember the gauntlet the police made the neo-Nazis run through — a gauntlet of their angry, violent enemies — and I do know that the kid charged with and convicted for murder had just been attacked by a mob of “protesters” before he drove out like a bat out of hell.

The rally/protest of the neo-Nazis didn’t seem very violent to me, in other words, and was not a riot. But the protests against them did turn a bit violent, though I’m not sure I’d use the word “riot” to distinguish them. It was mostly white people that I remember engaging in the anti-Nazi violence, as is the case with most leftist protests.

Now, I partook of protest marches back in the ’80s and early ’90s. But there was no rioting. Then I moved to Seattle in time for the infamous WTO riots, and that’s when I began really turning against the left — and Grier might note that those were lily-white mobs engaging in violence in that debacle. The protesters were also not good at arguing or making propaganda: I was there for the initatory “parade” in Capitol Hill, which was illegal (unpermitted) and stupid, childish — and the propaganda leaflets were not at all persuasive, though I WAS AND REMAIN OPPOSED TO THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION. But while I merely laughed at the parade, I was angry at the rioters in the days following.

Before the weird Trump epoch — or, more accurately, sparking the Trump epoch — BLM, BAMN and antifa engaged in riots to protest speech they did not like. They were violent and they were criminal and they were appallingly “un-American” (at least insofar as that they were explicitly anti-free speech). I would also call each and every one of the many mobs that destroyed Confederate statues also riots, and I saw a lot of white skin peaking around iconoclasts’ masks.

I judge Grier worse than a liar. He’s furthering the cause of racial tribalism in America, pushing prejudice and bigotry of a leftist variety against what he likely thinks of as “right-wing” “structural racism,” but in so doing is actually attempting to solidify an anti-white racism and a demoralizing “pro-black” excuse for violence. Grier is fanning the flames of the ideological divide and blowing smoke up our assessments, encouraging Funny or Die’s mostly white leftist audience to think that there is racial prejudice where none is in evidence.

And let me reïterate: I hate mob violence, and don’t approve of it when white people do it any more than when “people of color” do it. Back in 1999, I shocked my friends when I lashed out at the mob violence as well as stupid arguments of the WTO protesters. Because my friends, I gathered —most of them libertarians — bought the old romance of leftist protest. I gave up on leftist protest at that time, because I despise violent mobs.

Exception? Yes, I make an exception. I am against mob violence unless the violent mob overthrows a violent state and sets up a peaceful society. Only then will I support mob action: when it actually decreases State terrorism.

I have never seen that happen in America, though. Never in my life. It always seems to play into the hands of the statist elite. But if it did — if direct insurrection against the State has led to less state violence, then hey: I’m on board.

The point of race hustlers, though, and all this racial special pleading, is not to decrease state violence — though they sometimes bring it up as an excuse for their violence. They are really trying to excuse mob violence for their cause, and when they do this the State takes the cue to increase its power over the people. Tyrants historically love mobs, at least those that serve them. The left knows this, seeing that they ascribe to Trump an “authoritarian” plan to rally his mobs to engage in “fascism.” But so far, it is Trump crowds’ protesters who’ve engaged in the bulk of the violence. No Trump rally that I can recall ended with dead store owners and burnt-out police stations smouldering storefronts — and all the rest associated with the BLM riots of 2020.

I turned on the left because I am basically against violence against innocent people, and the left most evidently is not. And Grier is just another shill for the myths that excuse mobs and (in a back-handed way, via anarcho-tyranny) encourage states to terrorize peaceful people.

Also, for Funny or Die to promote this witless video — isn’t this a bit too on the nose? I mean, it’s not funny. So….

twv