[Peace-discuss] What he saw in the riots (excerpt)

[David Green]

Michael Tracey is *not *a National Review pundit. He is an honest,
well-informed independent journalist with a sterling track record,
including regarding Russiagate. He is supported by his Patreon
contributors, of which I am one. I think it's well worth it to give $5 per
month to the only journalist telling the truth about what's going on as a
result of Antifa/anarchist destruction following the death of George Floyd.
He publishes his reports in various journals, some of which are
"conservative." For example, he and Angela Nagle published a post-mortem of
the Bernie Sanders campaign at American Affairs:

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/first-as-tragedy-then-as-farce/

He has travelled across the country in his car to report from various
cities:

https://medium.com/@mtracey/two-months-since-the-riots-and-still-no-national-conversation-12a7e3e4e006

He puts up a lot of stuff on both youtube and twitter; his interviews with
local residents as he drives around the country are often revealing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n7_E2xBtbg


Beyond his current work, he has questioned transgender doctrines, among
other things; of course he has been vilified by the Woke Left.

Regarding much of the devastation that was caused in Minneapolis, it's
pretty clear that it was not "provoked" by the police or other state
forces. Tracey, in general, feels that the main destruction has been by
"multi-racial" (mostly white) anarchists, etc., often from out of state
which has been followed by local vandalism by the black population. I know
the "outside agitator" claim sounds suspicious in light of the 1960s, but
that appears to be the case, given that cars from other states have
different license plates.

For his trouble, Tracey is routinely vilified and threatened on twitter.
Nevertheless, he is literally the only one doing this kind of work. Mort,
I'm not sure why you're surprised that NPR etc. are not doing this sort of
work. The reason they don't do it is that they are opposed to Donald Trump,
and don't want to do anything to facilitate his re-election. It's not
surprising, historically, as you know, that there would be a media blackout
on unpleasant truths.

What we have with the "BLM" responses to the death of George Floyd, as
Tracey has documented, is a violent and quasi-religious paroxysm. Tracey
has documented the latter aspect of it as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUz3dKdeHrQ&t=101s

Tracey also points out the obvious hypocrisy of the "left" justifying
protests during a pandemic, while not affording the same dispensation to
Trump supporters.

This exaltation of the antifa/anarchist "left" is absolutely misplaced.
Black Lives Matter has been a political travesty since the day of it's
invention.

DG

On Sat, Aug 1, 2020 at 4:14 PM Brussel, Morton K <brussel at illinois.edu>
wrote:

> This seems pretty bad, but just as I am suspicious of reports from the NYT
> on how bad things are in Russia and China, so I am suspicious and skeptical
> of the reporting from The National Review. The Economist didn’t relay such
> a report. Did the NYT or WP report on these things?
> I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what transpired, but I didn’t get such
> views of scenes of destruction from CNN or PBS—curious. Also, I don’t know
> if provocateurs were involved, as well they might have been. Also, I don’t
> know what provocations emanated from police actions, and then federal
>  militia actions.
>
> —mkb
>
> On Aug 1, 2020, at 2:49 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss <
> peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
>
>
> https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/interview-journalist-michael-tracey-riots-protests/
>
>
> In terms of targets and patterns of destruction, it varies somewhat by
> city. Minneapolis and St. Paul are what set off the nationwide convulsion
> and underwent the most extreme destruction, so the patterns there may be
> most instructive. The initial target was the Third Police Precinct
> building, which Minneapolis police ultimately fled upon orders from the
> mayor, Jacob Frey — allowing protesters/rioters to seize it for a time. A
> nearby Target store was then bombarded. But one fallacy that was often
> heard in the early days of the riots was that the “targets” were merely
> corporate chains that could easily cover the damage. It’s plausible that
> the insurrectionary activists, many of whom came from out of town, did
> initially “target” corporate chains to some degree. But once the chaos
> breaks out, it’s impossible to contain.
>
> One block away from the Third Police Precinct building, a resident named
> Rick told me about an Indian restaurant and a brunch restaurant that had
> been burned to the ground. Was the initial target some “corporate” chain?
> Maybe, but it’s not as though that could be strictly adhered to as some
> kind of clearly delineated rioting ethos. In the Lake Street area of
> Minneapolis, entire blocks are boarded up and/or destroyed. Elsewhere in
> the region, individual parcels of land are reduced to rubble, almost
> without rhyme or reason. For instance, it’s not clear to me why an
> Ethiopian restaurant in St. Paul was subjected to an arson attack and
> reduced to rubble. Or why a Goodwill’s windows were smashed. It could
> simply be that many of the rioters were so amped-up (and probably
> intoxicated) that they had no ability to discern what they were going after.
>
> Elsewhere, such as the heavily black areas of cities like Chicago and
> Milwaukee, “looting” broke out when there was a vacuum of municipal
> resources caused by the mass protests and other riot-like activity. I would
> distinguish this form of opportunistic “looting” from the ideologically
> driven insurrectionary rioting that initially sparked the unrest. If you
> are a black 16-year-old and there’s no police around, and all your friends
> are rushing into a busted-up streetfront store to take sneakers, it’s
> understandable why you’d follow suit. According to residents, the “looting”
> in heavily black areas like Chicago’s West Side started in earnest at
> apparel stores like Foot Locker and branched out from there. Police had
> generally stood down. In Philadelphia and the Bronx, I was told by
> residents that the acquired goods ended up being sold in black markets,
> such as the K&A (Kensington and Allegheny) intersection in Philadelphia.
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