By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, July 09, 2020
A TikTok video that recently went viral on social media
showed a recent Harvard graduate threatening to stab anyone who said “all lives
matter.” In her melodrama, she tried to sound intimidating with her
histrionics.
She won a huge audience, as she intended. But her video
also came to the attention of the company that was going to give her an
internship later this summer, Deloitte, which decided it didn’t want to add an
intern who threatened to kill strangers who said something she didn’t like.
This wouldn’t have been much of a story. But then the
narcissistic Harvard alum posted a very different video — one that showed her
weeping in a near-fetal position.
She fought back tears while complaining about how unfair
the world had been to her. Her initial TikTok post had earned cruel pushback
from the social-media jungle she had courted. Deloitte, she sobbed, was mean
and hurtful. And she wanted the world to share her pain.
The Harvard grad instantly became an unwitting poster
girl for the current protest movement and the violence that has accompanied it.
What turns off millions of Americans about the statue toppling, the looting,
the threats, and the screaming in the face of police is the schizophrenic
behavior of so many of the would-be revolutionaries.
On one hand, those toppling statues or canceling their
own careers on the Internet pose as vicious Maoists — the hard-core shock
troops of the revolution. Their brand is vile profanity, taunts to police,
firebombs, and spray paint.
In homage to Italy’s Blackshirts of the past, they wear
black hoodies, don makeshift helmets, and strap on ad hoc protective padding —
part lacrosse attire, part cinematic Road Warrior costume.
The televised stereotype of the Antifa activist is a
physically unimpressive but violent-talking revolutionary. He seems to strut in
laid-back, blue-city Minneapolis but wisely avoids the suburbs and small towns
of the nation’s red states. He spits at police when standing beside fellow
agitators but would never do that when alone confronting an autoworker or welder.
When police march against the Antifa crowd and their
appendages in order to clear the streets, they often scream like preteens,
objecting to mean officers who dare to cross them.
When arrested, the trash talkers are usually terrified of
being jailed or of having an arrest on their records.
Federal authorities are currently searching thousands of
videos to ferret out looters, arsonists, and assailants. Perpetrators who are
caught are shocked that the evidence that they once posted online in triumphant
braggadocio is now being used to charge them with felonies.
What is going on?
Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and their large numbers of
imitators and loosely organized wannabes are mostly made up of middle-class
youth, often either students or graduates. They deem themselves the brains of
the rioting, the most woke of the demonstrators, the most sophisticated of the
iconoclasts. In truth, they are also the most paranoid about being charged or
being hurt.
What explains the passive-aggressive nature of these
protesters and rioters?
Many no doubt are indebted, with large, unpaid student
loans. Few seem in a hurry to get up at 6 a.m. each day to go to work to
service loans that would take years to pay in full.
While some of those arrested are professionals, many are
not. Few seem to be earning the sort of incomes that would allow them to marry,
have children, pay off student-loan debt, buy a home, and purchase a new car.
Historically, the tips of the spears of cultural
revolutions are accustomed to comfort. But they grow angry when they realize
that they will never become securely comfortable.
In today’s high-priced American cities, especially on the
globalized coasts, it’s increasingly difficult for recent college graduates to
find a job that will allow for upward mobility.
The protestors are especially cognizant that their 20s
are nothing like what they believe to have been the salad days of their parents
and grandparents — who did not incur much debt, bought affordable homes, had
families, and were able to save money.
Earlier generations went to college mainly to become
educated and develop marketable skills. They weren’t very interested in ethnic
and gender “studies” courses, ranting professors, and woke administrators. For
the students of the 1960s who were, protesting was a side dish to a good investment
in an affordable college degree that would pay off later.
But when such pathways are blocked, beware.
The woke but godless, the arrogant but ignorant, the violent but physically unimpressive, the degreed but poorly educated, the broke but acquisitive, the ambitious but stalled — these are history’s ingredients of riot and revolution.
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