BLACKS BLAST BUSTED BUST

[k.d.]

2020 was many things, all of them bad. It was the year of COVID, the year of George Floyd, the year of riots and looting, the year of economic downturn, the year of mass retail bankruptcies, and the year of dodgy mail-in voting.

But it was also the year that social justice activists wanted Americans to know that property is, well, just property. From “progressive prosecutors” decriminalizing property crimes in cities across the nation to leftists defending the mass destruction caused by BLM, the message was clear: Property losses are no big whoop, and if you complain about them, you’re a genocidal maniac who prioritizes inanimate objects over human life.

All throughout the year, politicians and activists lectured the public about the unimportance of property damage. “Black lives matter more than property,” declared the leftist New America Foundation in June, adding that “prioritization of property” and “reverence for property” are “white supremacist” traits, and therefore “destruction of property is a direct challenge to a system built on exploitation and oppression.”

“Police are putting property over the sanctity of human life!” screeched In These Times that same month.

[i]The Nation[/i] topped them all with a piece titled “In Defense of Destroying Property.” Yes, property [i]should[/i] be destroyed, if doing so furthers an important cause:

What if property destruction is more than an understandable lapse of judgment and loss of control? What if it is not a frustrated, emotional reaction but a reasonable and articulate expression in itself? Refusing to incorporate acts of destruction into the political imaginary of protest deprives these acts of their political power.

So go out there, you passionate protesters, and smash things!

Wait, no, don’t smash [i]that[/i]!

Last week, a large ceramic sculpture honoring ventilated black woman Breonna Taylor was destroyed by vandals in downtown Oakland, Calif. The bust, which frankly looked more like Willie Tyler’s puppet Lester than the Kentucky dead girl, had only been up for two weeks before it was demolished. Leo Carson, the obviously sight-impaired sculptor, blasted the vandalism as an “act of racist aggression” and called on police to vigorously find and arrest those responsible. Oakland’s mayor and city council also decried the destruction and ordered the police chief to spare no resources to apprehend those responsible.

So much for the value and necessity of property destruction as social statement. Suddenly, protecting property isn’t “white supremacy,” but an act of social justice, and vandalism isn’t an act of social justice, but “white supremacy.”

Odd how those definitions can turn on a dime.

Similar to how, last week, when loony white dude Anthony Warner blew up some property in Nashville on Christmas Day (after broadcasting a warning intended to prevent human casualties), leftist Twitter denounced the act as “domestic terrorism” because property was destroyed! But literally that same day, when leftist “Earth First” vandals sabotaged three natural-gas pumping sites in Aspen, Colo., depriving over 3,500 people (many of them elderly) of heat and hot water for days during a snowstorm, Colorado officials dismissed the notion that the attack was “terrorism,” because “only property” was destroyed.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to determine when one can or can’t destroy property…when vandalism is “social justice” or “Nazi tyranny.”

But at least the Oakland sculptor has raised almost $30,000 to redo the bust in bronze, promising the city that the new Lester, make that [i]Breonna[/i], sculpture will be impervious to vandalism.

Good thing [i]Popular Mechanics[/i] didn’t publish a manual this summer instructing activists in how to demolish bronze sculptures.

Oh, shit…