Riots for thee, but not for me

A funny thing happened on the way to the riots. Left-wing revolutionaries discovered ‘NIMBY!’ — Not In My Backyard.

The first hint came in May when the sports reporter Chris Martin Palmer tweeted ‘Burn that shit down!’ cheering on low-income housing in Minnesota being set ablaze. But then the rioters came for him. Distraught, Palmer tweeted out an SOS.

‘They just attacked our sister community [note the woke gender designation] down the street,’ he furiously typed. ‘It’s a gated community and they tried to climb the gates.’ A mysterious ‘they’ then had to ‘beat them back’. And it got worse. ‘They destroyed a Starbucks.’

 The audacity! The impudence! ‘And are now in front of my building. Get these animals TF out of my neighborhood. Go back to where you live.’

The ‘animals’ very quickly replaced Mr Palmer’s romantic, vicarious, subversive thrill with tweet-storming, hair-raising, visceral fear. As it turned out, he didn’t want his shit burned down. Not In His Back Yard.

Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle experienced her own ‘come to NIMBY’ moment in June.  After shrugging off weeks of vandalism, riots, the terrorizing of local businesses at the CHOP (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest) encampment, and even two murders, as a ‘Summer of Love’, Durkan was confronted with bullhorns on her doorstep. Led by the militant city council member Kshama Sawant, rioters marched to the mayor’s home. Incensed, Mayor Jenny demanded an investigation into Sawant for daring to disturb her domestic sanctum, far from the colorful and homicidal ‘street carnival’ on Capitol Hill. Durkan took immediate action to break up the CHOP menace. Her Summer of Love was over like a bad gap-year fling.

Seattle radio show host Paul Gallant also discovered the inexorable and insatiable demands of the mob. Never has there been a less fitting last name. A few weeks ago, the cheeky ESPN radio jockey was hailed as a hero for slaying President Trump with a smug tweet: ‘Walked through it [Seattle’s riots] last night out of curiosity and saw no burning, pillaging or deaths. Chill dawg.’

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Then, last weekend, Gallant’s apartment building was burned and pillaged. Thanks to the gallant members of the Seattle fire department, the residents were saved from death. Shaken, Gallant tweeted, ‘I feel like I need to buy a firearm, because clearly this going to keep happening. Enough is enough.’ Welcome to the Second Amendment, dawg.

Understandably, it’s hard to keep perspective when the fate of humanity is at stake and Trump refuses to impeach and remove himself from office. Twitter and CNN can convince the most sincere social justice warrior that the nightly arson and looting by black-hooded anarchists is a mere right-wing figment — that nevertheless serves the greater cause.

As Fidel Castro once said, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. The key is to make sure it’s not your egg that gets cracked.