May 31, 2020
Cracking Down on Misfits’ Crime Sprees and Big Tech
By Clarice Feldman
I don’t know how many people today still read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, but if you are puzzled by the breakout this week of rioting and mayhem (at last count in 17 cities) you’d do well to make yourself familiar with this incredibly well-reasoned text on mass movements. Why are the streets regularly filled with mostly pasty looking stoners pelting stones and bricks, destroying businesses in the poorest urban areas and of even attacking law enforcement on thinnest of pretexts? Partly, I suppose it’s because the shutdown kept them isolated for so long, bored and out of work, but Hoffer’s observation seems to me to best fit: “The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement.â€
Much of the looting -- as far as I could tell from the online videos shot in Minneapolis -- has been from neighborhood black thugs, but not all of it by any means: The riots that accompanied the looting there and elsewhere significantly involve white men and women with a decided stoner look about them. Reports are that many of these rioters are, in fact, being bussed in from elsewhere. The mayor of St. Paul said every person arrested was from out of town. The President tweeted that 80% of all the rioters in Minnesota were outsiders and reminded readers that federal law made crossing state lines to engage in violence a federal offense that would be prosecuted and punished. The attorney general was clear that it would be.
The greatness of our nation comes from our commitment to the rule of law.
The outrage of our national community about what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis is real and legitimate. Accountability for his death must be addressed, and is being addressed, through the regular process of our criminal justice system, both at the state and at the federal level. That system is working and moving at exceptional speed. Already initial charges have been filed. That process continues to move forward. Justice will be served.
Unfortunately, with the rioting that is occurring in many of our cities around the country, the voices of peaceful protest are being hijacked by violent radical elements.
Groups of outside radicals and agitators are exploiting the situation to pursue their own separate and violent agenda.
In many places, it appears the violence is planned, organized, and driven by anarchistic and far left extremists, using Antifa-like tactics, many of whom travel from out of state to promote the violence.
We must have law and order on our streets and in our communities, and it is the responsibility of the local and state leadership, in the first instance, to halt this violence. The Department of Justice (including the FBI, Marshals, ATF, and DEA), and all of our 93 U.S. Attorneys across the country, will support these local efforts and take all action necessary to enforce federal law.
In that regard, it is a federal crime to cross state lines or to use interstate facilities to incite or participate in violent rioting. We will enforce these laws.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/cracking_down_on_misfits_crime_sprees_and_big_tech_.html
