"Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Friend Is No Nazi/He has a signed copy of Mein Kampf. That doesn’t mean he admires Hitler."

Writes Graeme Wood in The Atlantic.

[O]ne can make out statues [Harlan] Crow has collected from countries ravaged by political violence: Nicolae Ceaușescu, the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party; Lenin and Stalin; Enver Hoxha of Albania; the Hungarian Communist Béla Kun. These authentic specimens were harvested from the wreckage of collapsed tyranny, and they are kept in the condition in which they were found....

"To my partial surprise, 'In Defense of Looting' is only tangentially about looting. Mostly it’s a defense of violence..."

"... arguing that nonviolence, in the form associated with (for example) Martin Luther King, is a tool of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy. The book’s argument: the US was conceived in racist, patriarchal sin. The concept of 'property' is illegitimate and produces and perpetuates those evils. Loot and take up arms to fix the problem. That’s what works—not nonviolence—and by the way it is beautiful."

Tweets Graeme Wood, linking to his Atlantic article, "The Pinnacle of Looting Apologia/If the real, lasting change you wish to effect is burning society to cinders, then perhaps looting is the right tool."

From the article:

The destruction of businesses is an “experience of pleasure, joy, and freedom,” Osterweil writes. It is also a form of “queer birth.” “Riots are violent, extreme, and femme as fuck,” according to [the author Vicky] Osterweil. “They rip, tear, burn, and destroy to give birth to a new world.” She reserves her most pungent criticism for advocates of nonviolence, a “bankrupt concept” primarily valuable for enlisting “northern liberals.” Liberal is pejorative in this book....

Her conviction that her opponents deserve violence would be easier to abide if it were not obvious that nearly everyone counts as an opponent. Up against the wall are members of the media; “liberal commentators, de-escalators, nonprofiteers, right-wing trolls, vigilantes, and, of course, the police”; clergy who physically intercede between cops and protesters; and Nation of Islam members whose crime was to “broker a peace between gang leaders” and “chase looters” from neighborhood stores....

I don't agree that it's "easier to abide" violence aimed at a more specific group, but Wood is trying to reach Atlantic readers, and I think he's trying to shake them up with the warning that being a nice liberal is not going to save you from the form of violence that is bubbling up in America today.

Talk about an "arrogant bastard"!

Is it Bob Dylan... or Graeme Wood?

Wood quotes every jackass he can find in Hibbing, Minnesota and never even considers the theory that Dylan sings not like the townsfolk he heard talk but the singers he heard sing.