A typical discussion of what’s happening right now in LA:

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Trump administration is spoiling for a fight on America’s streets. On Saturday, after a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests degenerated into violence, the administration reacted as if the country were on the brink of war.

The violence was unacceptable. Civil disobedience is honorable; violence is beyond the pale.

You want to know what’s “unacceptable”? It’s bullshit writing of this sort.

Look again at the second sentence: “On Saturday, after a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests degenerated into violence…”

The sentence implies that the violence began on Saturday. Did it?

The sentence implies that the initiating event of the violence was the “degeneration” of the protesters’ protest. True? If so, how do we know?

The word “degeneration” is a metaphor. What is its literal content? How did the protest “degenerate”? What actually happened? No answer is given.

Question: why is it acceptable to write for the nation’s “newspaper of record” with such wholesale indifference to questions of simple facticity? How can a discussion of events in LA proceed as though all of these questions could be brushed aside, evaded, or ignored, while the author delivers a homily about everything else?

“Violence,” we’re told, is “unacceptable.” But isn’t self-defense a right, and isn’t self-defense violent? Yes, on both counts. If so, how can violence be unacceptable? Obviously, it sometimes is acceptable. No one ever disputes this, except when it comes to defending ourselves from Our Government. What if the protesters’ violence was defensive? No answer. How can an author bracket the issue of self-defense while discussing the commission of violence? I guess he can if he’s a mainstream American journalist. Such a person is likely to have spent his entire career producing verbal apologetics for the powers that be. If he raised the question of self-defense, he might justify violence against those powers. Since that’s a taboo, the question itself is a taboo. So, evidently, is honest inquiry itself. 

The unanswered questions above illustrate the actual skill set of the average mainstream American journalist: compress the maximal number of evaded questions into the smallest number of assertions; then discuss irrelevant side issues, and congratulate yourself on your journalistic professionalism. These people are experts at covering events only in the sense that they excel at cover ups. They’re like well-designed distraction machines: give them any event, and they’ll find a way to distract attention from its most salient feature.

People talk a lot nowadays about “viewpoint diversity.” Here’s the viewpoint that I find worthy of discussion but insufficiently discussed: We are ruled by tyrants who employ thugs to keep us in our place. Those thugs are responsible for the vast bulk of the initiated violence that takes place in this country. When people strike back, as they very occasionally do, we should, on the whole applaud. Granted, we should first be sure that the retaliation in question satisfies the usual criteria for defensive violence. It should be defensive, proportional, discriminate, and so on. But when it is, we should clap as loudly as we can–not in a spirit of glee at the sheer exercise of violence, but to make clear what we think of the people on the receiving end. There’s no candor like contempt.

The caution I’ve described in the preceding paragraph far exceeds anything employed by apologists for the United States government (including the journalistic ones), who are reflexively quick to applaud any fucking thing this government does, no matter what’s done, or how it’s done, or why, or to whom, or in what way. Yes, we have to hold ourselves to higher standards than these unapologetic shills. But that doesn’t mean that no standards apply to them.

It’s time for mainstream journalists to face an obvious fact. They may hope that our desire for accommodation with the United States Government is infinite. They may want stability at all costs, or stability at a cost borne by us. They may want us to pretend, with them, that “civil disobedience” marks the limits of our resistance, that we’ve alienated our right of self-defense to the authorities, that we believe in some mythical “social contract” that demands our acquiescence in every malfeasance, every abuse, and every atrocity that’s sent our way.

Perhaps it’s time to let them in on a little secret: they’re badly mistaken. Our desire for accommodation isn’t infinite. We don’t want stability at all costs. We refuse to pretend that resistance must end with our martyrdom, but without casualties for our tormentors. It’s time to remind these people that if those tormentors prick us, we bleed, but if we prick them, so do they. That’s the real lesson of LA. Better late to learn it than never.