Via Min in the comments,

Arlene Dávila, a professor at NYU and founding director of the Latinx Project, believes that looting, theft, and destruction are all part of this essential tapestry of protest. She writes, “Anyone surprised that protests include looting of luxury stores in Soho & elsewhere doesn’t know the 1st thing about racial capitalism & luxury consumption. Racial exploitation is at the root of consumer capitalism built on the commodification of black bodies through slavery.”

Those with a taste for adolescent nihilism tarted-up as woke theorising can head over here for more of the same. There, you’ll learn that sweatshops exist and that “advertising is one of the whitest industries in corporate America,” and that therefore – yes, therefore – people who recently found their businesses and neighbourhoods violated and ablaze should just quit complaining and suck it up, baby.

One can only hope that Professor Dávila returns home one evening to find that it too has been chosen as a target of ‘protest’ – i.e., robbed of anything valuable and merrily on fire. Possibly as a result of parents belatedly registering the kinds of people now entrusted to educate their children.

Or would that somehow be unfair? I ask because, stripped of its rote contortions, Professor Dávila’s reasoning seems to be, “I am unhappy, therefore I am obviously entitled to smash whatever I choose, terrorise whomever I choose, however arbitrarily, and to destroy the hopes and livelihoods of countless random people.”

Because – magic words – social justice.

Readers may note just how often leftism is functionally indistinguishable from sociopathy.

Update, via the comments:

Note too that Professor Dávila carefully sidesteps the countless scenes of feral violence against random people, including elderly women, even terrified animals, and wants us to imagine that the rioting and looting and arson have been neatly confined to “luxury stores” and is therefore, somehow, acceptable, even righteous. Something to applaud.

Of course, this is a lie, as hours of video footage demonstrate.

But it’s interesting how our dishonest woke educator, our teacher of other people’s children, seems to believe that the property of the owners of those stores, and the livelihoods of the people they employ, and the ongoing nightmare for the people who just live nearby or in the same smashed and burning buildings… well, they don’t matter.

And so, Dr Louise Raw, a suitably woke BBC-employed writer and historian, denounces “virulent class prejudice” as a self-evidently bad thing, and then, in the very next tweet, is publicly amused by the thought of “rich, white, middle-aged men” being killed in disproportionate numbers, complete with smiley-winky face. 

And when other Twitter users point out this contradiction, with varying degrees of liveliness, our woke historian and BBC employee doubles down and dismisses those objecting, en masse, as “fascists,” “neo-Nazis” and “right-wing” crayon-eaters. Presumably on grounds that no-one else, none of her enlightened leftist peers, would register a contradiction. Or anything unsavoury. 

Update, via the comments: 

It’s worth taking a moment to ponder what it must be like to inhabit a milieu in which public expressions of racial disdain are not only aired with expectations of impunity, but also as a marker of status. A way of signalling one’s social credentials and general modishness. And being so accustomed to this environment, so steeped in its values, that, when challenged, the obvious response is to construe any demurral – all of it, wholesale – as the work of “neo-Nazis.”

It’s a complicated dance. Quite a contortion.

Via [+] in the comments.

Wisdom of the woke:

So, to recap. You should, like, totally get Big Sexy with whomever – even people you aren’t attracted to, apparently – but if your sexual and romantic appetites are insufficiently niche and radical, and more or less in line with mainstream leanings, then you should probably assume that there’s something wrong with you. Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.

Ms Fabello and her throbbing feminist brain have been noted here before.

Attention, woke citizens. During the current lockdown, do you feel a need to “challenge microaggressions” – those “verbal, behavioural or environmental indignities that communicate hostile, derogatory or negative racial slights”? Specifically, those committed during video conferencing?

According to Michigan State University’s Amy Bonomi, director of the university’s Children and Youth Institute, and Neila Viveiros, associate vice chancellor for academic operations at the University of Colorado Denver, the expanded use of virtual meeting platforms such as Zoom and Skype has created “a ripe setting for unconscious bias.”

But of course. The frontier of indignation must forever expand.

“Unconscious bias includes using language, symbolism and nonverbal cues that reinforce normative social identities with respect to gender, race, sexual preference and socioeconomic status,” Bonomi said. “For example, when the virtual background of a Zoom meeting attendee has pictures of his or her wedding, it unintentionally reinforces the idea that marriage is most fitting between opposite sexes.”

It turns out that the reckless visibility of a wedding photo may be crushing the self-esteem out of the touchily unwed. You see, the mere sight of a photo of someone’s happy day can “crowd out the experiences of people with minoritized social identities,” albeit in ways never quite explained. Other taboos include references to “simple activities like family dance parties,” which are apparently a thing, and “gardening with a spouse.”

Curiously, given the stated importance of “sensitivity” and being mindful of what things might mean, we aren’t invited to ponder the kind of person who would resent someone else’s wedding photo. And then complain about it. Or whether such neurotic affectations, these unhappy mental habits, are something to be actively encouraged. In the name of progress. At a university.

Update, via the comments:

Robert Murphy on the pathologies of the leftist campus:   

This is not a matter of “Oh, gee, there’s a bunch of people who have different views about whether health insurance should be provided by the government.” That’s not what I’m talking about. [These are people whose reaction is,] “Oh, there’s a speaker coming to campus and we don’t like that person’s views. We are going to credibly threaten that we will break stuff and hurt people, we will set things on fire and smash windows.” And so, then the school has to cancel because of security concerns. And then that gets spun as “Oh yeah, the reason that speaker couldn’t come here is because he would incite violence.” The kind of mindset that would do that and would see nothing weird about that. “Yeah, the reason the speaker can’t come here is because he promotes violence – by us, his enemies.” 

Which rather calls to mind the tenderly whispered wife-beater’s lament: “Don’t make me hurt you, baby.”

Needless to say, examples abound. And do note the role of their academic enablers.

Cathy Young on Lenin and his admirers: 

Many leftists in places like Jacobin magazine see Lenin as the “good communist” to Joseph Stalin’s “bad communist” — the revolutionary wrongly maligned as an authoritarian. Indeed, Lenin’s birthday this year was marked on Twitter by New York State Senator Julia Salazar, a member of the new crop of young progressive politicians. The “Lenin good, Stalin bad” formula was also popular among Soviet reformers, both in the late 1950s-early 1960s and in the late 1980s. It was wrong then; it is wrong now… As independent Russian historian Nikita Sokolov recently told Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, Lenin’s only consistent position throughout his political career was that “he was a fundamental believer in violence as the solution to any problem.” 

Based on history, and their own writings, it seems entirely possible that devotees of Marxoid fantasy typically start with the ideal of violence and coercion, the titillating rewards of having power over others, and then work backwards in search of a pretext.

Oh, and Dr Jennifer Cassidy is an Oxford University politics lecturer who has thoughts on what kind of books you’re allowed to have on your shelves.