Should We Use the Military to Quell Rioting in America's Cities?

I think where you and I agree is that law and order needs to be reestablished. And one of the reasons why I think that it needs to be reestablished is there's a fire of consciousness. And this fire is you're allowed to loot and smash and steal and people are doing that now. And I don't think they're doing it in the memory of George Floyd. And I think you got to put that fire out because once you allow people to do it like the Blasio did in New York City and forced the police to stand back, people know they can get away with it. And you're doing some horrific things. People running over people with cars and smashing into buildings. And it's fucking madness. When madness happens, you have to crack down. You have to do something about it. That's where I support, whether it's the National Guard or if the police have the resources, use the police. But something has to be done. When you're saying like President Trump de-escalating on television, that is not going to do a goddamn thing about those kids smashing windows. It's not going to change their attitude. They're not watching the news. They're not paying attention. They know they have a very simplistic perspective. George Floyd, this is bad. Black Lives Matter, chaos, smash that window, take that shit. They're not going to say, hey, you know, when Trump got on his knees, I was going to Luke Gucci, but I'm not going to do that anymore. They're not thinking like that. There's fake bullshit on both sides. Yeah. But you've got to do something to stop the fire. You got to put that fire out, then de-escalate. But first the fire has to stop because it's an obvious mob mentality thing. Because no one's ever seen this before. No one's ever. And there was a Santa Monica, there was a guy running around with a gun pointing at people. People were driving into fucking people and knocking them over. It's crazy. It is. And it's not something that anyone expected seven days ago. And it is a sign of like a breakdown of a society. It's a perfect storm. There's no doubt about that. There's economic despair from three months of not working is unprecedented. You've never had a time where through no fault of your own, you are broke. You can't pay for food. You can't pay your mortgage. You can't pay your rent. You're fucked and there's no jobs to be had. It's not like there's anything these kids can go out and do to better their position. The amount of jobs that existed just three months ago, it's drastically reduced. So there are opportunities which are already slim to none. You know, we're talking about people getting out of college in 2020, how bad their economic opportunities are before all this in comparison to the past. And how about if you're coming out of high school and aren't going to go to college? I mean, most people don't go to college. And so my only point is that the military is not a solution. What is the solution, though? Well, the solution is to actually do something about the material condition ultimately. But right now, the solution about the fire, how do you put out the fire? Because there's a fire when these people are smashing windows all down Fifth Avenue. That's a fire. Right. But I think where we view it differently is that in my view, the tactics, the aggressive tactics that the police have used have only made that worse. No, no, we agree on that. Right. And so my view is if you bring in the military, first of all, I find it, I find all of, I think we are getting far too comfortable. And this is partly part of the perfect storm with the pandemic. Like we've become very comfortable with all these extreme limitations on our actions, behavior, wearing the masks in public, which creates a level of anonymity, like all of that goes into this. So when we have a curfew imposed of 1pm or 5pm or 6pm, we're just good to go with that. But that should be taken in and of itself very seriously as an infringement on First Amendment rights. I agree. So my point is that if you bring in the military, it is frightening in terms of our liberties, our ability to protest, our First Amendment rights, which are incredibly important and I think ultimately only leads to additional violence. Yeah. I'm going around in circles here because I agree with you on all those things. And I am 100% in support of the people protesting. Right. People that are walking down the street with signs about George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, I'm 100% in favor of that. It's the looting. So how do you stop the looting? You've got to do something to stop the looting. If you don't stop the looting, it is going to fucking continue. Well stop focusing on tear gassing protesters and start focusing on protecting stores. I don't think so. I don't think so. I think it's about tear gassing protesters after the looting. After all that shit got crazy, that's when they started cracking down on the protest. I think it's a mistake because I don't think they're connected. I think the people that are doing all the looting and the smashing are not the people that are peacefully protesting. And there's a ton of videos of people who were screaming. There's a one video of this girl who's yelling at these girls in front of a Starbucks that are spray painting Black Lives Matter. It's an African American girl and these white girls who spray. She's like, why the fuck are you doing that? They're going to blame us. They're going to blame us. I mean, she's right. That look, that's a huge part of this whole thing, which is that there's just upper middle class white liberalism and their inability. I mean, just as a whole element of white guilt and so much more. There's an entire industrial industrial complex set up to make white people and upper middle class white people in particular feel uncomfortable condemning looting and violence in this particular scenario. Even though everybody agrees with you, Joe. I mean, pretty much everybody is like, yeah, protests are fine. Looting is bad. It's great. And what happened to George Floyd was fucked up. That's like one, two, three. Ninety five percent of people in this country would agree with something like that. And so that's why I think that that I mean, look, that shows you that there is again a political way to be forged here, which is like, like you said, nobody thinks that this is nobody was defending George Floyd. No one. What has been interesting is that these riots have not just been in the poor neighborhood or in the black neighborhood. I mean, they have been all. I think that's part of why people are so freaked out is they've been sort of intentionally in the wealthy parts of town is part of what makes it so unsettling for everyone across the board. And so, you know, look, I my only point is, you know, yes, looting, bad violence, bad, absolutely all of that. But you can't imagine that the military is an answer to the situation. Yeah, I don't know what the answer is. But when people see the chaos and the randomness of it all, that's what's really frightening. When people saw what was happening happening in Minneapolis as a direct result of a bad cop killing a man that was handcuffed and not a threat. But then people say, OK, I get these people. But then when you see them smashing windows in Beverly Hills, you're like, what the fuck does this have to do with George Floyd? Like what is going on here? And how are you justifying this? And they're not. But that's the thing is it's not just a bad one bad cop or even just policing. Right. I mean, let's remember, right. It wasn't just one bad guy. There are three other guys just standing around watching. 100 percent, but that has nothing to do with Louis Vuitton. Sure. But what I'm saying is that's why this spread across the country is because the grievances aren't specific. That was the flashpoint. I can understand that if it comes to the marches. But the grievances are not just specific to that one thing. Marches and protests, not smashing the windows of target. You know, and they did they did a target right down the street from here. What the fuck does that have to do with anything? It has to do with nothing. It has to do with lawlessness. It has to do with people taking advantage of the situation and escalating. Also, it's probably exciting. People have been locked up and bored as fuck. And all of a sudden they got something. Look, it is in many ways similar to war. And this is why. Because when people are they have a real cause and when war is going on, there's a lot of people that I know that have served overseas. And one of the hard kind of scary truths is it's some of the best times of their life. Yeah. And I have some action. Younger wrote a great book about it called tribe. It's a fantastic book that really gets to the psychology of it. And you know, this is a guy who was over there for long periods of time as a journalist. When you are involved in this and you feel like you're fighting the good fight and you're like fuck corporate America. But you know, you're fucking 20 years old. You believe that shit. Yeah. You know, my friend Bridget Fettis. She's she's a brilliant writer and she's really hilarious. And she she was talking about some papers that she found that she wrote when she was 24. And she was like, I was reading this like, holy fuck, like I was so dumb. She was like, she was like, I was such a radical. She was like, I was like, AOC, I sounded like AOC. But I'm looking back back at it now as a grown grown ass woman going, what the fuck was I doing? What was I thinking? I think that's what you're dealing with a lot of these idealistic kids. They think they're going to tear it all down and burn it to the ground. But they don't know where the fuck their cell phone comes from. They don't know who makes their sneakers. They don't know what it what it costs to keep the electricity on. They have no foot. They have no shoe in the game. I don't know. I mean, but a lot of a lot of those young people, though, I mean, look, what has their life been? And they they're graduating from high school, they're graduating from college. They know very well what the what the cost is and what the rent is and what it looks like for them in their life going forward. And that's exactly where that hopelessness and nihilism comes from. There's a great video and I've talked about this before, but I'll say it again of a Flint sheriff from Flint, Michigan, talking to these people and saying, look, I'm going to put the baton down. We're going to we're going to march with you. But see, you asked what the answer is. That is the answer as opposed to military because that that and what did that lead to that deescalated that led to less. You're right. But that's not right. That doesn't stop. That's not. That's not while there's looting. He's meeting these peaceful protesters of that approach rather than crackdown tear gas, rubber bullets, you know, and this contentious us versus them and the, you know, the militarization all of that, that approach led to less violence. I agree with you. But all that approach, the crackdown tear gas happened after the looting. That's the that's the impetus for it. It's not like they saw these people protesting. They're just going to start shooting tear gas into the first year of protest. We have seen that. But we saw here. That's all we saw here. The first people we saw were burning down things in Minneapolis and they allowed that. And as Sagar was talking about, that's that's really where it all took place. Seeing people get away with shit like that. Yeah. It's like, OK, now there's a fire of the mind. Yeah. And that fire needs to be put on. But people understand this in a war context, right? Like three fires. Like that's why we have very strong rules of engagement. Like people understand that the way the psychology of taking on this can happen. And that that Minneapolis looting, that target, it was a beacon. It was a message to any of these shitheads that you're talking about. Hey, we can get away with this. And then night after night after night after night. That's how fifth. I mean, you saw, I'm sure the same videos I did. You had like organized gangs like people with car getaway cars, lookouts posted on the corner, all that. Where where's the NYPD? Right. I mean, that that is that breakdown is a very precious thing. And this is on the riots front. I mean, look, Baltimore 2015, they had these level of riots. What happened? Massive economic destruction. But worse than that is that police and many of the others have took a much more risk averse approach to the way that they were going to that community. The community is screaming for police specifically for this reason, which is that in the aftermath, we know from many of these rise from the MLK times and after Baltimore, it caused massive economic destruction to these cities. It is not a noble thing to allow this to continue. It's actually your job as a city. I mean, there's a whole movement. I mean, underground. Nobody wants to say this. A lot of people don't want to live in cities now because of what happened. We know first of all, I live in an 800 square foot apartment. You know, fucking terrible. This would be locked down in an 800 square foot apartment. And like the only thing you do is like go to the grocery store and you can't go out to eat or do anything. And now I've got shit like being blown up in the streets like a couple blocks from my house. Like I don't really know if that's the city life is all that enticing. Get out there with crystal out. Yeah, I need to go out and get your Internet from the sky. Yeah, I think there's a lot of people who are thinking that, which is that, hey, you know, fuck this. Why am I paying all this rent to live in a soulless box and then maybe get, you know, maybe have my shit get broken?