Here’s a particularly horrible video from yesterday’s rioting inside the Minneapolis target. Here, the black mob has set upon a white woman in a wheelchair named Jennifer:

In the video, you will hear a woman scream, “She stabbin’ people.” A closer view of the clip at the end of the attack on her shows that she did have a knife. You can well imagine why a woman in a wheelchair caught in the middle of looting would have her knife out. What you might find harder to figure out is what a woman in a wheelchair is doing in a store being ransacked by rioters.

Your first thought is that she was just a shopper who happened to be there when the riot sparked off. Nope. She claimed in a subsequent interview that she was in the store peacefully protesting. Um, really?

She was peacefully protesting against the looters by blocking the door. They beat and robbed her. pic.twitter.com/93pj65tuoz

— Cassandra Fairbanks ?⏳ (@CassandraRules) May 28, 2020

This earlier video appears to show her joining the looters, but being attacked by fellow looters as she was trying to loot. I say “appears,” but it’s not really clear what she was trying to do here. Repatriate stolen items to Target? What?:

jennifer really had it coming pic.twitter.com/9KZyvCg2qC

— ??☆彡 (@gwapkitty) May 28, 2020

Jennifer doesn’t appear to be the total innocent you might have thought if you only watched the first video. But the overwhelming fact is, there is never an excuse for a mob to set upon a person in a wheelchair! Ever! It just goes to show how savage a mob is. Look at the result of their handiwork:

The building set on fire at the BLM Minneapolis riot is collapsing now. It looks like the city is just letting fires continue. Firefighters were attacked when they responded to the auto parts store engulfed in flames earlier. pic.twitter.com/okAsLX7XoZ

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) May 28, 2020

The morning after in Minneapolis
pic.twitter.com/71mYRx4qlu

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) May 28, 2020

There’s a reason why unlawful police violence is so horrible: because in a civilized society, police have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. If they abuse that monopoly, as they appear to have done in the case of George Floyd, it is a very serious problem. This is why it is worse when a teacher or a clergyman molests a child. The victim is just as damaged, but the damage in those cases goes beyond the victim, to the fabric of society. Same thing with killings like George Floyd’s. He’s just as dead as he would have been if his killer were a street thug, but the fact that the man who killed him is a police officer, and he did it not in the heat of the moment, but after he had George subdued — that is an attack on the social contract itself.

There’s also a reason why riots are especially horrible: because it means anarchy. Because it means nobody is safe, and anything can happen. A terrific book to read is Among The Thugs, the writer Bill Buford’s 1992 account of embedding himself with a band of English soccer hooligans. It’s a fantastic book. Buford wanted to understand what drove people to riot around football matches, so he became part of that culture to write about it (and took a beating in one soccer riot). It’s grotesque, the things he describes, but Buford makes you feel the seductive power of the crowd. He writes:

The second principle was the more important: everyone — including the police — is powerless against a large number of people who have decided not to obey any rules. Or put another way: with numbers there are no laws.

Talking to English soccer hooligans:

“The violence,” he said. “We’ve all got it in us. It just needs a cause. It needs an acceptable way of coming out. And it doesn’t matter what it is. But something. It’s almost an excuse. But it’s got to come out. Everyone’s got it in him.”

… Mark was still explaining. “You see, what it does is this: it gives violence a purpose. It makes us somebody. Because we’re not doing it for ourselves. We’re doing it for something greater — for us. The violence is for the lads.”

Deep truths there. Violence really is in all of us. Not to go all Freudian on you, but civilization is only possible when people can control their passions — especially passions towards sex and violence — and submit them to the rule of law. They have to internalize the rule of law, or those passions will be right at the surface, waiting to burst forth. And note too what these hooligans told Buford: that the point of the violence is to assert the tribe’s power and worth. In Minneapolis, those crooks who looted target wanted TVs, but more than anything, I think, they wanted to assert power. George Floyd’s death at the hands of a police officer is just an excuse.

Buford is an American who was living in England at the time he wrote the book. Here he talks about how the thugs are aimless working class men:

I am in a tricky area. I have lived in England since 1977, and one of the things I’ve learned is that you don’t talk about the working class, at least in any detail, unless you are working class yourself. You don’t criticize the working class or make generalizations about being a member of it. You would never point out its traits in someone. It is not done; even today, you leave it alone. It is understood that non-working-class people don’t have the right to do so.

As a consequence, however, few people have come out and observed that the working class doesn’t exist any more. In itself, this wouldn’t be particularly significant—after all England is not the first technologically advanced country to see its working class disappear; it could be argued that it is one of the last—except that no one is admitting that the thing is no longer around. The reverse seems to be the case, at least among the members of the first non-working-class working-class generation, my “mates”: working-class habits … have simply become more exaggerated, ornate versions of an ancient style, more extreme because now without substance.

But it is only a style. Nothing substantive is there; there is nothing to belong to, although it is still possible, I suppose, to belong to a phrase—the working class—a piece of language that serves to reinforce certain social customs and a way of talking and that obscures the fact that the only thing hiding behind it is a highly mannered suburban society stripped of culture and sophistication and living only for its affectations: a bloated code of maleness, an exaggerated, embarrassing patriotism, a violent nationalism, an array of bankrupt antisocial habits. This bored, empty, decadent generation consists of nothing more than what it appears to be. It is a lad culture without mystery, so deadened that it uses violence to wake itself up. It pricks itself so that it has feeling, burns its flesh so that it has smell.

To what extent can Buford’s commentary about the white working class of 1980s England — the social element that produced soccer hooligans — be applied to the black rioters and looters of Minneapolis? What about the white people who have joined in that rioting and looting — Jennifer, it looks like, and others who have been caught on video? What kind of inner collapse does an individual, and a society, have to undergo to allow the rampaging barbarian within all of us to come out? Think of the Chicago police attacking the protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention, in what was later described as a “police riot.” What did it take for them to suppress not only their humanity, but their sense of duty as upholders of the law, and justify beating masses of people?

Jennifer from Target is a weird character, and it’s not clear what she was doing there. Still, though: Imagine the humanity one has to surrender to join a mob attacking a woman in a wheelchair. 

That’s the thing you get from reading Buford’s book: to the mob, seeing weakness in others is first and foremost an opportunity to cause harm. The most difficult parts of his narrative to read are those in which the mob (all of whom are white, by the way) set upon innocent, defenseless people.

I hate a mob. The mob is the enemy of us all. We can fix a broken police force. Nobody can control a mob.

UPDATE: Oh great, look what the mob accomplished last night:

The under construction affordable housing development that burned in the widespread violence in south Minneapolis late Wednesday and early Thursday was to be a six-story rental building with 189 apartments for low-income renters, including more than three dozen for very low-income tenants.

Construction began last fall on Midtown Corner, and was expected to completed and ready for occupancy this year. Late Wednesday the wood-framed upper floors of the building were fully engulfed in flames, with thick plumes of smoke that figured prominently in widely viewed photos of the riots. By Thursday morning, what had been an active construction site, was reduced to a pile of smoldering ashes atop what was left of the concrete first-floor commercial space.

UPDATE.2: Ah, here’s an example of inspiring cross-racial cooperation. A white looter tried to steal Jennifer’s purse, and a black looter helped by beating Jennifer in the head. Lovely people, this lot:

A person tries to steal items in the wheelchair woman’s purse. Someone then runs up from behind and hits her repeatedly on the head. #Minneapolis #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/c1nleTWhGj

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) May 28, 2020

UPDATE.3: Get a load of this creepy Target looter. I wonder if he’s wearing underwear beneath his flasher’s raincoat:

All the aesthetics, even the lighting, feel really good here hoping David Lynch sees this https://t.co/j3R2BTggsw

— Tara Ann Thieke (@TaraAnnThieke) May 28, 2020