THE MOLOTOV COCKTAIL PARTY
CONTEMPLATIONS WHILE WATCHING LOS ANGELES BURN . . . AGAIN
“Burn, baby, burn. Burn that mother down.”
—The Trammps, Disco Inferno (1976)
Paul Johnson’s book The Intellectuals begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ends with Lillian Hellman, and Bertolt Brecht occupies the middle. What impressed me the most when I read the book was the miasmic spirit that breathed from person to person that perhaps the best solution for all would be to burn all of civilization down and start over—a position which has been tried to one degree or another beginning with the French Revolution, continuing with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Mao’s revolution in China, and at its greatest extreme, Pol Pot’s insanity in Cambodia.
And today the same spirit of wanton destruction lives on in the increasingly common Leftist habit of political mob violence, which has filled our screens in recent days—once again—with images of burning cars, gleeful looting, and masked figures hurling bricks and Molotov cocktails at policemen. But watching the latest round of performative anarchy, I can’t help feeling it all rings a little trite.
After all, the current perpetrators did not invent the riot.
The first real fracture in post-Reformation Western Civilization occurred in July 14, 1789, when the Bastille was stormed by a mob of revolutionary workers, tradesmen, and mutinous soldiers. Collectively, all that is European and its distant extensions were thrown into the rapids of disintegration/integration/disintegration that has typified the experience of the world since the French Revolution. No one more deserved a revolution than the French aristocracy, but no one has since been able to heal France—the most disappointing country in modern times—as represented in the 2024 Summer Olympics with its “inclusive” (read: pagan drag queen) entertainment segments, and staging the open water swimming events in the Seine River—a flowing septic tank that winds through the center of Paris.
A mob that wipes out a thousand years of history is tempting to imitate. And it happened again to greater consequence in Russia when the Petrograd (renamed from St. Petersburg because of WW1) demonstrations that began on March 8, 1917, (Gregorian calendar) turned violent and triumphed by March 12, leading to the Czar’s resignation by March 15. And another millennial past disappears.
The worst riots in American history occurred in New York City July 13–16, 1863, and are called the Manhattan Draft Riots. They took place in Lower Manhattan during the American Civil War, sparked by a new draft law in 1863. This law allowed wealthy men to avoid conscription by paying a $300 commutation fee or hiring a substitute, which fueled resentment among Irish immigrants. The official death toll was either 119 or 120.
The riots quickly turned racist because the Irish immigrants resented competing with the freed Africans for jobs. At least eleven Black men were lynched and many more were beaten or killed. Federal troops intervened and with superior numbers of rifles and cannon firing grapeshot at the rioters suppressed the rebellion. As pictured above, the riots were almost entirely male, and quite bloody.
My father warned me in 1948 (the summer of my fifth birthday) about mobs (he had in mind racial lynch mobs)—that even if I joined the mob to stop its actions, the emotion influencing a mob is so overwhelming I could end up fully joining with the mob. Rioters and demonstrators typically intermingle in modern political action events, no doubt causing some demonstrators-by-day to join the other group under cover of darkness.
My generation attended church more than any previous generation, but when we arrived at college in 1962, we en masse virtually agreed with Frederic Nietzsche that God was dead. Time magazine caught up with events on April 8, 1966, with its magazine cover asking “Is God Dead?” Which inevitably led to a total cultural embrace of drugs, the sexual revolution, and the attempt by many youths from the privileged upper half of the middle class to fulfill Timothy Leary’s famous counterculture slogan: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
I was in the army at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA, in 1966, a few miles up Highway 1 from Big Sur, which was overrun with young people trying to do their Jack Kerouac imitation, and acting as a plague upon all the local businesses and residents.
I called them Bums With Perfect Teeth.
In fact, they were what we now call trust fund babies having a go at the open road. Two of my best friends in Special Forces, both from that same class and both good soldiers, had been on the road themselves when they received their draft notices and both enlisted with the goal to make it to Special Forces. We joked that if the summons had come two years later they would have fled to Canada.
The trust fund babies are a large and interesting class in America today, and they show us much about what is wrong with the nation—more than almost any other class. I bring them up because they supply significant numbers of recruits to the anti-Israel movements and other fringe movements of the kind that now end up on the street hurling bottles at cops.
These children of the capitalist upper class dominated my graduate programs at the University of Iowa. Pleasant people to be around. Many of the males had gone to prestigious prep schools. The college names mentioned in the hallways were Harvard, Middlebury, University of Michigan, Kenyon, Oberlin, and Davidson.
Once around them, I quickly understood that despite great personal talent, discipline, breeding or manners, and all that money can buy, they were quite unsure of themselves. It is not a reductio ad absurdum to say that with the loss of God, they lost their assurance that their inherited wealth was legitimate. I can’t think of another explanation for their behaviors. They bought their clothes at the Salvation Army Thrift Store and dressed like ragged peasants and they were uniformly (not to say blindly) liberal. I could understand their being tempted by the liberal offer of guilt-free drugs and the sexual experience of your choice, but I had a harder time understanding the economic reasons for going full socialist. Finally I realized that being wealthy beyond avarice in the international economy rendered them immune to any economic disasters.
What they subliminally or consciously feared was being on the wrong side of a repeat of the Storming of the Bastille, or the Petrograd demonstrations of 1917. These fears drove them always to find the left-most political frontier and camp there.
And so they have been. If we watch closely the public temper tantrums that now pass for civil unrest, we can see signs of their presence.
Who participates in televised demonstrations (riots) is always a dicey subject. In some cases, you know the rioters were local residents. The participants in the NYC draft riots during the Civil War were definitely Irish men living in lower Manhattan. But by the time you reach the period of labor violence in the latter end of the 19th century, forget about it—both labor and capital were bringing in trainloads of thugs armed with clubs to battle it out at the factory gate.
My wife and I had three small children when we lived in Gary, Indiana, in 1974—a growing family. My Uncle Charles, a local labor leader and general participant/leader in all local left-wing causes would regularly show up at my house to collect my eldest children so they could participate in demonstrations or protests in the area. They were bright, beautiful, and photographed well. I had been raised in a family that walked picket lines and attended public protests—like the 1963 March on Washington. I let them go without comment, but I can easily imagine the Simons children walking down Broadway in Gary, carrying a banner sign that said DON’T CALL ME QUEER. No one watching the protest would have any idea where those young demonstrators came from.
In 2020, cities across the country—Minneapolis, Minnesota; Los Angeles, California; Chicago, Illinois; New York City, New York; Seattle, Washington; and Portland, Oregon—experienced wide-spread looting and fires during the George Floyd riots. Minneapolis burned the earliest and the most with more than $550 million done in damage to the city. Altogether some estimate more than $2 billion in destruction. The mainstream media described the riots as “Firey but mostly peaceful.” Trump criticized the governors for not taking a stronger hand, but didn’t intervene.
The Democrat Party, since it has a practical monopoly on the demonstration cum riot—with the exception of Jan. 6—has exploited these events to the hilt to stir the latent fears of the sedentary majority.
For many years this has been a major part of the Democrat Party playbook. The riot’s purpose is to reinforce the will of the left and strike fear in the right—All those Democrat voters out on the street burning cars, looting electronic stores, throwing rocks at the police could visit your city, your neighborhood. For their efforts they hope to receive meekness and surrender.
Fast forward to today, and we are stuck with an unending soft insurrection against civil order. ICE enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws, military parades, and anything the president does will do as an excuse now and for the foreseeable future.
Not to downplay the injuries or real violence associated with these demonstrations, but they are a version of street theater, not real riots. There are too many women involved—who must be involved, because it is the only way the events can be called “Mostly peaceful,” by the Mainstream Media and Democrat presidents, and mayors, and governors. (The federal government sometimes prosecutes rioters; the Democrat-run states and cities essentially don’t.)
The Democrat regimes who rule the large cities control these riots like they were directors of Kabuki Theater with a first, second, and third act—as much as the traffic will bear. Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was able to watch Minneapolis burn for twelve days—May 26 to June 7, 2020.
The modern political street theater is a mixture of male and female, professional and amateur, those working from a script and those who are hired on an improv contract. The banner signs are printed in advance. The bricks to throw at the police are stored in local warehouses. The professional fireworks—as in the LA and Portland riots were an afterthought, but they came fast, and they came from far away; the flammable fluids and empty bottles for Molotov cocktails are kept on hand.
In this most recent episode, the men provide the violence, the women provide the cover, and the Democrat politicians provide the running time—prolonging events as long as their credibility will bear, allowing the demonstrators to burn cars, drop rocks on cars traveling the freeway, burn buildings and loot stores—all in the name of hindering ICE officers who are fulfilling the country’s immigration laws by exporting illegal aliens.
President Trump closed the theater down by bringing in the California National Guard and a detachment of Marines (no cannons or grape shot necessary).
You have probably never heard a pinned pig squeal. I have. A pinned pig squeals exactly like the governor of California squealed through his perfect teeth (the bum), and without a doubt the whole herd of pigs wanted to rush off a cliff and drown itself in the Pacific Ocean.
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NOTE:
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This Substack is edited by Titus Gee