Meanwhile, no one in the Mainstream Media is just coming out and saying it. One commentator watching footage of rioters in Austin, Texas quipped, with a wry, knowing smile, "Hmmm – how did that pallet of bricks get there?" They know, but they can't say it, nor look into it, despite that it's their supposed job, and duty, to do so. Everything being told the public is being redacted of truth-telling, if not an outright fabrication. The video that people are ostensibly rioting over looks really staged, as does every socio-political extenuation of it.
Because I've seen this before, as with past "events." It's like how, once one has been around the block and through the woods a couple times, one can identify from up to a block away someone who's sizing one up to ask for money, try to con, or worse. Or how I can, nine out of 10 times, discern immediately that someone I meet or am in close proximity to is bad news and should be avoided. One learns to discern mannerisms, postures and facial expressions which are consistent with certain character traits; those of maleficent people tend to give themselves away immediately because such people are overconfidently counting on their victims' being naïve, stupid, or trusting, because most people are. The mannerisms and postures of all concerned in this "event," and of this "event" itself, similarly betray the scam and its maleficent intent.
When one discusses "race" in America, or "race in America," it's so loaded with implications that I am loath to do so. The reader should try to bear in mind that I am reporting what I see, not responding to anything outside of my own perception. What I am personally tired of seeing is the Black population's being continually exploited toward political ends which are seldom, if ever, ultimately in its favor. I shan't endeavor to delineate that, but Malcolm X had put it so much more succinctly and eloquently than I could, over a half-century ago. I'm neither a Conservative nor a Liberal, just a guy who was raised in a household steeped in Civil Rights activism in the late '60s. I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X at age nine, and attended a predominantly-Black public school and church. Over the past 50 years, I have watched Black folks continually be put into a box so that the White Elite can "liberate" them from it, over and over, like how Shepard Tones seem to infinitely spiral upward or downward without attaining any resolution. They keep undermining Black people's self-esteem and self-determination, so that the White Elite can keep leading them halfway to the Promised Land.
There came a point where, before I'd stopped drinking entirely, I'd drink "just" Sprite and generously tip the bartender. Despite my not getting drunk, I had to deal with the behaviors of those who were: I had to have "drunk" conversations, I had to deal with "drunk" sexuality, and I had to run the risk of getting into a "drunken" brawl. After I stopped drinking (which had come down to wine-with-dinner, at home) altogether, I just didn't go to bars anymore – though not so that I wouldn't be "triggered," since I could previously go to them without wanting to drink in public. It's that I could now see how toxic that environment, itself, is. When bars aren't alive with jovial conviviality (couldn't resist the alliteration, there), they're where dark forces hang out, waiting for vessels weakened by intoxication. The direct or proximal intoxication of opinionated rage is what I'm avoiding by laying off social media. The rhetoric and semantics employed by the slogans and hashtags are designed to limit thought, and within particular limited parameters. Take, for example, "Silence is complicity." It's not dissimilar from "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists," for those old enough to have sufficient recall of the 9/11 "event."
The day after I'd made my decision to lay off social media "for the time being" I passed by a house, two blocks from where I live, which had been targeted for firebombing, obviously by paid (White) agitators, and probably because it was the nicest house, most representative of "Bourgeoisie" or "white privilege." Nice family with young children, and an inflatable unicorn on the front lawn – their family life destroyed along with their house, and their kids probably traumatized. I wondered how the parents were explaining to their kids why that had happened, why someone had undeservingly done that to them and their nice, happy home. I hadn't had to look much further than Instagram for the explanation.