For the last two months, we've been watching as BLM and Antifa have knocked over statues, defaced monuments, and set fire to basically anything they can get their hands on.  St. Louis had to go because he led some Crusades.  Christopher Columbus has to go because he opened the door to colonizing a new world.  George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have to go because they owned slaves.  Frederick Douglass and Ulysses S. Grant and Teddy Roosevelt and Jesus Christ had to go because...never mind.

And it's not just statues that are under fire.  There are Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, Eskimo Pies, Mrs. Butterworth, and the girl from Land O' Lakes butter.  There's the NFL's Redskins, the TV show Cops, the National Anthem, Goya foods, and basically all the police.

What started out as protests against the killing of George Floyd has metastasized into a battle against everything American, everything capitalist, and anything that is not sufficiently woke.

Once can certainly appreciate those sentiments. America was built on land stolen from the American Indians.  The country had slavery from the beginning and Jim Crow laws until the 1960s.  As a result, blacks are disproportionately represented in the justice system, and those of European descent enjoy white privilege.  Anything below a living wage is basically slave labor.  College and health care are human rights and should not be the kinds of things that Americans should have to pay for, or the kinds of things people can make a profit off of.  Some people have more money than they need, while others don't have enough to feed their families.

If the "peaceful protesters" who are telling us that capitalism needs to go and the United States is the problem had real principles, they would take their demands to the next level.  It's not enough to boycott Goya foods or MyPillow.com or Hobby Lobby.  No, if these activists really wanted to show the world that it can do without capitalism and the United States, they should refrain from using anything that American capitalism has produced.

Twitter.  Gone.  Apple.  Gone.  Facebook.  Gone.  Twitch.  Gone.  Cell phones.  Gone.  Uber.  Gone.  Call of Duty.  Gone.  Amazon.  Gone.  Quicksilver.  Gone.  Nike.  Gone.  Starbucks.  Gone.  Fortnite.  Gone.  Supreme.  Gone.  X Box.  Gone.  North Face.  Gone.  Not to mention staples like Coke and Pepsi and McDonald's and Frito Lay and Disney and countless others.

If the goal is to tell us that capitalism is bad and should be destroyed, then doesn't logic demand that the fruits of the imperialist, racist, sexist American capitalist system be obliterated?  Isn't using an iPhone or wearing a Supreme sweat shirt or Nike shoes the watered down equivalent of using the data from Nazi experiments on prisoners to develop new medicines?

Do these "activists" have the courage of their own convictions?  Are they really ready to destroy American capitalism and everything that it's created?  If they want to burn the system down and replace it, then they should say so and start living a life without its fruits as an example to others.  If their goal, however, is to continue to enjoy the fruits of the capitalist system but just steal the profits or take the ownership, they are not freedom-fighters, as they style themselves to be, nor are they heroes of the downtrodden seeking to destroy the racist oppressive system of America.  Rather, they are in fact simply spoiled, envious thieves who want to take what others have built and use it for their own purposes.  They are nothing more than common criminals who covet their neighbor's wares and seek to exercise power over them...and everyone in the country while they're at it.

George Orwell recognized this in 1984: "We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power."

Image: Johnny Silvercloud via Flickr (cropped).