LA riots: snap judgments and high-flying theories
Jun 09, 2025
∙ Paid
(This is Part-2; for Part-1, go here)
As I write this, cars are burning, thousands of rioters are blocking the 101 Freeway in downtown LA, cops and National Guard are firing rubber bullets and tear gas at the rioters.
There are all sorts of theories people use to explain what’s going on.
Let’s try an old stand-by. It was very popular 10 or 14 years ago. Dialectical Materialism. Remember?
Originally proposed by Marx, Engels, and Hegel, it went like this. A cause or movement or policy or idea emerges. It gives birth to its opposite. So we have a thesis, and an antithesis.
These two opposing forces engage in conflict, and thus give birth to a new idea or cause—which becomes a new thesis, which gives birth to its opposite antithesis, and so on.
In this case, we’d have Biden’s open border sieve. The thesis. Then Trump gets elected, and brings in the antithesis—a clamp-down.
These two policies/actions crash into each other, and will produce some new thesis.
But although Marx and his colleagues put forward Dialectical Materialism as a theory of how history organically evolves, later on people began saying:
“Wait. No. This ongoing pattern is IMPOSED and manipulated intentionally, by Elite planners, who use it to usher in a New World Order.”
That makes sense. And it does describe, from a high perch, the clash we’re seeing now in the LA riots.
And it’s interesting, as long as you’re not in the line of fire. As long as you’re at some distance from the action.
People who live and work in ivory towers, or in mommy’s basement where they turn out bad prose, often opt for Dialectical Materialism.
BUT at ground level, there’s another kind of theory. I’d call it KNOCKING ON YOUR DOOR.
It’s in the form of a question, and it goes this way: If you live close to, or in the middle of the riots, who would you rather have knock on your front door, cops and soldiers or the rioters?