Looting A "Powerful Tool" To Bring About Lasting Change, California D.A. Says

“This is the end” spoke The Doors. And we may now have come to that moment as a nation.

New guidance from Diana Becton, first-term Costa County (California) District Attorney, states that law-enforcement officers must consider if looters “needed” the merchandise they stole before charging them. California law, under Penal Code 463, defines “looting” as taking advantage of a state of emergency to commit burglary, grand theft or petty theft, and those engaged in the act can be charged with a felony and serve up to three years in jail. But Becton, who is one of many radical district attorneys financially supported by George Soros, is attempting to circumvent the law by proposing preposterous charging guidelines for the crime. Becton says that when considering charging looters, law enforcement types should ask, “Was the theft committed for financial gain or personal need.” (Emphasis mine.)
“Pardon me, did you need the big screen television, those Louis Vuitton handbags and those bottles of Wild Turkey?”

Becton believes stealing is perfectly acceptable if one needs what one takes from someone else. Yet, when a couple painted over a “Black Lives Matter” message on a local street, her office charged them with a “hate crime.”

A government’s primary responsibility, be it local or federal, is to protect its citizens and their private property. Absent property rights and the rule of law, chaos, anarchy, and unfettered violence will reign interminably. The United States, uniquely founded on these principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights, would simply cease to exist without them.

And Becton isn’t the only person desperately seeking to justify looting. National Public Radio published a lengthy interview with Vicky Osterweil, author of In Defense of Looting, a book in which she argues that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.” Yes, and so are murder, abortion and a nuclear holocaust. Osterweil defends looting and says that “white supremacy” is behind the idea of property. She claims the rioters-cum-looters who break windows and steal things from stores are merely “engaging in a powerful tactic that questions the justice of ‘law and order,’ and the distribution of property and wealth in an unequal society.” She avers that looting “attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed,” and the idea of property itself, which she believes is unjust because it means that “in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions.”  Yes, it’s called trade… and commerce. Osterweil needs to read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of nations.

Osterweil says that looting doesn’t really harm anyone. (Like CNN, she thinks it’s “mostly peaceful.”) Tell that to the countless small business owners who have seen their stores, dreams and lives destroyed. But she doesn’t worry about that, because she claims that the supposed value of small businesses is a “right-wing myth.” She further argues that the world is organized “for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories,” and that looting allows rioters to “demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.” Ah, there it is. Screw work, screw the rule of law, just give us free stuff! But wait, I thought property was bad. Why, then, do you want it so badly, free or not?

There are only two ways to get “free stuff.” One is to steal it. The other is through the forcible taking and redistributing of others’ property via state oppression. There may be a difference without a distinction here. Or vice-versa.

If the “It’s not a crime to take whatever you need” school of thought permeates the country’s institutions, no one’s property will be safe, including their own lives. No one will be secure in his or her person. An obvious rape defense would be, “he needed her, needed a release. He has never had a really attractive girl before, obviously due to systemic racism/ableism/ageism/body shaming/fill-in-the-blank.”

So everyone will be free to take what they want need from whomever, wherever…be it a business, neighbor, school or church.

It will be history’s most tragic irony if the American Revolution ends up being “cancelled” by modern-day Jacobins, leftist spawn of the disastrous French Revolution.