Amid Riots Ripping The Country, NPR Promotes Book ‘In Defense Of Looting’

'One thing about looting is it freaks people out. But in terms of potential crimes that people can commit against the state, it's basically nonviolent.' Tell that to Kenosha, Chicago, and Minneapolis.

Vicky Osterweil’s new book, “In Defense of Looting,” “makes the case that looting isn’t a betrayal of protests for Black lives, but a vital aspect of the movement,” writes Claire Fallon in the Huffington Post. Fallon approvingly connected Osterweil’s defense of looting directly to rioting in Wisconsin last week that led to two dead and millions of dollars in damages against innocent bystanders who saw their life’s work go up in smoke.

National Public Radio also decided to feature Osterweil Thursday on its podcast “Code Switch,” for which the tag line is “Race. In your face,” under the banner “America reckons with racial injustice.” The interview openly makes the case that the existence of racial injustice in history justifies violent crime.

NPR assistant editor Natalie Escobar, a graduate of the nation’s top-rated journalism school at Northwestern University and who previously worked at The Atlantic, uses her publicly funded job and platform to interview Osterweil about his new book. It is expanded from a 2014 essay with the same name issued in the wake of the Michael Brown riots in Ferguson, Mo., which also included looting.

Osterweil is a transgender male who calls himself a “writer, editor, and agitator.” His Twitter handle is Vicky_ACAB. ACAB means “all cops are b-stards.” The acronym has been spray-painted on buildings in Kenosha and numerous other riot-torn American cities this summer in the name of Black Lives Matter. Osterweil has written for The Nation, an openly Jacobin publication, and Al Jazeera America, according to his Barnes and Noble bio.

“In the past months of demonstrations for Black lives, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about looting,” Escobar opens the introduction to their interview. Since the looting-accompanied rioting has ruined myriad innocent, largely working-class and minority Americans‘ businesses and lives, yes, I’d say there has been “a lot of hand-wringing about looting.”

Escobar wants to turn that into hand-waving. Osterweil “argues that looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society,” Escobar writes. “The rioters who smash windows and take items from stores, she says, are engaging in a powerful tactic that questions the justice of ‘law and order,’ and the distribution of property and wealth in an unequal society.”

Looting is wealth redistribution. Good to know.

Another thing Osterweil says is that Democrat public officials’ and the media’s constant attempts this summer to distinguish the rioters from “peaceful protesters” is a lie and a ruse: “Another trope that’s very common is that looters and rioters are not part of the protest, and they’re not part of the movement. That has to do with the history of protesters trying to appear respectable and politically legible as a movement, and not wanting to be too frightening or threatening….the history of the movement for liberation in America is full of looters and rioters. They’ve always been a part of our...

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