In the Daily Mail, we read this:
Malls across America descended into chaos and violence on Monday as bargain-hungry shoppers engaged in mass brawls, fought in food courts and – in one instance – led to a SWAT team being deployed.
Fights were reported across the country, with instances at malls in Colorado, Illinois, Tennessee, Ohio, Connecticut and New York. Many saw fights taking place in food courts, and incorrect reports of gunfire. Many involved teens or juveniles.
One incident, at The Mills in Jersey Gardens, New Jersey, saw 48,000 people fleeing after a fight culminated in a loud bang and a person shouting ‘shots fired’ at around 5pm.
Video shows corridors packed with panicking customers trying to escape the mall as heavily armed police in body armor arrive at the scene to sweep the area for suspects, Pix11 reported.
Law enforcement is suggesting that at least one of the incidents may have been organized on social media.
The article describes the combatants as “bargain-hungry shoppers”. I do not think that description is entirely accurate. Look at the photos and video provided: what do you notice? The fighters are overwhelmingly teenage and black. This does not suggest consumerism run-amok. This suggests hooliganism.
*DING DING DING!* Everyone’s racism radar is instantly detecting returns from my direction. But they are false positives. Cool your jets.
Skin color is not the point. The point is a correlation that I have discussed before: the astronomical rate of unemployment among black youths and breakdown of family structure in urban ghettos. I do not know for certain, but I am willing to wager that many of the black teenage mall hooligans shown in the video are unemployed and come from broken single-parent homes.
This is not a racial quality. In Great Britain, the exact same phenomenon – troublesome, rioting youths – is seen in the white British low-to-no income urban classes, who also experience mass unemployment and utterly broken family structure. As Thomas Sowell, who incidentally wrote his final column yesterday, discussed in September:
…Kids from homes where they were not given behavioral standards, who are then not held to behavioral standards in schools, are on a path that can lead them as adults straight into prison, or to fatal confrontations with the police.
This is ultimately not a racial thing. Exactly the same welfare state policies and the same non-judgmental exemption from behavioral standards in Britain have led to remarkably similar results among lower-class whites there.
The riots of lower-class whites in London, Manchester and other British cities in 2011 were incredibly similar to black riots in Ferguson, Baltimore and other American cities — right down to setting fire to police cars.
He refers to this:
The same process is moving along among lower-class whites in the USA as well. This was well-described in Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart, which I strongly recommend as reading material. Where family structure is destroyed and employment becomes the exception to the norm, trouble follows. This has already happened to a large degree in poor white rural communities. But the contagion is spreading into the suburbs.
Similar problems are seen in rural China, where gangs of young unmarried men do nothing but cause trouble. Jobs are not plentiful in these areas. Women are scarce, due to the One-Child Policy which led to a huge number of female abortions for many decades. These young men have no perceivable future. So, what else to do but cause trouble?
GOVERNMENT-SUBSIDIZED FAILURE
In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his bombshell “Moynihan Report”. It was a study examining the birth rate of illegitimate children in black families. At the time, the figure was roughly 25% – a figure that Moynihan called a tipping point. His warning was that if this figure climbed any higher, it would lead to complete dysfunction in poor black communities.
The rate did indeed climb higher: 70% today, nearly three times what it was in 1965. And Moynihan’s prediction was mostly correct: poor black ghettos are almost entirely dysfunctional. Family structure, particularly fatherhood, is significantly damaged. Ghetto schools are little more than minimal-security juvenile detention centers. Employment has been replaced by welfare.
Progressive liberals and the NAACP have always dismissed Moynihan’s report as racist nonsense, which is itself nonsense. One look into the ghetto is all it takes to see the truth. Detroit is a living monument to this.
But the problem is not explicitly racial, which is the entire thrust of Murray’s book. He identifies the exact same trends increasingly in poor white communities: joblessness, fatherlessness, illegitimacy, bad schooling, and dependency on welfare benefits. These are not negative trends which discriminate on skin color. They are equal-opportunity solvents.
Even the liberal New York Times understood his point:
In his new book, “Coming Apart,” Murray flips the script that has energized Republican politics and campaigns since Richard Nixon: the white working class, he argues, is no longer part of a virtuous silent majority. Instead, beginning in the early 1960s, it has become increasingly alienated from what Murray calls “the founding virtues” of civic life. “Our nation is coming apart at the seams,” Murray warns — “not ethnic seams, but the seams of class.”
Using a statistical construct he calls Fishtown — inspired by an actual white, blue-collar neighborhood of the same name in Philadelphia — Murray sorts through demographic data to present a startling picture. Women in Fishtown now routinely have children outside of marriage. Less than a third of its children grow up in households that include both biological parents. The men claim physical disability at astounding rates and are less likely to hold down jobs than in the past. Churchgoing among the white working class has declined, eroding the social capital that organized religion once provided.
Illegitimacy, crime, joblessness — these are not merely the much debated pathologies of a black underclass, Murray finds. They are white people problems too.
Nowadays, the mythical idea of an inherent “white privilege” has become a popular zeitgeist among liberals. So the New York Times might be more reticent today to admit that societal failure is due to factors that are racially-neutral. But at the time of the book review, the Old Gray Lady was seeing clearly.
CONCLUSION
As long as the welfare checks keep rolling out, this will continue. When the government subsidizes piss-poor behavior with free money, you will get more piss-poor behavior. “When the price is lowered, more will be demanded.” When the cost of piss-poor behavior is lowered, more of it will be demanded. This is true across the spectrum of race and nationality.
On an individual level, the best way to escape the welfare cycle is this: get out. Kids have to get away from areas ruled by the lower-class welfare mentality – whether it be an urban black ghetto, rural white trailer park, Latino barrio, whatever. If parents can help them do this, they will be doing them an immeasurable service. But where kids with a spark of potential are surrounded by envious dolts, you can be sure the envious dolts will stop at nothing to drag them down.
On a society wide level, these problems will be curtailed when the welfare checks stop rolling out. I believe this will eventually happen – not because of politics, but because of fiscal reality. The US government is already bankrupt on paper, to the tune of over $222 trillion in unfunded liabilities. They will never be able to afford this over the long run. When the US government begins to default on it’s own debt obligations, welfare benefits are going to be turned back significantly.
Necessity is the mother of change. When the welfare checks stop rolling and lower-class families realize they can no longer be paid by the government to be self-destructive, this will be a huge encouragement to return to societal practices that result in stability and productive behavior. It will be an incentive for families to stick together and for individuals to seek out job skills and employment.
The bottom line is this: do not pay people for engaging in piss-poor behavior and expect to get something good out of it. We get what we pay for.
