Posted on October 5, 2009

by

Daniel Clark

"We're pleased we delivered a peaceful summit," says Pittsburgh mayor Luke Ravenstahl, and not without reason. After all, the protesters against the G20 Summit only smashed a couple dozen storefronts, set several small fires, committed a handful of violent attacks against the police, and necessitated about 200 arrests for disorderly conduct and failure to disperse. All things considered, the amount of destruction did not come anywhere near meeting expectations.

Obviously, those same expectations have not applied to political demonstrators who are predominantly conservative. If, at the 9-12 rally in Washington, or at any of the local "tea parties" that preceded it, there had been so much as one rock thrown at a policeman, one fire set, or one plate glass window broken, the media would have characterized all the participants as a violent mob full of dangerous lunatics.

Oh, wait a minute. They did that anyway. They even derided those demonstrators by nicknaming them "teabaggers," a slang term used to describe the practitioners of a deviant sexual act. Unlike the liberal pundits who used the word on the air, the tea party attendees had to have it explained to them, which is the real reason for the insult in the first place. If you're one of those red state yokels who has gone through life happily unaware of the practice of teabagging, you're just not cool, as far as elitist corksniffers like Anderson Cooper and Keith Olbermann are concerned.

Whereas conservatives are depicted as sociopaths just for petitioning their government, left-wing political activists can go on a rampage, destroying the property of their fellow citizens, and still be congratulated for their relatively good behavior. The expectations they set for their conduct are so low that any amount of destruction short of recreating a scene from Gangs of New York is met with relief, bordering on gratitude.

The media's role in maintaining this double-standard betrays their recognition that it is the activists on their own side who are the troublemakers. It was the anti-capitalist G20 demonstrations that were infested with exactly the same kinds of people that they'd portrayed the tea partyers to be. If the liberal talking heads had any integrity, they'd put the pejorative where it belongs, and refer to this group as the "G20-baggers."

The unemployable, dentally challenged shack-dwellers of dubious progeny were among them. So were the vehemently oblivious anti-anything activists, who couldn't explain why they were there, apart from their vague belief that the fate of the planet depended on it. Then there were the religious fanatics, demanding that every facet of their fellow Americans' lives be dictated by their Ouija-board environmentalism.

Above all else, there was hatred. That's not merely to say there was anger, which had also been present at the tea parties, but bile-driven hatred. The primary target of it, according to the G20-baggers' banners, was a faceless system called capitalism, but what does that mean? Capitalism is not a "system" like socialism, that is imposed from above by a hyper-powerful entity. It can only be considered a system in the same way that a natural process like the nitrogen cycle is a system. If you don't like it, there's no sinister mastermind to blame.

Capitalism is the natural economic activity of a free people. The G20-baggers' hatred was directed at those who make constructive use of that freedom. Their enemies list is comprised of practically anybody who has been enterprising, inventive, industrious, or any combination thereof. On one protest group's website was a list of 81 "targets" around Pittsburgh, their only apparent unifying theme being that they were places of business. One must wonder where some of the other marchers, who were declaring a "right" to employment, thought all the jobs were going to come from.

When the G20-baggers are not destroying property with rocks and bottles, they're advocating government policies designed to reduce the standard of living of those who have worked hard to improve it. Hence their demands for reduced energy consumption, and of course, direct confiscation and redistribution of wealth.

If the media really thought there was any comparable hatred on display at the anti-socialist 9-12 rally, there would have been no shortage of cameras there to witness it. There must have been about150 times as many people at that event than at the G20 protests, yet they were orderly, and they left the city in the same condition in which they found it. It doesn't seem to have occurred to anybody to express relief at the lack of destruction.

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