How Do You Say "White Interlopers" in Spanish?

Considering the thugs and goons who burn down neighborhoods (Ferguson), or beat people upside the head with bike locks (UC Berkeley) or even go so far as shoot their political enemies (Steve Scalise), I suppose this story shouldn't surprise me. It doesn't; it just infuriates me.

When three Los Angeles friends soft-launched their coffee shop earlier this month, they expected maybe five customers. Instead, they encountered more than a dozen angry anti-gentrification protestors demanding they leave the neighborhood for good.

"They tripped our customers that came in," said John Schwartz, one of the co-founders of Weird Wave Coffee Brewery. "They banged on our glass. They screamed into the room. They threw stuff at me when I tried to remove some stickers they put up on the window. It was a picture of a guy in a ski mask beating up another guy. . . They tried to incite fights by getting in people's face and saying 'f*ck you, I'm going to beat you up, I'm going to kill you,' trying to get someone to punch them first."

There are levels of irony here that just jump out at you, not least of which one of the co-owners, Mario Chavarria is a Latino who fled from his native El Salvador when he was 10 and has lived in the barrio most of his life. The goons who seek to force this coffee house to shutter whilst proclaiming the mantle of "anti-fascism" are behaving exactly like the SA urged the boycotting of Jewish businesses in pre-war Nazi Germany.

The Left has always proclaimed itself to be the champions of fairness, justice and equality when in fact actions like these illustrate that what they want isn't justice; what they want is eternal vengeance for historic wrongs real or perceived. BLM activists and self-proclaimed leaders of the black community actually want to go back to an era of self-imposed Jim Crow. How's that for irony? Boyle Heights in 2017 is nothing new. We saw it in Harlem in 1995 and that ended in arson and murder courtesy of Al Sharpton.

Obviously, in no way do I condone what is happening to the owners and patrons of this coffee house. Like everything else, the Left has hijacked a legitimate concern, that is the sometimes negative effects of gentrification, and used it as a pretext to foment chaos to advance their own message and purpose which is the attainment of power. True that the influx of more well to do residents into poorer neighborhoods can lead to the displacement of poorer residents, the solution is not to let these places remain as they are to fester and rot. The solution is the inculcation of traditional American values of hard work so that the poor can break the cycle of poverty and their kids can live a better life than they did so that they, too, can live in places like a revitalized Boyle Heights.

But no. Progressivism is not about lifting people up. It's about bringing others down. Way down, and always as hapless, helpless drones subservient to the needs of The State. Recall Ex-President Obama's mad Stalinist social engineering scheme to destroy zoning commissions and property values in the interest of "diversity."

I wonder how that sits with the goons of Boyle Heights.

posted by at 03:00 PM

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