Leftist Puppet Masters

Just in case you haven’t heard enough about Vicky Osterweil and her crusade against small shopkeepers, Daniel Greenfield fleshes out the story. (via Maggie’s Farm) You will be happy to learn that transgendered Vicky, who used to be called Willie, married one Sophia Lewis, a suitably Marxist lesbian, who calls Vicky her “wusband.” Will the brilliance never cease.

The happy couple resides in the tony confines of West Philadelphia, an area that did suffer some vandalism and looting by Black Lives Matter protesters. But, not to worry. It was only a minor inconvenience.

Greenfield explains:

Sophia might be gay and Vicky might be transgender but they were a conventional enough couple living the hipster dream in a gentrified area of West Philly, and touting a gift certificate to an antique shop that they had received as a wedding present. The sort of thing you do when you’re trying to smash capitalism, and abolish the family along with private property.

Right after you get married and pick up something nice at the antique shop.

The Black Lives Matter riots and the looting trashed parts of West Philly, but it doesn't seem to have done much to disturb their idyllic world of community gardens, social justice yoga studios and punk hair salons. And even if it did, unlike their proprietors, Vicky and Sophia can move on.

These hip radicals are certainly not suffering from the actions that they have been encouraging.

The ugly truth about Marxist capitalism-smashing hipsters is that they are the least exposed to the consequences of their theories. When a third of Philly pharmacies were robbed in a coordinated campaign by gangs coming in from outside the city, it had a major impact on black senior citizens getting their prescriptions, but not on an upscale white hipster power couple.

Spending your twenties and thirties deconstructing everything is the luxury of the upper class. It’s the hobby of people who don’t really have jobs or a family depending on them for support. That’s why the deconstruction is fundamentally unserious. After writing a book calling for the abolition of the family, Vicky and Sophia got married. Vicky’s living in West Philly where the riots and the looting are going on, shopping for antiques, and writing a book in defense of looting.

Vicky declaims against small businesses, but they are precisely the people she ought to be defending. It’s the poor who will suffer. It’s the poor who will see their work go up in smoke. It’s the poor who will find their neighborhoods uninhabitable. 

Of course, neither Vicky nor Sophie are black. They are self-appointed puppet masters, inducing others to live out their ideological fantasies, impervious to the damage being inflicted on the people they pretend to care about.

The small businesses that Vicky Osterweil ridicules provide their owners with some measure of independence. The looters turn them into subjects of the same sort of massive corporate monopoly that Osterweil claims to hate, yet ultimately champions and makes his money from.

Osterweil preaches in defense of looting in the name of the black community. But the death of small businesses hits black communities hardest. Shopping online is a lot easier if you have a credit card or a checking account. Portions of the black community have neither. Wiping out street retail in urban areas not only guts neighborhoods, it turns retail into wealth privilege.

Upscale areas will still have street level retail once the Black Lives Matter riots die down. But the poorer black areas hardest hit by them won’t. The white leftists promoting looting will still have their quaint cafes, punk hair salons and social justice yoga studios that Vicky and Sophie rave about, they’ll also have local supermarkets like Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, groceries, restaurants, boutiques, coffee shops, and the rest of the hipster detritus of gentrification.