Many of the young people rioting today are not committed Marxist revolutionaries.  (There are large, powerful, dark forces behind the riots; the actual rioters are just political fodder.)  Many are rioting largely because it's considered by their peers and their influencers to be the cool, popular thing to do.  In that, they are the most recent iteration of the popular American "counterculture" that began in the mid-20th century and has traveled hand in hand with left-wing politics (and has, alarmingly, gained the upper hand in the popular culture). That counterculture has a lineage that goes back to the Beat Poets, a group of young men with literary ambitions who sought to live a more passionate, more ecstatic experience than the standard "American Dream" of family, security, and prosperity.  Their writing and experiences became the blueprint of the American counterculture: sex, drugs, rapturous music, mad impulses,...(Read Full Article)