Niew Amsterdam

Riot Time, And The Livin' Is Easy

The riots have come to NYC. You can see pictures and videos all over X.

Riots get results — that’s why people riot.

But how do they start? The common belief is that riots start because of injustice. I don’t doubt that in the spark of every riot there is an injustice, sometimes real, sometimes perceived. But I don’t think riots start because of injustice. I think riots happen because the rioters sense that they’ll be tolerated.

How do we know how many riots might have combusted but the rioters perceived they would be (a) not supported by the community and (b) utterly crushed? We don’t. It’s like viruses. The vast majority of time people get “infected,” don’t show symptoms, and their immune system overcomes it, so they don’t get into the statistics. This is fact. Why didn’t we know this? Because no one ever studied it.

It’s the same with riots. You have a spark. Mobs are cunning. If the rioters perceive on a gut level that they have popular support, it grows or dies. Then comes the response. In the US, it’s usually pretty soft. Even when the response has been harsh, it’s soft by world standards. And you get results. Why not riot? I’m sure a game theorist has worked this out.

I struggle to explain New York City’s peculiar culture to non-New Yorkers. We have a reputation for being “liberal” - that squishy word which, in American English, means “kinda sorta lefty” but which in proper English means nothing of the sort. I’m not a grammar junkie or language purist but I do think that words should have some meaning.

That’s not what “liberal” really means. Liberals, rooted in Enlightenment thinkers like Locke and Mill, champion personal freedom, small government, and individual rights like free speech and property, while leftists push for equality and systemic change. Mixing them up makes it impossible to talk politics clearly.

I bang this drum regularly, along with finger-wagging to read Colin Woodard’s American Nations, which describes the cultural differences in the present United States brilliantly. He sure nailed “Niew Amsterdam.” It’s far more accessible and expansive than Albion’s Seed, which focuses solely on British influence.

I’m putting my own framework onto Woodard’s description of the stark cultural distinctions between New Netherland (Greater New York City) and Yankeedom (New England) by saying that New Yorkers are liberals and New Englanders are leftists. He doesn’t put it quite that way but I don’t think he’d object.

New Netherland, founded by Dutch settlers in the 17th century, cultivated a liberal ethos of individual freedom, commercial ambition, and multicultural tolerance, prioritizing free inquiry and personal prosperity over rigid ideology—hallmarks of classical liberalism.

Conversely, Yankeedom, established by Puritans, is left wing: it’s all about collective responsibility, moral reform, and a utopian drive to build an equitable society, often through robust community governance and education.

New Yorkers are cosmopolitan liberals, focused on individual rights and pragmatic trade, while New Englanders lean toward leftist ideals of social cohesion and systemic change.

How do I reconcile this with NYC’s rigid, machine Democrat governance? Good question.

All societies are weird agglomerations, cobbling together dissonances and differences, and NYC is no exception. The “machine” came with the great wave of Irish immigration in the 18th and 19th centuries and it sits uneasily on top of the Anglo-Dutch template of tolerance and mercantilism. That’s another story for another time.

But the template persists: New Yorkers are tolerant and liberal. You want to dress up like Dolly Parton and claim you were dropped from Mars to enlighten the masses? Fine. But don’t expect me to pay for it and try to do it in a place where I don’t have to see it. A Yankee will turn drag into a moral crusade. Haven’t they? Drag isn’t just something some weird guys do. It’s morally good!

New Yorkers are liberals, New Englanders are leftists.¹ They may cooperate strategically on certain things, but deep down, they loathe each other.

But have New Yorkers changed so much that this no longer applies?

Woodard thinks that cultures have surprising endurance. They do but sometimes societies really do change. We’ve already seen how demographic change brought a political machine to New York.

Then there are the peculiarly corrosive effects of modernity: loss of identity, major media manipulation, the internet, social media gaslighting.

The current demographic change that really puts a spanner in the Woodard’s works is twofold: the woke invasion of NYC’s monied classes, and the cowardice and fear of the Jewish upper middle classes, presented with an enemy on its own side: the left side.

The new hip monied class, the people who vote for Dan Goldman — and Goldman himself (Sidwell Enemies; Yale; Stanford), a Jewish trust fund baby born in Washington, DC. He lives in lower Manhattan, i.e., among his fellow rich non-New Yorkers who moved here to get even richer and more powerful, and to use their wealth and money to destroy America. They are almost like agents of Yankeedom in the gates of the Emerald City.²

He is not a New Yorker. His friends and colleagues are not New Yorkers.

Then there are the once-stable remnants of the white middle-class that still dominates certain neighborhoods. They own private homes in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. Jews are part of this class, although dwindling. They bought homes in the 1950s, their kids bought homes nearby in the 1970s and ‘80s but the grandkids are hither and yon. They’re being replaced by Asians, both East and South.

I personally believe—and this is just a gut feeling—that their morale has totally collapsed and they’ve checked out. Checked out of what? The struggle, history, the whole ball of wax. They’re just trying to survive this shitstorm. They’re old.

So who can we look to, to say, “No pasaran”—we’re not going to tolerate this shit in our town, so pack it up boys—?

Accuse me of being sentimental here, like Orwell but I believe this:

"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated."

If there’s hope, it’s in the Hispanic working class, which has almost seamlessly replaced the Italians. I’m referring to the acculturated ones, not the Spanish-speaking tradesmen.³

They are a huge component in law enforcement and the Fire Department.

They staff the court system, as security, administration, or guards.

And they run businesses. Yes, I know that Marxists call this class “petit bourgeois” but I’ll fold them into the working class — but even if you think of them as “petit bourgeois” my point stands.⁴

Which is, real New Yorkers hate this shit. The Hispanics in NYC are not going to be sympathetic to this.

And I for one don’t know what the fuck is going to happen, because I don’t know how much of true New York is in control here.

I think that the power structure has been completely invaded and infected by Wokeness. Woke blacks and their white allies run NYC. The reason why Cuomo has shot up in the polls is that he’s seen as “old New York”— a goombah who won’t tolerate lawlessness.

I certainly do not mean to imply that what’s left of the Jewish middle-class in NYC (the real New Yorkers, not the Dan Goldman voters) is going to approve of violence. I do think that they have a tendency to go squish. The Italians don’t. Italians say:

“This is our country. It’s been invaded. They break the law. They wave flags from a foreign country and attack our law enforcement. Crush them.”

To Jews, this = Nazi Germany. It’s always a hop, skip, and a jump to them from here to Nazi Germany.

So I don’t know what’s going to happen. I do know that what happened in LA is coming to NYC. How successful they’ll be depends on whether they’re tolerated.

1. This is one of the reasons I hate Handmaid’s Tale so much—Atwood put Gilead in the last place it would happen. But I digress.

2. Goldman is among the wealthiest members of Congress, with an estimated personal net worth of up to $253 million according to financial disclosure forms.

3. Nearly 100% of tradesman in Manhattan is Spanish-speaking; you have to go to Brooklyn to find non-Spanish-speaking ones—they’ll probably be Polish or more recently, Ukrainian. The native white, working class tradesman in NYC is dead as a doornail or he’s one of those curiosities who gets photographed on D-Day Day, in a wheelchair.

4. You should take a walk from 125th to the top of Manhattan, on the West Side. West of Broadway it’s 99% Hispanic, except for Riverside Drive and a few black enclaves here and white enclaves there. And quite a lot of it east of Broadway is Hispanic. The demographic change is massive. And on the whole, it’s a big improvement on what it replaced. I can walk there now.