Madison’s police monitor promises to ‘f-ing burn this city down!’
It’s a political Rorschach test here in Madison WI. Irresponsible or understandable? Depends whether you’re an over-taxed home owner paying off a mortgage or a social justice warrior voting Francesca Hong next Tuesday.
“I will f-ing burn this city down!” No denying: Aeiramique Glass, Madison’s “interim” independent police monitor, said it. Her own people recorded it after her altercation with Madison police during the battle for the Corey Ruiz Autonomous Zone (aka “CRAZ”).
Instead of apologizing, “Mikka” the Monitor doubled down. Just “a metaphor that so many people have used that comment when they’re fighting for justice when something is wrong.”
Got to say, missed that one in our own checkered political career. Never wrote Burn Down the Town into any of Gov. Tommy Thompson’s speeches. (Never heard TGT use the F-bomb, for that matter.) TGT never confused justice and cop bashing.
M.L. King Jr — arsonist?
Monitor Glass has hired an attorney who spins that calling for municipal arson was a favorite catch phrase of the late, great Martin Luther King Jr. Not the first Marxist to rewrite history. The civil rights leader never said any such a thing! ML King employed civil disobedience — not fire bombing! (What he actually said.)
“I think that’s really disturbing any time a city employee is calling for violence,” Mayor Satya Rhodes Conway responds. “Any time”? When have there been others?
After which, Monitor Glass tripled down, trespassing on electoral politics: “Her priorities have continuously been in the wrong place and the wrong perspective,” she said of the mayor, as quoted by WISC TV-3. Imagine any other city employee saying that! On cue, Mikka’s Police Civilian Oversight Board — no conservatives allowed! — toadied up:
Throughout history, expressions such as “burn it all down” have been widely understood as rhetorical metaphors used to express profound frustration with institutions perceived as unjust or unaccountable. They have appeared in … movements for social change as symbolic calls for systemic transformation rather than literal acts of destruction.
‘Burn, baby, burn!’
Except when “burn it all down” did result in literal acts of destruction while transforming the system for the worse. The fire-breathing Stokley Carmichael was among many who chanted “Burn, baby, burn!” in the 1960s — and cities DID burn.
Black militants and their accomplices burned black neighborhoods like Watts in Los Angeles in 1965, Newark and Detroit in 1967, Chicago in 1968 (“Violence erupted in Chicago’s black ghetto on the west side, eventually consuming a 28-block stretch of West Madison Street. Looting and arson took place.” Source here.)
Beauty salons were among the black businesses that radicals torched in Ferguson MO in 2014 after police stopped Michael Brown. The George Floyd Riots of 2020 began in Minneapolis and spread. Madison’s City County Building was firebombed that summer. Despite that CNN chyron, the Left burned Kenosha after police stopped Jacob Blake from kidnapping children. Through all that, what was transformed?
Can we stipulate that it wasn’t MAGA or the Chamber of Commerce that set fires on Willy Street and E. Washington Avenue this past week?
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Words matter. Mizz Glass (for the time being) is a City of Madison employee. Paid $148,992 to serve as an unbiased arbiter of a police officer’s split-second decision making. Are you kidding? “I will f-ing burn this city down!” is incitement to violence. Aeiramique Glass is a cop-hating racial arsonist.
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