At one level, the gap is surprising: The “oppressed” seem less enthusiastic about riots than those who worry about their oppression. At another level, it’s not surprising: The people whose neighborhoods are being destroyed are less sanguine about the destruction than are those who observe it from the comfortable environs of our nation’s capital. (The Caller did manage to interview one black man in DC who commented that “peaceful protest has more impact on what’s going on.”) But this is mostly a class divide. The women interviewed in DC share the up-talk and vocal fry that characterize well-off, college-educated young women today. They aren’t people who run or depend on small businesses that can be ruined by one night of destruction; they aren’t people whose wages might suffer from business closures following mass violence. They speak in the most abstract of tones. We saw this in the 1960s with the rise of “radical chic,” in which (as the writer Tom Wolfe memorably noted), tony Upper-East-Side types shared cocktails with Black Panthers. Many of the most violent New Left revolutionaries of the 1960s and ’70s were the privileged children of wealthy parents. And even today, there’s a lot of voyeurism among those encouraging violence.