DSA chapter plans ‘Riots and Uprisings’ reading club to study ‘how people struggled’

A book club for arson. That's essentially what the Metro DC DSA chapter is organizing this fall, dressed up in the soft academic language of "reading groups" so it sounds like something you'd find at a public library rather than a seminar on how to burn down a Target more efficiently. The syllabus reportedly includes the anti-deportation riots in California and Minnesota, which is a polite way of describing nights when federal buildings got torched, cops got hit with bricks, and small businesses that had nothing to do with immigration policy watched their storefronts get smashed in.

Call it what it is. This isn't historical inquiry. Nobody studying the French Revolution needs a discussion group to "process" the storming of the Bastille as if it happened last spring. These riots happened months ago, the participants are still being prosecuted in some cases, and DSA wants to sit around unpacking "how people struggled" like it's a workshop on resilience rather than a debrief on property destruction and assaults on law enforcement.

The instinct to romanticize this stuff is the tell. If the goal were understanding unrest, you'd study root causes, policy failures, economic conditions, the whole boring policy-wonk apparatus. Instead the framing is "riots and uprisings," language that treats a mob torching a police precinct as morally equivalent to Selma. That's not history. That's rebranding.

None of this is illegal, and DSA has every right to hold whatever seminar it wants. But normalizing riot nostalgia as civic education is worth naming plainly, because that's exactly the kind of soft-pedaling that makes the next riot easier to excuse.