Is Property Damage Ever Justified?
Sources
Abdulkarim Complaint: https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/abdulkarim-criminal-complaint.pdf
Cole, Hannah Rabinowitz, Devan. “What to Know about the Trump Justice Department’s Case against the Southern Poverty Law Center | CNN Politics.” CNN, April 23, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/23/politics/what-to-know-criminal-case-southern-poverty-law-center.
Hastings, Tom. “Property Damage, Violence, Nonviolent Action, and Strategy.” CNCR, June 2, 2020. https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/blog_post/property-damage-violence-nonviolent-action-and-strategy/.
Jones, Marian. “In Defense of ‘In Defense of Looting.’” Lux Magazine, n.d. Accessed April 24, 2026. https://lux-magazine.com/article/in-defense-of-in-defense-of-looting/.
Osterweil, Vicky. “In Defense of Looting.” The New Inquiry, August 21, 2014. https://thenewinquiry.com/in-defense-of-looting/.
Rodriguez, Joshua. “Federal Prosecutors Seize on California Warehouse Fire to Criminalize Anti-Capitalist Opposition.” World Socialist Web Site, April 21, 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/04/21/zylb-a21.html.
Transcript
Hi it’s Friday, April 24, 2026, you’re tuned in to Why, America? I’m your lawyer friend Leeja Miller. Earlier this month, a Kimberly Clark paper products warehouse located an hour outside of LA was set ablaze, causing $500 million dollars in property damage. A worker at the plant, Chamel Abdulkarim, has been charged with federal and state felony arson in relation to the fire. In a video uploaded to Instagram, he said “All you had to do was pay us enough to live.” The man pleaded not guilty at a state arraignment hearing earlier this month, and the federal charges against him could land him in up to 20 years in federal prison. 175 firefighters were called to the scene to contain the blaze. No one was hurt. At a press conference about the incident, First Assistant US Attorney for the central district of California Bill Essayli said, quote “Look, America is founded on free enterprise and capitalism. Anyone who attacks our values, our way of life, our system, which provides the best goods and services to the most people, we’re gonna come after aggressively.” Today, we’re dissecting that very American value–the value placed on property above lives and humanity, and the role property destruction plays in any resistance. Statistics tell us that right-wing extremist violence tends to rely on violence against people and bodies, while leftist extremist violence often results in property damage. The way the state responds to the two, including when a Democrat is in office, speaks volumes to the American values our government holds most dear. Property, and the rights of inanimate businesses (and, of course, their shareholders) often enjoys more protection and more collective outrage at its destruction than literal human life. But is property damage a valid form of protest or is it counter productive to the movements that engage in it?
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Before we dive in, let me make it clear that I am in no way advocating for anyone to break any laws, that would be crazy. This is for educational purposes only.
Is property damage a form of terrorism? The FBI agent who provided an affidavit alongside the arrest of the alleged Kimberly Clark arsonist was from the FBI’s LA-based joint terrorism task force, indicating that the federal government is very much investigating this incident in relation to the defendant’s political ideology. The statement from the US attorney I mentioned earlier indicates the same–this crime is being seen not as an isolated act of arson, but instead an attack on American values, on the American way of life, where capitalism is king. We’ve talked about domestic terrorism before on this channel but some of this bears repeating. There is no federal statute criminalizing domestic terrorism. The way the federal government goes after people it accuses of engaging in domestic terrorism is either through charges related to providing aid to terrorists or by adding a sentencing enhancement to an underlying criminal act. So if this individual is convicted under a federal arson statute, they’ll ask the judge to increase the sentence because it was motivated by terrorism or was a terrorist act. So he has been charged with arson of a building used in interstate and foreign commerce and then the feds will request he get the full 20 year sentence because it was an act of terrorism. At the state level, he faces up to life in prison based on state arson charges, which he has pleaded not guilty to despite police body cam footage of him turning himself in. I’m unclear what sort of creative legal arguments his defense attorney is going to have to use to try to argue out of this one. But it is pretty apparent to me that the federal government, for its part, will absolutely use this incident to further punish and intimidate against anti-capitalist behavior. Which brings me to NSPM 7.
In late September last year, after the murder of Charlie Kirk, Trump dropped a memo titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, also known as National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 or NSPM-7 for short. It directs Trump’s entire group of national security and intelligence goons to quote “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation designed to suppress lawful political activity or obstruct the rule of law.” This includes individuals and institutional funders and employees of organizations that aid and abet the people engaging in said criminal conduct, as well as non-governmental organizations and American citizens residing abroad that help fund and support entities that engage in or support domestic terrorism. It directs the attorney general to quote “issue specific guidance that ensures domestic terrorism priorities include politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder.” Many of those activities on the list are not on the list of domestic terrorist crimes–trespassing is usually a misdemeanor, “civil disorder” can be weaponized against any form of first amendment-protected protest–it is taking the definition of domestic terrorism and stretching it to include the types of things that they frequently accuse leftist protesters of engaging in (trespass, destruction of property) despite the fact that according to the Brennan Center quote “under current law, a charge of material support in the domestic context requires that the person being charged have provided support for one of the specifically defined ‘federal crimes of terrorism.’ By contrast, Trump’s order directs federal authorities to investigate the provision of material support to ‘any and all illegal operations.’ This threatens to criminalize a wide range of activity” end quote including participating in protests or providing donations or services to organizations whose ideology the regime may define as “antifa.” If you go to a protest and hand out water bottles, that could be material support for terrorism under this sweeping order.
NSPM-7 also tells the IRS commissioner to quote “take action to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism.” Again, under this definition, that would be any non-profit that is assisting to organize any direct actions or protests or resistance efforts, because Trump could slap a “civil disorder” label on it and call it domestic terrorism. And what do you know, this past Tuesday the Justice Department announced it had filed criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization, alleging the org had defrauded its donors by funding violent extremist groups. My heart dropped when I saw that announcement, because the explicit targeting of non-profit groups has been something I’ve been waiting for, and there it is. Probably deserves its own entire video.
But perhaps the most damning part of NSPM-7 doesn’t require you to read beyond the intro paragraphs. Because they’re not even trying to hide that this entire directive is based around prosecuting activities of people BECAUSE they ascribe to a specific ideology. Section 1 states quote “Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” The clear outcome of this is that the regime is going to prosecute and slap a “domestic terrorist” label on people based solely on their ideology. Someone trespassing and damaging property who’s a member of a group that upholds “traditional American family values,” whatever the fuck that means, might get a misdemeanor trespass charge, but someone who committed the same crimes but espouses “anti-American” ideals would be called a domestic terrorist for it. And that’s exactly what is likely to happen here. The US attorney made it clear–this is being interpreted as anti-capitalist and anti-American, which falls into the regime’s definition of terrorist activities.
Businesses and their advisors are already using the fire as a teachable moment. With Forbes telling CEOs to try to be a bit more considerate about employee sentiment, even though it’s so hard because being a CEO makes you sooooo busy, but just try so that they feel heard enough not to set shit on fire!! And a workplace security management website insisted that security professionals can use the incident to convince higher ups to pay them more for their services to prevent employee disruption of the workplace.
Which brings us to the larger discussion I want to have about this today. One which will require you to maybe stand in some gray area, allow multiple competing things to be true at the same time, and challenge your deeply held beliefs. But hey to me that’s just a Friday afternoon, ya know? Is there ever a situation in which property destruction is justified? Entire books and theses have been written on this, but let’s at least get a little into the weeds.
If you are finding yourself feeling very strongly about this, that immediately the answer is no there is never a situation in which anyone should ever resort to property destruction, or that yes property destruction is always a valid response to the system, I ask that you perhaps engage with the gray areas in this situation.
The last time this country grappled with the question of whether property damage is ever justified was during the George Floyd uprising here in Minneapolis. As someone who existed here in Minneapolis during that time, but did not participate in the property damage, allow me to share my lived experience. The summer of 2020 was a scary time to be in Minneapolis. And yes the act of property destruction during that summer was absolutely a deeply unsettling, destabilizing thing to witness and to exist in proximity to. I was straddling two worlds that summer, spending part of my time living in my mother’s basement in the suburbs and part of my time in my now husband’s apartment a couple blocks from Lake Street where the demonstrations were happening, about 6 blocks from where George Floyd was murdered. I was also balls deep in bar prep, seeing first hand how I, as a newly minted lawyer, was being primed by the system to be really good a protecting the property rights of wealthy people, most subjects you’re tested for on the bar in order to become an attorney involve the protection of property rights, no matter what area of law you plan on practicing. It is drilled into you. Meanwhile, as the protests against George Floyd’s murder unfolded, buildings were set on fire, businesses were burnt to the ground, others were boarded up, and in the months after the protests subsided, many businesses left the area. There are parts of Minneapolis that six years later are still empty, boarded up, or burnt out buildings. Much of the destruction, however, was fixed, new buildings popped up, Target, Cub Foods, Autozone, despite seeing looting and arson and property damage, are all fine. The local businesses that were destroyed are not. Uptown hasn’t been the same since, though that is due to a number of underlying factors. There were a number of outsiders who came during the uprising to take advantage of the chaos, to participate in looting and arson not because of their beliefs or their ideology but to simply exploit the chaos for their own entertainment or personal gain, I don’t know. When my husband took night shifts helping to patrol his apartment building that summer, he wasn’t keeping his eyes peeled for antifa or leftists, that’s not who we feared, we feared the people who wanted to cause chaos for the sake of it, because of the rumors, some true, some not, of right wing actors coming into the city to terrorize the lefties in Minneapolis. And it was absolutely a scary time to live in Minneapolis. And it was really a mind fuck to go from that chaos to the wealthy western suburbs where my mom lived and see everyone going about their business as usual, amid a pandemic and a global uprising, whose lives were completely and utterly untouched by the chaos in the city.
So when I consider whether property damage is ever justified, my views are absolutely colored by my experiences that summer. And they require me to hold a number of truths at the same time. Was I scared? Definitely. Am I sad about especially the small businesses that were ruined because of the property damage that occurred that summer? Yes. Do I believe that the property damage that occurred that summer was the result of exclusively leftist, quote unquote “antifa” actors? Absolutely not. Did the property damage lead directly to the goals of the movement, like defunding the police or ending police brutality? Obviously not. Did it raise the visibility of the plight of black and brown people who are being disproportionately abused and killed at the hands of police, as embodied by the murder of George Floyd? Without question. Did it force the members of this community to confront really hard questions in a way that peaceful protests do not? In ways that the people I saw in the suburbs didn’t have to contend with because they weren’t witnessing the level of unrest and property damage in the city? Yes. The central question being: do we value capital, property, capitalism, the protection of enterprise, of business interests, of the “market,” the comfort of the capitalists MORE than we value the lives of black and brown people being murdered by police? The lives of the workers who work for scraps while CEOs make millions and companies take away billions in profit on the back of that labor? The workers who suffer injuries and death in warehouses that value speed and profit, where the cost of death and dismemberment of workers are factored in as part of the cost of doing business? As Marian Jones wrote for Lux magazine in her review of the book In Defense of Looting, which itself is a controversial read that is on my reading list, quote “looting allows participants and open-minded observers to recognize the material connections between race, policing, and property, which can help future battles against racism. Looting enables the looter to imagine a struggle against white supremacy that doesn’t center on winning acceptance within the capitalist hierarchy of bosses and workers but instead tries to level it.” That’s of course in the context of the George Floyd protests, but in the context of the Kimberly Clark arson, the property destruction gives us the opportunity to have these conversations, to think critically about our role in the system of oppression that is facilitated by capitalism. As Jones points out in her review of In Defense of Looting, significant movement building has happened historically in this country on the backs of rioting and property destruction. The Watts Riots inspired Bobby Seale to start the Black Panthers. The Detroit riots led to the formation of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, a radical black working-class labor organization. Even in Minneapolis, it was in part the existing networks of activists and mutual aid organizations that formed during the uprising in 2020 that were activated once more this winter in the face of ICE occupation and brutality. And those resistance efforts only strengthened the networks of activists, and birthed new activists, in this state this winter.
The author of the book In Defense of Looting, Vicky Osterweil, wrote an article of the same name for The New Inquiry back in 2014 in the wake of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown. In the article, she writes quote “It took months of largely non-violent campaigning in Birmingham, Alabama to force JFK to give his speech calling for a civil rights act. But in the month before he did so, the campaign in Birmingham had become decidedly not-non-violent: protesters had started fighting back against the police and Eugene “Bull” Conner, throwing rocks, and breaking windows. Robert Kennedy, afraid that the increasingly riotous atmosphere in Birmingham would spread across Alabama and the South, convinced John to deliver the famous speech and begin moving towards civil rights legislation.
This would have been impossible without the previous months of courageous and tireless non-violent activism. But it is also the emergent threat of rioting that forced JFK’s hand. Both Malcolm X and MLK had armed bodyguards. Throughout the civil rights era, massive non-violent civil disobedience campaigns were matched with massive riots. The most famous of these was the Watts rebellion of 1965 but they occurred in dozens of cities across the country. To argue that the movement achieved what it did in spite of rather than as a result of the mixture of not-non-violent and non-violent action is spurious at best. And, lest we forget, Martin Luther King Jr., the man who embodied the respectable non-violent voice that the white power structure claims they would listen to today, was murdered by that same white power structure anyway. [And, I would add as my own aside, at the time of his death MLK was actively questioning the efficacy of non-violence. Okay back to Osterweil:]
Though the Civil Rights movement won many battles, it lost the war. Mass incarceration, the fact that black wealth and black-white inequality are at the same place they were at the start of the civil rights movement, that many US cities are more segregated now than they were in the sixties: no matter what “colorblind” liberals would say, racial justice has not been won, white supremacy has not been overturned, racism is not over. In fact, anti-black racism remains the foundational organizing principle of this country. That is because this country is built on the right to property, and there is no property, no wealth in the USA without the exploitation, appropriation, murder, and enslavement of black people.”
She goes on to say quote “The mystifying ideological claim that looting is violent and non-political is one that has been carefully produced by the ruling class because it is precisely the violent maintenance of property which is both the basis and end of their power. Looting is extremely dangerous to the rich (and most white people) because it reveals, with an immediacy that has to be moralized away, that the idea of private property is just that: an idea, a tenuous and contingent structure of consent, backed up by the lethal force of the state. When rioters take territory and loot, they are revealing precisely how, in a space without cops, property relations can be destroyed and things can be had for free.” Again, Osterweil was writing in the context of anti-police brutality protests, but the Kimberly Clarke arson also forces us to contend with the idea of property, with who or what deserves protecting and, for white people especially, with our own pearl clutching that inevitably follows property destruction because it inherently questions the power structures that we directly benefit from. It’s important to interrogate the reality that white people, even working class white people, even working class white liberals, would be more concerned with the lost value of a large multinational corporation than with the underlying class solidarity with a person protesting their inability to afford to live while that corporation sees massive profits. Or would be more concerned with the optics, with how the media might cover this, with losing the support of the public because property damage is somehow more controversial in this country than the murder of black and brown people by police or than the “accidental” death and dismemberment of countless workers across the country in the name of production, all that pearl clutching acts to divide a progressive leftist movement that genuinely pushes against the status quo and provides the type of class solidarity that can actually build the type of movements that would make the world a better, more just world to live in. Marian Jones writes quote “As Osterweil notes, many of the white liberal critics who decry looting also denounce multinational corporations and predatory lenders for wreaking havoc on small communities. But then they are appalled “when rioters take their critique to its actual material conclusion.”
Okay but I’m asking you to hold multiple truths at once, so I also would argue that just because looting and property destruction acts as a strong means by which to undermine and question the role of capitalism in our lives and in our own oppression, it is also true that that doesn’t mean that all property destruction is effective at furthering the anti-capitalist, socialist cause, or any progressive cause at all, that all property destruction is moral or justified, or that all people engaging in property destruction are doing so from a place of a nuanced understanding of how their actions bring about change or question the status quo of capitalism.
Some argue that while it can be really cathartic to see someone light a warehouse on fire in protest of the wealth inequality in this country at a time when that inequality has never been so huge and when everyday Americans are deeply deeply aware of the fact that they are just barely scraping by while the .1% make billions, or to see someone like Luigi Mangione, who Abdulakarim the alleged Kimberly Clarke arsonist compared himself to, take violent action against the CEO of a healthcare company that itself commits violent acts every single day as it refuses care for millions while robbing them blind, while all of that can feel cathartic, perhaps if a person is so dedicated to the cause that they are willing to commit an act that could land them in prison for life, that energy and zeal could actually be put to better use towards collective action that would actually create real change. As Joshua Rodriguez writes for The World Socialist Web Site, quote “Southern California, where this incident took place, is a crucial chokepoint for world commerce. A strike by warehouse workers, in alliance with port workers, truck drivers and rail workers, would shut down vast sections of the US economy. This enormous social power must be consciously organized through rank-and-file committees, independent of the pro-corporate union bureaucracies and both big-business parties. Isolated acts against capitalist property, moreover, do not solve the underlying problem, which is the capitalist system itself.” The Kimberly Clark Corporation reported a profit of $2.4 billion last year. The destruction of a $500 million dollar warehouse, which I imagine was insured, likely isn’t going to tank the business. But what about the small businesses owned by people of color that were destroyed in the George Floyd protests!! What about them!! Marian Jones writes quote “If you care so much about racial justice, the argument goes, then why would you endorse destruction of property owned by people of color?
The question assumes that the left’s aim is the racial diversification of the existing system. In trying to call her out, Osterweil’s critics instead demonstrate the thinness of their own politics.
For liberals, meritocracy ranks high in the struggle to end white supremacy. By this logic, when individual people of color seek higher office or become a CEO, they are challenging white supremacy, no matter how they wield the power they’ve gained; likewise, the success of individual people of color as business owners is celebrated as anti-racist by definition. The preoccupation with entrepreneurs of color ignores the bigger picture — the exploitation, coercion, and subjugation of people of color have been instrumental and are inseparable from capitalism’s development.”
But, as Tom Hastings writes for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, quote “Some may argue that [arson and use of explosives]—if they do not hurt or intend to hurt others—are not violent. However, from a strategic perspective, they have an impact that is similar to violence. They make most people afraid and therefore less likely to mobilize publicly in support of the cause. They also divert media coverage, alienate the general public, raise support for public officials to “restore order” through any means necessary, and increase unity and obedience among security forces.” He goes on to say quote “There are five basic elements of my notion of when destruction of something may be helpful to a nonviolent campaign.
That no private individual's property is destroyed.
That the item destroyed was harming others.
That the core organizers of the campaign approved of the physical actions ahead of time.
That no property destruction happens in the context of a public event unless that destruction was advertised ahead of time as likely to occur.
That the act can be explained very well and repeatedly to the public by those who were totally transparent in their actions and are demonstrably committed to nonviolent strategy.”
In other words, it’s one thing to theorize about property destruction, but there is a very real PR element involved when it comes to movement building, and if you really want the work you’re doing to be a MOVEMENT, one that invites larger and larger groups in and forms coalitions to create larger change, you do have to consider optics, competing opinions, and coverage by mainstream media, and be strategic with all of it, which individual acts of property destruction rarely do.
I don’t have the answer here to serve you on a silver platter, turns out no one does people have been theorizing and pontificating about this shit for centuries at this point, but I guess my main point is this: property damage as a form of protest is not the same thing as violence perpetrated by the state or by the economically powerful people and companies that commit violence every day when they steal our labor, factor death and dismemberment into the cost of doing business, and push profit over people and the planet and really above all else. The alleged arson at the Kimberly Clark facility provides us with an opportunity to have a larger conversation over what we actually care about, the current systems in our society that are leading to our oppression, and the tactics that are actually useful to help make a better world for everyone. That in itself is a powerful thing. But I do think that Minneapolis showed us this winter that it is in collective action, more so than individual acts of frustration, where we start to build out the world we want to see, which I assume is the ultimate goal in all of this. Sometimes that collective action comes on the heels of violence or destruction. But it is truly all of us working together, we FAR outnumber the .1%, remember, together we do have power, we just have to have the will to work for that better future. So if you identify with that anger that led Abdulkarim to allegedly start that fire at the Kimberly Clarke facility, I urge you to use that anger for good, whatever that looks like to you–labor organizing being especially important in this specific case of worker exploitation, or participating in hyper-local mutual aid or neighborhood organizations, or promoting economic boycotts, which your mutual aid network can help to prolong because you can pool resources, ensuring that you know who your neighbors are and you have a network of support is a great place to start.
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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like my episode from Monday about why women are NOT okay right now.
