Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles

Source: Bigstock

Sometimes you chase the story, and sometimes the story chases you.

Two weeks ago I’m walkin’ through Century City, the business, residential, and dining district adjoining Beverly Hills. This is familiar territory to me; it’s home. So I know when something’s not right. Like the bus full of black folks that came barreling past me down Avenue of the Stars. And not just any bus; one of those supersize air-conditioned bathroom-in-the-back buses.

I’m not a man who speaks in absolutes, but here’s one I’ll stand by: If a bus full of black people enters an upscale area and nobody on board is wearing a jersey, it’s bad news.

And bad news it was. The bus shat out BLM like a BM. Dozens of angry blacks with placards and bullhorns bellowing, “Whose streets? Our streets!”

As the crowd gathered in front of a high-rise office building, I approached one of the protesters.

“What’s up?”

“Man, we tryin’ to get face-to-face with a racis’ Jew gentrifier.”

It was only out of self-preservation that I didn’t answer, “Mission accomplished; what can I do for you?”

I’ll go a long way for a laugh, but not that far.

So here’s the gist of the protest. As I’ve mentioned in previous columns, L.A.’s black population has dwindled to just a few remaining areas that could realistically be called “black communities.” It’s a “black belt” that starts south and east of the prosperous Westside and stretches farther south beyond LAX. But those communities are placeholders, destined to be either Hispanic or gentrified within the next decade. And blacks know this.

Now, in that “black belt” there’s a shopping mall that’s often described as L.A.’s last “black” mall—the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. It’s seen better days, as has the area around it, a skid row of liquor stores, smoke shops, check cashing places, hair extension parlors, and fast-food joints. As for the mall itself, it lost its anchor stores years ago, and there are as many empty retail spaces as occupied.

However, a new light rail line is opening soon that will connect the mall to other parts of the city. And structurally the mall is quite sound; it just needs a face-lift. Which is exactly what a New York investment firm was planning to give it. In April, CIM Group (led by cofounder and principal Avi Shemesh) bid $130 million for the mall, and the bid was accepted by the investment fund that owns the property (a fund with a black CEO, for the record).

All looked good. One spiffy new mall coming up!

But then on May 25 a Minneapolis fentanyl freak stopped breathing, and L.A. BLM decided that no “white” or “Jew” firms should be allowed to own L.A.’s last black mall. Facing protests, CIM turned chicken so fast, BLM thugs licked their fingers as if finishing a bucket meal. CIM apologized, screamed “Defund the police,” and pulled out of the deal.

And the asking price of the mall fell considerably. It was now a “troubled property.” Months went by with no serious bids.

In October, in stepped a new Jew, Asher Abehsera, and his billion-dollar urban development company LIVWRK. Abehsera put in a bid of $100 million, and the owners, who at this point really wanted to be free of the hassle, accepted. Abehsera pledged to redevelop the mall with the community in mind. He promised to add housing to the property and consult with community leaders about the look and feel of the renovations.

So of course BLM declared war on Abehsera. That’s why the activists were in Century City that day; they were picketing his high-rise office. Abehsera has three strikes against him: He’s white (to blacks, Jews are white), he’s Jewish (to blacks, Jews are “worse whites”), and he’s “right-wing” (he partnered with Jared Kushner on a few real estate ventures a decade ago, so to the mob, that makes him a “Trump Jew”). When the protesters were unable to breach the office tower, they hatched a new plan: They’d hit Abehsera at home; they’d lead an assault on his neighborhood.

Following my Century City encounter with the picketers, I began monitoring the Instagram accounts of the “defend Crenshaw Mall” BLM activists. And I saw their call to action to descend upon Abehsera’s house. “If we’re not sleeping because he’s trying to take over OUR neighborhood, we’ll make sure he’s not sleeping in HIS neighborhood either,” one post declared.

I recall reading that and thinking, “I sure feel bad for the poor bastards who live next door to THAT guy!”

Then I saw the address of the protest.

Oh fuck me, he’s a neighbor.

As I said, sometimes you chase the story, and sometimes the story chases you.

So, we had a BLM aktion in my neighborhood a week ago, and it was instructive. It proved a point I made in this column back in October. The black community in L.A. no longer has the size or vigor to protest without the help of imbecilic white leftists. And Antifa doesn’t give two craps about the Baldwin-Crenshaw Mall. With no skinny-jeans white commies taking part, what showed up outside Asher Abehsera’s house was a weak, sclerotic mess of about forty black folks and maybe six white sympathizers who barely had the energy to march in a circle for an hour before calling it a day.

Now, forty BLMs can still do plenty of damage, but the cops were out in force, and God bless them for that. They were impeccably professional, allowing the “protesters” their right to march while meticulously protecting the residents’ private property. But funny enough, it turned out that their main task was to separate the protesters from the neighbors who showed up to say, “Fuck off, BLM.” As I’ve pointed out before (and as certain conservative pundits bafflingly refuse to accept, as if it’s a violation of some article of faith), Beverly Hills is not leftist. The largest districts in Beverly Hills went for Trump in 2016 and even more so in 2020. The city also has a large population of Persian Jews, and that’s what tripped up the BLM thugs. Blacks have gotten far too used to dealing with Woody Allen Jews—weakling, neurotic nebbishes of European descent, people who are either Marxist or have Marxists in their family tree (shit, even I have that…my great-uncle Sol founded one of NYC’s most revered atheist/Marxist bookstores).

Persian Jews are cut from a different cloth entirely. It’s a healthy and virile community that categorically rejects racial guilting and socialist wealth redistribution. So the protesters were met by a bunch of Persian Jewish neighbors who stood against them with zero fear.

One BLM nutcase started screeching about “white supremacy,” and a Persian homeowner mockingly yelled back, “Hey, I’m a sand-brother! Stop oppressing me!” Other residents—including a local rabbi—called out the protesters as racists for harassing Abehsera because he was the “wrong color” and the “wrong faith” to buy the mall.

It soon became unclear whether the police were there to protect us from the protesters or the protesters from us.

Beverly Hills is not Portland.

One local white or Jewish (it’s hard to tell with a COVID mask on) mom brought her way-too-young daughter to march with BLM. She moaned about how “these poor people only want the same community control that we have.” To which one of the Persians snapped back, “You think we have the right to tell someone not to buy here because of their race or religion? If we tried that, we’d be accused of a hate crime and hauled off by the DOJ.”

Several of the protesters chanted the motto that appeared on the flyers they were handing out: “Black L.A. will not be erased.” Kinda sounds like “You will not replace us” (except without the media outrage and SPLC blacklists). This is an oft-repeated theme on the various social media pages opposing the mall sale. Words like “displaced” and “replaced” are used liberally, with one activist straight-out saying, “There won’t be a Black L.A. by next Thanksgiving if they pursue this purchase.”

That’s an overstatement (and a bit optimistic), but in essence it’s accurate. “Great Replacements” can and do happen, and black L.A. is in the final stages of one. But black L.A.’s Great Replacement is unique in that it represents the complete and total failure of the post-civil-rights-era black American business model, which can be summed up as “Don’t make yourself indispensable, don’t make yourself needed, or even wanted. Shout, march, and bully for your supper, because you’re owed it.”

Black L.A. is disintegrating because blacks are surrounded by racial and ethnic groups that adhere to very different models. The problem facing black L.A. isn’t “white supremacy.” It’s that every demographic group in Southern Cal does better than blacks. Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, even African blacks. Those groups have more wealth, they constitute a more vital part of the workforce, and they contribute more to the economy than black Angelenos. So as L.A.’s blacks are chased out on one end by Hispanics who conquer by sheer numbers, they’re gentrified out on the other end by every other race and ethnicity in the city.

This comment on the Instagram account of the mall protesters got no love:

I’m all for buying back our block, but there’s nothing wrong with gentrification. We deserve nice things and to have a mall that looks like the Grove or Century City. That mall is outdated, old and only has had maybe 2 renovations since I was born. I would LOVE to see gentrification done to it by us.

Ah, here’s the rub. There can be no improvement or renovation to the mall, whether by whites, Jews, blacks, or whoever, because the moment that area ceases to be crappy, all those other, more successful populations—with their capital and spending power—will flood in. It can’t be stopped. Black Angelenos are in an unenviable position where their only possible hope for survival as a “community” (as opposed to a diaspora) is to keep their last remaining neighborhoods shitty.

Again, a doomed business model.

It’s a tragic end to a uniquely and iconically American community, one that I have nothing but fond memories of as a youth attending majority-black L.A. public schools in the early 1980s. But it’s a community whose leaders made a conscious decision to adopt the leftist tenets of welfare over wealth-building, open borders (because all “BIPOCS” are in it together and totally not in competition), and “don’t throw ‘our children’ in prison even if they murder us and make our community a cancer to those who live near us” (a creed propagated by the maggot George Soros, exactly the type of Jew BLM should be harassing).

The conditions that ended black L.A. will follow blacks no matter where they run. And if the business model doesn’t change, neither will the outcome.