America was founded on violence, expanded on violence and has consistently responded to economic violence against workers and the poor with violence from the state. So, when someone burns a warehouse and says, “pay us a liveable wage,” they’re not introducing violence into a peaceful system. They’re responding in the only language the system has ever consistently respected. ~Eevie
A man filmed himself burning down a warehouse and posted it to social media. As he lit stacks of toilet paper on fire inside a Kimberly-Clark distribution center in California, he said, “ If you’re not going to pay us enough to live, at least pay us enough not to do this.” In a final clip, as the building consumed itself behind him, he said, “There goes your inventory.”
Like many of us, we watched and nodded. A silent understanding.
Not because we want things to burn, but because we understand the math. You grind people down enough, remove every other option and eventually, someone does the arithmetic out loud.
Kimberly-Clark lost close to $650 million dollars in that fire… and I’m willing to guess, not a single working-class American feels bad for them.
When companies accumulate profit on the broken backs of their workers, so egregiously, without giving them their fair share, the crowd will inevitably grow fickle.
Ten warehouses have gone up in flames now. Something tells me the number will continue to grow as the year presses on.
The interesting part about the Kimberly-Clark story, is that the man who lit it on fire, Chamel Abdulkarim, didn’t even work for them. He worked for NFI, a third party contractor hired to run the warehouse. One layer removed. Exploited twice. And NFI isn’t clean. In 2018, the Department of Labor ordered its subsidiary to pay nearly $3.5 million to around 1500 warehouse workers for wage theft. This arson was not random anarchy… this came from a man at the end of a very specific rope, if you ask me.
That isn’t radicalism. That’s cause and effect, baby.
America has a creation myth about how change happens. We teach it to our children. You organize, you march, you petition, you wait. The arc bends. Justice comes. But, we leave out the part where the arc only bent because someone was willing to break something. Or burn down a warehouse.
The labor movement didn’t win the eight-hour workday by asking nicely. They won it after the Haymarket affair, after bombings, after the National Guard opened fire on striking workers at Ludlow and killed women and children sheltering in a tent colony. They won it after decades of violence. Most of it directed at workers, some of it coming from them. The sanitized version gives us Labor Day as a holiday.
The real version gives us mass graves in Colorado.
Black Americans didn’t win civil rights through moral persecution alone. They won incremental, fragile, constantly-threatened gains through organized resistance that the state met with fire hoses, attack dogs, bombings and assassinations. And when cities burned in 1967 and 1968, when Newark and Detroit and over a hundred other cities erupted, the government finally moved their asses. Not because they’d been convinced, but because the cost of not moving their asses became too high.
There is a difference between revolutionary violence and dishonorable violence.
White Americans fought violently too, but ours was dishonorable violence in service of nefarious ends. We fought to steal land that didn’t belong to us, from people who already lived here. We fought to keep human beings in chains. We fought to maintain racial order that guaranteed our comfort at everyone else’s expense. That violence was not revolution. It was protection of plunder. Barbarism. Something white America has never truly reckoned with. Abhorrent. Inexcusable.
There is nothing honorable in that. And that distinction matters, because the question of who gets to use violence, for what purpose, and with what consequences, has never been applied equally in this country. Not once.
On March 28th, 2026, an estimated eight million Americans took to the streets to protest the fascist regime that has taken us all hostage. Over 3,300 events across all fifty states. The second largest single day protest in American history. People showed up in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana. In conservative counties. In small towns. Not just blue cities performing resistance for each other — everywhere.
It was peaceful. It was massive. It was the third time they’d done it.
The White House called it the product of “leftist funding networks” with little real public support. After the October protest, Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself dumping shit all over the protesters. That’s not a government that feels pressure. That’s a government that feels nothing at all.
Eight million people, and the response was a fucking meme.
What exactly are we waiting for peaceful protest to accomplish again? Because we have the data now. Three rounds. Millions of people. Historically unprecedented turnout. And the machine didn’t slow down, not even a little.
False hope is it’s own form of violence. Maybe the answer isn’t organizing harder, voting smarter, protesting louder, then waiting until something shifts. I don’t know. The evidence isn’t supporting it either. Maybe we are missing a key component to turning the wheel. All I know is that every single right that exists in this country has been extracted through pain. Not asked for. Not granted. Extracted. The eight-hour workday. The right to vote. The right to exist in public without being lynched. None of it came free. None of it came because the people in power looked down at the marchers and felt moved.
It came because, at some point, the cost of denial became higher than the cost of concession.
We are not there yet. Or maybe the threshold has already been crossed and the people who know it are still waiting to see who moves first. I'm watching that the same way you are. There are no easy answers.
Chamel Abdulkarim is sitting in West Valley Detention Center right now, no bail, facing felony charges, for burning down a warehouse owned by a company that stole wages from workers for years. Kimberly-Clark’s stock dipped and bounced right back up. NFI Industries issued a statement. Everyone is fine.
Everyone except the people who were inside that building at 12:30 in the morning doing the same job for the same money who now don’t know how they’re going to make rent.
The system is working exactly as designed.
The only question left, the one nobody wants to answer out loud, the one the world keeps asking us, is what we are willing to do about it. Not performatively. Not symbolically. Actually.
I don’t know the answer and I do not condone violence. I’m not a violent person. But I’m done pretending the question of whether violence is unreasonable at this point.
If this landed for you, share it — restack it, send it to the group chat, text it to the friend asking the same quiet questions you have. And if you've been reading for a while and getting something real out of it, consider a paid subscription. It's what keeps me doing this full time. Free or paid, you being here matters. Thank you for reading.
That’s the part they don’t consider: nobody risks a good job. But no one with a brain cares about a shit job, because they can just go down the street and get another shit job with no problem. It’s like “you get what you pay for” doesn’t apply to hiring employees in their minds.
For every person like this guy, there are thousands quietly monkeywrenching their employers in ways that don’t show up on camera. Because you get what you pay for, like it or not.
re: warehouse arson in Ontario, CA
One of those small points never mentioned in media content.
If whomever did this, declares himself a political terrorist then this arson will not be covered under insurance policies for fire damage.
After the towers fell on 11-SEP-2001 every insurance provider rewrote all policies to exclude coverage for “acts of political terrorism”.
So…?
It is now in the interests of the owner of this warehouse to silence the arsonist prior to him issuing a press release expressing his intent and what were his motives and personal politics.
Not necessarily by way of a staged, false self-hanging, which might lead to yet more questions, more investigations. Much simpler dropping the charges. Then providing him a one way plane ticket to a non-extradition destination would suffice. (Though Venezuela is not an option any more.)
...might be of interest to others?