Alicia Price looks like a nice girl. She’s wearing a T-shirt with the picture of a bear carrying a sign saying ‘Free Hugs.”

Moments later there is a video sequence of her taking a cigarette lighter and setting a police car on fire (starting at 7:35). She’s pleaded not guilty and her case will come to trial 9/13/2013; months from now.

She’s not alone, of course; the Vancouver Sun has a database where you can scroll through the hundreds of charges arising from the Stanley Cup riot of 2011.

There are several points I’d like to make about those charged and, more importantly, the tens of thousands of rioters who were not charged and will never face any public sanction for breaking the law, trashing the streets, stealing private property, torching private cars and attacking the police that day in June two years ago.

The first is that these were not a band of organized agitators from out of province or out of country; these were our kids. Otherwise passive couch potatoes, video game players and smart phone texters became a raging mob of anti-social, anti-capitalist, anti-democratic maniacs. Young people, largely from the suburbs, went on a crazed rampage that went on for hours and hours.

The second point is that they didn’t confine their assaults to private property and the police; they also attacked individuals who tried to intervene, notably one Robert Mackay who tried to prevent rioters from entering the Bay and was assaulted by 15 people.

Forget the phrase ‘Stanley Cup riot.’ It wasn’t over a hockey game, a cup or anything else. This was a riot of pure nihilistic anarchy; a physical repudiation of not just capitalism, but of society, order, individual rights, private property, laws, and most notably of their parents.

Our young people don’t just ignore their parents, they despise us and our entire system. They have become cultural Marxists and anarchists, ready and willing to tear society down at the slightest provocation.

In attempting to do so, they made a point that has been made by revolutionaries time and again around the world; that when the social contract breaks down at its core, it cannot be propped up for long by the police; not that the Vancouver police did much propping up because they were, presumably, under orders not to injure much less arrest the rioters.

In earlier days, the army would have been called out, the Riot Act read and the rioters shot until they dispersed. The conscription riot in Montreal in 1917 is a case in point. Well, we won’t see that again. There is no government in Canada, no Mayor, no Army commander, prepared to fire on rioters in Canada these days and yet there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of young people ready to shred every aspect of modern Western society.

Not that they need to riot. They can wreck society by just doing more of what they do the rest of the time: not getting married, not having children, not voting, not going to church and not taking part in civic life.

Are they terrorists? Perhaps not by the conventional definition; but they certainly terrify me.

A Canada passed on to childless, self-centered, nihilists who believe in open borders, climate change, the ‘evils’ of GM food, oil sands, tankers, fracking, nuclear energy and who think Islam is ‘cool’ should terrify all of us.