[wl]

It's only demonstrably wrong if you're going to insist on the very literal "almost none of the BLM protests involved violence" and ignore that that statement, in isolation, is rather misleading. Sure, most of the protests were peaceful. But when they weren't, it was was very bad.

I was living in Downtown Chicago during the two major BLM protests that went violent last year. From my window, I saw people shooting out windows, starting fires, and looting. Even if it were a moot point to call 911, it didn't matter because you'd get a busy signal if you tried calling. Businesses I frequented, including the coolest camera shop I've ever seen, were destroyed. In the days following these riots, it took 45 minutes to an hour to enter my neighborhood because of National Guard checkpoints. The grocery stores and pharmacies were closed because their windows were smashed in, they were looted, and they were generally smashed to hell. And local BLM organizers infamously defended their actions as the "cry of the unheard" and the looting as "reparations."

I've read accounts similar to my own from people in Seattle and Minneapolis.

I get that some opponents of BLM want to use these riots to discredit what the movement stands for. But BLM proponents shouldn't try to gas light me and others who were victims of these demonstrations in defense. They were horrific. People died.

[mlthoughts2018]

Nobody is gaslighting anyone. By your own account, the perpetrators of the looting, property damage, etc., were not part of the BLM protests, but clearly differentiated groups adding violence to something non-violent.

I live in NYC and in my neighborhood we also had windows boarded up after days of looting, cars smashed in the street, fires and more. Literally none of it was related to the BLM movement.

Similarly with Portland where many friends and coworkers live, the violence there was literally brought about by Trump and his false allocation of Homeland Security agents to “protect” federal landmarks, yet they abducted people off the street with no due process.

I’m certain looting happened, destruction happened, violence happened. It happened literally around the corner from my apartment.

That absolutely does not give anyone any entitlement to indulge racist or fascist biases to blame that violence on BLM or associate it with somehow representing the purpose of BLM, etc.

[wl]

You assert that the groups responsible for the rioting were clearly differentiated from the BLM protests, but I don't see how one can differentiate them without making a no-true-Scotsman argument that the rioting somehow goes against the principles of the movement and they can be distinguished on that basis. At the time, some people were claiming that the rioting was the work of alt-right agents provocateurs, but that doesn't seem to have panned out. (Cf. the assertions that the Capitol rioters were antifa agents provocateurs.)

It's also not a good argument given there were loud voices claiming to speak for BLM that were justifying the rioting and looting. Reparations, smashing the racist capitalist system, etc. Maybe they don't represent the movement as a whole, but if so, the movement had lost its voice to extremists by that point.

An example of this kind of thing, posted by a friend who took part in BLM protests, in response to a status update I made: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnCI4_9W4AAAxDf.jpg

Bad actors doing embarrassing or destructive things is a real problem for ad-hoc decentralized movements. And that's why I'm careful to not hold the acts of individuals against a movement unless said acts are the whole point of the movement. But at the same time, "Black Lives Matter riots of 2020" is the most accurate label for the events in question that I can think of.