Considering the sheer number of protests and protesters involved, BLM protests were mostly peaceful.

https://today.uconn.edu/2020/10/study-2020-protests-shows-di...

"While the summer of 2020 experienced 100 days of violence and destruction in cities, according to the the U.S Department of Homeland Security, the most recent CCC study of 7,305 separate events in May and June suggests that 96.3% of events involved no property damage or police injuries and 97.7% of events had no injuries reported. Pressman spoke with UConn Today about the new report."

In contrast, the attack on the capital building was a deliberately violent attack on the seat of our national government. Rioters brought zip ties to potentially hold lawmakers hostage, blunt force weapons, and firearms. It was inherently a violent undertaking with revolutionary aims.

> Considering the sheer number of protests and protesters involved, BLM protests were mostly peaceful.

This is a pretty terrible standard, since MAGA rallies are mostly peaceful as well. The issue is what do we do with the ones that aren't, not how many of them are.

I think the comparison was BLM protests to this “protest”, not all MAGA rally’s.

which is sort of silly. the source cited higher up is counting how many separate BLM events involved police injuries and/or property damage. how does it make sense to compare that figure to a single event? with a sample of one, it can only be 100% or 0% by that methodology.

But this wasn't a rally. This was literally them storming the halls of Congress to take back their country from what they believe are corrupt communist deep state agents. Why do they believe that? Because their leader Trump has been amplifying this type of conspiratorial misinformation on Twitter for the past 4 years

The “the percent of protests that are peaceful” largely depends on what you decide to include in that category.

Suppose the peaceful portion of BLM protests didn’t happen, would the violent riots go from being justified to unjust? Why would the presence of the peaceful protests change our moral assessment of the violent ones? Same with the MAGA demonstrations. It should not matter that there were numerous other peaceful MAGA rallies when assessing the storming on the capital.

People brought firearms to BLM events, too. Whether they brought them before or after riots broke out is unknowable. I support BLM and not rioters, fwiw.

What makes this unique is that there are records online of people planning violence in advance.

And that was a small fraction of the people who were there to protest, so they were mostly peaceful as well.

Certainly most of the large BLM protests ended in destruction and violence, at least in my state of Minnesota. There’s a reason the national guard had to be deployed. People find strength in numbers.

I like how you respond to a thoughtful post with statistical data with your own conjecture.

That statistical data is pretty bunk. What constitutes an 'event?' It seems that they cast a pretty broad net if they came up with thousands of them. There was a protest in my town with all of 30 people in attendance - does that count? For several nights in a row I tuned in to the news in my state to watch straight up riots in Minneapolis.

It's clear from the pictures of what happened in the capitol that it was done by a tiny fraction of people from the protests, so you don't need any statistical analysis for that.

It usually only takes one to change public perception. And DC was a sample of one. OTOH, BLM has media covering for them(1) to make the group look peaceful.

1. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cnn+fiery+but+mostly+peaceful&iax=...

If you murder every 100th day, are you 99% peaceful?

99% of days you are.

100% agree, these social media companies with their fake empathy and double standards are not fooling anyone.

Who has died? Can you name names?

19+ people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...

I think that list is only Minneapolis. There are more.

> the BLM riots were terrorism and equivalent to what happened on Wednesday

One group is rioting to protest frequent ignored murder of their community.

The other riot to attempt to halt an important democratic government process. That's clearly and demonstrably premeditated sedition and treason anyway you spin it, or ignore it in your case.

I read your argument to be that the terrorism is justified in one case and not justified in the other. That may be the case, but many will disagree about which form of terrorism is justified and then you have a bunch of terrorists everywhere. My argument is that neither terrorism is justified, and both were enflamed by the state of politics and most of the violence/bad behavior was done by desperate criminals or the mentally ill.

The BLM riots were never terrorism, that's a huge false equivalence so you can give up that attempted re-frame.

You yourself said people were rioting for political purposes. Either rioting for political purposes is terrorism or it isn't, regardless I hope you apply whatever standard you use uniformly and recognize that the riots and Wednesday were both caused by divisive political rhetoric causing ideologically motivated people to think violence is their best option. Introspection is important as is empathy for those you disagree with.

> Either rioting for political purposes is terrorism or it isn't

That's an insane assertion.

Comparing the Junior Congresswoman to the President of the U.S. does not lend credence to your follow-up statement especially given the ridiculous & slanderous coverage she's been given. No further discussion with you is warranted. one-tab.com/page/tE5DJcsOQFiJQtKjGFH8wA

While they hold different offices, AOC is undeniably a favorite of the left and has 12 million twitter followers. Her being a junior congresswoman does not disqualify her from inciting riots. One does not need to be in government at all to incite a riot. The news article I linked was not slanderous afaik and casts AOC's pro-rioting views in a positive light. It is difficult for me to compare the impact of the BLM riots to Wednesday, but I view both as preventable tragedies caused by politicians. I won't attempt to quantify the tragedy or weigh them against each other. If you only want to view Trump as culpable, I wish you all the best but I think you would be wrong.

Your tone is extremely patronizing and your message is incorrect. At a minimum, the protests were anti-police. Protestors were chanting slogans extremely hostile to the police. By creating an unsafe atmosphere after months of quarantine lockdowns, people rioted which resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage across multiple cities and these deaths. Criminals and people with mental disorders were emboldened by sharp rhetoric/opportunism to break the law. I see this as very similar to what happened this week.

The protests were the largest civil rights movement in US history.

That's several orders of magnatude larger than the largest trump rallys and riots.

Painting BLM as one unified voice of violence is totally dishonest.

Protesting the police is not violent, calling for justice is not violent. The continued, undeniable unaccounted murder of citizens by police is understandable reason for a relatively small portion of the BLM protests to turn ugly, and the police have a major, direct hand in that escalation.

Actually, the protests were anti-police murder. They were protesting the large numbers of murders of Black people by police.

Again, please don't intentionally misconstrue what happened this summer in the BLM movement, or the impetus behind that.

And if you see those protests as "similar" to a fascist mob trying to overthrow the US government, well, I don't really know what to say, other than that you are obviously incorrect.

If the protests did not result in billions of dollars in damage and the deaths we have discussed in this thread, maybe their admirable intentions would have mattered. But the fact is the riots were absolutely unnecessary and destructive. You can sympathize with the rioters all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that the rhetoric pushed before and during the BLM riots was not one of tolerance and understanding. BLM riots created destructive mobs. If the movement prioritized nonviolent rhetoric this wouldn't have happened.

How about David Dorn, retired St Louis Police Captain.

The suspects have been caught and charged. Dorn was not a Trump supporter and wasn't killed for political reasons. Debra White told the paper that her father opposed much of Drumpf's rhetoric and policies, including "the things he said about Colin Kaepernick, the kids locked up in cages, the racist remarks." Dorn's daughters stated their father did not want to support the "law and order agenda".

Jessica Doty-Whitaker shot for saying all lives matter.

This is a very strange case. But nevertheless it can't be said if she was killed for that. And the incident was not part of any kind of protest or riot.

"Ramirez said in the Fox59 interview the two groups separated because they realized people in each group were armed. He said both groups then fist-bumped and went their separate ways. But someone opened fire from a nearby bridge and struck Doty-Whitaker, Ramirez said. He said the shooters then ran away. Ramirez said he fired back but did not hit anyone. When contacted by IndyStar, members of Doty-Whitaker's family declined interview requests."

Police later released the video. She was shot just moments after yelling out “All lives matter”.

https://www.wthr.com/article/news/crime/police-release-video...