This really speaks to the problem, though. They've proven to be more than happy to bait the mob when they think they can use it to consolidate their own power.

The GOP has been doing a large scale equivalent of swinging nunchucks around in public. The problem isn't that sometimes it swings around the wrong way and whacks someone they didn't intend to whack. Well, no, it is, of course that's a problem. But the more fundamental problem is that they're recklessly swinging an unpredictable weapon in public in an effort to be intimidating in the first place. And the problem is that people who didn't feel personally threatened by this behavior just sat there and came up with sorry excuses to try and rationalize it. This is deeply antisocial comportment that should have no place in the top echelons of civil society.

I see a pretty big difference between protests against police violence and protests against an election result.

There’s also a huge difference between people standing in the street shouting that they don’t like you and breaking down the doors to a restricted federal building after saying they were going to kill you and/or shut down a civic proceeding.

There police protests included riots, arson, looting, and murders. Harris didn't condemn this until months later when specifically pressed on the point. Just as Trump has always condemned violence when specifically asked.

No police were killed by BLM protestors. And considering the vastly larger amount of protests with BLM (more than 9000 protests), it's a wonder more violence didn't happen.

Had every BLM protest been as violent and unhinged as the capitol protests, we would have had thousands of deaths.

> No police were killed by BLM protestors.

This is not true. Here is one example of a retired St. Louis Police captain/current (at the time) police chief of Moline Acres being killed.

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/retired...

There are other examples as well.

> Had every BLM protest been as violent and unhinged as the capitol protests,

Aside from the single police officer, all the deaths seem to have been protestors. At least two were killed by police - one was shot by the police, and the other was pushed off a balcony.

It is the case that between two and three dozen people were killed during the BLM protests and associated actions like the autonomous zone, with nearly all of them, judging by the articles I have found, being victims of the protestors rather than protestors themselves.

Middle of the night. What makes you think that murder was BLM related?

Also, not to diminish the death. But he was not a police officer. He was retired and doing security work for a friend.

It's also a wonder that more people haven't been killed in the capitol protests.

IIRC there are 25 deaths attributed to the "BLM protests". That includes all of them, across the country, likely a number of events in the high hundreds or low thousands. AFAIK that number does not include any police deaths, though there were a couple attributed to right-wing extremists in the same period.

In a single medium-sized event, Wednesday's riot got 5 people killed. One of them was a policeman, and at least three of them were due to violence. So in terms of fatalities per participant-day, Wednesday's event was probably at least two orders of magnitude more violent than the "BLM protests" taken as a whole.

I think that's a significant difference, and one that exposes this sort of whataboutism as false equivalency (in addition to the other issues with whataboutism).

BLM is responsible for many police killings, including one incident in Dallas in 2016 where 5 police officers were murdered in one event.

I know this country has memory holed the negative actions of BLM, but they have a lot of law enforcement blood on their hands.

Let me help you understand my comment. I put “BLM protests” in quotes because I am specifically talking about the protests last summer that resulted from several high-profile police brutality incidents with black victims. I don’t really consider any particular group labeling itself “BLM” to speak for that particular movement, hence the quotes.

In a similar vein, I’m not blaming the people who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday for previous right-wing attacks, including on LEOs e.g. the boog boi murders earlier last year.

The police murders were committed under the BLM protests.

Consequently, the media mislabeling of the reign of terror campaign this summer doesn’t legitimize destroying communities because a few people were pissed off and corporations attempted to add an air of legitimacy to it.

I watched a bunch of people chant at a door on Wednesday, a couple windows were broken, a guy in viking shit flexed on a chair, an unarmed woman was shot climbing through a window, and my feed is filled with hyperbolic morons screaming sedition and traitors.

I’m over it.

The police murders occurred before 2020, so they can't have occurred during the protests I'm talking about. That seems pretty darn simple.

> Consequently, the media mislabeling of the reign of terror campaign this summer doesn’t legitimize destroying communities because a few people were pissed off and corporations attended to add an air of legitimacy to it.

Engaging with any subjective representation of the protests I am talking about is outside the scope of what I'm willing to discuss—for those who've been subjected to it, I can't compete with the right-wing media's firehose of disinformation. My point about fatalities per participant-day stands as a metric of the violence during last summer's protests compared to the riot last Wednesday, and you can take it or leave it.

the problem is that both sides of this issue have internalized a subjective representation of events and their doctrine moving forward is based on that subjectivity. this is how politics work. to understand where the right is operating from, you need to be willing to understand their narrative as they understand it and the same goes the other way. this imo is the only way to begin broaching the utter communication breakdown that is happening. for a not insignificant portion of our country, the cultural lockstep that emerged between corporate avatars, media, and government officials cheering on what they experienced as months of violence, destruction and lawlessness (and not to mention a jarring reversal on the necessity of lockdowns that have served as a de facto economic sanction on middle america) has fundamentally destroyed trust in these institutions, more alarmingly, it has shown that violence is the path to results. it is very important to understand the mindset of these people and how it brought them to the capital.

on my part i think my initial comment was poorly constructed as this was the main point i wanted to communicate.

It’s interesting that there is one place in this country where protest should be encouraged and that is at the halls of power in Washington DC, and the media feeds the lie that destroying your communities in fire is legitimate protest while being angry at and petitioning your federal government at their seat of power is sedition.

Ask yourself that question, why the reaction to this event?

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. We don't allow that, because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for: curious, thoughtful conversation on topics of intellectual interest.

I'm not going to ban you right now because you posted better comments several months ago, but please don't do this. Instead, if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

> destroying your communities in fire is legitimate protest while being angry at and petitioning your federal government at their seat of power is sedition.

Do you seriously actually believe this is a balanced representation of the events we're talking about? A simple yes or no, please.

Please stop adding to political battles and flamewars on HN. It is not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Supposedly more cops died in one day of (presumably Thin Blue Line supporting) riots at the US Capital than did many months of the so-called "anti-cop" demonstrations. Perhaps if the police cleared out the MAGA folks as enthusiastically as they did the peaceful demonstrators for Trump's church photo-op, then a lot of this could be avoided.

And the goal of the BLM demonstration was not violence, whereas that was the goal of at least some (if not many) of the MAGA folks. Quite a few folks walking around with zip ties and more than one noose as well.

Going back to July 27, 2020, Trump tweeted:

> Anarchists, Agitators or Protestors who vandalize or damage our Federal Courthouse in Portland, or any Federal Buildings in any of our Cities or States, will be prosecuted under our recently re-enacted Statues & Monuments Act. MINIMUM TEN YEARS IN PRISON. Don’t do it! @DHSgov

* https://www.cbs17.com/news/national-news/trump-tweet-threate...

* https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12878776213808373...

Quote mining is such a magical thing.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-kamala-harris-l...

She was talking about BLM protests, whose goal was not violence:

> "I know there are protests still happening in major cities across the United States, I'm just not seeing the reporting on it that I had for the first few weeks," Colbert said.

> "That's right," Harris replied. "But they're not gonna stop. They're not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I'm telling you."

* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/09/01/fac...

See also Biden on violence:

* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/01/07/fac...

Meanwhile, the rioters at the US Capital:

> “This is not America,” a woman said to a small group, her voice shaking. She was crying, hysterical. “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”

* https://archive.is/tZVFs (paywall)

* https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/capitol-trump-ins...

> She was talking about BLM protests, whose goal was not violence:

Maybe that wasn't the goal, as it also wasn't the goal of most of the Trump protestors. But there was nevertheless plenty of violence.

Just seven months ago, dozens of Secret Service agents were hospitalized after being attacked by BLM protestors attempting to storm the White House.

https://www.newsmax.com/us/white-house-secret-service/2020/0...

Recent events have really, really opened my eyes as to how the media covers events that it supports versus events it does not support.

> Maybe that wasn't the goal, as it also wasn't the goal of most of the Trump protestors.

People were talking about storming Congress months ago:

> “Will you and several hundred more go with me to DC and fight our way into the Congress and arrest every Democrat who has participated in the coup?” Holland posted on Friday. “We may have to shoot and kill many of the Communist BLM and ANTIFA Democrat foot soldiers to accomplish this!!!”

* https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/11/cops-n11.html

> One of Lang Holland’s posts reflected Donald Trump’s baseless allegations that the presidential election he lost to Joe Biden was stolen, and said: “Death to all Marxist Democrats.”

> Holland, who led the police department in Marshall, Arkansas, also wrote “take no prisoners” and “leave no survivors”.

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/09/local-arkans...

> In a popular thread referencing a Trump tweet promoting the debunked conspiracy theory of election fraud, one user asked, "what if Congress ignores the evidence?"

> "Storm the Capitol," was a popular reply.

> Five days later, on January 6, as pro-Trump militia proceeded to do exactly that, the mood on thedonald.win switched to jubilation and outright defiance of police, with thousands joining "watching party" message threads.

> "This is what Trump told us to do!" a top post in one of these threads read.

* https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-01-08/us-capitol-st...

Yes, no doubt some people were talking about it. Some people participating in BLM were talking about killing all the cops. Neither one of these is a representative view of most the protesters. Indeed in the Trump case, apparently some of the violence was protestors fighting protestors to stop them from getting into the Capitol.

The claim for 50 secret service agents being hospitalized comes from one unnamed source in the trump administration; and both fox news and newsmax have a strong right-leaning bias, so it's hard for me to believe it's true at all.

I think that's possibly an over-charitable view, but if you accept it it still paints them as negligent and incompetent. "Some terrorists have explicitly said they will do this thing, in public, but, eh, they probably won't, so why worry about it" is a ridiculous take for someone in their position.