These Are Not “Peaceful Protests”; Their Violent Rhetoric Incites Violence

“If that is the result of George Floyd’s killing, he will have not only died in vain but, more, died as a critical girder supporting the enemy’s battlements.”

The first thing you absolutely have to understand about the #BlackLivesMatter protests-turned-riots going on all across America is that pretty much everything you are hearing from most news sources right now cannot be taken at face value. A draconian speech code, enforced as ruthlessly—jobs lost, reputations tarnished, lives ruined—as anything you might find in an actual totalitarian regime, is preventing them from telling you the truth. And this is true even if they wanted to tell you, which most do not, in large part because they have been entangled in a web built up of years of their own mounting lies and distortions. Their minds have been coopted, and they can no longer see with clear eyes and report in an unbiased, clear-minded fashion on what it is they are seeing.

If you spend your time watching most closed-minded evening newscasts or reading the likes of The New York Times, The Atlantic, or other publications representing the peer-approval-driven, herd-minded, white-shoe contingent that sometimes go by the misnomer of the “intelligentsia,” one of the big lies you are currently being fed again and again and again is about some important distinction to be made between the peaceful protests in the service of a just cause and the violence, looting, and rioting that may—it is heedlessly suggested without much in the way of evidence—even be incited by shadowy white supremacists hiding in the protesters’ midst. Do not believe that, not for a second. Use your common sense: Even if there were a few actual white supremacists who had snuck into the party, a truly peaceful protester cannot be “incited” to loot and riot. But if you have seen the “peaceful” protestors up close, as I have as I walk around New York City, you have seen their hatred, their rage, their hooting, howling, cursing and screaming, their divisive rhetoric directed against police, law, order, and against America itself, their bullying and intimidation, their intolerance for others who have a different view. An “ACAB” (“All Cops Are Bastards”) slogan or a shout of “F— the Police” does not a peaceful protest make. That kind of dark, hateful, violent energy naturally spills over into dark, hateful, violent actions. If you believe, as many do, that it is fair to blame the sometimes incendiary rhetoric of a politician like President Donald Trump for the sometimes incendiary actions of his supporters, even when the actual connection is tenuous at best, then you should also believe, consistently, that it is fair to blame the violent rhetoric of #BlackLivesMatter for the violent actions of some within these protesters’ ranks and especially those who are clearly part of the movement. This is why #BlackLivesMatter has left a trail of looting and rioting on so many of the occasions when the movement has reared its ugly head.

Many of the protesters are, themselves, nominally peaceful, at least as far as their actions are concerned, and, more than that, have even tried to restrain their more violent comrades. But many others are not. The bullies, looters, and rioters are not, as the media would have you believe, some other element, coming from outside, whether outside the movement, outside the state, Russia, or wherever. Most of the violent cohort is coming from within the movement, a subset, to be sure, but a subset of the same movement. This is why many stores and even iconic monuments are getting graffitied with the very same oft-profane and hateful #BLM slogans or anti-police rhetoric in one form or another. In New York City—and again, you can see this in the few videos that do not try to whitewash the truth or, as I have, see this in person—the violence and looting are emerging and spinning off organically from within the protests and coming largely though not exclusively from young black men, the very same young black men who have been incited to violence by a decade of irresponsible and incendiary lies leading them to believe, absurdly, that we are living in some sort of white supremacist police state in which a war is being waged on the “black body.” That lie is based on the core lie at the root of #BlackLivesMatter: the belief that cops are disproportionately killing black men.