The myth behind BLM’s ‘peaceful protests’
"Online search engines refused to return anything but “peaceful protests.” Siri (the artificially-intelligent friend supplied by Apple) was tweaked to answer the question “Do black lives matter?” with “Yes,” but to answer “Do all lives matter?” with “All lives matter is often used in response to the phrase Black Lives Matter, but it does not represent the same concerns.” In both cases, Siri directs users to the Black Lives Matter website.
The day after that first bloody weekend, Yahoo News admitted no violence in its short report on worldwide “anti-racism protests.” The news agency AFP led with a report about police and military responses in the US capital, before admitting “isolated looting” in New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Associated Press reported on foreign protests, with admiration for the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol and the protest outside the US Embassy in London (contrary to lockdown). AP admitted that 14 Metropolitan Police officers were injured by “protesters” in one night but claimed these injuries “followed a largely peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration.”
In the first two weeks after the death of George Floyd, the protests cost $1 billion to $2 billion in insured property damage. In the three calendar months, more than 30 people were killed, and 14,000 people arrested in American protests alone (according to that Wikipedia page). Yet most news media and politicians have followed the line that Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters are overwhelmingly peaceful. Towards the end of August, CNN infamously broadcast from Kenosha, Wisconsin, in front of burning cars with the banner “fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.”
The police can’t win. Any enforcement of the law gets reported as shocking police violence. The police withdraw or take a knee. Then the police are blamed for lawlessness. Vigilantes step in. Then the police are accused of colluding with racists.
The narrative goes all the way up to Joe Biden, who excuses BLM’s violence while railing against “right-wing violence” (and editing Donald Trump into the pictures).
Similarly, Britain’s Liberal Democrats adopted the statement: “The Black Lives Matter protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful.” The Liberal Democrats seconded the Labour politicians who accused Boris Johnson of “stoking division and fear” by warning against extremists hijacking minority interests.
The BLM has done well out of this narrative. BLM received millions of dollars in the first half of June alone (including from owners of social media and mainstream media), plus $90 million in funds to bail protesters from jail.
Few newspapers have published scepticism of the narrative...
In early September, the mainstream media rushed to report supposedly independent findings that 93 percent of BLM protests were peaceful and non-destructive, and that police intervened in more BLM protests than non-BLM protests. CNN claimed that these findings “contradict assumptions and claims by some that protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement are spawning violence and destruction of property.”
Yet the supposedly independent study is explicitly anti-police, anti-Republican, and pro-protest (of almost any kind). The authors frame their findings to belittle the violence and blame it on counter-protesters. And the 93 percent finding is achieved by under-counting violent protests, using selective sources...
The US Crisis Monitor reports “only” 220 locations where protests were violent but does not admit that this works out at a rate of more than 9 percent of the locations in which BLM protests occurred. Imagine you’re a foreign tourist, thinking of visiting 100 American locations. Would you still travel given an expectation that 9 of those visits would expose you to violence?
The report describes 93 percent of protests as “overwhelmingly peaceful,” and describes the other 7 percent as “miniscule.” Imagine if you interacted with 100 protesters, of whom 7 were violent. Would you describe them as miniscule?
Further, the US Crisis Monitor characterises most of the violence as instigated by opponents of BLM masquerading as supporters. However, the report’s few citations focus on a supposed Hell’s Angel and white supremacist wielding an umbrella against windows.
The report then describes the violence as “largely confined to specific blocks, rather than dispersed throughout the city.” What is the threshold for “throughout the city”? The US Crisis Monitor doesn’t explain. It’s a sleight of hand...
The US Crisis Monitor claims to be non-profit, non-partisan, “independent,” and “objective.” Most of the parent organisation’s funders are foreign ministries, which are interested in the wider programme for collecting data on armed conflict globally. The organisers don’t declare their funders for the American part. They did not return my emails on this question.
The main domestic private funder is the Tableau Foundation, based in Seattle. Its claim to be “data-driven” is undermined by its presumption of “systemic racism” without definition or evidence. Its website claims “the need to dismantle the forms of racisms that are so deeply entrenched in our systems and institutions.” It supplies “data to address … longstanding inequities.” In June 2020 it committed $10 million “to dismantle systemic racism in the US.”
In June, the US Crisis Monitor’s organizers issued a statement expressing “solidarity” with any protests “calling for systemic and peaceful change.” At best, this statement is naive. It literally does not care the aim of the protests, such as authoritarianism or supremacy for one religion, race, or gender. And calling for peaceful change is different to actually protesting peacefully.
The US Crisis Monitor’s report sets up law enforcement as “right-wing,” and aligns itself with the Marxist politics of BLM and Antifa. It complains about “a wider push to militarise the government’s response to domestic unrest, and particularly demonstrations perceived to be linked to left-wing groups like Antifa.” The report repeatedly complains about the Trump administration inflaming tensions, without calling out any opposition politician.
The US Crisis Monitor’s report is biased against policing too: “These data reveal that the United States is in crisis. It faces a multitude of concurrent, overlapping risks – from police abuse and racial injustice, to pandemic-related unrest and beyond – all exacerbated by increasing polarization.” Note that the US Crisis Monitor does not admit protesters, or their various enablers, as causes.
According to its report, in about 4 percent of cases the authorities used “force” (such as pepper spray), which the US Crisis Monitor condemns as a “heavy handed police response [that] appears to have inflamed tensions and increased the risk of violent escalation.” This puts the US Crisis Monitor into a ridiculous contradiction: it describes the protesters as overwhelmingly peaceful given 7 percent violence, while condemning the police as heavy-handed given 4 percent.
The US Crisis Monitor is vague about the sources behind its conclusions. In the dataset, the source for each event is usually a local television station, sometimes a newspaper, sometimes a “local partner.” In no case does the dataset specify the reporter, the date, or any point of contact. In searching for data on my hometown, I found a local television news broadcast in San Diego listed as the source for a protest in Las Vegas (that’s 332 miles away by the shortest road). In 51 cases, the source is simply “Twitter.”
The US Crisis Monitor doesn’t list all its “local partners.” The global research programme talks about “a unique network of international and local partners around the world,” of which it lists a few NGOs, none of them focused on the US. It claims that some sources cannot be disclosed, for “security reasons.”
In the American dataset, some “local partners” have loaded titles, such as “Militia Watch” and “Count Love.” I doubt these partners are doing the police any favours. I didn’t see any partners with names like “Back the Blue.” None of the sources is official.
The US Crisis Monitor doesn’t follow its own coding rules. It defines “violent demonstration” at great length, to include vandalism, looting, blocking roads, and burning tires. By this definition, some cities were experiencing violent protests for months, but that’s not what the US Crisis Monitor admits.
The most observably destabilised city was Seattle, where violence started on 29 May. The Mayor, Jenny Durkan, soon curbed the police response and mischaracterised the protests as a peaceful carnival. The protesters declared a police-free zone on 8 June, initially under the title of CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone), later as CHOP (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest). Predictably, the area became a haven for crime. The Mayor’s own office admitted at least five times more criminal incidents within the area in June 2020 compared to June 2019, including two excess murders and 16 excess aggravated assaults. (The reports were gathered outside CHOP, so the true rate must have been higher.) On 1 July, city and federal law enforcers cleared the streets, but crime remained unusually high through August. City politics continue to favour the protesters. For instance, city government recently closed a park against a Christian gathering, but opened other parks to protests against the police.
Counting from 29 May to 1 July (i.e., ignoring disturbances after CHOP was cleared) gives 34 days. By the coding rules, every one of those days should count as violent, just for the disruption to traffic. Yet the dataset contains only 28 non-peaceful protests in Seattle from 26 May through 22 August (some of them occurring on the same day), plus 59 peaceful protests. The qualitative report does not give these findings but condemns police response...
[The US Crisis Monitor] blames federal intervention for a jump in violent protests in [Portland] and in the rest of the State of Oregon. Why is that the fault of the law enforcers rather than the protesters?
The US Crisis Monitor, its sponsors, and its reporters are pretending to be data-driven where they are agenda-driven. The project is anti-police and pro-Marxist. Its data collection does not even conform to the project’s own coding rules. Its sources are biased."
I didn't realise that the $1-2 billion price tag was for May 26-June 8, 2020 alone. So the true cost of the George Floyd riots is actually much higher.
Related:
ZUBY: on Twitter - "Approximately 80 million people died in World War 2. That was only 3% of the world's population. Thus, can we conclude that World War 2 was mostly peaceful?"
Michael Malice on Twitter - "AR-15s are mostly peaceful and aren't even in use 99% of the time."
Meme - "93% Of This Dude is Not On Fire, New Report Finds"
7% of protests being violent is over 10x the covid fatality rate, yet liberals are so upset about that but not this
Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 on Twitter - "99.98% of aircraft on 9/11 had uneventful flights"
Study: Up To 95 Percent Of 2020 U.S. Riots Linked To Black Lives Matter - "Of the 633 incidents coded as riots, 88 percent are recorded as involving Black Lives Matter activists. Data for 51 incidents lack information about the perpetrators’ identities. BLM activists were involved in 95 percent of the riots for which there is information about the perpetrators’ affiliation... When unarmed black people comprise 1.2 percent (or less) of annual police shootings, it is alleged to be a gross injustice that may legitimize, or at least excuse, murder, and theft. Yet when an activist movement is linked with riots approximately 6 percent of the time it engages in public protest, we are to see that movement as “non-violent.” ACLED labels a 5 percent rate of police use of “force” — such as rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, and other crowd dispersal techniques — as “heavy handed.” Thus ACLED both claims a 6 percent rate of rioting is “peaceful” and “non-violent” and that a 5 percent rate of police response to such riots is “heavy handed.”... The violence is not limited to the extreme of rioting. It is pervasive in the summer 2020 protests. Of the 12,045 incidents recorded by ACLED, 1,143 — or nearly 1 in 10 — involved violence of some sort: rioting, looting, clashes with police, cars rammed into crowds, bystanders pepper-sprayed, armed attacks. Of these violent incidents, 84 percent involved BLM.These statistics could be interpreted as indicating BLM is unusually violent among U.S. political movements, but ACLED interprets it in a way that enables resentment against police. Widespread U.S. political demonstrations such as the Tea Party, however, almost never featured violence despite holding thousands of events. Tea Partiers were even known for cleaning up the public areas where they demonstrated. The report goes on amazingly to suggest that police standing behind barricades using tear gas and rubber bullets is a disproportionate use of force against rioting in Portland that has included the use of blinding lasers, rushes at barricades with clubs, destruction of public buildings, bomb-throwing, arson, and murder... According to many innocent victims of this wave of injustice, the police response is not robust enough."
So much for the lie that the riots have nothing to do with BLM
'Mostly peaceful' lets Black Lives Matter off the hook for real violence - "The ACLED team cataloged a total of 11,541 civil-society incidents from May 24 through Aug. 29. ACLED’s event coding is far from perfect. It is reliant upon media reports, which carries with it its own obscuring bias; it does not appear to account for property destruction fully; and it may omit incidents of public menacing, threats, and intimidation.For example, I was personally present to witness the violent threats in the streets of Washington toward attendees of President Trump’s convention address. For that date, ACLED lists three “peaceful protests” and one “protest with intervention.” The ACLED data set is, therefore, charitable toward anyone who, from May to August, wished to communicate that he or she might visit harm upon others. Still, of the 11,541 civil-society incidents recorded by ACLED, 1,101 — just under 1 in 10, or 9.54% — were violent, according to ACLED’s own classifications. This yields a “peaceful” rate of 90.46%, rather than the reported 93%. That’s because the latter figure only counted BLM-involved events. Looking at the whole data set gives a more comprehensive picture.In any case, a nearly 1-in-10 chance of civic violence seems like quite a risky proposition. The United States, after all, once set the standard for the absence of this sort of thing. It’s when you dig into that 9.54%, those 1,101 violent incidents, that things get interesting. ACLED helpfully records the participants. Looking at them shows that of the 1,101 violent incidents across 97 days, 933 of them directly involved Black Lives Matter. That’s 84.74% of the civic violence in America across summer 2020.This is where a tremendously interesting, alarming, and entirely unreported-by-the-media fact comes into focus: Black Lives Matter participated in the overwhelming majority of civic violence this summer. The answer to our first question is that ACLED’s own data shows that the media characterization of BLM as intrinsically peaceful is misreporting. As for the second — is 93% peaceful really that low a figure? — requires a bit of perspective. As it happens, a 1-in-10 chance of violence is not particularly low. Looking to expertise in civil-society breakdown reveals it to be quite the opposite: a remarkably high rate of civic failure.Consider, for example, that only 2% of fatal police shootings involve the death of an unarmed African American. By media logic, that’s 98% peaceful. Of course it’s not, and BLM is prepared to bring real revolutionary violence to the U.S. to change it. Looking at the ACLED data, as opposed to trusting the media spin on it, illuminates the extent to which the Black Lives Matter movement is both unusually violent and uniquely responsible for civic violence in communities coast to coast... no one, anywhere, ought to be acquiescing to the demands of a movement whose legitimacy rests not upon law and democracy but upon menace and the mob. It’s probably too late to save professional sports and much of corporate America from that self-abasement, but people can and should be prepared to say no. Every person of goodwill and decency supports racial and civic equality in law and society; it is foundational to the American promise. A movement that physically attacks history, communities, and fellow people is not promulgating that creed.For another thing, we can speak the plain and empirical truth about Black Lives Matter and its radical allies. That means discarding euphemisms like “mostly peaceful” and speaking forthrightly about its leading role in fostering violence. That very role also means that we stop talking about it as a protest and start talking about it as an insurgency — or insurrection."
BLM Nominated For New Nobel 'Mostly Peaceful' Prize | The Babylon Bee
Fisher-Price Releases 'My First Peaceful Protest' Playset With House You Can Actually Burn Down | The Babylon Bee - ""Here at Fisher-Price, we are steadfastly committed to social justice," said toy designer Camden Flufferton. "We need to teach our kids what democracy looks like, and there's no better example of democracy in action than violent vandalism and arson. We hope this new playset will serve as an inspiration for parents wanting to teach their kids how to threaten citizens with violence whenever their demands are not met."... Experts are questioning the wisdom of this move by Fisher-Price, mainly because people in the target market don't typically have any kids. "We know we'll probably only sell, like, 3 of these," said Flufferton, "but selling them isn't the point. We just need you to know we're on the right side of history.""
BLM's 'Mostly Peaceful' Riots Cost 1000x More in Damage Than Jan. 6 Capitol Unrest - "the Capitol suffered approximately $1.5 million in damage from the Jan 6. incursion... the $1.5 million stands in stark contrast to the estimated over $1 billion costs caused by damage from BLM rioters... Somehow, the left equated calls for investigations into the 2020 election with the violence spawned at the Capitol, but their own calls for action against police brutality were not equated with last year’s riots or with a rise in violence against law enforcement. Some even condoned last year’s violence, claiming it was a legitimate response to injustice."
Looks like the Capitol Riot should've been called "mostly peaceful" too
Stop pretending the BLM protests were peaceful - "the term “peaceful protest” doesn’t seem to quite capture the impact of a society-wide upheaval that included, as a key component, mass riots — the magnitude of which have not been seen in the U.S. since at least the 1960s. From large metro areas like Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul, to small and mid-sized cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana and Green Bay, Wisconsin, the number of boarded up, damaged or destroyed buildings I have personally observed — commercial, civic, and residential — is staggering. Keeping exact count is impossible. One might think that a major media organisation such as the New York Times would use some of their galactic journalistic resources to tally up the wreckage for posterity. But roughly six weeks later, and such a tally is still nowhere to be found. A standard retort one often hears is that “the riots” must not be conflated with “the protests,” which is technically accurate in certain contexts. But the distinction is not as obvious as the media like to make out. In many locations, police and fire services were diverted to accommodate these massive protests, which in turn created a vacuum that enabled the outbreak of riotous activity. As one resident of Minneapolis explained to me, emergency services told him that they would simply be unavailable during the weekend of 29-31 May, while other locals recounted with amazement that police were totally absent as their neighbourhoods burned. In Milwaukee, a man described being chased down by rioters after getting off the bus on his way home from work. He saw no difference between protesters and rioters; the flippant idea that these groups can be so neatly disentangled is wrong. This view is just as likely to be espoused by black people and other minorities as anyone else (the Milwaukee man was black), which renders the media’s strident insistence to depict the ‘movement’ as entirely peaceful incongruous with the perceptions of working-class Americans (of all races). So many of them experienced what transpired more as a painful tragedy than any kind of wondrous harmony. Indeed, the resulting destruction may have set their majority-minority neighbourhoods back economically for months or years, if not longer. Most had already been struggling due to the pandemic, with the riots interrupting fragile reopening plans. To exclude the perspectives of these people from popular media narratives amounts to a kind of purposefully obfuscatory, moralising snobbery. Talk about ‘erasure’... media elites desperately do not want to undermine the moral legitimacy of a ‘movement’ that they have cast as presumptively righteous. And highlighting that urban minority populations are generally less enthusiastic about a movement whose mantra is “Black Lives Matter” would be embarrassing for obvious reasons. The white liberals and Leftists who claim to be so sensitively attuned to the feelings of minorities clearly spend very little time actually talking to working class non-white people — or at least those who happen to fall outside their activist cohort. If they did, they would be saddened to discover that, unlike them, working class non-whites frequently express “small-c” conservative cultural attitudes. For instance, black Americans whom I’ve spoken to on the street across America in randomly-selected encounters were almost unanimous in their approval of the National Guard deployments to their neighborhood during the riots. If anything, their main criticism was that these deployments came too late to prevent the destruction. This certainly makes the emotional meltdown of coddled 20 and 30-something journalists, who seriously claimed that they were “endangered” by a U.S. Senator’s NYT column advocating for a military presence to maintain order in cities, look especially disconnected and bizarre. So one could understand why the media would be reluctant to feature the “voices” of minorities who take an alternate view. There’s also the barely-hidden fear that properly depicting the after-effects of these riots would somehow “help Trump” during an election year. Even if it could be established as true that reporting on a historically significant event would “help” the incumbent president, refraining from such reportage on that ground would obviously be wildly improper from a journalistic perspective... For all the non-stop hysteria painting Trump as some kind of maniacal fascist, it truly is a lousy fascist who fails to leverage widespread social unrest and instability to consolidate power... Trump or no Trump, the lack of adequate coverage is the true affront. It should be more widely known that large swathes of a major American metropolis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, still lies in rubble over a month after the riots. And the main perpetrators of this destruction — namely those who committed the most incendiary arson attacks — were, by many accounts relayed to me directly, white Left-wing activists. Refusing to seek out and accurately present this information reflects the mainstream media’s propensity to operate under predetermined, politicised assumptions that are antithetical to any rightly-understood conception of journalism. Travelling around Minneapolis, one frequently sees the anarchist “A” symbol scrawled on charred and/or boarded-up buildings, as well as catchphrases like “Viva La Revolucion” — expressions typical of Left-wing activists. Indeed, it’s abundantly clear that there was a strong ideological component to these riots, one that’s also been under-emphasised by the media, again likely because of the belief that it could in some vague sense “help Trump.”"