BLM protests were overwhelmingly peacefull

The fact still remains.while i still acknowledge that blm protestors did go over the top its still a fact. (also i think this is in britain but either way fact remains)

I DONT support burning buildings  but what would you expect after decades of police brutality

Vague question, but maybe I'm reading it wrong.

that video is hilarious though i disagree with his points.

When I was a kid, my dad would tell us not to put our hands in our pockets, when inside a store, less it look as though we had stolen anything.

What buildings were burned down?

How do people find the time to protest.

Presumably they have nothing better to do.

Though I suppose that's logical, however one chooses to look at it.

I guess they've never been to portland.

duh.

First of all, I think the nomenclature is misleading.  BLM is a relatively small organization with only 9 chapters around the US.  There's not a membership list or a hierarchical governing structure.  BLM is essentially a handful of mostly queer, mostly black people who tweet a lot and run a website that highlights injustices and amplifies protests.  Yes, they will send out a tweet and email saying "everybody meet at 13th St. Baptist Church on Saturday to protest the murder of Jane Doe" but the odds that anybody from that organization will actually show up with a plan is pretty small.

There are advantages to this structure in terms of mamabirding investigations into local organizers and fuzzying up actual accountability but the primary disadvantage seems to be that most people think that most BLM protests are mostly Black and that's not always true, not even mostly true.  Within the actual Black CIvil Rights community of churches and NAACP members, BLM is barely tolerated and seldom considered representative.  I'm just saying, when we call somebody a BLM activist that generally means that they are shouting "Black LIves Matter" in the streets and wearing a BLM T-shirt.  That seldom means that anybody's taking any instructions from BLM.

What we are calling BLM protests were overwhelmingly George Floyd protests and protests against local police brutality and those protests would be more effective to be called by that name.  BLM did little more than blow a trumpet at most of these.

That said, BLM did do some actual organizing and representation in Minneapolis, LA, NY, and DC and I think it can be fairly said that some acts of violence were associated with marches they organized.  That doesn't change the fact that most protests against police brutality were overwhelmingly peaceful, daytime, socially distanced events while most of the violence and harm attributed to BLM took place at night with little political or social intent beyond "fuck the cops, let's fuck stuff up."  The racial makeup of those rioters varied widely and often according to regional demographics- in cities with large black core communities, we saw a lot of blacks but in terms of raw numbers the majority of damage attributed to BLM was done by white people.

Some building were definitely burned down, mostly in Minneapolis after police and firefighters withdrew from some neighborhoods during the rioting.  Famously, the 3rd Precinct Police Station was burned down on the second night of rioting.  About 150 buildings in mid-town Minneapolis were damaged by fire and a couple of dozen of these were total loses, including restaurants, gas stations, liquor stores and churches, overwhelmingly impacting non-white small businesses in the blackest neighborhood in the state.  As the Pioneer Press put it, "the irony of self-proclaimed advocates — many of them white — arriving from outside the city to burn down large strips of ethnic neighborhoods in the name of racial justice hasn’t been lost on residents of the Midway."

On June 13th, the night after Rayshard Brooks was killed by an Atlanta Police officer, Garret Rolfe (now facing felony murder charges), the Wendy's where Brooks was murdered was burned to the ground by Brook's 29-year old White mistress (now facing felony arson charges) among others.

Protests in Portland have continued throughout the past year and up to the present although violent protests in downtown Portland were commonplace long before BLM (George H. W. Bush famously dubbed Portland as "Little Beirut" after anarchists protested a campaign speech he made there in 1991).  Setting fires is fairly common and the City Hall, the County buildings, a police station and a city councilman's home have been targeted by arsonists in the past year although none of these buildings were totaled, nor people hurt, nor, as far as I can tell, were any Black people arrested for any of these crimes.  Portland is often called the whitest large city in America and it's probably true depending on how you define white and large city.  Portland is whiter than Salt Lake City or Omaha, which is saying something.  That Portland is hosting the longest running protests against racial disparities in policing says more about the virtue signaling nature of the protestors than the degree of injustice perpetrated by Portland Police (although Portland Police are under investigation for ties to White Supremacist organizations and collusion with White Supremacists to frame an unpopular Police Commissioner).

In my hometown, a beloved burger joint was partially damaged by fire at the height of the protests but a white homeless man with a grudge against the place was only taking advantage of the protests and is now facing felony arson charges.

We should note that FOX News must be given a lot of the responsibility for promoting the misconceptions of BLM  protests as mostly black arsonists.  Many media analysts have noted that when reporting from cities where BLM protests were mostly White, FOX substituted pictures of black protestors from other cities and dates.  When discussing protests generally or even specific totally peaceful protests, FOX employed pictures of buildings burning in Minneapolis, Ferguson and other violent riots from other times and places.

Well, I certainly didn't expect that.