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Is America burning? (Black Lives Matter protests, civil unrest and riots 2020)

The defacing of the Cenotaph ages ago at the Reclaim the Streets demo when Churchill got his mohawk always seemed pretty dodgy to me. The Daily Mirror ran a full front page with blown up images of the people seen doing it with a "FIND THE GUILTY BASTARDS" style headline which they returned to the next day. I remember thinking, I wouldn't want to be in their shoes, they'll obviously be caught and suddenly, on day 3 -poof! - nothing. No campaign, no photos, no headlines, no one ever brought to justice. Almost like someone had made a phone call and called it all off.

That is a load of bollocks for a start. The person was 'exposed', someone very much an activist. So not what you're suggesting at all which is tinfoil hat territory.
 
it may have been earlier in this thread that boogaloo was mentioned, but whether or not ...

damn - paywall. it would be great if you could post up the actual text
e2a: the boogaloo mob are full-on out-to-lunch mentalists
 
it may have been earlier in this thread that boogaloo was mentioned, but whether or not ...


Inside the Boogaloo: America's Extremely Online Extremists
NYT. August 19, 2020

At first glance, the We Are Washington rally might have looked like an early Fourth of July celebration, all bright stars-and-stripes Americana. It was a cool May morning in the state capital, Olympia, and low clouds were threatening to ruin the red, white and blue archway of balloons above the rally stage, the crepe paper behind it and the cut-out letters propped up in front that spelled “FREEDOM.” Few people wore masks. A man with a pistol on his hip meandered through the several-hundred-person crowd selling tiny yellow Gadsden flags — the “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake — for $5 each to anyone who wasn’t already carrying something. A canopy of marker-drawn signs held above heads blared complaints about Covid-19 and the stay-at-home order declared by Gov. Jay Inslee, at this point in its 69th day. “0.2% Death Rate. No Muzzle”; “Inslee Is the Real Virus”; “Kim Jong Inslee.” Some took a more conspiratorial tone: “You Are Being Lied To.”

Near the back of the crowd was a social-media-ready selfie backdrop: a large Q made of squares of cardboard, lying on the grass in front of the Capitol building. Below it, a hashtag: #WWG1WGA, “Where we go one, we go all.” It’s the rallying cry for QAnon, the conspiracy theory that at its most basic centers on a Democrat-run child-sex-trafficking ring and at its most elaborate involves figures like the pope and Joe Biden having been executed in secret and replaced with holograms. It might seem, in other words, like an odd theory to float at a rally that was ostensibly about the reopening of the local economy. But around the country, events like this one had become a beacon to fringe thinkers: anti-vaxxers, internet trolls, gun nuts, Proud Boys, hate groups, antigovernment militias and any other Americans who interpreted social-distancing and face-covering regulations as an infringement of their constitutional freedoms.
 
Fair enough, I completely missed that

Constructing some quite grand agent provocateur theory over one incident that was something you weren't correct about is not a politically safe or sensible line of deduction, but glad you realize that now.
 
It's almost as if it isn't just some tiny minority group of vandals, just smashing things up for shits and giggles :confused:
I think that's exactly what it is. News reports say 100 - 200 people doing the violence. I suspect it's roughly the same group night after night. Tonight city hall and the police union building were attacked. This isn't protesting.
 
It is if they're attacking the Police Union building
There is a right to peacefully protest, not attack and attempt to burn buildings. The local politicians are weak. State troopers pulled out of downtown in disgust leaving local police under staffed and unable to do many regular police functions due to the rioting.
The Oregon State Police troopers who have been guarding the Mark O. Hatfield federal courthouse in downtown Portland have left the city as of Thursday, an OSP spokesperson confirmed......“At this time we are inclined to move those resources back to counties where prosecution of criminal conduct is still a priority,” said OSP Capt. Timothy Fox, in an apparent jab at District Attorney Mike Schmidt’s recent announcement that he would be dropping a significant portion of the more than 500 protester cases brought over the course of the demonstrations.
 
There is a right to peacefully protest, not attack and attempt to burn buildings. The local politicians are weak. State troopers pulled out of downtown in disgust leaving local police under staffed and unable to do many regular police functions due to the rioting.

It's still the Police Union building. Every time a cop kills an unarmed person, they fight to the death, to shield him from justice. If it was some blameless small independent retail outlet that got torched, I'd oppose that. It's not. The police are 100% the forces of oppression, always have been. And the PU helps them get away, quite literally, with murder
 
There is a right to peacefully protest, not attack and attempt to burn buildings. The local politicians are weak. State troopers pulled out of downtown in disgust leaving local police under staffed and unable to do many regular police functions due to the rioting.

Folk sometimes do things without the "right" granted by the state; frankly it looks like your country could do with many more people challenging the racist state; rights or no rights.
 
I think that's exactly what it is. News reports say 100 - 200 people doing the violence. I suspect it's roughly the same group night after night. Tonight city hall and the police union building were attacked. This isn't protesting.
If it were just 100-200 people rioting for 89 days, the police — with all the resources of the state behind them — would have had those 100-200 people banged up a long time ago. And the arrests would have had momentum too — arrest 50 and that’s 25-50% of their problem gone. You have to be extremely naive or blindly ideological to think that just 100-200 people can sustain 89 nights of property destruction.
 
I think that's exactly what it is. News reports say 100 - 200 people doing the violence. I suspect it's roughly the same group night after night. Tonight city hall and the police union building were attacked. This isn't protesting.
As kabbes pointed out. There's a helluva lot more than that out on those streets. This is a real mass movement.
 
I think that's exactly what it is. News reports say 100 - 200 people doing the violence. I suspect it's roughly the same group night after night. Tonight city hall and the police union building were attacked. This isn't protesting.
Why isn't it iyo protesting?
 
There is a right to peacefully protest, not attack and attempt to burn buildings. The local politicians are weak. State troopers pulled out of downtown in disgust leaving local police under staffed and unable to do many regular police functions due to the rioting.

You'd be up in arms if the Boston tea party happened today
 
There is a right to peacefully protest, not attack and attempt to burn buildings. The local politicians are weak. State troopers pulled out of downtown in disgust leaving local police under staffed and unable to do many regular police functions due to the rioting.

The US Constitution guarantees all kinds of rights - it's the fact that they're not actually being honoured that has led to these events - but do let us know if such concepts are beyond your grasp...
 
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