49 Chicago police officers were injured by rocks, pipes, and fireworks while trying to defend the statue of Christopher Columbus in Grant Park. Despite their valiant defense of the man who discovered America, Mayor Lori Lightfoot sided with the BLM mob and had the statue removed anyway.
3 law enforcement personnel with the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service may face permanent eye injuries after having lasers shined in their eyes by Black Lives Matter rioters.
12 police officers were injured in Seattle by attackers throwing rocks, bottles, and fireworks.
These are some of the injuries suffered by large forces in a matter of days. By early June, I had tracked the cases of over 400 injured law enforcement officers in under two weeks of BLM riots. A month later, there are too many cases and too little reporting to even begin assembling any kind of complete picture.
A week after I complied my list, over 350 NYPD officers had been listed as injured in the BLM riots. By the middle of June, 75 law enforcement officers had been injured in the Denver Black Lives Matter riots.
Rifles, explosives, lasers, power tools, and firebombs are routinely used at the mostly peaceful protests.
Law enforcement officers have come away from what the media continues to falsely describe as “mostly peaceful protests” with fractured skulls, eye and ear injuries, and broken bones. Officers have been hit with bricks, baseball bats, and broken bottles. They’ve been shot, stabbed, and run over by vehicles.
The full total is not in the hundreds: it’s in the thousands. That’s a war zone.
And that’s just the law enforcement officers. No count has been kept of the civilians assaulted by the rioters. No one has assembled a list of store owners beaten and robbed by Black Lives Matter rioters.
Rough estimates place the scale of damage in the billions of dollars. Walgreens alone suffered $75 million in looting damage. Minnesota estimated damage to 1,500 businesses totaling $500 million.
This is wildly inconsistent with the media’s repeated false claims that the Black Lives Matter riots have been “peaceful”, “mostly peaceful”, “largely peaceful” or any other weasel words and modifiers.
Protests that injure thousands of police officers and cause billions in damage are not mostly peaceful.
They are mostly violent.
Carnage on this scale is not an accident or the work of a handful of unrelated people, as the media continues to falsely insist. When riots wound thousands and cost billions, the violence is not the aberration, it defines what the protests are and what they are intended to accomplish.
When marchers at a peaceful protest bring along crowbars, fireworks, and baseball bats, it’s not a peaceful protest. A genuinely peaceful protest would not allow marchers to bring weapons.
“The violence and pain and hurt that’s experienced on a daily basis by black folks at the hands of a repressive system should also be visited upon, to a degree, to those who think that they can just retreat to white affluence,” is not what a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest organizer sounds like.
The calls for violence and the acts of violence that define Black Lives Matter are not peaceful.
If Black Lives Matter were a peaceful organization, it would not draw its inspiration from Assata Shakur, who is wanted for murder by the FBI, and was the first woman on the Most Wanted Terrorist List.
Nationwide riots by a group that draws its inspiration from a domestic terrorist are not peaceful.
The media has covered this up by making a mockery of cause and effect and offering ridiculous euphemisms for violence that explain how mostly peaceful protests have ravaged entire cities.
“Protesters in California set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station and assaulted officers after a peaceful demonstration intensified,” ABC News offered. According to the media, when a peaceful demonstration “intensifies”, buildings start burning and police officers are assaulted.
But if violence is the result of a peaceful protest “intensifying” then it’s not a peaceful protest. Intensifying a thing brings out its true nature, rather than transforming it into something it’s not.
“Boston’s Peaceful Protests Turn Violent at Night,” a Voice of America headline claims.
Are Black Lives Matter protests werewolves who turn violent when they see the full moon? Does the night have some magical power that turns formerly peaceful protests into violent assaults?
“What changes a protest from peaceful to violent? Aggressive law enforcement,” CNN falsely claims.
If a protest is inherently peaceful, aggressive law enforcement won’t change that. Reopen protests by conservatives faced aggressive enforcement without resulting in rioting and looting.
Some of the worst Black Lives Matter riots have taken place in progressive cities like Portland, Minneapolis, and Seattle, under the watch of lefty politicians and black police bosses. If aggressive policing led to violent riots, the worst rioting should be in the least progressive cities, while progressive cities should be experiencing the least violent protests. Instead it’s the other way around.
The GOP and the Dems have aired dueling videos showing that BLM/Antifa mount violent riots or peaceful protests.
Guess what is the dividing line between them?
Daytime VS darkness.
ALL the Dems videos of peaceful protests were filmed during the day.
But after dark, many of those protesters go home and only the instigators and their useful idiots remain to be violent.
Gee, and nobody notices this?
There are “good people” who desire reform on the side of the protestors.
(Heck, the most in the GOP are pro-police reform!)
There are NO good people when the riots begin, only bad guys, some paid others in it for what they can get out of it.
This is because the “protests” are not against injustice; they are simply carried out where they can easily get away with the violence and destruction.
NONE of this is a result of anything Trump has done, not done, said or not said. It is all about the simple fact that he is President and the left can’t accept that. Now, thanks to the shenanigans of the DNC, they have Biden as the hope for an electoral victory. So, they have resorted to political terror to intimidate voters to vote, not for the best man, but for relief from terror. And, they want to blame the violence on Trump, but clearly, it is all their own idea.
@Nan G: If anyone is actually demanding “reform”, they would specify what needs to be reform and where that reform is needed. They don’t; they cite “systemic racism” yet destroy the most liberal cities in the country. Unless they are saying liberalism is racism, then they are saying the violence is merely for violence sake.