Right-wing provocateurs continue to instigate violence

Proud Boys and others who infiltrated BLM demonstrations haven’t stopped wreaking havoc

This story was updated on Jan. 12, 2022.

In a ten-week period during the “Freedom Summer” of 2020, almost 9,000 Black Lives Matter protests occurred across the country. Many people believe most of those protests contained burning buildings, vandalized and looted businesses, and physical confrontations between police and demonstrators.

The truth is that such violence was confined to only 7 percent of those protests that occurred between May 25 and July 31, 2020. That’s not according to BLM. That’s according to a police group representing the nation’s largest cities, the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

So which cities had the most violent protests? Seattle, which Donald Trump and his merry band of right-wing sycophants often vilified, had to be up there, right? Nope. Only 16 percent of protests in Seattle turned violent. Other Team Trump targets, including New York, LA, Chicago, and Detroit, all turned in violent figures of less than 10 percent. Even Minneapolis, ground zero for BLM where George Floyd was killed, only had 20 percent of its demonstrations fall violent.

Portland, another Trump target, was up there with 62.5 percent of demonstrations degenerating into violence. But Denver [68 percent] and Columbus, Ohio, [63.8 percent] cited higher percentages. No other of the 67 total cities reported a figure higher than 27 percent.