I was present at several of the protests in Portland that supposedly burnt down the city.

In all cases they were pretty mild until the police escalated. Like people were rightfully pissed but they were largely marches and chants until driven into a corner by riot cops who were all too ready to blanket downtown in tear gas and rubber bullets

There were elements that would go to the justice center and shake the fence and scream at the cops but nothing that justified the national guard showing up. Looting and such always occurred in the chaos ensuing after an extreme attempt to clamp down on peaceful protest.

Interestingly, a lot of what you saw in the media dictated liberal responses to it. The Democratic and Republican takes are so driven by the tv news. So, you got a crash course in the root cause of a lot of stupid liberal takes. Though, I will say, maybe where you are the liberals are this backwards, but in the US—I mean…they still got some stupid statist takes, but I would strike a few of these. Liberals were mostly supportive. In fact, the George Floyd protests radicalized some liberals I know.

They are still scared statists at heart, but I think a lot more of these are conservative takes than liberal takes. US Liberals are more the “ease off the gas” crowd and the “if you care so much, vote” crowd. Not so much the “protesters are mad they lost the election” and “police repression is A-OK” crowd.

A few of these feel like they were said about conservatives but holy shit did you hit the nail on the head with property damage and corpo rep.

Like “you have to accept the election result” is a liberal thing to say, but the “no matter the cost” bit is something a conservative would say when their dickbag is winning. Things like “protesters are just mad they lost the election” or “Antifa are the real fascists” or “Police repression is A-ok” are all things I’d more much more likely hear from a conservative than a liberal.

Notably, it is missing the separation of protestors into “good protestors” and “bad protestors,” which is what I associate with liberals talking about protestors. Most liberals feel bad watching a young kid getting brutalized by the cops, but if they can abjectify them by separating them into good and bad protestor dichotomy, thats how they can say police repression is A-ok.

Honestly, you should just draw parallels between the liberal response to the pro-palestine encampments, since they responded similarly

• “those people are probably outside agitators, they knew what they were getting into, and therefore the police action was justified”
• “those antifa kids are the bad protestors ruining our peaceful protests!”
• “<parroting police report uncritically>”

Also, the protests here were pretty violent in some cities and at at some points, but in practically every case the violence began with the police, as you’d probably expect if you paid attention to history.

The nonviolent ones were only nonviolent if you ignored the police response to them, though a few token peaceful marches with minimal police presence happened here and there.

And for full disclosure, I don’t consider property damage violent unless it was done solely for the purposes of threatening someone. Smashing a cop car up isn’t violent, but breaking a window and spraying hateful graffiti is violent.

I lived in Minneapolis during the protests, and someone did light up a gas station just a block from my house, but I wasn’t concerned - I’d already prepared to lose everything when I joined the protests. Fighting back against the government is going to take sacrifices, both from willing and unwilling participants; if we’re too afraid of stepping on people’s toes, then those in power will just use that angle to quash any up-and-coming resistances.

If protests are something people can just ignore until they’re over, then that’s what they’ll do - they need to be polarizing in order to actually get people to make a change. The enemy of positive change isn’t always negative change - it’s often an apathetic population who would rather not put forth the effort to make any change at all. If people are pressured to take a side by a sufficiently disruptive protest, they’ll usually join their fellow downtrodden, but you need to force them to make that decision.

I was protesting in Minneapolis at the time. Protests occurred and were peaceful during the day, whereas opportunist rioters stayed out at night in spite of curfew and rioted. There was also the infamous “umbrella man” white supremacist who burned down an AutoZone during the day. Of the 17 people convicted of arson during the unrest, only 3 were from Minneapolis/St. Paul; the rest commuted in to raise hell.

I do not want to downplay the property destruction of the rioters; I cleaned up several torched buildings in the aftermath and it was sad and scary. But the people who rioted were not protesters in my experience.

The ones marching were primarily liberals and leftists. The conservatives and centrists were the ones this bingo card should be talking about.

Not even slightly, the overwhelming majority of protests were 100% peaceful, and the rare incidence of violence received wall-to-wall media coverage. Here in Austin, TX, I saw a crowd of people protesting like I had never seen before, thousands of people matched from an HBCU here to the state capitol without incident. That one and the hundreds, maybe thousands like it barely made the news.

The “liberals” this bullshit graphic is trying to demonize were the ones doing the marching.

Considering that US liberals were the main participants in the Floyd protests, ‘arguing with liberals’ seems like a bizarre label for this.

I went to one in California. They kettled us in (basically surrounded us) with armed riot police and then fired tear gas shells at us from mortars.

The protest generally became violent after the cops did.

Some were chill some were not.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests

My personal experience: More cops at city center cause there were protesters. And asshole teenagers saying it was his fault in game lobbys.

Edit: They were probably asshole adults, but they just sound like idiot kids to me.