It's incredibly self-serving - this rhetoric is intended to legitimize and allow one side's speech and actions while suppressing the other side. Committed activists and partisans first proclaim "your speech is violence" as they seek to censor/deplatform/demonetize anyone who opposes their views. Then they proclaim "your silence is violence", and demand you (or the company you work for) exhibit their political views. Finally, they also proclaim "our violence is speech" as they participate in large-scale rioting and property damage but then try to cast those actions as legitimate "civil disobedience". It's just one big bag of gaslighting, broken logic, and arbitrary redefinition of common language.