Gold star for framing there!
Your tell was referring to all of that as BLM riots vs BLM protests. The protests themselves were by definition virtuous (a first amendment action at its core), whereas the riots were an ugly aftermath of that.
If those riots bother you, are you bothered by the fact that outside agitators might have fanned the flames? Case in point: https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/06/02/whats-up-with-umbre...
This was absolutely the case, as clip after clip showed umbrella man and others performing and inciting vandalism and chaos. Meanwhile, actual protestors were pleading with them to stop or directly intervening to stop them.
In each case, the instigators were young, white and frequently dressed in all black. Early arrestees matched this description and were frequently from out of town.
There was absolutely an infiltration/false flag operation. It amazes me how little this has been covered and how successful they were at establishing their narrative, even while so obvious.
Likewise, I'm amazed by how "Antifa" magically materializes at such opportune times for driving certain political narratives, then disappears again, yet there's very little questioning as to who these anonymous people really are. Instead, media and others just accept that they are who they say and assign them to a political "side".
It's bogeyman story telling all over again, and depressingly effective.
Indeed. It's an efficient engine by now: create fear of other; convert to anger; implant puppeteers' bidding; repeat.
In fact, they've been so effective at instilling a persistent, generalized fear, they can skip straight to the anger/action step.
The creation of Team Red v. Team Blue was a masterstroke of political manipulation, cementing American society into a never-ending genteel gang war.
And again, there was documented subterfuge to provoke these riots -- but according to you "it's all fair play"?
What I see reported about the anti-mask/vaccine protests are about as neutral as one could hope for such a crowd.
Let's see, one side is asking for the police to refrain from abuse of power and the other is people who don't want to take simple steps to help mitigate a pandemic. Hmmmmmm.....
The conservative persecution complex is a hell of a drug.
Reporting on lockdown/mask/covid protests has been so egregious and lopsided as to put Poe's Law to the test. Peacefully protesting business closures and weird, shifting mitigation mandates are apparently the worst kind of racist (journos' favorite smear). [1][2] If by "simple steps" you mean people losing their jobs because they can't Zoom into work from their pajamas or the "simple step" of showing medical papers to get sushi or the "simple step" of not seeing a dying loved one because of a bonkers government covid policy -- we might have different ideas of simple.
I'm not conservative, so the persecution complex insult doesn't really work on me, but I agree. Partisans love to feel persecuted because it gives them a sense of purpose. Conservatives are full of hypocrisy, just like liberals. But leftists and liberals are certainly not against abuses of power. They simply want state power to come down on political enemies in the right-wing.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/08/trump-sent-...
[1] https://www.salon.com/2020/05/04/anti-lockdown-movement-powe...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/sunday/anti-lockd...