Hacker News Reader

Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I witnessed the 2020 protests firsthand and saw no looting or riotous behavior; only marching. Commercial theft seems to have been, overwhelmingly, performed by opportunists and not the protesters themselves, and only one actual property fire was recorded[1].

This is in direct contrast to the efficient cause of the riots during January 6th, which was political and not opportunistic in nature. Attempting to discharge the responsibility of those involved in the latter by appealing to the former is distasteful, to say the least.

[1]: https://citylimits.org/2020/06/09/how-widespread-was-violenc...

View on HN

Well I can assure you the protesters in Minneapolis were violent, destructive, and I personally saw hundreds of protesters looting stores, breaking ATMs, smashing windows etc. etc. Hell, the protesters even burned down the police precinct.

The riots in Minneapolis were worse by every metric than Jan 6. And in some cases orders of magnitude (cost of damage, for one). And I'll tell you what else - a lot more people are going to jail for the Jan 6 riots than the Minneapolis ones.

Not that there is a reason to compare the two, but a mob of people going after the elected leaders of a democratic country, especially during election procedures, has far more implications and ramifications on a country than looting.

Its actually much worse to unleash violence on poor communities and immigrant business owners.

I can't speak for Minneapolis, because I don't live there. But I'm actively invested, as a New Yorker, in dispelling myths about what it was like here.

As for whether things were "worse": I consider the political and cultural damage of storming our nation's Capitol worse than just about anything you can put a bill of damage on. You can't put that kind of cultural trespass back in the box the way you can with "ordinary" protests and riots.

> I witnessed the 2020 protests firsthand and saw no looting or riotous behavior;

No, you witnessed a tiny portion of the protests.

I personally know of business owners whose businesses were looted, literally just local store owners.

I am not denying that stores were looted, or excusing looting.

Read the comment carefully: the distinction is between protesters and opportunists, with the latter not being protestors. There is no evidence that protestors individually or collectively engaged in looting.

Are you going to make the same distinction for all the peaceful protesters on January 6th who never entered the Capitol? Because if not I don't really see a difference.

Actually, I do make that distinction, and I think most people do as well. I'm not particularly enthused about the initial protest, but I would not characterize the protestors who did not enter the Capitol (and did not encourage others to do so) as "rioters."

I haven’t heard of any investigation, much less charges leveled, of people who protested but did not enter the Capitol.

People who might know of / ultimately be charged with incitement have been subpoenaed, but again, I don’t know of any charges. Anyone pressing such charges will have to show a clear line between first amendment speech and not, so they are going to be careful not to waste their time.

I and all my personal friends make that distinction about both sets of events. Regardless - reading a thoughtful, honest post that you happen to disagree with on some ideological level, and projecting your internal image of a hypocritical political enemy onto them by extrapolating to things they didn't say, is one of the most common forms of conversation poison.

> projecting your internal image of a hypocritical political enemy onto them by extrapolating to things they didn't say, is one of the most common forms of conversation poison.

Can you explain how they did this?

> I witnessed the 2020 protests firsthand and saw no looting or riotous behavior;

If that isn’t meant to imply there wasn’t any looting, then why did you add it?

The rest of what you said is just about definitions and is irrelevant to the facts of what happened.

“There is no evidence that protesters engaged in looting”

That’s because you use a different name for the people who did. You have no way to be certain nobody who looted wasn’t also there to protest, so the labelling doesn’t mean anything.

In aggregate the protests unquestionably led to looting that wouldn’t otherwise have happened. The fact that not all protesters were looters is irrelevant. The looting was part of the protesting, even if not all protesters supported it.

> If that isn’t meant to imply there wasn’t any looting, then why did you add it?

Because there's a falsehood in the original post: that protestors were somehow responsible for the riotous behavior. The original post then goes on to use that falsehood to justify a different instance of riotous behavior, except that the specifics are inverted: the protestors and rioters during J6 were in the same crowd.

The labeling means a lot in terms of the legitimacy and legacy of the single largest American civil rights protests in the last 50 years. I'm proud of the ways that hundreds of thousands of New Yorks peacefully and righteously comported themselves during the protests, and I do not want their legacy unduly influenced by opportunists. We should judge them not by others' actions.

Right - so you are trying to use language to separate the actions of the protesters from the actions of the looting.

I don’t think it’s that simple. The riots only happened because of the protests. The protests interfered with the police response, and the protesters didn’t stop the looting themselves.

That doesn’t make the protesters into looters, but it does mean that the looting was a side effect of the protests and the protesters bear some responsibility for that.

The protesters actions had consequences, one of which was to enable looting and the destruction of people’s livelihoods.

I’m fine if you want to say that the cost was worth it to make this political statement, but I think it’s ludicrous to pretend that the looting would have happened without the protesters.

> That doesn’t make the protesters into looters, but it does mean that the looting was a side effect of the protests and the protesters bear some responsibility for that.

This is a chilling and dangerous responsibility to burden protestors with: are we to argue that every single person who protested peacefully outside of the Capitol on J6 is responsible for the rioters and insurrectionists who stormed in? They did, after all, interfere with the police response and provide moral support for the single greatest outrage against our government in nearly two centuries.

Our cultural and legal standards of free speech enshrine protest, and ensure that protestors are not vilified for actions that are not theirs. I do not think we should undermine that.

> are we to argue that every single person who protested peacefully outside of the Capitol on J6 is responsible for the rioters and insurrectionists who stormed in?

Didn't the government already decide the answer to this is "yes", though, by filing criminal charges against people just for being there?

> This is a chilling and dangerous responsibility to burden protestors with:

No it’s not. It’s simply a reality. The way the chose to protest facilitated the looting. When the looting started they could have ended the protest and summoned the police.

You seem to be conflating legal liability with responsibility. I’m not saying they should be prosecuted.

I’m saying that it’s just a mental fantasy to pretend they don’t bear responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

> are we to argue that every single person who protested peacefully outside of the Capitol on J6 is responsible for the rioters and insurrectionists who stormed in?

Sure - once it became a riot, if people stuck around and got in the way of the police, they certainly bear responsibility.

> They did, after all, interfere with the police response and

Yes, and they are responsible for thst.

> provide moral support for the single greatest outrage against our government in nearly two centuries.

Moral support is a different matter.

> Our cultural and legal standards of free speech enshrine protest, and ensure that protestors are not vilified for actions that are not theirs.

Preventing police from doing the job of protecting business from being looted is their action.

> I do not think we should undermine that.

Blocking police from doing their jobs is not speech.

Nobody is talking about limiting free speech or protests. That’s a red-herring.

To me the comparison is very accurate. On both occasions there were mostly peaceful protests and some opportunist. The fact that you call one a protest and another a riot is quite telling of your bias.

The key observation is that the NY protests had two discrete groups: protestors, and opportunists.

There was no such distinction during J6: the opportunists who did storm the Capitol and menace our legislative branch started as protestors, and promoted themselves to riotous behavior when the opportunity presented itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com