16 Comments

>>(This suggests, by the way, that cops should spend more time protecting stores during protests, and less time policing the protesters themselves.)

I think this speaks to the fact that there's a rarely-questioned police prejudice against protesters - specifically, the assumption that looting and protesting are done by the same people.

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Dec 2, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Maybe it's just that I'm not in the 5% of Americans that watch TV cable news, or living under a rock in some other way, but I've literally never heard that before, that the "The George Floyd Protests were a Civil War".

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> There are a few cities where riots appear to have outnumbered peaceful protests — most notably Portland (where all reported demonstrations were violent!),

I'm a Portlander, and this is a very irritating sentence. The Portland Police Bureau declared all the protests to be riots, yes. Many of those declarations happened just about the instant night fell, prior to any violence or property damage occurring, and were immediately followed by the PPB tear-gassing protestors to "quell the riot". Taking the police's classification of anti-police protests at face value is not responsible journalism.

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Speaking of remembering details as you do at the end of your essay. My recollection is that right wing figures were imaging there would be a civil war before the Floyd protests. Consequently, those same actors label those protests as a civil war. I believe that progressives ought to attempt to avoid violence. Elements of the right see male capability for violence as an essential element of masculinity.

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What's a good book (or 2 or 3!) on the Spanish Civil War?

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