His point was literally that the media inherently focuses on the most violent aspects, because they’re sensational. Your comment just supports the idea that Americans’ views have been shaped by sensationalist media coverage.
Just out of interest, were you a paid subscriber? I just checked your profile and noticed you are a QAnon nutjob.
So knowing that a deranged, reactionary recluse like yourself wasted money donating to a centre-left liberal would be super satisfying. But if you weren’t a paid subscriber then I don’t think Noah would care either way 🤷🏻♂️
Yes, I was a paying sub. Just canceled. I'm more than open to honest debate from both sides. But Noah is just turning out to be trumpeting the MSM now.
By the way, your personal attacks are why more and more people are leaving the left now.
They are not "Biden's funds." It would be great if they actually were, but it turns out it is US Treasury funds. These funds come in part from collected taxes of people who actually pay them. The rest (majority?) of the funds come from borrowing from the future in the form of increased national debt. The reason factories will be built in the places they are being built is because those are the best places to build them, at least according to the folks who have control over the funds.
Also, even if there were fewer deaths, there seemed to be a lot more violent looting than was associated with anything that could be rightfully called a protest. My city was lucky enough to have no fatalities, but still many small businesses were completely ransacked. Many of them have not and will never recover.
Your city appeared to have experienced one of the riots. As Noah pointed out clearly, the definition of "riot" is police report of violence and looting.
His own stats are damning. 25 people died. 25. $2 BILLION in damages, the most expensive in insurance history. The irony is many of those businesses they burned down were run by mom and pops, and some of those were minorities. All for the media lie that he was suffocated by police. Autopsy said suffocation wasn't the cause of death. He had "‘no life threatening injuries identified’ and reveals high levels of multiple additional toxic drugs on top of the Fentanyl that was initially reported.”
FYI, that is factually incorrect. Both autopsies determined that George Floyd’s death was a homicide. Chief Medical Examiner Andrew Baker’s autopsy findings explicitly stated that “Floyd's heart stopped while he was being restrained and that his death was a homicide caused by cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” The fact that fentanyl intoxication and underlying heart problems increased the likelihood of Floyd dying as a consequence of Chauvin compressing his neck does not change the fact that Floyd died as a result of Chauvin compressing his neck.
Your argument here is the equivalent of claiming that Private William Santiago from A Few Good Men wasn’t actually murdered by Dawson and Downey, since it was the underlying coronary condition he had that increased the likelihood of him dying due to their actions.
Homicide is not always murder. Argument is that a healthier Floyd would have survived; not sure Chauvin had murderous intent. Rather gratuitous to run all four cops through both state and federal prosecutions. Tou Thao was just sentenced to more than state guidelines.
More egregious cases of police misconduct out there, e.g. Daniel Shaver. Yet no rioting. Not sure why Floyd garnered so much sympathy; maybe it was time to whack on the police, and he was convenient.
My guess is that more police departments have been strengthened than defunded as a result of the protests, but whatever the mechanism, I think its clear that we need better policing, probably larger numbers of police officers [the US has few police per capita than many European countries], more auxiliaries to handle things like traffic enforcement, more intelligence work to break up markets in stolen goods and guns.
The point is that the national protests were in fact mostly peaceful, as the comparison with smaller protests with more fatalities from past decades very clearly shows. I don't think he's "padding" things by talking nationally about the national protests.
He specifically called out Portland and Seattle as being different, just as you say.
I think it's pretty well established that Chauvin's knee on his back compressing his diaphragm was the proximate cause of death. The jury seemed to also believe unanimously that Chauvin was largely responsible, although i do have some degree of sympathy for some of the young cops who were on their FIRST WEEK ON THE JOB, and were put in an incredibly uncomfortable position by Chauvin, between defying their commanding officer, or saving a man's life who was being murdered and probably never working another day in the police department again. From what I remember, they even tried to get him to take his knee off his back but Chauvin's response was "he's staying right here". Floyd was not a great guy, there are accounts of him pointing a gun at a pregnant woman during a home invasion, and the entire reason the cops were called in the first place was because he tried to pass a counterfeit bill, but what happened to him was obviously tragic and inexcusable.
My thoughts on the protests were that they harmed a lot of innocent people, almost certainly resulted in people dying from and spreading COVID due to people congregating together, destroyed the credibility of public health officials and epidemiologists who declared en masse that racism is a public health issue that the virus shalt respect, but apparently Orthodox Jewish funerals were unacceptable before that, destroyed black owned businesses, and created a lot of weird behavior and lack of civility in people due to being cooped up inside, and the stress of dealing with the virus. The original goal of police misconduct wasn't resolved imo, and the police have responded by pulling back, and not doing traffic stops or anything where they could be filmed or caught on camera. I think a lot of cops were scared shitless watching what was happening, and the mentality is now don't do anything more than what's required, but the people who have been hurt the most by this are African-Americans living in neighborhoods that need better policing. Maybe my thoughts will be different in 5-10 years, if actual legislation is passed with more independent oversight of police, but I'm skeptical of that happening.
How can you scientifically determine whether a gathering is a riot or a protest? It seems like any biases the stats gatherers have are going to be heavily reflected in that data. It's quite subjective.
Also, w.r.t. deaths per capita vs. the civil rights movement protests... I would like to see the causes of death. I'm not sure I'm convinced that the violent nature of a protest is always correlated with the deaths. For instance, if you found out that all the 30 or so who died during the Watts protests died from being trampled, whereas all 20 or so who died during the Floyd protests died from blunt force trauma or bullet wounds or stabbings, I would still tend to think the latter were more violent.
The role of the Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys, and the police themselves in instigating violence, rioting, and vandalism has just been completely memory-holed, and appreciate that this article at least mentions that they played a role, but it needs more discussion.
Noah, I don't think many of your paid subscribers thought we were in a civil war. Maybe you wanted to run this on Fox News? =)
One of the things I appreciate about your commentary is that, while you are left-leaning (like me), you really try to see the other perspective, rather than just assume bad faith.
I wanted to offer that you missed one key piece of the right-wing perspective on the Floyd protests. Namely, that these occurred during a period of mandated social distancing and lockdowns. Contemporaneously, right-wing protests against the lockdowns themselves were put down comparatively quite harshly.
I personally marched down Manhattan's 8th Avenue with BLM protestors that Summer. That's the side I'm on. I still don't have a hard time seeing why the mere fact that these protests were allowed at all is enraging to the political right.
And, crucially to your point, thousands of "public health experts" put out a letter saying left wing protests should be allowed and right wing protests should be suppressed. And the media gave this fawning coverage.
I saw a lot of arguments like that at the time. Basically, that systemic racism was a public health issue on par with Covid. Often, accompanying statistics about health outcomes disparities were presented. The glaring hole, every time, was that there was no attempt to quantify the benefits for public health of the protests themselves, which were non-existent.
CDC and MSM performance on the pandemic were bad across the board. The was virtually no attempt to give people and local decisionmakers the information and tools with which they could make cost effective decisions about NPI according to local conditions.
But that no reason to condemn BLM demonstrations. Condemn the looting and the police that failed to prevent it, not the demonstrators.
I don't think it was just bad performance. It became undeniable that the public health authorities did not want the public to know the truth plainly if that would lead to undesirable behavior. Unfortunately, once people stop trusting you, it becomes a lot harder to influence their behavior. So it was both unethical and ineffective at the same time. Extremely embarrassing. Not just for the specific people in charge but, apparently, the entire ethos of the field.
I'm not condemning BLM. I participated. Just pointing out that Floyd protests being the only allowed mass gathering obviously enraged a lot of people.
Large events, even outdoors, were essentially illegal at the time. Sports, Concerts, classes, etc. were all not happening.
There is a ton of nuance to all this, I don't want to be reductive. I'm not trying to claim BLM protests should not have happened. I am just saying lockdowns are key to how these events are viewed by certain people.
Defunding the police and abolishing the police are not the same thing. Nuanced defunding the police means not paying the police to do things that police are not good at such as making emergency calls to subdue mentally ill people. Cori Bush is absolutely for defunding the police and will tell everyone who will listen that she identifies with poor people because she used to be poor herself.
Much of what you say is right. As far as I can see most urban politicians agree with you. If your local mayor does not vote them out. Exactly who are you mad at for doing what?
Great article and it addresses and important point, namely that it was nowhere near a civil war and was actually less violent than most past mass protests. In fact, both protesters and police were much less violent than the prior large civil disturbances. In addition, the COVID pandemic and lockdowns leading up the protests likely played a huge role in exacerbating the violence that did occur.
That said, I was in a building that was set on fire by protestors (there was very little danger, but it was interesting at the time) and watched several times as protesters blockaded the exits to police buildings and lit them on fire. This happened several times, as did violence against private politically oriented buildings (a police union in Portland was lit on fire so many times it had to move out of the city and Democratic political offices were also vandalized, and Seattle and Minn. both had extensive damage).
Finally, you mention the CHAZ but I think is worth noting that armed gunmen took over a large portion of a major city. This action was applauded and called "the summer of love" by local politicians. Until "security forces" and other elements killed and injured each other. This set a horrible precedent (what would it be like if armed right wing insurgents held a section of a major city for several weeks). I am always amazed at how this (and the politically motivated arsons) are downplayed. Taking over parts of cities with armed groups is no more OK than interfering with an election. Both are horrific and should be called out.
So, it is worth remembering that some fairly important norms around taking over parts of the US were broken. I would argue that anyone concerned about t January 6, and I am very concerned about acts aimed at suborning an election, need to remember that.
The rule of law exists precisely to prevent this kind of tit for tat violence. If one group is allowed to take over portions of major cities with armed gunman, the other political group will feel empowered to disrupt elections they believe to be fraudulent. It does not matter that they are wrong, in fact the reason we have a rule of law precisely because people will do stupid things particularly when they are wrong. We agree to disagree on a huge number of issues but then have institutions (that seem to be continually under attack) to resolve these issues. We should not engage in political violence and when one side does this it should be called out by all of us. This is something that both political parties seem to either support or ignore.
While some individuals acquitted themselves well in 2020/21, I think the big takeaway for all of us should be that very few organizations held up under the pressure. If we want to avoid something becoming a civil war later, we will all need to do better.
"Armed gunman took over a large portion of a major city" - I lived near there, that's not how I'd describe it. Perhaps "Idiots occupied a small park in a very sympathetic part of town, acted like idiots"
"Idiots occupied a small park in a very sympathetic part of town, acted like idiots"
This is just a sympathetic framing. "Acting like idiots" is just comically vague language. What is the limit of "acting like an idiot"? Homicide? Genocide?
Looking at a map now, it's not even half a percent of total land area in the city, probably less than a quarter of a percent... is this a "large portion"?
I'm from Seattle, went to school in Capitol Hill, and still live in WA state. If you are "looking at a map" to understand how Capitol Hill fits into Seattle, you are betraying your claim to have "lived near there".
Capitol Hill has over 30k residents and is quite centrally located. It's plainly a large, even if not minority, portion of a major city.
Except the part were people got killed. No offense but making light of that is kind of the same thing people (who I guess you disagree with politically) have been doing .
I am also looking an article now that says two people were killed and four more shot. That should be kind of a big deal. Not saying it is equal to Jan 6th due to the location and the fact that it inferred with an election. Alternately, saying that its ok to kill a couple people and shoot a few more because its only .5% of the city is kind of odd.
I think it was stupid, I'm not defending the CHAZ at all. Predictably, crime happened where policing stopped, but I don't think it helps at all to act like it was the second battle of Fallujah. Seattle is still here, it did not burn to the ground, it was never at risk of being taken over by Antifa or whatever.
The article is good, but the "no civil war" framing is a bit of a straw man. Point is what can demonstration organizers and police do to reduce violence during large scale demonstrations. I guess better said, what more?, since there was less law breaking during these protests than earlier ones.
Democrats contested the elections of 2000 and 2004. They refused to acknowledge Trump as the legitimate president in 2016. Abrams refused to concede defeat. Governors and Secretary of States changed state election laws unconstitutionally. They have refused to this date to allow inspection of signed affidavits for address changes in states like MI and GA. Thousands of witnesses saying they saw irregularities. GPS data of ballot mules going back and forth to drop boxes. If there's a civil war, make no mistake, the Uniparty (left and RINOs) were the ones who fired the first shot.
Just wanted to point out that this is also factually incorrect. In 2004, John Kerry conceded the election had been lost on November 3rd. The second claim that the democrats refused to acknowledge Trump as the legitimate president in 2016 is also false and doesn’t have a modicum of evidence to support it. On the 9th November, Hillary Clinton (the DNC nominee) explicitly congratulated Trump and “hoped he will be a president for all of our country.”
I'm not sure who "refused to acknowledge Trump as the legitimate president in 2016". A lot of people *said* they refused to acknowledge him, but how many people actually disobeyed executive orders, claiming that the person issuing them wasn't the president, and how many congress people refused to recognize his signature on a bill as valid?
Thanks Noah. However the belief that we are in Civil War is created by the incessant fear-mongering of the media which by and large is overwhelmingly controlled by the left.
Biden proclaiming 'white supremacists are the biggest threat to American Democracy' and the leftist media ignoring everything exposed by the Twitter files and ignoring all Hunter Bidens transgressions are some of the most absurd handlings of news. China is a much bigger threat to our Democracy and corrupt politicians an even bigger threat.
Trump might say things that people find crazy (because they are being brainwashed by the media) and he does sound like a moron most of the time, but the man is trying to avert war while the anti-war party of Democrats actively PUSH for continued war in Ukraine.
When Cuba got attacked by the US and they asked for Russian support afterwards, the US was threati y having it's biggest enemy on it's door step. We faced them head on. Putin is doing the same in Ukraine. Ukraine wants Putins enemy to setup shop 200 mi from Moscow. We did exactly what Putin is doing now. The West thinking Russia will let Ukraine join NATO without going to war are delusional. And the US pushing NATO for Ukraine inclusion is what instigated this. NATO is not interested in having Ukraine join (they are way too corrupt and we are only using it to antagonize Putin) and will not allow it in the future either.
It also seems that you forget that the Democrats disputed Trumps win and FALSELY claimed Russian interferences and tried to make everyone believe Trump and Putin are BFFs. The Democrats lied and used US intelligence agencies to fabricate false stories of Trump-Russia collusion to win the election. Why do you think Republicans would not dispute an election if they lose? How about Al Gore disputing the election outcome in 2000 and asking for repeated recounts of ballots?
"Biden proclaiming 'white supremacists are the biggest threat to American Democracy'"
Doddering semi-senile corrupt mediocracy of a man reading a teleprompter. At least he motivated some great memes with that speech. My personal favorite:
The thing about the Floyd riots/protests was not the riots or the protests. It was the sudden normalization of fringe ideologies that scapegoat our country, our society, and the majority of people in it. And it was the discovery of an elite to push these ideas forward as respectable and to trigger political action along their lines, though they are detestable to a large percentage of our society. *That* is what the right is mobilizing against.
If more widely accepted these ideologies would make it impossible for us with our differences to live together in the same country. At that point, I suppose you could call it civil war.
The other thing that gets lost in almost every account, including this one - is that the Portland protests were violent BECAUSE OF PROVOCATION by right wing agitators, like members of Patriot Prayer who had spent the previous few years consistently provoking fights with left wing youths in downtown Portland. By far the majority of participants in the protests were peaceful - people organized food and water donations, barbecued to feed the crowds, and danced on the lawns near the protest sites, made funny signs, brought their oh-so-Portland sense of humor to the Moms Protest and Dad leaf blower phalanxes. Not that there weren't some hyped up Antifa Black Blok types - unfortunately it's pretty easy in an extremely polarized climate to get young men (sorry I would say 99% male and 99% quite young) to really relish violent confrontation. But by and large (and I lived here through all of it) the violence was EXTREMELY localized (like a 10 block radius if that) - provoked every night by the incursion of right wing agitators, and Trump-dispatched violent, unidentified and way over-the-line security forces. Those of us in the rest of the city either went to the protests until early evening, then hived off home before things got crazy, or participated in the many completely nonviolent marches (and even 'car parades') that occurred regularly elsewhere in the city and were safer and quieter for families, older people and others. I am still gobsmacked by the number of people who insist Portland is a violent hellhole when the violent parts of the protests were localized, small and conducted mostly between two sets of testosterone-fueled agitators who were not supported by the vast majority of peaceful protestors. Portland has other problems but it is still a beautiful place with a vibrant and peaceful municipal culture . The protests were never a city-wide 'riot' - and the preponderance of protestors were peaceful, and simply outraged by the police conduct in the George Floyd case - and in Portland itself where the police force was not trusted by many citizens because of its bullying attitude and apparent racial discrimination.
My wife and I used to visit downtown and adjacent areas of Portland 3 or 4 times a year throughout the 90s and 00s. The dreaded gentrification of many neighborhoods turned them into nice places to visit, eat, drink, shop (OK, I just ate and drank), and so forth. But, the ever increasing amount of "urban campers" and "spangers" took its toll, and we stopped going. This was all before Floyd protests. I'm thinking the "occupy" crowd was the beginning of the "holy crap. look at all this crap" period, but maybe I am not remembering exactly. As for how violent the protests were, most all of us were not there, and only saw what our favorite internet silos wanted to show, and it looked bad.
Totally David - I don't mean to say there aren't issues downtown ,(and all around town) with homelessness, drugs etc. Just to note that the memeification of Portland as some sort of bizarrely and instantaneously violent hellhole was so disconnected from the realities of the historical moment the fighting arose from (incl decades of right and left wing skinhead battles across the PNW, among other things, as well as years of right wing agitation and provocation in PDX, mostly by nonresidents) that it really had very little to do with the complex roots , and small size, of the violence....
Thank you for your reply, Sarah. There are issues in all big city downtowns, some worse than others. Since you bring up "right wing agitation and provocation" as a main part of Portland's violence problems (I don't mean to put words in your mouth - if you meant something else, please correct me), I will refer to this article by a very much "left wing" individual as to why he moved out (but just to Salem). https://quillette.com/2021/03/14/leaving-portland/
BTW, I'm not a fan of this trend of people trying to label any form of human behavior as being a "right wing" or "left wing" thing. Those used to describe different theories of governance (e.g., capitalism or socialism and everything in between or beyond), but at this point its about labels for cultural attitudes, hair styles and tribal affiliations. I just learned the other day on a different substack that drinking cheap/bad beer is a right wing thing and that NPR tote bags are a left wing thing ...
Yeah right wing and left wing seem really out of date at this point - and the problematic desire on both 'sides' to rumble and violently confront others is just ... useless and troubling.
This suggests, by the way, that cops should spend more time protecting stores during protests, and less time policing the protesters themselves.
This ought to be one of the key points of policing reform, not what not to do (shoot or rough up unarmed civilians) but what they should do deter people from committing crimes and arrest those who do. Of course this is not just during protests. That's the job every day.
Glenn Loury is entitled to be appalled that there were any riots at all. But as I said on Twitter at the time it's a mistake to confuse a mass movement which represented however briefly a realization that racism had real impact in the people's lives with the country coming apart much less to describe everything that happened dismissively by "the riots".
Humble suggestion: limit comments to paid subscribers. This comment section used to be very informative and educational(and friendly), but is feeling more and more like twitter these days.
“Mostly peaceful”. Queue the chyron of cities burning. What a joke. Unsubscribing.
His point was literally that the media inherently focuses on the most violent aspects, because they’re sensational. Your comment just supports the idea that Americans’ views have been shaped by sensationalist media coverage.
Just out of interest, were you a paid subscriber? I just checked your profile and noticed you are a QAnon nutjob.
So knowing that a deranged, reactionary recluse like yourself wasted money donating to a centre-left liberal would be super satisfying. But if you weren’t a paid subscriber then I don’t think Noah would care either way 🤷🏻♂️
Yes, I was a paying sub. Just canceled. I'm more than open to honest debate from both sides. But Noah is just turning out to be trumpeting the MSM now.
By the way, your personal attacks are why more and more people are leaving the left now.
Have fun in your echo chamber.
They are not "Biden's funds." It would be great if they actually were, but it turns out it is US Treasury funds. These funds come in part from collected taxes of people who actually pay them. The rest (majority?) of the funds come from borrowing from the future in the form of increased national debt. The reason factories will be built in the places they are being built is because those are the best places to build them, at least according to the folks who have control over the funds.
You have a different data set, or you just dislike the adverb "mostly."
Also, even if there were fewer deaths, there seemed to be a lot more violent looting than was associated with anything that could be rightfully called a protest. My city was lucky enough to have no fatalities, but still many small businesses were completely ransacked. Many of them have not and will never recover.
Your city appeared to have experienced one of the riots. As Noah pointed out clearly, the definition of "riot" is police report of violence and looting.
His own stats are damning. 25 people died. 25. $2 BILLION in damages, the most expensive in insurance history. The irony is many of those businesses they burned down were run by mom and pops, and some of those were minorities. All for the media lie that he was suffocated by police. Autopsy said suffocation wasn't the cause of death. He had "‘no life threatening injuries identified’ and reveals high levels of multiple additional toxic drugs on top of the Fentanyl that was initially reported.”
FYI, that is factually incorrect. Both autopsies determined that George Floyd’s death was a homicide. Chief Medical Examiner Andrew Baker’s autopsy findings explicitly stated that “Floyd's heart stopped while he was being restrained and that his death was a homicide caused by cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” The fact that fentanyl intoxication and underlying heart problems increased the likelihood of Floyd dying as a consequence of Chauvin compressing his neck does not change the fact that Floyd died as a result of Chauvin compressing his neck.
Your argument here is the equivalent of claiming that Private William Santiago from A Few Good Men wasn’t actually murdered by Dawson and Downey, since it was the underlying coronary condition he had that increased the likelihood of him dying due to their actions.
Homicide is not always murder. Argument is that a healthier Floyd would have survived; not sure Chauvin had murderous intent. Rather gratuitous to run all four cops through both state and federal prosecutions. Tou Thao was just sentenced to more than state guidelines.
More egregious cases of police misconduct out there, e.g. Daniel Shaver. Yet no rioting. Not sure why Floyd garnered so much sympathy; maybe it was time to whack on the police, and he was convenient.
What police department has been defunded since the Floyd murder?
Looks like some cuts in ''21 that were restored in ''22:
https://therealnews.com/nobody-defunded-the-police-a-study
My guess is that more police departments have been strengthened than defunded as a result of the protests, but whatever the mechanism, I think its clear that we need better policing, probably larger numbers of police officers [the US has few police per capita than many European countries], more auxiliaries to handle things like traffic enforcement, more intelligence work to break up markets in stolen goods and guns.
I'm not sure what that damns. He acknowledges that this was a large set of chaotic behavior that cause some significant damage.
His claim is just that it was not a civil war or anything like that, and that it was mostly peaceful. Which the statistics support.
The point is that the national protests were in fact mostly peaceful, as the comparison with smaller protests with more fatalities from past decades very clearly shows. I don't think he's "padding" things by talking nationally about the national protests.
He specifically called out Portland and Seattle as being different, just as you say.
Why is that "padding?"
He doesn't refer to the riots as being mostly peaceful, but rather the protests in general. There really is no such thing as a "peaceful" riot.
I think it's pretty well established that Chauvin's knee on his back compressing his diaphragm was the proximate cause of death. The jury seemed to also believe unanimously that Chauvin was largely responsible, although i do have some degree of sympathy for some of the young cops who were on their FIRST WEEK ON THE JOB, and were put in an incredibly uncomfortable position by Chauvin, between defying their commanding officer, or saving a man's life who was being murdered and probably never working another day in the police department again. From what I remember, they even tried to get him to take his knee off his back but Chauvin's response was "he's staying right here". Floyd was not a great guy, there are accounts of him pointing a gun at a pregnant woman during a home invasion, and the entire reason the cops were called in the first place was because he tried to pass a counterfeit bill, but what happened to him was obviously tragic and inexcusable.
My thoughts on the protests were that they harmed a lot of innocent people, almost certainly resulted in people dying from and spreading COVID due to people congregating together, destroyed the credibility of public health officials and epidemiologists who declared en masse that racism is a public health issue that the virus shalt respect, but apparently Orthodox Jewish funerals were unacceptable before that, destroyed black owned businesses, and created a lot of weird behavior and lack of civility in people due to being cooped up inside, and the stress of dealing with the virus. The original goal of police misconduct wasn't resolved imo, and the police have responded by pulling back, and not doing traffic stops or anything where they could be filmed or caught on camera. I think a lot of cops were scared shitless watching what was happening, and the mentality is now don't do anything more than what's required, but the people who have been hurt the most by this are African-Americans living in neighborhoods that need better policing. Maybe my thoughts will be different in 5-10 years, if actual legislation is passed with more independent oversight of police, but I'm skeptical of that happening.
How can you scientifically determine whether a gathering is a riot or a protest? It seems like any biases the stats gatherers have are going to be heavily reflected in that data. It's quite subjective.
Also, w.r.t. deaths per capita vs. the civil rights movement protests... I would like to see the causes of death. I'm not sure I'm convinced that the violent nature of a protest is always correlated with the deaths. For instance, if you found out that all the 30 or so who died during the Watts protests died from being trampled, whereas all 20 or so who died during the Floyd protests died from blunt force trauma or bullet wounds or stabbings, I would still tend to think the latter were more violent.
https://acleddata.com/download/35251/
This FAQ appears to be more accessible.
For the determination of riot v.s. protest: you might want to consult the ACLED codebook. I am quite satisfied with their definitions. https://www.acleddata.com/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2017/10/ACLED_Codebook_2019FINAL_pbl.pdf
For the Watts riots: 23/34 were shot by LAPD or the National Guard. https://time.com/5873228/watts-riots-memory/
For the King riots in 1992: 10/63 were killed by law enforcement, and 36/63 were other homicides. https://spreadsheets.latimes.com/la-riots-deaths/
Noah provided the breakdown of deaths in his article.
The breakdown of deaths in the George Floyd protests, that is.
The role of the Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys, and the police themselves in instigating violence, rioting, and vandalism has just been completely memory-holed, and appreciate that this article at least mentions that they played a role, but it needs more discussion.
Noah, I don't think many of your paid subscribers thought we were in a civil war. Maybe you wanted to run this on Fox News? =)
One of the things I appreciate about your commentary is that, while you are left-leaning (like me), you really try to see the other perspective, rather than just assume bad faith.
I wanted to offer that you missed one key piece of the right-wing perspective on the Floyd protests. Namely, that these occurred during a period of mandated social distancing and lockdowns. Contemporaneously, right-wing protests against the lockdowns themselves were put down comparatively quite harshly.
I personally marched down Manhattan's 8th Avenue with BLM protestors that Summer. That's the side I'm on. I still don't have a hard time seeing why the mere fact that these protests were allowed at all is enraging to the political right.
And, crucially to your point, thousands of "public health experts" put out a letter saying left wing protests should be allowed and right wing protests should be suppressed. And the media gave this fawning coverage.
Yeh that was pretty silly.
I saw a lot of arguments like that at the time. Basically, that systemic racism was a public health issue on par with Covid. Often, accompanying statistics about health outcomes disparities were presented. The glaring hole, every time, was that there was no attempt to quantify the benefits for public health of the protests themselves, which were non-existent.
CDC and MSM performance on the pandemic were bad across the board. The was virtually no attempt to give people and local decisionmakers the information and tools with which they could make cost effective decisions about NPI according to local conditions.
But that no reason to condemn BLM demonstrations. Condemn the looting and the police that failed to prevent it, not the demonstrators.
I don't think it was just bad performance. It became undeniable that the public health authorities did not want the public to know the truth plainly if that would lead to undesirable behavior. Unfortunately, once people stop trusting you, it becomes a lot harder to influence their behavior. So it was both unethical and ineffective at the same time. Extremely embarrassing. Not just for the specific people in charge but, apparently, the entire ethos of the field.
I'm not condemning BLM. I participated. Just pointing out that Floyd protests being the only allowed mass gathering obviously enraged a lot of people.
It's not the fault of BLM protestors that between the CDC and the MSM many people got the idea that outdoor demonstrations are super-spreader events.
Large events, even outdoors, were essentially illegal at the time. Sports, Concerts, classes, etc. were all not happening.
There is a ton of nuance to all this, I don't want to be reductive. I'm not trying to claim BLM protests should not have happened. I am just saying lockdowns are key to how these events are viewed by certain people.
Defunding the police and abolishing the police are not the same thing. Nuanced defunding the police means not paying the police to do things that police are not good at such as making emergency calls to subdue mentally ill people. Cori Bush is absolutely for defunding the police and will tell everyone who will listen that she identifies with poor people because she used to be poor herself.
Much of what you say is right. As far as I can see most urban politicians agree with you. If your local mayor does not vote them out. Exactly who are you mad at for doing what?
Great article and it addresses and important point, namely that it was nowhere near a civil war and was actually less violent than most past mass protests. In fact, both protesters and police were much less violent than the prior large civil disturbances. In addition, the COVID pandemic and lockdowns leading up the protests likely played a huge role in exacerbating the violence that did occur.
That said, I was in a building that was set on fire by protestors (there was very little danger, but it was interesting at the time) and watched several times as protesters blockaded the exits to police buildings and lit them on fire. This happened several times, as did violence against private politically oriented buildings (a police union in Portland was lit on fire so many times it had to move out of the city and Democratic political offices were also vandalized, and Seattle and Minn. both had extensive damage).
Finally, you mention the CHAZ but I think is worth noting that armed gunmen took over a large portion of a major city. This action was applauded and called "the summer of love" by local politicians. Until "security forces" and other elements killed and injured each other. This set a horrible precedent (what would it be like if armed right wing insurgents held a section of a major city for several weeks). I am always amazed at how this (and the politically motivated arsons) are downplayed. Taking over parts of cities with armed groups is no more OK than interfering with an election. Both are horrific and should be called out.
So, it is worth remembering that some fairly important norms around taking over parts of the US were broken. I would argue that anyone concerned about t January 6, and I am very concerned about acts aimed at suborning an election, need to remember that.
The rule of law exists precisely to prevent this kind of tit for tat violence. If one group is allowed to take over portions of major cities with armed gunman, the other political group will feel empowered to disrupt elections they believe to be fraudulent. It does not matter that they are wrong, in fact the reason we have a rule of law precisely because people will do stupid things particularly when they are wrong. We agree to disagree on a huge number of issues but then have institutions (that seem to be continually under attack) to resolve these issues. We should not engage in political violence and when one side does this it should be called out by all of us. This is something that both political parties seem to either support or ignore.
While some individuals acquitted themselves well in 2020/21, I think the big takeaway for all of us should be that very few organizations held up under the pressure. If we want to avoid something becoming a civil war later, we will all need to do better.
"Armed gunman took over a large portion of a major city" - I lived near there, that's not how I'd describe it. Perhaps "Idiots occupied a small park in a very sympathetic part of town, acted like idiots"
They forced the police out of an entire precinct.
"Idiots occupied a small park in a very sympathetic part of town, acted like idiots"
This is just a sympathetic framing. "Acting like idiots" is just comically vague language. What is the limit of "acting like an idiot"? Homicide? Genocide?
Looking at a map now, it's not even half a percent of total land area in the city, probably less than a quarter of a percent... is this a "large portion"?
I'm from Seattle, went to school in Capitol Hill, and still live in WA state. If you are "looking at a map" to understand how Capitol Hill fits into Seattle, you are betraying your claim to have "lived near there".
Capitol Hill has over 30k residents and is quite centrally located. It's plainly a large, even if not minority, portion of a major city.
I lived on First Hill, right up the street from the Starbucks reserve when this all was happening.
Except the part were people got killed. No offense but making light of that is kind of the same thing people (who I guess you disagree with politically) have been doing .
I am also looking an article now that says two people were killed and four more shot. That should be kind of a big deal. Not saying it is equal to Jan 6th due to the location and the fact that it inferred with an election. Alternately, saying that its ok to kill a couple people and shoot a few more because its only .5% of the city is kind of odd.
I think it was stupid, I'm not defending the CHAZ at all. Predictably, crime happened where policing stopped, but I don't think it helps at all to act like it was the second battle of Fallujah. Seattle is still here, it did not burn to the ground, it was never at risk of being taken over by Antifa or whatever.
Epic straw man right there.
If a city doesn't completely vanish from the map then no one can complain about what happened there. Cool.
The article is good, but the "no civil war" framing is a bit of a straw man. Point is what can demonstration organizers and police do to reduce violence during large scale demonstrations. I guess better said, what more?, since there was less law breaking during these protests than earlier ones.
Democrats contested the elections of 2000 and 2004. They refused to acknowledge Trump as the legitimate president in 2016. Abrams refused to concede defeat. Governors and Secretary of States changed state election laws unconstitutionally. They have refused to this date to allow inspection of signed affidavits for address changes in states like MI and GA. Thousands of witnesses saying they saw irregularities. GPS data of ballot mules going back and forth to drop boxes. If there's a civil war, make no mistake, the Uniparty (left and RINOs) were the ones who fired the first shot.
Just wanted to point out that this is also factually incorrect. In 2004, John Kerry conceded the election had been lost on November 3rd. The second claim that the democrats refused to acknowledge Trump as the legitimate president in 2016 is also false and doesn’t have a modicum of evidence to support it. On the 9th November, Hillary Clinton (the DNC nominee) explicitly congratulated Trump and “hoped he will be a president for all of our country.”
Hillary and DNC launched a coup attempt with Crossfire Hurricane to take down a sitting US president. This is all public record now.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-jan-07-na-electoral7-story.html
https://rollcall.com/2005/01/07/democrats-contest-ohio-electoral-vote-but-bush-officially-re-elected/
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/19/2004-kerry-election-fraud-2020-448604
I'm not sure who "refused to acknowledge Trump as the legitimate president in 2016". A lot of people *said* they refused to acknowledge him, but how many people actually disobeyed executive orders, claiming that the person issuing them wasn't the president, and how many congress people refused to recognize his signature on a bill as valid?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZftriZq5Vo&t=10s
Yes, these people *said* they refused to acknowledge him, but none of them actually refused to go along with his legal authority.
https://grabien.com/getmedia.php?id=1553381&key=b292805e143fcd0ac5bef7946ff1980e&userid=17087
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/50-democratic-congress-members-planning-skip-inauguration/story?id=44783997
I love how two people have already engaged with this comment. Did you really think these claims needed to be rebutted? here?
Facts are your friends: https://gop.com/research/over-150-examples-of-democrats-denying-election-results-rsr/
Thanks Noah. However the belief that we are in Civil War is created by the incessant fear-mongering of the media which by and large is overwhelmingly controlled by the left.
Biden proclaiming 'white supremacists are the biggest threat to American Democracy' and the leftist media ignoring everything exposed by the Twitter files and ignoring all Hunter Bidens transgressions are some of the most absurd handlings of news. China is a much bigger threat to our Democracy and corrupt politicians an even bigger threat.
Trump might say things that people find crazy (because they are being brainwashed by the media) and he does sound like a moron most of the time, but the man is trying to avert war while the anti-war party of Democrats actively PUSH for continued war in Ukraine.
When Cuba got attacked by the US and they asked for Russian support afterwards, the US was threati y having it's biggest enemy on it's door step. We faced them head on. Putin is doing the same in Ukraine. Ukraine wants Putins enemy to setup shop 200 mi from Moscow. We did exactly what Putin is doing now. The West thinking Russia will let Ukraine join NATO without going to war are delusional. And the US pushing NATO for Ukraine inclusion is what instigated this. NATO is not interested in having Ukraine join (they are way too corrupt and we are only using it to antagonize Putin) and will not allow it in the future either.
It also seems that you forget that the Democrats disputed Trumps win and FALSELY claimed Russian interferences and tried to make everyone believe Trump and Putin are BFFs. The Democrats lied and used US intelligence agencies to fabricate false stories of Trump-Russia collusion to win the election. Why do you think Republicans would not dispute an election if they lose? How about Al Gore disputing the election outcome in 2000 and asking for repeated recounts of ballots?
"Biden proclaiming 'white supremacists are the biggest threat to American Democracy'"
Doddering semi-senile corrupt mediocracy of a man reading a teleprompter. At least he motivated some great memes with that speech. My personal favorite:
https://babylonbee.com/news/france-surrenders-to-biden
The thing about the Floyd riots/protests was not the riots or the protests. It was the sudden normalization of fringe ideologies that scapegoat our country, our society, and the majority of people in it. And it was the discovery of an elite to push these ideas forward as respectable and to trigger political action along their lines, though they are detestable to a large percentage of our society. *That* is what the right is mobilizing against.
If more widely accepted these ideologies would make it impossible for us with our differences to live together in the same country. At that point, I suppose you could call it civil war.
The other thing that gets lost in almost every account, including this one - is that the Portland protests were violent BECAUSE OF PROVOCATION by right wing agitators, like members of Patriot Prayer who had spent the previous few years consistently provoking fights with left wing youths in downtown Portland. By far the majority of participants in the protests were peaceful - people organized food and water donations, barbecued to feed the crowds, and danced on the lawns near the protest sites, made funny signs, brought their oh-so-Portland sense of humor to the Moms Protest and Dad leaf blower phalanxes. Not that there weren't some hyped up Antifa Black Blok types - unfortunately it's pretty easy in an extremely polarized climate to get young men (sorry I would say 99% male and 99% quite young) to really relish violent confrontation. But by and large (and I lived here through all of it) the violence was EXTREMELY localized (like a 10 block radius if that) - provoked every night by the incursion of right wing agitators, and Trump-dispatched violent, unidentified and way over-the-line security forces. Those of us in the rest of the city either went to the protests until early evening, then hived off home before things got crazy, or participated in the many completely nonviolent marches (and even 'car parades') that occurred regularly elsewhere in the city and were safer and quieter for families, older people and others. I am still gobsmacked by the number of people who insist Portland is a violent hellhole when the violent parts of the protests were localized, small and conducted mostly between two sets of testosterone-fueled agitators who were not supported by the vast majority of peaceful protestors. Portland has other problems but it is still a beautiful place with a vibrant and peaceful municipal culture . The protests were never a city-wide 'riot' - and the preponderance of protestors were peaceful, and simply outraged by the police conduct in the George Floyd case - and in Portland itself where the police force was not trusted by many citizens because of its bullying attitude and apparent racial discrimination.
My wife and I used to visit downtown and adjacent areas of Portland 3 or 4 times a year throughout the 90s and 00s. The dreaded gentrification of many neighborhoods turned them into nice places to visit, eat, drink, shop (OK, I just ate and drank), and so forth. But, the ever increasing amount of "urban campers" and "spangers" took its toll, and we stopped going. This was all before Floyd protests. I'm thinking the "occupy" crowd was the beginning of the "holy crap. look at all this crap" period, but maybe I am not remembering exactly. As for how violent the protests were, most all of us were not there, and only saw what our favorite internet silos wanted to show, and it looked bad.
Totally David - I don't mean to say there aren't issues downtown ,(and all around town) with homelessness, drugs etc. Just to note that the memeification of Portland as some sort of bizarrely and instantaneously violent hellhole was so disconnected from the realities of the historical moment the fighting arose from (incl decades of right and left wing skinhead battles across the PNW, among other things, as well as years of right wing agitation and provocation in PDX, mostly by nonresidents) that it really had very little to do with the complex roots , and small size, of the violence....
Thank you for your reply, Sarah. There are issues in all big city downtowns, some worse than others. Since you bring up "right wing agitation and provocation" as a main part of Portland's violence problems (I don't mean to put words in your mouth - if you meant something else, please correct me), I will refer to this article by a very much "left wing" individual as to why he moved out (but just to Salem). https://quillette.com/2021/03/14/leaving-portland/
BTW, I'm not a fan of this trend of people trying to label any form of human behavior as being a "right wing" or "left wing" thing. Those used to describe different theories of governance (e.g., capitalism or socialism and everything in between or beyond), but at this point its about labels for cultural attitudes, hair styles and tribal affiliations. I just learned the other day on a different substack that drinking cheap/bad beer is a right wing thing and that NPR tote bags are a left wing thing ...
Yeah right wing and left wing seem really out of date at this point - and the problematic desire on both 'sides' to rumble and violently confront others is just ... useless and troubling.
And when people have a reason to be happy:
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/super-bowl-lii-destruction-in-philadelphia-was-a-white-riot
This suggests, by the way, that cops should spend more time protecting stores during protests, and less time policing the protesters themselves.
This ought to be one of the key points of policing reform, not what not to do (shoot or rough up unarmed civilians) but what they should do deter people from committing crimes and arrest those who do. Of course this is not just during protests. That's the job every day.
I'm getting a Norton malicious web site popup.
Fyi.
Great awesome article
Glenn Loury is entitled to be appalled that there were any riots at all. But as I said on Twitter at the time it's a mistake to confuse a mass movement which represented however briefly a realization that racism had real impact in the people's lives with the country coming apart much less to describe everything that happened dismissively by "the riots".
Humble suggestion: limit comments to paid subscribers. This comment section used to be very informative and educational(and friendly), but is feeling more and more like twitter these days.
But i really enjoyed reading this post!
I'll be honest, as a Brit I was just fed up that it became such a media talking point over here.
Thanks for the clarifications and information.