link to original reddit post by /u/plazman30
We have some great friends that we've known since I was in my 20s. They're VERY progressive. The wife got her law degree and now uses it to help people that can't afford legal representation, which I think is commendable.
We hadn't seen each other in well over a year, because of the pandemic, and now that we were all fully vaccinated for at least a month, we went out to lunch.
For reasons that I still don't understand, the conversation at the table came around to discussion of BLM and the BLM protests.
The wife was very upset that people were saying the BLM protestors should not have taken to the streets. I told her that some people had a point. We're in the middle of a pandemic with a highly contagious virus. Large groups of people gathering without social distancing is just a bad idea, no matter how you look at it. If this was 2019, then I could see these protests being needed. They WERE needed in 2020. 2020 was just the wrong time to do them.
Then I pointed out that there was a lot of property destruction that happened because of those protests, and people lost their livelihood because of those protests, and no one is being held accountable for all the businesses being burned down, or being forced to pay restitution for all the businesses that were burned down.
Her reply shocked me. She said the protests were 100% peaceful. The people in those crowds that started the fires and destroyed businesses were alt-right, or Trump supporter plants to make the BLM protests look bad.
And I thought Republicans were nut-jobs by seeing ANTIFA in every right-wing crowd.
Then her husband talks about the whole bricks thing. If you haven't heard, supposedly, right-wing people would have a pallet of bricks delivered to a BLM protests site and just left there, and then the bricks would break store windows. He was complaining about the brick deliveries. So, I asked him why would a peaceful protestor even pick up a brick. Is the problem the presence of the bricks, or is it the people that used them? They want the brick delivery people held accountable, and I told them I want the brick users accountable.
Luckily, the conversation moved in another direction, and we had a great time.
Has anyone else bumped into progressives that feel that Trump plants did all the destruction during BLM protests.
I read an article about the BLM protests in Camden, NJ. When the protests started there, the police showed up and joined the protestors. And after the protests were over, the police got hot dog carts out. Everyone hung out afterwards and just chilled with the cops.
In one article I was reading, protestors complained the police showed up in uniform and protested with them. The tone of the quote made it sound like they wanted to do some damage as part of the protests, but the presence of the police prevented them from being able to do that.