Riots? What Riots?

In my three decades as a media critic, this summer’s huge effort by the press to cover up the endless rioting by George Floyd’s mourners has been its most shameless and shameful episode yet.

Until very recently, a remarkable number of naive Americans had fallen for the mainstream media’s repetitions that the Peaceful Protesters were not—repeat, not—looting and burning. The MSM has been in such flat-out denial mode that it hasn’t even bothered to concoct exculpatory euphemisms for the riots, such as Retail Mourning, Do-It-Yourself Reparations, or Arson for Equity.

Even last week a new report from a leftist think tank, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, admitting to the immense number of violent demonstrations during this Summer of George was spun by the media as proving that all those boarded-up shops near you don’t exist. CNN, for example, declaimed:

About 93% of racial justice protests in the US have been peaceful, a new report finds

About 93% of racial justice protests in the US since the death of George Floyd have been peaceful and nondestructive, according to a new report. The findings, released Thursday, contradict assumptions and claims by some that protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement are spawning violence and destruction of property.

About 7,750 of those protests were linked to the Black Lives Matter movement, the report states. Peaceful racial justice protests took place in more than 2,440 locations across all 50 states and Washington, DC—violent demonstrations occurred in fewer than 220 locations, according to the report.

In other words, there have been riots in almost 220 different cities. Now, to you and me, riots in approximately 218 places might sound like a lot, especially since there were multiple riots in many of these locations. For example, ACLED records 69 separate riots in Portland.

If you look at the data behind this report, you will see this leftist group has characterized 617 incidents in the U.S. since the death of George Floyd as “riots,” with 598 falling in the subcategory of “violent demonstrations” and 19 of “mob violence.”

A few were unassociated with Black Lives Matter or Antifa, such as a July 21 brawl in Los Angeles between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. But the vast majority of the 617 riots were related to the media-proclaimed Racial Reckoning.

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