The violence during the BLM riots was awful. I live adjacent (across the street, at the time) from the Austin neighborhood on the west side of Chicago, and those riots trashed all the grocery stores on the west side, already a food desert. One grocer I know slept on the floor of his store with a shotgun in his hands. I got to watch video footage of another retailer elsewhere beaten in his store in the middle of the night.

The idea that people think that the BLM riots are somehow a mic drop argument for the effectiveness of civil violence is just further illustration of how far apart our premises are.