On the Mostly Peaceful Los Angeles Riots

(Also mostly peaceful open thread.)

Whatever is going on in Los Angeles, Western media want you to know that it is peaceful, OK? It is really the only consistent thing anybody has to say about Los Angeles right now. “Los Angeles is mostly peaceful” says reporter after reporter after reporter in nearly identical articles published in all major European and American media.

What makes the L.A. protests mostly peaceful, we read, is the fact that they are confined to just a few city blocks and only a minority of anybody attending these protests is doing anything violent. This is just like how the 6 January 2021 protests at the U.S. Capitol were mostly peaceful for exactly the same reasons.

The BBC says that in Los Angeles, “much of the protest activity has been peaceful” and that “Demos have also been confined to relatively small pockets.” Le Monde agrees that they “have been largely peaceful,” although “tensions escalated with the deployment of the National Guard.” The New York Times confirms that “the protests have remained largely peaceful,” and elsewhere they write in nearly identical language that “Demonstrations against the Trump administration’s immigration policies have been largely peaceful.” Stern likewise say that the protests are “largely peaceful” although some “violent clashes” resulted when police tried to break them up. According to tagesschau the protests are either “mostly peaceful” or “largely peaceful,” while The Guardian writes of “mostly peaceful protests involving a few hundred people,” and Le Figaro says that “the demonstrations in Los Angeles have remained mostly peaceful.” CBS News says that “the demonstrations have been largely peaceful” and NBC News that “the protests have been largely peaceful and there have not been widespread reports of damage.” NPR, meanwhile, tells us that “demonstrators said the protests had been mostly peaceful” and they even quote some woman attesting that “Everybody here wants to be peaceful.” Meanwhile, La Croix notes that, while there have been some “moments of tension, particularly after the arrival of 700 Marines … the demonstrations” remain “generally peaceful.” Finally, Euronews laments some very rare “violent incidents” which have occurred “on the fringes of these overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations.” All of this means that Wikipedia has abundant reliable sources to confirm that “most protests have remained peaceful.” In fact “peaceful” is a word that recurs in their article a full 18 times.

I’ve wanted to write about these riots for days, but in the end it’s all so tiresome, and transparent, that I can’t find any room to make an original argument.

Protests like these only happen because city and state governments are fully on board with them. They generally require some coordinating event, whether the arrest of a Floyd or an ICE raid. From there it takes a few days for the protesters to realise that authorities will tolerate their disruptions. The press invariably insist that the protesters are mostly peaceful, even as they stand in front of rioters literally setting things on fire. This allows journalists to cast any attempts to suppress the protesters as unjustified escalation from the state. The upshot is that a bunch of criminals get to vandalise their cities and loot local businesses for a few weeks, because racial justice.