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On Sunday night, the White House was dark, and a line of riot cops stretched across Lafayette Square, a public park directly across from the darkened building. Facing the cops were hundreds of protesters, demanding an end to police killings. Hands up! Dont shoot! they chanted. No justice, no peace! No racist police! Others hurled invective at the cops, and some even pelted them with water bottles and traffic cones. The cops responded with smoke canisters and flash grenades. Klieg lights cut through the fog of chemical agents and weed. The anger in was palpable. Tag artists climbed up on a bronze statue of the Polish freedom fighter Thaddeus Kosciuszkothat had been there since 1910 when William Howard Taft was presidentand spray painted Fuck 12 and BLM on its base.

After three months of social distancing, on what would become the most violent night in a week of protests, I had donned a KN95 mask and waded into the crowd of people assembled in front of the White House to protest the police killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd. Protests in Washington are part of the citys furniture. You can find one here on almost any given day. Lafayette Square, in fact, has been the site of a permanent peace vigil started by anti-nuclear weapons protesters in 1981. In the nearly 30 years Ive lived in Washington, Ive watched abortion marches (pro and con), anti-war protests against the invasion of Iraq, numerous tea party rallies, and the massive womens march after the 2016 election. Just a few months ago, I covered a pro-Trump anti-impeachment protest.

But this past week has been different. In the first days, the collective action wasnt so much a protest as a howla howl of pain over senseless death and violence and racism, none of which has been addressed by the political system. But since then, something remarkable has happened.

By the time I arrived at Lafayette Square after dinner Sunday night, the initially peaceful protest was growing heated. I choked on the tear gas that hung in the air, which was charged with danger from the electric mix of so many riot cops and people on the edge. Fireworks punctuated chants for justice. Explosions from M-80s seemed to come from nowhere and ratcheted up the tension. Designed for the military to simulate artillery fire or explosives, the M-80s were a destabilizing force, causing panic and chaos in the dark night. Every boom sent masses of people running away from the White House, unsure whether the riot cops were shooting at them or whether the fireworks might provoke the cops to start shooting at protesters.

Many there pleaded with the bottle-throwers to back off and de-escalate. But rage won out. The crowd surged against the barriers in the park, prompting the riot cops to push them back with more tear gas. Volunteer medics rushed in with milk and water to pour into the eyes of protesters. As the 11 p.m. curfew grew near, protesters built a bonfire in the middle of H Street and were dragging traffic barrels, plywood notice boards, and whatever else they could find to stoke the blaze. Men pushed past me to rip branches off trees around the Veterans Administration to provide fuel for the fire. The flames grew higher and higher until they were licking the leaves of a mighty oak tree that hung high above. From across the street, I watched as dark smoke engulfed its branches. An African-American protester standing near me looked on in horror. This isnt right, he said with despair. This is our city.

As the bonfire grew bigger and bigger, the police started shooting gas canisters into the crowd and everyone started running. I turned the corner around the VA and ran into a phalanx of police cruisers. Someone threw an M-80 at the cops that landed just a few feet from me and exploded. I jumped back and joined others running for safer ground, my pulse racing. It felt like a war zone. Once the smoke cleared, I crept back to watch the crowd reassemble in front of the VA. People cheered as some men climbed up on a traffic signal and rocked it until it fell over and shorted out the nearby streetlights, plunging the street further into darkness. I finally headed home as the park bathroom went up in flames.

Sunday nights fires were an expression of years of pent-up frustrationwhat people do when nothing else works. It was utterly predictable and fully understandable. Even so, veering from pandemic to pandemonium in a matter of hours left me with vertigo. One day I was hoarding toilet paper and covering protests by a handful of right-wing activists pissed off because they had to wear a mask at Walmart, the next I was in the middle of the worst civil unrest DC has seen in decades. It was like the earth had suddenly shifted on its axis, and I was still trying to adjust to the disequilibrium. I thought of Joan Didion famously watching the social upheaval of the 1960s and quoting William Butler Yeats: Things fall apart/The centre cannot hold. Didions commentary was a lament. But after witnessing the visceral anger on display in Lafayette Square this week, it was obvious that right now, the center should not hold. It just wasnt clear where wed end up once the spinning stopped.

The next morning, I was still so keyed up I couldnt sleep, so I got up early and walked back down to check on the tree that had provided a canopy for the bonfire. It seemed like a noble sentry, something solid in the chaos. If it had survived the night, maybe the country would, too. The walk to the White House was like surveying the aftermath of a natural disaster. The bike store near my house had been looted. Sidewalks sparkled with broken glass. The charred remains of city trash bins lay neglected in the street. I saw a man scrubbing red graffiti off the side of the AFL-CIO building that said, Burn it down.

Stephanie Mencimer / Mother Jones

When I reached Lafayette Park, city workers were already cleaning up the nights mess with an efficiency developed after years of practice. The traffic light was upright and under repair. Street sweepers, which had disappeared after the lockdowns started, spun away at the mess, preparing the street for another day of protests. All that was left of the bonfire was a patch of melted pavement. The tree was a little singed, but mostly unharmed.

The District of Columbia government was born from the civil rights protests of the 1960s and 70s, when activists demanded home rule for the majority-black federal city that had been governed by a federally appointed three-member board of commissioners, almost exclusively comprised of white men. Finally, home rule was granted in 1973, but the city still has no true autonomy as a state with full representation in Congress. The roots of protest here run deep, as does sympathy with it. Thats why DCs municipal government helped restore order with street sweepers, while the White House brought out military hardware and paramilitary troops. (On Friday morning, the DC department of public works deployed its fleet of dump trucks to block off parts of 16th Street near the White House and helped activists paint a blocks-long Black Lives Matter banner in yellow traffic line paint in a stunning display of municipal resistance.)

In front of that same tree that had guarded the bonfire, peaceful protesters had gathered on Monday until federal law enforcement tear gassed them so President Donald Trump could film a campaign ad and wave a Bible in front of the historic St. Johns Church, which briefly had been on fire the night before. Later that evening, the administration sent in a helicopter, marked with a red cross, to terrorize the crowds, whipping up dust and glass on the streets and scattering terrified peoplea possible violation of the Geneva Convention.

But as with George Wallace and his dogs and firehoses, the Trump administrations use of paramilitary tactics on peaceful protesters has backfired spectacularly. Instead of scaring away the protesters with a militarized show of force, the protests have only gotten bigger, and not just in DC. People who have spent the past three months afraid to leave home have streamed out into the streets to raise their arms in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

The evening after the presidents photo op and the appalling show of force by federal law enforcement, I followed the protesters up 14th Street, where everything was boarded up with plywood in anticipation of coming disturbances. The mayor had imposed a 7 p.m. curfew, which was fast approaching. The streets were largely empty, until I got to the Luther Place Memorial Church. A historic Lutheran church whose first pastor had been an abolitionist, it was open, as it had been during the riots in 1968, when the church sheltered and fed thousands of people. Church members and volunteers were handing out water, snacks, and masks to anyone who needed them. Inside, theyd stocked the sanctuary with a remarkable collection everything from hockey helmets to duct tape to swimming goggles, donated by people wanting to show support for those who marched. The church may have provided the ultimate service to the people on the streets: It let them use the bathroom.

By around 9:30, I watched as DC cops herded protesters into a narrow city block and boxed them in, using a likely illegal tactic that the city council and civil libertarians have been trying for years to eradicate from the police department. Despite its deep experience of dealing with protesters, the Metropolitan Police Department has still suffered from many of the same problems with brutality as in other cities. As officers in padded suits arrived and swung batons as they walked toward the protest, I was sure the night would devolve into violence and that the police would crack some skulls.

Instead, as the crew of officers pushed in on the trapped protesters, a Swann Street resident opened his front door and let more than 70 people escape into his house, where they stayed until the next morning and evaded arrest. I later discovered that the resident was Rahul Dubey, whose son went to elementary school with my kidsa real-life reminder of how ordinary people sometimes step up to do extraordinary things.

After I got home that night, I did a midnight interview with an ABC radio affiliate in Melbourne, Australia, which had seen my tweets about all that had happened over the past 24 hours. The host asked me if in all the unrest, I was hopeful for the future. I laughed and emphatically said no. I explained that these protests were a sign that American democracy is fundamentally broken. The voices of the people most affected by police brutality are the ones who have been intentionally shut out of the political process, through gerrymandering and voter suppression. I told the Aussies that right now, as a key effort of his reelection campaign, President Trump had enlisted sympathetic state governments and his attorney general to unapologetically try to make it harder for people to vote. What kind of democracy is that?

But now, at the end of the week, I might answer that question differently. On Tuesday night, hundreds and maybe thousands of people marched past my house and took a silent knee in front of Le Diplomate, the swanky French restaurant where Trump children and cabinet members like to dine. In 1968, that same street had been burned during the uprising after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, imbuing the scene with symbolism. Watching all those people engaging in silent protest brought tears to my eyes. I was so moved by the moment that I screwed up the video.

Meanwhile, the response by the White House has been to call in more troops, build more fences. But something has started that Trump cant stop. On Wednesday night, even more people converged on downtown DC, laying down in the baking heat, in masks, on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the Trump Hotel in memory of George Floyd. A man sang Lean on Me, and the crowd followed, waving their illuminated phones as the sun set.

The breathtaking images and the sound of all those voices in harmony restored my sense of equilibrium with the possibility of a new center, one that is more humane and reflective of our values than what we have witnessed the last four years. It left me feeling something I hadnt experienced since that November night in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected: hope.

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I've lived in DC for 3 decades and covered dozens of protests. This one is profoundly different. - Mother Jones

How long must we continue to endure daily abuses, daily mistreatment and daily injustices? How many more of our fathers and brothers do we have to bury that are being murdered by the hands of a few bad apples in our law enforcement departments and these Zimmerman-style vigilantes?

Even our women today are being killed under these same circumstances. Theres only so much that we as a people can take, and the fact of the matter is we are at the breaking point. The minds of African Americans have been so tipped in such a way that what you see in society is an imbalance as a result of the deprivation of justice. When you have liberty but not justice then theres no joy in being free because the only reason that people are joyous is that there is justice present. However, when justice is denied the balance of the mind is tipped. Justice should always be present. It should be there when we lay down to sleep and there to greet us when we awake.

People sleep, but justice should never sleep. Unfortunately in this day and age, America has put justice to sleep. They sent Michael Vick to prison. There was no justification for the way the dogs were treated; we all know that it was unjust. They have laws against animal cruelty. They are quick to punish anyone that harms an animal; they have more respect and give a dog more justice.

So we as African Americans get the message that what America is telling us is that Dogs Lives Matter, not ours. What America is telling us is that a black life is beneath the life of a dog or a cat. Yet, does this call for rioting, looting, destruction of property? Of course not. We wouldnt dare mimic how America was built, rioting like the Boston Tea Party or the theft of property like the taking land from my Native Indian ancestors. I know it is hypocritical to tell someone not to do what you have done and continue to do. However, we shouldnt stoop down to their level. Lets not advocate nor participate in looting, rioting and the destruction of property. That would only help them in their narrative describing us as animals. They want to call us animals but wont give us the justice that they give even to animals.

Justice is going to the dogs.

Mr. Hobson is a former Riverhead resident and a graduate of Riverhead High School.

Originally posted here:
Featured Letter: America has put justice to sleep - Riverhead News Review

Today, Disney released a slew of new policies and guidelines regarding the reopening of the Walt Disney World Resort after a long closure due to COVID-19.

With those updates came the information that Stormalong Bay, one of the most popular pools on the entire property, will not immediately be reopening with the Disney Yacht & Beach Club Resort.

Other feature pools on the property will be operating under reduced hours and capacity to allow for social distancing, and poolside activities may still be available.

As far as other special offerings or childcare options that wont be available are: the fireworks voyages, such as the Pirates and Pals Fireworks Voyage, or other tasting cruises. Fun runs, the Wonderland Tea Party, Hula lessons, in-room childcare, the mermaid school, and other special classes and programs will be unavailable at the immediate reopening.

Of course, continue to follow along with WDWNT as we continue to cover the reopenings of the Disney Parks and Resorts around the world.

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Disney Releases Which Resort Activities Will be Available When Resorts Reopen - wdwnt.com

The civil unrest seen across the United States following the killing of George Floyd brings to the fore the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous observation that "a riot is the language of the unheard."

Taken from his 1968 speech "The Other America," King condemned the act of rioting, but at the same time challenged audiences to consider what such actions say about the experience of those marginalized in society.

"Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention," King said.

In other words, peace cannot exist without justice. This conviction has deep roots in Christian thought, it can be traced to the authors of the Bible and early Jewish and Christian communities.

More recently, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, said of the current protests that the church aligns "with those seeking justice." The comment followed a controversial visit in which President Trump held a Bible in front of St. John's Episcopal Church an act preceded by the dispersal of a crowd of protesters and priests tending to them with the use of tear gas.

As scholars of biblical texts and religion and culture, we believe that understanding how, often violent, unrest informed both early Christianity and the foundational stories of the United States itself can guide us in this current period of turmoil.

Israelite injustice

Deep rooted dissatisfaction with prevailing social injustice and actions against such inequity isn't new. It would have been a familiar theme to the people who wrote the Bible and it is reflected in the texts themselves.

Unrest lies at the heart, for example, of the biblical story about the origins of ancient Israel. As recounted in the books of Genesis and Exodus, Abraham's grandson Jacob travels to Egypt for food in a time of famine. After Jacob's descendants are made slaves, Moses delivers Israel from bondage and leads them back to the promised land.

Here, the event that sparks liberation is Moses' witnessing of the oppression of the Israelites. The book of Exodus details how they left Egypt with gold and silver procured in somewhat uncertain circumstances from their Egyptian neighbors. The manner of this acquisition would be a topic of discussion in biblical interpretation for centuries, for fear that it looks like plunder.

However, both ancient Jewish and ancient Christian sources viewed these goods as "fair wages," in the words of the scholar James Kugel just repayments for the Israelites' years of slave labor.

Archaeological evidence points to a generally different origin story for the ancient nation of Israel though one also of social unrest. According to some scholars, the settlement stemmed from the rebellion and regrouping of people who fled the collapse of large, urban areas in the southern Levant, modern-day Israel and Palestine.

The biblical impulse toward social justice appears especially in the prophets of the Old Testament, such as Amos and Isaiah whose call for justice and equality is a constant theme. It is little wonder, then, that they were cited in the context of the modern-day civil right's movement. King cited prophets from the Bible repeatedly in his "I Have a Dream" speech. When he talked of "justice" rolling "down like waters, righteousness like an everflowing stream" and "crooked places" being "made straight," he is pulling directly from the Books of Amos and Isaiah.

Early Christian unrest

The New Testament also attests to experiences of social unrest in early Christianity.

In the Book of Matthew, Jesus is quoted as saying, "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." And in confronting money changers in the Temple of Jerusalem, Jesus overturns the tables and whips the money changers for their unjust actions.

To some this might provide justification for the destruction of property. Others, however, observe that Jesus claims that the Temple belongs to "my father's house" meaning his family and as such cannot be taken as justification for destroying someone else's possessions.

It is clear from many passages that the religious movement had a primary concern to care for the oppressed and that in that context, unrest can sometimes be justified.

Nonetheless, some parts of the Bible have been used to justify the quelling of social unrest. Jeff Sessions, former attorney general of the United States, recently appealed to Romans 13 when claiming that enforcement of strict immigration reform was the rule of law: "I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order."

Biblical scholars dispute this interpretation, noting that the word "law" appears only once in Romans 13, when Paul states that "love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law."

Civil religion and unrest

Biblical passages have been used by American politicians for as long as there has been a United States.

As historian James Byrd has argued, the American revolutionaries claimed the apostle Paul gave Christians the license to resist tyrants using violent means.

In addition to drawing on the Bible, the Founding Fathers also produced a new sacred canon to justify unrest in the event of injustice founding stories referred to by scholars as "civil religion."

Think, for instance, of the Boston Tea Party dumping tea into the harbor in a protest against an unjust tax. The national narrative sees this as heroic.

The fact that injustice requires action is similarly supported by the Declaration of Independence. It frames the relationship between Britain and the colonies as one of "repeated injuries and usurpations" which the colonists have tried to solve, only to be "answered only by repeated injury."

Repeated injustice, then, was grounds for revolution.

'Deferred dreams explode'

Martin Luther King did not call for violence, but said "peace is not merely the absence of this tension, but the presence of justice." He also stated that if peace meant silence in the face of injustice, then "I don't want peace."

King did not think that riots were the best approach to take. But he warned against condemning them, unless society also condemned the conditions that brought riots about.

As one pastor in Minneapolis put it, referencing the poet Langston Hughes as she assessed the protests: "Deferred dreams explode."

The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts and is syndicated by The Associated Press. The Conversation is wholly responsible for the content.

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The Conversation: A justification for unrest? Look no further than the Bible and the Founding Fathers - Pocono Record

Mass protest works, even when participants break the law in acts of targeted civil disobedience. Random lawbreaking like vandalism and theft on city streets does not.

The nonviolent protests that were a famous hallmark of the civil rights movement in the United States were not passive. Organizers executed direct actions linked to their political goals, including those that required breaking unjust laws, like sitting at segregated lunch counters and in prohibited seats on buses. Organizers knew that white onlookers and police would respond with violence and spur chaos, and they faced that violence with courage and dignity. Those heroic actions spurred passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

Anti-Trump resistance in the streets in 2017 was not as bold, but it included acts of defiance. Protesters shut down access to airports and agitated and confronted members of Congress. The targeted disobedience had an impact, delaying and scaling back Donald Trumps efforts to enact some form of a Muslim ban and mobilizing a sustained level of heightened political engagement by a huge cohort of mostly women. They spurred electoral change in the year to come.

Black Lives Matter is driving progress in reducing police violence. Protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere refused police orders to disperse. They disobeyed curfews. They disrupted Democratic candidates events. They forced their issue onto the political agenda and got results. Trump signed a criminal justice reform bill, and reforms have led to fewer police killings in big cities where liberals hold political power.

Much of these public protests looked chaotic in the moment, particularly when police responded violently with military-grade equipment and wartime tactics, firing tear gas, releasing dogs, and turning power hoses on fellow Americans. But they were part of a concerted campaign of political action that continues today in the form of large mass demonstrations against police violence and racial injustice in many American cities.

But over the past week, weve also seen a significant number of incidents that look like random theft and vandalism. Windows have been smashed and stores burglarized as targets of opportunity or outlets for fun, closer in spirit to a sports riot than targeted civil disobedience.

And research shows that on a larger scale, vandalism can be very damaging to vulnerable communities, while also creating a counterproductive distraction from real efforts at political action.

Nobody is speaking in favor of vandalism or theft, but theres unquestionably a sense in the air on the left that its inappropriate to condemn these actions. The sentiment is pervasive on social media, where many on the left make the point that human life matters more than property, as if theres a hard trade-off between the destruction of property and saving the lives of African Americans.

To be clear, if a few smashed windows or a looted Target were the price we had to pay for racial equality, it would be one well worth paying. But this is not the trade-off.

Nobody leading real movements for change is suggesting that people engage in indiscriminate acts of destruction. In fact, there are many examples of protesters intervening to stop looters and vandals (many of whom are white) whom they realize only serve to discredit their work. Nationwide, protesters are challenging the multiple, interlocking injustices faced by African Americans. Right now youre either helping or exacerbating the problems and its clear where the vandals stand.

The kind of nonviolent direct action something that requires more courage and discipline than mere peaceful protest spearheaded by Mahatma Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King Jr. in the US is one of the hardest and most underrated tactics for political change in the history of the world.

Defenders of more aggressive forms of physical force are correct that their approach can also bring about useful change. But their examples, like the Boston Tea Party, do not capture the current chaos.

The essence of the Boston Tea Party is that New England radicals protested an act of British Parliament that was designed to help the British East India Company. They boarded the companys ships and destroyed its tea in an act tied directly to their political message.

Some sympathetic voices argue that the current looting and vandalism have a similar political connection to the protests. Speaking to Voxs Terry Nguyen, sociologist Darnell Hunt gamely tried to posit that protesters are not indiscriminately burning things. They seem to be more focused on chain stores, like Target, or specific cultural icons that represent a system people feel has not served them.

The reporting from the ground does not fully support this theory. The vandalism and looting is not exclusively targeting big-box stores or symbols of transnational capitalism. Instead, journalists are capturing incidents of indiscriminate looting and vandalism being carried out by opportunists from Los Angeles to Washington to Miami to Philadelphia. Local black- and immigrant-owned businesses have been robbed and torched, along with a labor union headquarters and whatever else happens to be nearby. Theres no meaningful connection between much of the vandalism and the protesters political messages.

One could have a separate conversation about things like pulling down the Robert E. Lee statue in Montgomery, Alabama, or attacking the one in Richmond, Virginia. These gestures may or may not be politically effective, but the symbolic meaning of physical assaults on inanimate monuments to white supremacy is very clear. Even setting police cars on fire is a legible form of political action, albeit a political risky and substantively dangerous one. Spraying graffiti on one of Trumps hotels or smashing in the windows would be a form of protest. Smashing windows that just happen to be nearby is not.

Many riot skeptics have pointed to Princeton political scientist Omar Wasows research showing that while nonviolent protests helped boost the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the long hot summer of rioting in 1968 shifted white opinion sharply to the right. There is some countervailing evidence suggesting that the 1992 Los Angeles riots actually did inspire constructive political change, though Wasow himself argues that they are likely picking up the effect of genuine shock over the events that precipitated the rioting.

A recent Morning Consult poll, which is broadly full of encouraging information about public views of the protests, does also say that 64 percent of people have heard a lot about looting and over 70 percent think its very important to prevent it.

And beyond politics, its actually worth thinking about not just the secondary political consequences, but the actual direct impact of vandalism on the communities where it occurs.

The rioting of the 1960s was concentrated in majority-black neighborhoods, and William Collins and Robert Margo find that it meaningfully depressed property values in impacted neighborhoods. This is perhaps not a shocking finding (of course property values decline when buildings burn down), but they show that the effect was large enough, systemic enough, and lasting enough that that the racial gap in the value of property widened in riot-afflicted cities during the 1970s. In a separate paper, they find that the same set of riots decreased labor market earnings for black workers in impacted cities.

One piece of good news about 2020 is that, so far, absolutely nothing on the scale of the big 1960s riots has taken place. The point, though, is that you really are hurting people when you engage in indiscriminate property damage, and the more that happens, the worse things will be.

In theory, the division of labor in a protest situation in the United States should be very clear. People are allowed to protest (its in the Constitution!), but they are not allowed to destroy property and steal. Police officers are supposed to enforce the law by arresting and deterring criminals while protecting law-abiding citizens.

This is obviously not what has been happening over the past week in the United States.

Because the protests target police misconduct, many police officers have been acting as counterprotesters engaging in further acts of misconduct by beating or gassing peaceful demonstrators and oftentimes seeming to target members of the press. Some of this seems to come from grassroots cop sentiment, some from police leadership, and some from the president of the United States himself.

In New York Monday night, NYPD officers appeared to take out their longstanding grievances with the citys mayor and overall public opinion by completely standing down in Midtown Manhattan to allow looters to run rampant.

The fact that police can choose to engage in either broad or selective underpolicing is one reason the realities of municipal governance are a bit trickier than people sometimes allow. Officers in Baltimore appear to have responded to the Freddie Gray protests by staging a years-long de facto police strike that sent the murder rate soaring.

But while navigating these issues on a practical level is tricky, on an ethical level its an easy problem those looting and vandalizing are in the wrong, and police officers who focus their ire on peaceful protesters while letting vandals roam free are also in the wrong, and political leaders like Trump who use the existence of vandals as a hazy excuse to fire tear gas into law-abiding crowds are the wrongest of all.

Last but by no means least, virtually nobody in this country whos accountable to a black electorate thinks this is constructive.

What I see happening on the streets of Atlanta is not Atlanta. This is not a protest. This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said on Monday. This is chaos.

The day before, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser cautioned that tearing up our beautiful city is not the way to bring attention to what is a righteous cause.

Rioting, looting, and burning is not the way, according to civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis.

This sentiment extends beyond moderates like Bowser and Bottoms and veterans of the 1960s like Lewis. Ilhan Omar has a very different ideological orientation than those mayors and comes from a different tradition than Lewis, but she shares the same perspective that looting and vandalism are antithetical to the causes she is fighting for.

Some political leaders have been trying to make this same basic point by perhaps exaggerating the extent to which mayhem is being wreaked by out-of-towners or even false flag operations by white supremacists. But the sentiment all these elected officials are expressing is clear this is not what they and the people they represent want. It is not helping them, and while they dont want vandalism to be the center of attention, they also have no interest in soft-pedaling their criticism of it.

We should not obsess about vandalism and crowd out attention to the dignified conduct of the much larger group of legitimate protesters, to the underlying injustices they are highlighting, to the potential for solutions, or to the intersecting catastrophic failures of national leadership that we are currently living through. But we cant deflect the basic reality that at a time when millions are struggling to address serious problems, the people running around smashing windows arent helping.

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Vandalism and theft versus civil disobedience: The differences, explained - Vox.com