@thej6m: There are at least three very clear differences.
1. As you point out, the protests for BLM had a good reason behind them, they were driven by a systemic attack on black people in this country by the police force. Contrast that with a bunch of people angry that they didn't get their way in an election, and were fed a bunch of lies about election fraud. Lashing out when people are routinely being killed because of the color of their skin is way more understandable than lashing out because an election didn't go the way you want. Just because both end up with violence doesn't mean they're equivalent at all.
2. Much (maybe most, but I don't have the research to prove that) of the violence at the BLM protests was instigated by police forces. If you'd like, I can link you to twitter threads with thousands of examples of the police attacking peacefully protesting people, thus turning a protest into something else. Yes, there were incidents of assholes in the protests doing things as well, but if you compare videos of yesterday's police interactions with those of the BLM protests, you'll find a world of difference. Most of the videos of violence from BLM start with police pushing crowds out of areas. That's not what happened yesterday. The insurrectionists pushed into the police and stormed the Capitol, and the police didn't really push back. (Police got more aggressive yesterday at night, but that was well after the violence had started).
3. There's a mile of difference between people breaking windows on storefronts in a downtown area and people storming the US Capitol. One we see happen many times a year, even just when a city wins a championship. The other hasn't happened on the scale it did yesterday for more than a hundred years. What was the goal of people yesterday? If they had gotten their hands on Pelosi or Schumer, what do you think would have happened? I'm not saying I love people breaking into stores and burning cars, but I understand how that can happen during a mass event. Storming the Capitol, though? That's in a completely different league.
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