>

We aren't comparing the two ideologically, we are comparing the way law breaking in protests is discussed and handled.
/u/mattl3791 (OP) has awarded 3 delta(s) in this post.
All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.
Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
^Delta System Explained ^| ^Deltaboards >

Large groups of people under one banner are actually many individuals all with their own way they want to achieve things.
Do you think one person who thorns a brick while 99 others march peacefully should not be condemned? Should there be consequences? >

If only one person fires a gun at the British at Lexington, he probably gets hanged.
If a bunch of other people fire after he does, it's the "Shot Heard Round the World!" >

Can you answer my question without using an idiom, in plain English? >

Sorry I didn't think of the possibility you might not be familiar with the phrase.
If one person walks up to a police station and throws a brick, he's getting arrested. What if 50,000 people walk up to the same police station and overrun it? And does our perspective on the situation change if they are Egyptians or Chinese people storming their government buildings vs our own? >

Are you describing an act of protest?
I think there is a line where a protest becomes a revolution. 
The expectations are different for each. Iran is seeing a revolution currently in those actively fighting for their freedom. 
But does it matter if we label it something or another thing when there will always be supporters of that behaviour and objectors? >

I'd say the distinction lies more in the goals of the people protesting/revolutioning rather than the means they are using >

Where do you draw the line though? Do you believe every cause should be forgiven in public view or straight up allowed to be violent?
Like we can see the seriousness of a cause like BLM but alternatively there are people who genuinly do not believe it has reached the threshold where violence is acceptable. 
And that threshhold is surely different for everyone. And the amount of violence is surely different for everyone. I mean say, Nelson Mandella caused damage to hospitals and undoubtedly that cost people their lives. And many would argue that was justified due to the violence and damage recieved to him and the people of his cause. 
But that logic could be extended to any group. ISIS believes themselves to be freedom fighters just as strongly as any other , they believe their violence is wholy justified and necessary and paid in kind to the violence they recieve. Is condemming their violent acts wrong? Undoubtedly, their cause would not be as widespread if not for their violence. Or is it okay to condem because you might not believe in their cause (which is what you are complaining others do with BLM)?
I use extreme ends on examples to show the reasoning can’t really just be “the violence is okay because the people committing the violence feel like it is okay.” 
Alternatively, how much violence is okay? Like in my two examples, both could be argued as terroistic vs freedom fighter. But either way their causes are extreme change. 
But how much violence should someone protesting the expansion of the “silent area” in a library be able to cause? Like should they be able to destroy books for their cause? Spray paint? Yell and scream in librarians faces? Take a hostage or kill someone? Take over a section of the library and only allow comrades of the anti silent library union in? Should they only be able to do so after they exhaust whatever beuacratic means there are? 
Its a weird thing, because no one really likes violence and giving a blanket okay allows bad stuff to occur. But we can all vaguely agree sometimes it has been necessary historically.  I don’t think its a copout to talk about these lines and to critise violence when some would say movements like BLM have not exhausted to beaucratic democratic means of change at all (if voting records are to be believed, still most gen z and millenials are not voting as much). And starting a precedent of not always looking at violence critcally allows bad actors to be violent without immediate reproach. >

!delta
This is the first post to actually help me understand what my own position is better. Plenty of replies have been some silly semantics about obviously ridiculous extremes. Ironically your reply of extremes has a certain level headedness to it I find refreshing.
I think it's fair as you say to judge violence on a case by case basis as being excessive, uncalled for, understandable, whatever. I think the denouncing of violence in a protest can also be done though without using it as an excuse to avoid addressing the issue of the protest. Can we agree that the BLM riots became an ugly look for the US while not also ignoring that police brutality is another ugly look? >

I definitly can agree. Violence alone does not make any cause wrong and neither does it make the opposition correct. But violence from any cause should be considered critally and can be judged even if the underlining cause is “correct”. 
Though I agree many people jump this to dismiss all claims of a cause. And use it to support the opposing side which definitly brushes over it all easily. I think though the people who do that clearly aren’t making logical conclusions, they are very purposefully just trying to dismiss rather than engage in any discourse. >

What's the difference between a protest and an insurrection?
Should they be treated the same? >

A lot of it is sadly determined after the fact. MLK was certainly called an insurrectionist and worse in his day.
I don't think there is a meaningful distinction it's a sliding scale and very grey. >

The first part of that was a cop out, but okay.
So you're saying there's literally nothing protesters could do to delegitimize themselves?
In theory, the purpose of a protest is persuasion; demonstrate your grievance thereby convincing others to make mollifying changes.
Violent persuasion is coercion, not persuasion.  If a protest movement appears to be coercing rather than persuading, why should I focus on their grievances more than coercion and the subsequent harm they do?
Rudyard Kipling said that once you pay the danegeld, you'll never get rid of the Dane.  If I mollify a movement that's violent and destructive, I invite more violence in the future. >

Kipling was also a horrible racist lol.
The purpose of the violence is to make your life uncomfortable. Slavery is bad. Eventually saying slavery is bad wasn't enough and a civil war had to be fought because peaceful discussion doesn't move bigoted people to change.
The riots of the civil rights movement were every bit as critical to it's success as the impassioned speeches of MLK.
To say, well I don't like being coerced, that's the point. Sometimes peaceful protest doesn't make people change their mind. Sometimes you have to push harder.
No one will listen to you when you're violent is a crap argument, because no one was listening for years while you were peaceful either. >


Kipling was also a horrible racist lol.

You would be too if you were born when and where he was.  Not sure why you brought that up instead of addressing the point.
Also not sure why you didn't answer the question I asked.  Are you saying that a protest movement can do literally nothing to discredit itself?

The purpose of the violence is to make your life uncomfortable.

What's odd in your response is that you completely ignored that we are (by your framing in the OP) talking about a reaction to protests but you interpreted it from the perspective of the protestor justifying himself.
I understand why and how an insurrectionist might do that, but the operative question is how I should react.  You say the point of the violence is to make me uncomfortable - okay, I'm uncomfortable.  Why should I default to "okay I'll listen to your points and consider making changes" instead of "fuck you, you don't get to threaten me and I'm not giving you a goddamn thing while you hold people and things hostage."
Why should I respond to the threat of violence passively?  Why should I care more about mollifying you than protecting myself and peaceful society? >

Say the same thing about jan 6th and ill believe you have a real view. >

Say what about January 6th? 
As far as protests go it honestly was considerably less violent than BLM riots or many other events. There is zero imperial evidence that the election was faked though. If there was legitimate evidence I wouldn't ignore it just because they stormed into a government building.
There is also a disturbing additional component to January 6th. The sitting president encouraged and promoted the riot. That makes it a lot less an expression of free people and more of a coup plot. 
Either way, I think I judged them to be misinformed based on what their platform was, not their actions. >

but we are denouncing this because they broke the law, as you said it was a literal coup attempt. >

No. If the process of democracy was legitimately rigged in the United States so that one side was rigging elections, I wouldn't think it was so outlandish an idea to abandon defunct democracy for a coup attempt.
That is what is so dangerous about being misinformed. If the earth is really secretly ruled by billionaire lizard aliens it's not insane to fight back. The insanity came when I was deluded into believing in billionaire lizard aliens. >

if someone wants to protest in the middle of the park about not enough bigfoot funding, I say go for it. If someone wants to murder random people because of childhood starvation I would be against that. >

I think there are some notable exceptions that need to be made very clear. 
- Power vacuums are dangerous. Protests that remove leadership violently can easily be taken advantage of. 
- Mobs that commit or encourage interpersonal violence in a lateral, nonproductive way (not self-defense, not overthrowing dictators, not fighting back against police) are dangerous. 
- Not all causes are equally valid. If a protest as part of a false premise, or political play, or xenophobic fervor, or some other fear-based reason, then its violence should count against it. >

I'm tempted to award a delta for this because you raise some fair points, but I'm very worried about your last point. Protests are largely based on public outcry. They are given their moral mandate because a large group of people deem it so. It doesn't need to be a majority opinion, as long as a sufficiently large minority feel sufficiently oppressed as to act on it.  I'm not sure who would be in charge of deciding which causes are valid and which are not. Certainly any attempt to do so ends up in uncomfortable territory. >

I'll give you an example that should help clarify what I'm talking about. While protests are probably always legitimate in original cause, (we're upset because we feel economic insecurity, etc), the direction those protests go in aren't always valid (eg we need to remove all the jews from warsaw). >

That's a good example because we all (hopefully) can agree about the moral position of such a protest.
But in that case, I would still say, ignore any violence, any side show so to speak, and deal with the issue of the protest in good faith. In this case, I find the position being put forward to have no logical legs to stand on.
Essentially, I'm trying to avoid the all too common dismissal of public outcry because the outcry isn't expressed in a perfectly lawful way. Deal with the issue and decide as a government or a society if it has merit rather than hiding behind the shield of law and order. >

I don't believe that, as you said above, protests are given a moral mandate, since what I believe is morally justified to protest might not be to you.
When the presidential election in Brazil ended. Many people went out on roads and blocked the traffic asking for  military intervention (stage a coup). When an native-brazilian was arrested by the federal police for suspicion of threat of aggression against the president elected, supporters of the current president tried to invade that building of the federal police and burn several private vehicles in the Brasilia.
So just because you agree with the moral position of a protest, doesn't mean everyone else does it too. And maybe your right. Maybe an ideal or movement shouldn't be dismissed because they committed acts of violence, wether that's burning cars or breaking in government buildings, that doesn't mean that those behaviors are acceptable, since such cases lead to people and people's property being harmed. >

In dictatorship countries the government plant people to vandalize so they can dismiss the protests as terrorists or foreign agents trying to destroy the country >

Not limited to dictatorships unfortunately. The US does all sorts of nutzo stuff like that all the time. Vietnam War is a good example where they sent spies to turn a bunch of anti-war groups violent. They mostly failed and were ousted as government plants but the fact they tried is revealing and they're only getting better at this stuff as time goes on. How people think they haven't moved into social media really makes my head spin. It's the biggest arena for obfuscation that the powers that be have ever had access to.
It is tragic but imo, the casualties of protests are part of it. Things are not so casual as the people merely trying to use the sidewalk think. True evil reigns in these people's lives and they're trying to fight it. Ideas and change are so hard to change, and the truth is we are fighting against a stalwart entity that will kill and lie all it can to hide the ugly truths. >

You make a good point. However, often, there is violence against the people who aren't doing anything wrong. Let's take BLM. I hated the BLM protests for multiple reasons. The one relevant to this discussion is the people involved hurt lots of innocent people. If all of the violence and aggression had been toward entities such as the police or members of government responsible for certain laws, I still would have condemned the protests, but I would have been able to look past that particular aspect. Instead, they destroyed random businesses and attacked random people. >

Do you know how many black owned businesses were destroyed in 'black lives matter' protests (riots)? 
A lot. Lol. >

how many were consciously destroyed with the protesters being aware that's what they were doing vs how many were destroyed just as an inadvertent consequence of things like looting happening in primarily black neighborhoods >

Does....does that matter? 
BLM protests led to a bunch of black owned businesses getting destroyed >

I don't think critics are arguing with the statement that "black lifes matter". They are saying that the overall movement is causing trouble and not the best way to create positive change. Most of them still agree with the message behind the movement but feel that movement itself is causing more harm. >

In my experience whenever someone tells you that "this isn't the best way to do X" they're being disingenuous. It's easy to find how someone else isn't perfect instead of discussing the main issue in good faith. >

Is there any line you would draw, or are all forms of protest valid? What about assassination of a political opposition? >

Oddly enough this is the comment that has come closest to changing my POV. No, I had not considered assassination and I would say that an assassination nullifies your cause no matter what it is, really.
In that case I would like to restate my position to be about protests or acts of insurrection that are generally peaceful but contain components of lawbreaking or violence.
If the sole purpose of your act is violence, such as murdering abortion doctors, assassinating a politician, etc., then I do think your cause is largely irrelevant.
!delta >


then I do think your cause is largely irrelevant.

I agree that full-out violence or murder is more along the lines of an attempt at revolution, or terrorism, than a protest, but I'd hesitate to say that makes a cause irrelevant. >

I mean, you can have a really valid opinion of what a bad president Donald Trump is but if you assassinate him your political views don't really matter? You're crossing a line that makes motive irrelevant. >

I hate how predictable it is that I'm going here but would you say the same about assassinating Hitler? >

If I as a German citizen try to assassinate Hitler and fail, I am justly going to be put to death by the government and it's not an overstep of power.
Now, you might become so convinced from personal conviction that he needs to die that it's worth the personal risk to you. If so, so be it. But assassinating a government leader as a citizen should always be automatically illegal. Dietrich Bonhoeffer became involved in an attempt to overthrow Hitler and while it may have been morally commendable obviously the government put him to death and that's really a reasonable reaction.
Whether he is morally right or going to be rewarded in the afterlife is kind of another question entirely. >

You're bringing in a whole different kind of standard here.  You've never defined the legitimacy of a protest by what is legally permissable.  In fact you've explicitly said that laws being broken doesn't invalidate the cause. >

Well you're going into the past and bringing up a controversy that we have now morally settled as a society.
Sure, we all now agree Hitler is bad. The fact is in 1938 German people, lots of them, liked him.
So in 1938 if you decided to protest Nazism, and the way you did that was to try to assassinate Hitler...as a society we have to say that invalidates your opinion. It doesn't really matter what is bad about Nazism you're just going to get the death penalty and justly so.
No if you're some time traveler with the hindsight that you can save 6 million Jews...go for it. Shoot the guy. But that level of clarity doesn't exist in real life, and so I have to say that assassination is bad. If I have to clarify that all knowing time travelers are excluded, so be it. >


Many African Americans felt like they were fighting for not just an idea, but survival.

If they really felt that way, it was because of the garbage media acting like black people were living out The Most Dangerous Game or something. >

So I can’t speak for the truckers in Canada, but in the USA a protest is legal in general terms.
When we say we don’t support a violent protest, it is because they are hurting people, and that isn’t ok. Another poster mentioned assassination, but need not rise to that. Some friends of ours had a young son in 2020 who was born missing an organ and was in peril, real risk of death. He was out of the hospital, but until he was old enough for a surgery / transplant, if he for a fever they were on a clock. 
When our friends were racing to get their son who was less than a year old and very sick to the hospital, BLM protestors had blocked the road, and threw bricks at their car as they backed away to find another way in while yelling obscenities and racial insults at them. Are you a supporter of eBay behavior? I absolutely denounce it.
Other people near here were attacked and some killed by protestors. Local businesses were looted and burned. That isn’t a protest against the problem, as they aren’t going after the court house and the police station. 
Rioters burned down minority owned businesses, small businesses that didn’t come back in many cases.
To clarify, this isn’t an all or nothing thing. If you are protesting the police and you resist the police, you are acting against what you are protesting and as long as you aren’t seriously injuring anyone, I am ok with that. If you are protesting a bad court ruling and you trash a court house, I am ok with that as well, as long as you don’t hurt anyone. I really don’t care that rioters damaged the capital, but they lost me completely when they began hurting people. At that point they should absolutely be denounced.
So a protest where people who are resisting the police while protesting the police? Go for it, just don’t hurt people.
Burning down small businesses and stealing big screen TVs in mass looting? You aren’t protesting, now you are just being violent and taking the easy chance to steal. >

BLM and the Canadian truckers is a wild comparison. BLM caused billions of dollars of damage and killed two dozen people, the truckers simply caused a big traffic jam. 
The bigger point is that rioting and destroying cities is an awful way to get people to support your cause, especially when many of the events BLM was rioting against turned out to be completely justified shootings. >


the truckers simply caused a big traffic jam.

Should be noted that trucker's blocked international trade because they weren't allowed to travel internationally without meeting immigration laws. Ironic that you only take issue with BLM rationale for protesting. >

The truckers were protesting certain laws they disagreed with. It’s fine to disagree with them, but their reasoning wasn’t a lie. 
BLM used completely justified shootings like Ma’Khia Bryant (who was shot while she was violently attempting to stab someone) as an excuse to riot. >

The law to travel internationally without regard to the local population. There reasoning isn't a lie, it's just dumb. 
BLM used George Floyd to demand police reform. The US is very violent though so violence occurred just like every protest they have. >

Violence is always bad but sometimes necessary. We celebrate WW2 veterans because that was the only way to rid the world of the nazis and imperial Japan. If the same result could have been achieved through a letter writing campaign than those calling for war would have been evil.
Likewise violent protests are only good if they are the only thing that works. Since in a democracy nonviolent protests work much better that is not the case. Violent protests happen because some of the protesters like violence and serve no useful purpose. >

Hmm. Take a delta for the fact that you have made a clear distinction of a time and place for violence and nonviolence and I like it once you state it.
!delta
But I want your opinion on something. The thing is BLM protests followed on decades with no change in the US. Or maybe more fairly stated, change that comes at far too slow a rate. At some point can we justify the violent turn some of it took because peaceful methods have achieved such lackluster results for so long? >

To my knowledge there’s no good data on the number of unjustified police shootings but I doubt it is accurate to say no progress has been made for decades. 
I think there could be a case if there was a clear way that violent protests would quickly achieve their goals. For example I could see how violence against the Iranian morality police could quickly achieve equality for women that would otherwise take decades. I don’t know enough about Iranian politics to know if that is actually the case.
For BLM it seemed their goals were inchoate, their diagnosis of the problem wrong , and their methods unlikely to achieve anything good. I think it is now clear that after causing billions in property damage and several deaths the changes caused by the protests have  resulted in the deaths of thousands of black people while achieving the next to nothing positive. All that was predictable at the time of the protests. >

First of all, I think you discount the power of violent protests. Nonviolent protest brings awareness to an issue; violent protest brings urgency to an issue. There have been very many successful partially violent protests in the US, for instance Stonewall. Even Martin Luther King himself changed his views to admit that violence might be necessary. For instance saying:

Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.
To my knowledge there’s no good data on the number of unjustified police shootings but I doubt it is accurate to say no progress has been made for decades. 

In a way, logically it is unlikely that much has happened until now. Because what motivation is there for the police to change themselves? It has only been recently that people have been able to record on the streets acts of violence.

For BLM it seemed their goals were inchoate

Since BLM has no central leadership, it wasn't supposed to have many shared goals beyond that black people should be treated equally and not be killed indiscriminately. The protests did make significant change, because many cities did pass new legislation, companies passed new policies, and new people got elected. Just those changes are not as visible because they are not as dramatic for the news. But they are there. For instance, if you read the proxy questions for many major companies, for the last few years they have been adding questions about how to increase diversity and work against racism. In fact, the only reason there wasn't more change was because the protests didn't continue. For instance multiple cities promised change, but then a few weeks after the riots, they didn't follow through. >

My understanding is the stonewall riots ended some targeted harassment but the real political gains came later after non violent political organizing.
According to the book Homicide: Life on the streets, police in Baltimore in the 60s used to carry plant knives to drop at the feet of the people they shot for resisting. Civilian review boards to investigate police shootings have been around for decades. Economist Roland Fryer found that police were 20% more likely to use force against black people but no more likely to shoot them. He attributes that to shootings being treated much more seriously than other types of force.
I don’t see companies providing lip service to DEI as being worth anything near the thousands of lives lost. >


it is very naive to expect real change to not be accompanied by some level of lawlessness, because the 'law' is what is on trial in a protest.

This isn't about 'breaking the law' as much as it is about objecting to violence and harm directed at innocent people. >

I'd just throw in the the public was wildly misinformed about George Floyd in particular and police violence in general. The crowds were saying "I can't breathe" as if Floyd started saying that once Chauvin put his knee on Floyd's neck, which isn't true. Floyd started saying that long before Chauvin put his knee of Floyd's neck, according to the bodycam footage. If you don't believe it, please look it up.
Also, "The medical examiner who ruled George Floyd's death a homicide testified Friday that Floyd's heart disease and drug use contributed to his death, but police officers' restraint of his body and compression of his neck were the primary causes". So Chauvin should have turned Floyd over to let him catch his breath, and Chavin failed to render aid once Floyd became unresponsive, both mandated by department policy. But the use of force expert in the Chauvin trial testified that the hold Chauvin used was within department policy.
Was Chavin's actions abusive? Yes. But was this some kind of example of obvious racist murder? No, not at all.
So the rioters should have instead tried to open a dialogue to try to pin down the facts rather than burning and looting Fairfax and Santa Monica, famously liberal Jewish neighborhoods. >

To be clear, they didn't lose their jobs to how the government enforced COVID, they lost their jobs due to how they responded to a public health order.
The same laws were enforced on me, yet I suffered no consequences.
Totally optional. >

Trying to compare the BLM violence and the relatively peaceful, but disruptive trucker protests is like comparing high school JV football and the NFL. Not even close to the same level of violence.
Even the closest thing on the right wing is January 6th riot at the capital. Even then, one day riot, one death (rioter) versus months of violence, countless buildings destroyed, billions of dollars in damage and lost wages/income for those impacted, dozens of deaths (primarily caused by the rioters themselves), and sparked a nationwide explosion of violent crime.
Denouncing violent, criminal activity is an absolutely legitimate stance. Condoning the violence (like the Democrats did until called out), is not. >


one represents more leftist ideology and the other more right wing ideology

It speaks volumes when one side is rioting for racial justice for victims of extrajudicial police executions, and the other is rioting because measures put in place to halt a pandemic and save lives mildly inconvinience them. >

What would be the point at which you would say a group of protesters has committed so much violence against innocent people that they lose their right to be heard? You are not very specific or using limiting language here. What about January 6? Does the act of breaking into the Capitol and shouting for the vice president’s execution nullify any right for the protesters to be heard, whether they were Trump supporters or BLM activists? What if a group of armed protesters started going house by house, breaking into people’s homes and executing their occupants? >

I answered Jan 6 in another comment but in short: there is no empirical evidence the election was stolen, so I disagree with their cause. The fact that they shouted for the vice presidents head doesn't sway my opinion much one way or the other.
As for your other example, this thread is honestly just chock full of made up strawmen examples, and I'm getting a bit tired of trying to reply to them. Obviously an execution squad is going to become the main story rather than whatever ideology they had to start with. Lol.
The original point of this post was about peripheral violence. A mob meets to protest anything, there is going to be looting, beatings, etc. Some of it may be extreme, some of it may be over or underreported based on media outlet and biases, whatever. The point is that there is a decided effort to obscure the fact that a large group of citizens feel disenfranchised by a government that is supposed to work for them. And the way it's obscured is that focus on the violence and sidestep the entire issue.
How does that have anything to do with execution squads? >

The way you word your post leaves it open to exactly the interpretations I’m suggesting, which is why you’re getting so many of those responses. They are extreme examples because your post doesn’t exclude them from consideration. You suggest that if people are angry enough, lawlessness is inevitable and should essentially be brushed aside. So why shouldn’t people wonder if you draw the line anywhere?
“A mob meets to protest anything, there is going to be lootings, beatings, etc.” This is of course not true. Large groups gather to protest all the time without violence. The vast majority of the George Floyd protests were not violent. The annual Women’s March and March for Life in Washington do not result in violence. The number of protests of any kind that result in actual violence is extremely low. There is absolutely no reason to assume that a large group of people protesting is inevitably going to result in violence. That’s why when it does, the protesters themselves are rightly criticized, because they then put innocent people in a position where they’re justified in defending themselves, their families, or their places of business. >

Sounds like you only accept violent protest for a cause that you agree with or think is moral. Who gets to decide what is a moral cause? Is violence acceptable for any cause? Look what MLK was able to accomplish without violence. I bet he would strongly disagree with your post.  
Was the 3 billion dollars in damages and over 30 deaths and hundreds of injured worth it for the BLM riots? What reforms actually resulted to improve the lives of black Americans? >

Actually, I picked two different causes on both ends of the political spectrum just to show my opinion doesn't really change based on the cause.
MLK spoke many times about the usefulness of violent protests, including looting. Go look up MLK on looting. He's been whitewashed over the years to appear more harmless but he wrote and spoke many times on the place violence has within otherwise peaceful movements.
I have a feeling you would be extremely uncomfortable talking to MLK. >

A bunch of truckers drove around and screwed up traffic, not the right thing to do but it happened. A bunch of white people went into black neighborhoods and rioted, looting and burning mostly black communities. Ruining these peoples prosperity for years to come and committing random acts of violence on whomever was available. At the end, the rioters somehow got to blame the police for their actions and get the people trying to prevent the destruction fired. Makes the Purge seem less far fetched doesn't it? 
While I feel the protestors should be forced to clean up their mess and personally apologize to every person they hurt after a nice prison stay you seem to feel all is well, the two events are pretty much the same and those innocent people who wanted nothing to do with this should just suffer for living in the way of other peoples need to violently help them. 
You are the person who committed the copout. You ate what you were fed on the news and could give a shit about the damage done, or the lives ruined. >

Hmmmm, would you say the same about, oh, the Tulsa Race Riots?  Or about the January 6 riots?
If one person who believes an ideology commits some sort of atrocity in the furtherance of that ideology, not, it does not disgrace the ideology, but that becomes less and less tenable as

a larger fraction of the believers participate in the crime
a smaller fraction of the believers condemn the crime

Further, the fact that someone has a genuine grievance does not mean that the ideology they develop in response to that ideology is right.
You can object to Russian feudalism or the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty  without supporting Stalin or Hitler.
You can despise police brutality and still realize that BLM is a scam. >

Comparing the riots in the states to the trucker convoy is pretty ridiculous if you ask me. The two are barely comparable.