George Floyd’s Death Almost Consumed America in Revolution

As the streets exploded, nearly every institution celebrated a ‘reckoning.’ Then people fought back.

By Mike Gonzalez. He is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Excerpts:

"During the civil unrest between May and July, more than 2,000 officers were injured in the line of duty, according to an analysis by the Major City Chiefs Association, an organization of police executives. Of 8,700 protests across major U.S. cities that summer, 3,692 involved some level of illegal activity, and 574 included outright violence, including attacks on police as well as destruction of local businesses and other private property.

The report found 2,385 looting incidents, 624 arson incidents, and 97 police vehicles burned. In Minneapolis and St. Paul combined, about 1,500 properties sustained severe damage, with nearly 80 completely destroyed. Reporting from Axios found that the destruction resulted in at least $1 billion to $2 billion of paid insurance claims."

"The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project reported in September 2020 that at least 86% of riots for which the identification of the participants was known were explicitly linked to Black Lives Matter activism."

"After all, the founders of BLM, particularly Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, were trained by Marxist ideologues: Ms. Cullors in radical-left activist Eric Mann’s Labor/Community Strategy Center, and Ms. Garza in Gramscian scholar Harmony Goldberg’s School of Unity and Liberation.

The goal of these BLM leaders was clear. In 2019 Ms. Garza had told a group in Maine, “We’re talking about changing how we’ve organized this country. . . . I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society.”"