Most people don’t even want that, they just want to bitch and keep their daily routine. Which includes finding stuff to bitch about from behind a screen.

JK the French know how to protest

To be fair, I've never met someone who doesn't either support or denounce violent protests in general - French or otherwise. This sounds like someone getting angry at the internet as a whole, without seeming to understand that it's made up of so many different people that it simultaneously holds all possible viewpoints at the same time.

Always with the "liberals".

I don't think the people saying "protest like the french" are the "liberals" OP is claiming "lost their mind" at BLM. This feels like strawman of strawman.

GuYs dOn't bReAk mY TaRgEt

Uh, the Internet is not the problem here. The problem is that liberals in real life work their asses off to make sure that their protests do nothing more disruptive than get people to honk horns. And even THAT is sometimes too disruptive for liberals.

That is a problem, for sure, but it's not the same problem as "Someone who isn't a liberal supported violent protest on the Internet, but then a liberal denounced it!? What's the deal?"

Like, yeah, people who think they can make change peacefully within the system that exists to exploit them are making it harder to actually make change, but they're not the ones crying out in support of French protests in the first place.

Because they're terrible at war, and that's sorta okay.

Yeah, exactly which liberals are we talking about? Maga? This shit is beyond moronic.

Yeah, all this talk of violent protests right before an important election will DEFINITELY not help the fascists declare martial law and stay in power. /s

I am not aware of a single "liberal" who got upset about that at all.

The problem might be that you either don't know what a liberal is, or that you don't know how people use the term in everyday life.

You saw a mildly critically post from a soccer mom. We get it, you think you're morally righteous and anyone with a slightly different opinion is an evil LiBeRaL

classical liberals maybe

gUiS gUiS iT's Da LiBbErUls!!!1!!1!!

Protest that doesn't disrupt is barely protest

Oh no, not this trope again.

maybe people who are really into Liberace?

Are the liberals in the room with us now

New lines of division just dropped! I totally voting for Trump now! /s I'm such a dumb lib or liberal or whatever!

I wish people would realize that the ability to protest is directly tied to social safety net.

You get beaten by a cop, you will get free healthcare that is not directly tied to your job. In the US, if you do have healthcare, it is tied to your job and your job can fire you for protesting if they want (unlike France we have no protection for being fired for political opinion).

Are we talking about Martínez de la Rosa-era liberals? (that was on the 30's. The 1830's)

They keep forgetting to put "neo" in front.

Usually for posts like these I assume they're talking about the unfortunately large group of milquetoast left-leaning Americans who think the system destroying their livelihoods can be reasoned with, as if the people stepping on our necks are just unaware of their actions, and would feel really bad if we wrote them a letter explaining the situation. They're certainly better than the neck-steppers themselves, but neither will ever actually fight to improve the situation we're in.

Education at its finest.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/13/fact-check-democrats-have-condemned-violence-linked-protests/3317862001/

There you go, now you can be aware. This article includes quotes from Biden, Clyburn, Lightfoot, Wheeler, and Pelosi condemning property destruction. (Pelosi's quote is about the 2017 Berkeley protests though)

Here is a followup about Dems distancing themselves from the George Floyd protests more recently.

https://www.deccanherald.com/world/how-the-2020-george-floyd-protests-are-haunting-democrats-in-2025-3583363

The people that "denounce violent protest" are people that have never been to a protest that wasn't a planned parade. Violence is an inevitable result of protests because the state itself uses violence to stop the protest. No matter how peaceful its initial intentions of protest are.

A "protest" that has a start and end date coordinated with the state is not a protest. It is a parade.

The majority of what people call "violence" is property damage. Property damage is not violence. But somehow we convince everyone that broken windows are worse than broken bones.

The same people that "denounce violent protest" also seem to have no problem with the use of chemical weapons on crowds of unarmed people. You go out to a protest, the first time your eyes are burning from tear gas you'll understand why any protest will fight back when violence is first placed on them by the state.

Steps to make people watching on TV "denounce violent protest"

(0) Society reaches a breaking point and protest form with the purpose to disrupt the ability of society to operate without acknowledging the injustice the protest is pointing towards.
(1) Protest are labeled "violent" because of property damage. Usually with less property damage than the aftermath of the average football match "celebration" results in. But these initially small acts of property damage are the focus of the media. Very little is said about why the protest started to begin with.
(2) Police use chemical weapons (banned in warfare) on their own citizens. Rubber bullets, flash bangs, hoses, etc. All acts of actual violence. Don't believe me? Take a rubber bullet to the head and tell me it's not violence.
(3) Protesters respond to violence with self defense measures. Kick back tear gas canisters, using leaf blowers, and becoming more defensive in body armor and gas masks to maintain the disruption the protest is meant to create. Yes. The goal of a protest is to disrupt society and inconvenience you. That's the whole point. Stop saying "it makes me not support them when they block the road". Dude, they are blocking the road because you weren't supporting them. Protest is the voice of the unheard.
(4) Police work to escalate violence through plain clothes officers working to increase property damage and get crowds of people to reach levels of property damage not intended by the protest. An individual act of violence of a single protestor or act of property damage can be used as justification to use violence on to a larger degree on the crowd. The police goal is not to keep the protest peaceful. The goal is to escalate the violence so they can justify their own levels of violence.
(5) Media covers the protest primarily on the property damage and violence of the protesters. The violence of the police is not spoken about. The violence of the police is treated as "keeping order" when it is doing the opposite. All the time we watch media people on the ground not "afraid of the violent protesters" but are literally running away from tear gas and flash bangs themselves. Next time you watch media coverage, watch how the media acts, it's far more telling than how the media speaks.
(6) The protest either dies out due to people not wanting to risk their lives as the violence is escalated by the police. OR the protests continue and are primarily maintained by those willing to use violence in self defense.

All of this time. The protestors would leave and allow the disruption to end if even a fraction of their demands are met. Paris protest started because of a failure in the education system. The government would rather spend their money on a militarized police force than on education. That should tell you a lot about the reason why protest became necessary to begin with.

TLDR: There are no "peaceful protest" that are capable of achieving the end results the protest itself is trying to achieve. The state will respond in violence to stop anything that actually has a chance of forcing change. There is no staying peaceful when chemical weapons and rubber bullets are introduced.

How MLK was viewed at the time

Ah, the Liberal Surrogate ™️.

Insert the thing you want to use as a punching bag. The right, the left, the middle, doesn't matter. Choose your own adventure.

I dunno man, there are some who ONLY operate under the Marxist definition of "Liberal". They don't believe language evolves and that maybe to most people "Liberal" is the term used to describe anyone with progressive ideals.

It's refreshing to see someone else explicitly state that property damage isn't violence.

It's capitalist and media propaganda to conflate the two to protect themselves.

To be fair, back when I would have identified as a Liberal, I was exactly the type of person to say "If we just communicate that we're unhappy more effectively, they'll listen this time for sure!"

straw man fallacy?

The same tea-partyers that wanted to overthrow the government because Obama wore a tan suit, are also the people that openly call for the death of people that don't agree with them, while also talking a lot about the sanctity of life. Fucking psychopaths.

Not just that, but US police are extraordinarily different from police in most of the world. They trace their roots back to organizations first formed to hunt escaped slaves. They are heavily militarized, almost never face any consequences for abusing their power, and are usually encouraged to use violence against left-wing protestors.

At points during the BLM protests, Trump called in the National Guard, who proceeded shoot and kill both protestors and bystanders.

Liberals didn't lose their minds.

However, the media are owned and controlled by the billionaires. This allows them a lot of control of the narrative and your perception of events.

The most effective form of protest workers have against owners requires no violence at all: It's strikes, ideally a general strike. The economic damages from even one week of half of the country's workers refusing to work would force the wealthiest permille to make concessions.

The principal problem people in the USA have is that your hyperindividualism prevents you from developing a class consciousness with your fellow workers. Most of you are not joining unions to make them strong for collective bargaining, not standing in local elections against establishment candidates, not joining/creating local mutual self-help groups, and so on.

I mean, I miss those days.

Bright eyed and bushy tailed. Believing that most people are kind at heart...

Now I'm pretty sure my neighbors will call ICE on my other neighbors if they ever do anything even slightly annoying.

"Safe" protests won't accomplish a damn thing.

I love the No Kings protests in Portland... congratulations, you're protesting for an audience who already 99% agrees with you.

But that's protests in Portland in general, BLM, Occupy Wall Street, etc. etc.

Want to make a real difference? Take that shit to D.C. and shut the city down for a month. That might move the needle.

Preaching to the pre-converted? Pointless.

Seems to me if this was about politicians, the word Democrats would've been used. It never occurred to me at all that this was regarding politicians, since the party name is universally how they would be spoken about.

It's one of those things that is just heavily a part of the education system and media that no one really questions.

However, it's also a very easy thing to explain. When people realize that their governments and their media care more about property damage than the lives it's populations children; it's a very radicalizing moment for a lot of people.

I mean it does generalize and probably isn't true upon close exam, but they are not wrong about how easy it was for "liberals" to suddenly have a problem with protest the second it got messy.

Though NIMBYs gonna NIMBY.

Is it possible the "Americans can't protest like the French" and "I don't like disruptive protests" camps are two entirely different groups of people?

When the pearlclutching starts, that’s when you take it up a few notches. Not back down.

Sorry, took your comment about the 'soccer mom' as an indication you wanted to hear about party officials over lay people

No it was really just to illustrate that if they heard that it was some random one off case which wasn't common. I was thinking of it as being some Facebook rando whose politics got assumed because of some signal that didn't necessarily mean anything

i support violent protests. light teslas on fire, raid a walmart, block amazon delivery trucks.

but i don't support, for example, people breaking in and robbing some independent shopkeeper's grocery store. like, those are working class people on your side...

So it is true. Americans can't protest like the French. You just interpreted it wrongly

Classical liberalism was an improvement over what came before it. Neoliberalism is when it morphed into anarcho-capitalist-esque "austerity for the poor; rights and subsidies for corporations"

French police trace their roots to sending Jews to Germany, just fyi

We don't have a central figure or identity that can pull that kind of movement together. Single-day marches? Sure. Moving hundreds of thousands of people two thousand miles and then feeding them for a month? That's military logistics.

Nationality isn't the issue, location is. You can't protest in America like you can in France.