Dear Protestors:

If you want to make a point and want me, as a citizen, to listen to you about that which you’re protesting, then you and your cohorts have to demonstrate to me that you care about civility and the law of the land. The first amendment protects  peaceful  protests, not  violent  ones, ergo, it does not include destruction of property, looting, arson, and of course crimes against other persons.

I keep hearing people on the left say, “they have insurance” about businesses that are being impacted by the property damage and theft. But it’s not like insurance solves the problems of business owners and restores their business to where it was. Apart from the lost income which can be devastating to a business and keep it from staying afloat, the lost opportunity cost and countless additional hours it takes to get these businesses to where they were prior to looting and rioting are not insignificant. Plus the period of time they are out of business impacts any business momentum they might have had… if there’s much of a city left in which to run the business after the fact.

If you’re not condemning the riots, looting, violence and vandalism and you claim you support black lives matter, you are undermining your credibility.
If you want fellow citizens to respect you and be willing to co-create solutions with you, know that you can’t be trusted until you demonstrate you care about civility which means condemning these illegal actions. To clarify, I use the term “civility” to describe the overarching category of “operating respectfully within the law demonstrating a comprehension of how it creates mutual gain for our collective peaceful coexistence.”

“Wasow finds that nonviolent civil-rights protests did not trigger a national backlash but that violent protests and looting did. The physical damage inflicted upon poor urban neighborhoods by rioting does not have the compensating virtue of easing the way for more progressive policies; instead, it compounds the damage by promoting a regressive backlash. The Nixonian law-and-order backlash drove a wave of repressive criminal-justice policies that carried through for decades with such force that even Democrats like Bill Clinton felt the need to endorse them in order to win elections.“

If you ask me, when you don’t care about civility, there’s no reason to negotiate with you because you’ve proven yourself to be a terrorist and there’s no negotiating with terrorists since they can’t be trusted to honor their agreements.

I know the word “terrorist” is a charged word yet I have a well constructed and thought out set of reasons that have led me to use the word. When your political movement has you threatening the population and citizens around you with your flagrant violations on the law, lack of civility and violations of other people’s persons and property with your actions, you are creating terror. You have demonstrated that you can’t keep agreements because you do not honor the laws around you. There is no room for discourse with those who create terror and won’t keep agreements. That’s the definition of terrorist.

I’m sure this will upset some people to read and I’ll get called names because that’s what happens.

But before you do that, I ask you to look into your heart and consider the situation from the opposite perspective. If people wanted you to take up their cause and they were acting with varying degrees of condoning/supporting/encouraging lawlessness, would you think they were trustworthy enough to stick to their agreements when they clearly won’t honor other people’s basic natural rights as guaranteed by the constitution?

The more this behavior happens the more you push people to the right because they perceive those condoning/supporting/encouraging the lawlessness to be 🦇 💩 crazy.

If your outcome is backlash that’s leads to repressive criminal justice policies (not unlike Biden’s 1994 Bill), keep it up.

If, however, you and your cohorts want to effectively protest and have the silent majority consider your cause, it is incumbent on you to:

  • not initiate violence
  • ensure none of your cohorts do that
  • at the first sign of one of your group doing so, chastising them and distancing yourself from them to delineate that you do not support those actions and do not wish to be associated with them