Police reports reveal the real culprits in 2020 urban riots

Contrary to popular belief, a battery of police reports prove that the riots that struck U.S. cities in 2020 were not inflicted by gangs, leftist radicals, or #BlackLivesMatter.

But if sensational media were misleading the public, then who were the culprits?

The Associated Press reviewed thousands of pages of court documents relating to 2020 protest arrests, and found that most arrestees were “young suburban adults from the very neighborhoods [then-President] Trump vows to protect from the violence.

The AP investigation profiled the protesters:

And many arrestees were peaceful marchers, charged with non-violent crimes, rounded up by police to discourage free speech. Many of those arrested later had charges dropped due to lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.

As early as July 2020, law enforcement officials knew that the worst violence was committed by organized white supremacists. In Virginia, police discovered that white-nationalist Boogaloo Boys instigated the local violence; Black Lives Matter leaders thanked city police for intervening.

Police reports in at least six other cities, such as Minneapolis, revealed the same thing: Most of the arrested looters were actually white nationalists who came from outside the city.

The AP investigation found that the Trump administration sought to corrupt and politicize the arrests, interfering with cases that — legally speaking — should have been handled by local courts, not GOP-controlled federal agencies. In September 2020, an administration official admitted that they had been lying about a supposed “antifa” conspiracy; white nationalists were, indeed, involved in the riots.

A subsequent nationwide end-of-year nationwide survey of police reports, conducted by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, confirmed all of this. The urban violence in 2020 was consistently associated with out-of-town white nationalist organizations and far-right militias fighting against peaceful speech by Black Lives Matter and its progressive American allies.

Finally, in November 2022, a Department of Homeland Security internal report belatedly admitted that, under Trump’s illegal orders, they had “launched a failed operation that ensnared hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. protesters in what new documents show was as a sweeping, power-hungry effort before the 2020 election to bolster President Donald Trump’s spurious claims” about a non-existent “terrorist organization” that Trump accused his Democratic rivals of supporting.

Today, millions of Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News viewers falsely believe that the 2020 riots completely destroyed American cities structurally and financially. But from Portland to Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. and everywhere in between, damage was limited to a few neighborhoods in each city, and easily repaired. That’s not surprising, given that the marches in each city were found by police reports to have been “overwhelmingly peaceful.”

Relentless media sensationalism did not merely misled the public. In omitting most facts from their coverage and thriving upon outrage, partisan cable news channels energized white-nationalist violence against U.S. election workers, elected state and local officials and, on January 6, our national democratically elected government.