On the subject of media coverage and whether you're seeing the full picture, after our confederate monument protest, my cousin ended up arguing with my mom on facebook, on the pictures my mom herself took, insisting the protest was violent based on what she saw on the news.

Especially when the police are trying really hard to push a particular narrative, don't take what you're seeing at face value when you don't know what you didn't see that happened before.

It's pretty clear that the police in a lot of cities went into today wanting to knock heads and attack protesters so that they could sell white suburbia the image of the poor persecuted police valiantly standing against chaos.

Protest veterans can tell you that the cops routinely take steps designed to escalate in order to create an excuse to start cracking down on protesters, and the more marginalized the group, the greater the danger of the police trying to escalate.

I've personally been in protests where the police went out of their way to try and bait protesters into giving them an excuse to start arrests. It's obvious to anybody who's been through it before that the cops the last few days have been dumping gasoline and throwing the match.

The police wanted to knock heads, cops all over the country have been on edge every since those four Minneapolis officers were fired. I saw that here in Manatee when I left the house on Wednesday and there were cops *everywhere* driving around town in an obvious show of force.

The only rioting I'm seeing is coming from the people with badges and guns. We're watching a nationwide police riot with citizens trying to fight back and protect themselves and their communities from the militarized violent gang that is the police this country.

Going back to how I started this thread talking about our confederate monument protest, once all of us had left the monument except for a few rear guard keeping eye on the Nazis who showed up, the cops made a giant show of riding their horses to "break up" the protest.

That, of course, showed up on the news, even though it was a few dozen Nazis trying to start shit with a handful of protesters were refusing to engage. And then you had people like my cousin arguing with my mom that our protest, that my mom had just gotten home from, was violent