Because, inevitably, someone will snarkily ask why this is bad while tearing down Confederate statues is good, the answer is simple: these people are acting in support of white supremacism, whereas the statue protestors are acting against it. https://twitter.com/mr_ryanguillory/status/1279754810431070210

To talk about these things in purely procedural terms is to rob political action of its substance and its connection to actual human lives. At some point, you have to deal with the substance, the cause in which action was taken.

And, yes, there are some people who think that BLM is worse than the Confederacy. But the point is, those people are not just wrong, they’re wrong in the service of a particularly pernicious cause.

We shouldn’t indulge the idea that their behavior is in any way equivalent to that of people protesting against monuments to white supremacism.

And, yes, there will always be judgment calls and edge cases and all of that. But plenty of calls should be easy ones, and the fact that some are harder shouldn’t prevent us from calling the easy ones correctly.