The problems with the “more extreme protests play into GOPs hands” takes are many but #1 may be: no protest will ever be peaceful enough for Trump voters, and accepting the demand for perfect peace in response to brutality is more a trap playing into the GOPs hands than any riot.

A big #2 is this: it exonerates anyone who would locate the origins of violence with those reacting to brutal oppression and injustice rather than with the brutal oppression itself. It magically converts a silence from comfortable complicit abandonment to savvy strategy.

The most perfectly peaceful protests, civility scolds now agree, was the Civil Rights Movement, and their exemplar was Martin Luther King, Jr., who had to deal with the same bullshit that #BLM now does.

He had some things to say about that.

Nobody concerned with law or order or peace is voting for Trump. Period.

Nobody who wants to see violence diminish is voting for Trump. Period.

Letting anyone pretend otherwise lends them a moral victory they very much want and mustn’t get.

Moderates standing up against white supremacy and fascism is the moral duty of moderates, not of protesters. I for one reject any moderate’s use of anything BLM protesters do while protesting for their very lives as an excuse for shirking that duty. https://twitter.com/josephchalbaud/status/1300157316478763013

Finally, making moral decisions based on speculation of how people lacking moral compasses will respond a) cedes your own values to the preferences of those who lack those values, and allies you with them; b) gives them no chance to prove you wrong ...

... c) abandons those who have no choice but to fight to fighting alone; and d) blames the struggle that's been forced on them for any failure caused by that struggle.

In short, it's what we comfortable white people have done at every similar juncture. And here we are.

Yes, Trump is trying to whip up racial unrest, and people who respond to those sorts of things will respond to those sorts of things.

Those will will respond to it like Trump wants will respond to *anything* that happens. There is no protest peaceful enough for such as them.

I hope Trump's direct pitch to racism doesn't work, but if it does, Black people and allies protesting for their humanity and their lives are not to blame.

Racists, who respond to direct pitches to racism, are to blame.

Let's not forget it.

It’s so weird isn’t it that Republicans are never “helping Biden” by praising a literal mass shooter or supporting cops after months of shocking violence, but any whiff of riot “helps Trump.”

It’s almost as if violence and moderate response to it isn’t the actual driver here.

If Trump wins, it’s not because of any strategy BLM did or did not employ.

If Trump wins, it’s because white people in America are still fundamentally aligned with authoritarianism and white supremacy.

And that’s it.

I hope white people in America aren’t fundamentally aligned with white supremacy and authoritarianism, but we were four years ago, and if Trump wins, then we still are—period.

That’s on us, not the protesters’ strategy or lack of it.

And that’s it.