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Rioters in front of the Mark O. Hatfield federal courthouse during another night of unrest on July 25, 2020 in Portland, Oregon.Spencer Platt / Getty Images

January, 8, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – The media, business groups, Democrats, and many Republicans have rushed to condemn Wednesday’s largely unimpeded breach of the U.S. Capitol building as an “insurrection.” 

As some have pointed out, little, if any censure, from most of these groups resulted from numerous killings and unprecedented urban destruction last year by leftist rioters, who were often directly incited by Democratic leaders.

A Capitol police officer tragically has died, reportedly due to the actions of some people at the pro-Trump rally on Wednesday, though it must be noted that looters and agitators in Black Lives Matters riots have repeatedly, deliberately killed targets of their anger. 

At a Portland rally last August, “anti-fascist” anarchists murdered pro-Trump demonstrator Aaron “Jay” Danielson and celebrated the killing. “He was a f—ing Nazi! Our community held its own,” a woman can be heard screaming in response to the murder. Oregon governor Kate Brown blamed the violence on Trump supporters.

Multiple people, including elderly retired police officer David Dorn and an unarmed Chicago father, were fatally shot during lootings that erupted following the death of George Floyd in May. A total of twenty-five Americans were killed either amid “political demonstrations” or as a result of “political unrest,” in 2020, according to The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

Riots throughout May and the start of June led to the injury of nearly 1,000 police officers in a matter of weeks.

At one Black Lives Matter riot in upstate New York, for example, a heavily intoxicated woman who tested positive for five different drugs plowed her car through a line of cops, shattering one of their pelvises, while a passenger fired shots out of her window. She was released from federal custody.

Hundreds of violent “protests,” up to 95% of them linked to Black Lives Matter, caused between $1-2 billion worth of property damage across the United States just between May 26 and June 8. Rioting has continued into 2021 in various U.S. cities. 

“The number of boarded-up or destroyed structures I’ve seen across the country — commercial, governmental, and even residential — is staggering, and keeping an accurate count has been impossible,” said investigative journalist Michael Tracey, who made a cross-country trip in the summer to document the wreckage. 

“It would be almost trivially easy to go to Minneapolis, Chicago, or Seattle and interview an immigrant small-business owner who’d been ‘living the American dream’ but whose life prospects have now been seriously disrupted, if not destroyed altogether,” he added.

The damage done by any Trump protestors in the Capitol yesterday – which seems to be confined mainly to doors and windows – cannot compare.

In Seattle, Black Lives Matter rioters overran the local police department and seized six city blocks last year, leading to two homicides and a spike in local rapes. They later tried to seal Seattle police inside a precinct and burn them alive.

Antifa and Black Lives Matter thugs have burned the city hall of Portland and ravaged a federal courthouse and the police union there, among other things, throughout seven straight months of unrest. As protestors entered the U.S. Capitol yesterday, hundreds of people, some armed with long guns, quietly continued an ongoing occupation of a part of downtown Portland called “Red House.”

Agitators blasted fireworks at an ICE building in Atlanta. They threw “rocks, ceramic paint-filled balls and frozen water bottles” at a federal courthouse and another federal building in Oakland.

Riots linked to Black Lives Matter contributed to more than $50 million worth of damage in sleepy Kenosha, Wisconsin, after police killed an armed black man who shrugged off a taser and resisted arrest. 

In the middle of the COVID-19 crisis, rioters and looters even targeted pharmacies, pilfering or destroying around 150 of them in Philadelphia alone.

Moreover, Black Lives Matter and allied activists have torn down or vandalized dozens, if not hundreds, of statuesand other historic monuments, including memorials honoring first responders, Catholic saints, African-American soldiers, and victims of the Armenian genocide.

They desecrated the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial, torched historical St. John’s church, and forced entry into the AFL-CIO headquarters in D.C., setting it ablaze from within.

Two years prior, leftist agitators had stormed the atrium of the Senate Hart Building by Capitol Hill to protest the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

They also surrounded the Supreme Court, banging on and clawing at the outer doors ahead of Justice Kavanaugh’s swearing-in.

In November, Shutdown DC, the group of Black Lives Matter-affiliated radicals who harassed GOP Senator Josh Hawley’s family earlier this week, anticipated “blockading the White House” in the event of a Trump victory. They also had sought “to prevent Congress from returning” to session.

“We are not seeking a ‘return to normalcy,’” they said. “Rather, we see this as the time to rise up against the current crisis and move forward to dismantle…interlocking systems of oppression.”

Other D.C. “siege” attempts had been announced by radical left-wingers like Adbusters, a group linked to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Crucially, Democratic leaders unabashedly incited this likely unparalleled destruction – probably the worst wave of political-related violence to sweep the nation since the Civil War. 

In June, after several riot murders already had been reported, Senator Kamala Harris gleefully told Stephen Colbert, “They’re not going to stop.”

“They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not,” she said.

“Squad” member Rep. Ayanna Pressley likewise called for “unrest in the streets” in August. “You know, there needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as there’s unrest in our lives,” she continued.

“If you see anybody from [Trump’s cabinet] in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Rep. Maxine Waters, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, told supporters.

Nancy Pelosi who encouraged “uprisings across the country” against Trump two years ago, similarly labelled Republicans “domestic enemies of the state” four months ago.

Along with the Democratic Party, the liberal media widely took up the cause to justify and foment left-wing violence.

“Show me where it says protestors are supposed to be polite and peaceful,” CNN’s Andrew Cuomo said over the summer. In October, The New Yorker released a feature called “In the Streets with Antifa,” that explored the group’s notion that “confronting fascists with violence can be justified.” 

The news outlet The Nation published an article in June titled, “Burning Down the 3rd Police Precinct Changed Everything.” “By seizing the cops’ home base, rioters showed that law enforcement is not above the forces of history,” said writer Vicky Osterweil. 

More than 100 Minneapolis cops have filed for permanent disability in the wake the summer riots violence in the city, citing post-traumatic stress issues.

“Protests are messy,” downplayed German Lopez of Vox in an article covering a deadly Black Lives Matter event. “When thousands or millions of people rise up in very passionate demonstrations, some bad, violent people are going to get caught up in the cause.”

What happened to that idea when far more peaceful conservatives protested a fraudulent election this week?

Raymond Wolfe is a faithful Catholic journalist and editor at LifeSiteNews and is happily married. He formerly worked with the Center for Family and Human Rights.