They (not Trump of course) had to walk it back when it turned out not to be true.
Is there some outside groups posing as others, possibly, but to blame a majority of problems on them is just BS.
Now, I don't think the bulk of the looters are bad people. But to change the narrative to be anything other than a REALLY TERRIBLE PR move by young people being opportunistic is absurd. For the truck driver who was beaten, the MSM were calling the violent protestors brave.
It comes down to this - are you helping the cause or hurting the cause? Only delusional, heavily-biased people / social justice warriors think looting is helping the cause and they're making every excuse under the sun. To think that humans, by and large, will look past it (for right or wrong) is out of touch with reality.
And if you criticize the means in any way, you get attacked even if you support the same change. In my opinion, to suggest that young black people are so pliable and incapable of thinking that some posts by a rogue group would turn them into robotic looters is racist in itself.
Young people semi organized and did some dumb stuff and justified it because of rightful injustice. Are they bad? No. Was it wise? Of course not. That's what happened.
Outside of that - I've been involved in a coroner's inquest before as my jury duty and it was very interesting. You basically are tasked with deciding whether a death was homicide, suicide or natural causes. I've heard about these civilian oversight boards as the answer but they have challenges with "local political manipulation" and require "steep budgets for investigators" [1]
So from my coroner's inquest experience, I was thinking - you already have civilians. It's efficient. If an officer is involved and the coroner's inquest participants rule it to be a homicide - boom, you could mandate an automatic trial!
This seems like it would be easier to roll out, more efficient, and provide pure accountability to any officer involved shooting. They'd know they would be legally required to go to trial if the coroner's inquest ruled a homicide.
Certainly, some evidence could still be tampered with by the powers that be, but that would elude the civilian oversight boards too in those cases. And with body cams, social media and business and civilian cameras, it's gotten much harder for them to hide evidence. So if you have an easy path to a trial originating from jury peers after coroner input, then you have a ton more accountability.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/is-civilian-overs...
The problem, which shows up in plenty of posts on social media, is that people's concern should, first and foremost, be the excessive use of force by US police officers, and the lack of accountability that officers face, in particular when black lives are lost as a result. Sure, destroying things this is bad, but black lives matter.
I grabbed this quote from your reply specifically because it seems to make the claim that people who belive in social justice are delusional, heavily-biased, and are entirely or at least largely in support of looting. I've never seen anyone make the argument that looting is helping the cause. What I have seen is arguments that acknowledge the 'badness' of the looting, and point out that the same arguments are not being applied to the police.
"Funny how one bad protester labels the whole movement, but a few bad cops are never supposed to represent all cops." -@aStatesman (Twitter)
In fact, there are plenty of videos people have posted of protesters stopping looters in various places. This tweet has one, but there are many in the responses to that tweet as well: https://twitter.com/gryking/status/1267101707596632066
There definitely are people making such arguments. The assertion is that property is the root cause of injustice so presumably destroying it is just. See for example https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1267402206220869632
What puzzles me is that some people supporting this argument are highly paid software engineers. How do they reconcile this with the fact that it is precisely the concept of private property (and yes, violent enforcement of it) that allows them to sit in front of the computer all day building some cool stuff and not worry that some violent thug will break into their house and take away their laptop?
For example, a corrupt politician can understand why an anti-bribery campaign is beneficial for his country.
I think it's fair to say that destruction of private property turns the situation into an economic problem, which in turn is a political pressure point. Rich people have more influence over police departments and attorneys general than do poor people. But for such pressure to do any useful work, the message must be, "give us justice and the looting will end."
(That justice may come in the form of charges against specific police officers, or perhaps as a campaign of institutional reforms within the police apparatus.)
Consider for a moment what the optimal strategy would be to handle this vandalism and looting from the perspective of "Rich people." A) Capitulate to the demands of people using terror / destruction of property as leverage B) Utilize the vast resources available to you to end the source of the problem
I think your heart is in the right place in a very Robin Hood-esque kind of way but you're not grappling with reality if you think "give us justice and the looting will end" is going to play out favorably for the looters
Those vast resources that you mention (police and military) are at the very core of the conflict. Their use of force has only exacerbated the problem, because people spread videos of unjustifiable abuses (three cops brutalizing one prostrate individual in LA, a cop hitting protestors with his vehicle in NYC, a brigade of cops shooting law-abiding people on their own porch in Minneapolis, etc) that in turn draw more protestors to the fore.
Your A/B scenario is precisely the problem -- you equate the soothing of public anger with "capitulation" rather than "justice," and you make violence an imperative by arguing that the only strong approach is the brutal one.
Not to mention that you express a view that police brutality can "end the source of the problem." What is the source of the problem, if not police brutality itself? Were Americans violating curfews to demonstrate in the streets of major cities immediately prior to the murder of George Floyd?