Daily Broadside | The Riots Aren’t a Spontaneous Response to George Floyd’s Death

I had a friend ask me if I thought George Floyd’s death was part of a larger plan to touch off the riots and violence we’re experiencing as a way to create chaos in the lead up to the November elections. I’ve not seen any evidence that suggests his death at the hands of police officers was pre-planned—although one could be forgiven for thinking that, the way the four officers ignored Floyd’s pleas for relief as though they were waiting for him to die.

However, I do believe the upheaval we’re being subjected to is opportunistic. I say that because there is evidence of pre-planning that would require funding and coordination.

The clearest evidence is that a number of cities have reported that bricks were pre-positioned along routes that protesters would likely take. Here’s a sample I’ve found online:

Kansas City

Dallas

Chicago
“There is no doubt. This was an organized effort last night,” she said. “There were clearly efforts to subvert the peaceful process and make it into something violent.”

“There’s no question that both the people who were fighting and brought the weapons, that was absolutely organized and choreographed,” she added. “It seems also clear that the fires that were set, both of the vehicles and buildings, that that was organized and that was opportunistic, as well as the looting.”

Lightfoot gave no specific location, but she referred to instances in which a group would show up at a retailer, break windows and then load them into a rented U-Haul van they’d arrived with. The same happened with “caravans” of cars, she added, with sometimes just windows broken, but other times fires also being set after looting.

https://twitter.com/Jasmine_Jewels/status/1266948079325937665

Minneapolis

Earlier Sunday, state officials said several caches of flammable materials were found both in neighborhoods where there have already been fires and “in cars we’ve stopped as recently as this morning,” said John Harrington, state public safety commissioner. Some of the caches look like they may have been planted days ago and some only in the last 24 hours or so, he said.

Police are also finding stolen vehicles with plates removed that are being used to transport the flammable materials. Looted goods and weapons also have been found in the stolen cars, he said.

“The fact that we’ve seen so many of them in so many places now makes us believe that this is part of that pattern that shows that this in fact an organized activity and not some random act of rage,” he said.

New York

Baltimore
According to sources, mounds of bricks and bottles have been found in Downtown Baltimore. Baltimore Police confirmed they are working with law enforcement partners to sweep the area.

There’s also evidence of pre-planning that involves scouting for locations that would allow rioters to conduct their violence without a police presence.

“And they developed a complex network of bicycle scouts to move ahead of demonstrators in different directions of where police were and where police were not for purposes of being able to direct groups from the larger group to places where they could commit acts of vandalism including the torching of police vehicles and Molotov cocktails where they thought officers would not be.”

Scouts, stolen vehicles, pre-staged bricks. That points to planning.

The larger question this evidence begs is, Who is funding these rioters? We suspect that many of them are part of the loose confederation of anarchists known as Antifa. As for funding, many are quick to blame George Soros’s Open Society Foundations as being the force behind much of it. I haven’t seen any direct evidence that is true, although Soros’s loathing of the U.S. is well-known.

I’d like to see the DOJ and FBI pull that thread.