An infographic compares “500+ BLM riots” to “January 6” with stark statistics designed to make one seem catastrophic and the other trivial.
Research assistance from Claude AI.
The Death Count: A Study in Selective Statistics
January 6: “Zero Murders”
The graphic claims zero murders by participants on January 6. This is technically accurate only if you use an extremely narrow definition. Here’s what actually happened:
Five people died that day?one protester shot by police while breaching the Speaker’s Lobby, and three others from medical emergencies. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died the next day after suffering two strokes. In the months that followed, four more officers who responded to the attack died by suicide, with their families directly attributing these deaths to the trauma experienced that day.
Approximately 140 Capitol and Metropolitan police officers were criminally assaulted during the attack.
2020 Protests: “20+ Murders by Participants”
This claim is deeply misleading. While roughly 19-25 people died during the period of protests, the vast majority were NOT killed by Black Lives Matter protesters. The deaths included:
- Victims of counter-protesters, including the Kenosha shootings by Kyle Rittenhouse
- A federal security officer killed by a Boogaloo movement supporter (a right-wing extremist) who explicitly wanted to “use their anger to fuel our fire” and incite broader violence
- Deaths from opportunistic looters, personal disputes, and accidents that had no connection to the political goals of the protests
The manipulation: The graphic attributes every death that occurred during protests to “BLM participants” while using the narrowest possible definition for January 6.
Property Damage: Missing the Context
The numbers themselves are roughly accurate: the 2020 protests resulted in approximately $1-2 billion in insured property losses, while January 6 caused about $1.5 million in damage to the Capitol building.
But here’s what the graphic conveniently omits:
Scale and Scope: The 2020 protests occurred in over 2,000 cities across the United States over a period of months, with an estimated 15-26 million participants?making them the largest protest movement in American history. Studies found that 93-96.3% of these demonstrations were peaceful and involved no property damage.
January 6 was a single event, at one location, lasting a few hours.
Victims: Much of the 2020 property damage disproportionately affected minority-owned small businesses in urban communities. The January 6 attack targeted the seat of American democracy during a constitutional process.
The Real Manipulation: Apples and Oranges
This graphic employs classic propaganda techniques:
False Equivalence: It compares months of decentralized, nationwide protests involving tens of millions of people to a single, coordinated assault on the Capitol with a specific political objective?disrupting Congress’s certification of electoral votes.
Selective Framing: The 2020 events are labeled “riots” while January 6 is downplayed as lasting merely “a couple hours.” The graphic also ignores that fully functional pipe bombs were planted at both the RNC and DNC headquarters.
Intent Matters: The 2020 protests arose from public outrage over police brutality and systemic racism, with the vast majority being peaceful. January 6 involved a coordinated effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power following an election.
The Bottom Line
Both events involved violence that deserves serious examination and accountability. But this graphic isn’t designed to inform?it’s designed to manipulate perception by cherry-picking statistics, removing context, and creating false equivalencies.
When 15-26 million people participate in protests across thousands of cities, aggregate statistics tell you almost nothing about the movement’s character or intent. When a few thousand people storm the Capitol to disrupt a constitutional process, that’s a fundamentally different phenomenon.