Looting bothers me in a way that protests in and of themselves never could. While I may not agree with your protests, a peaceful protest is still proof that we live in a free society. For all the people screaming about how we live in a police state, they forget that if we really did, most of them would be too terrified to even leave the house, much less scream in the streets for a few hours.

But looting is something very different. Looting is nothing more than smash-and-grab robbery on a grander scale. It never helps a cause. It never raises awareness of an issue. It never helps anyone but the looters themselves.

Which kind of makes you wonder just why Black Lives Matter activists are so supportive of the tactic.

An activist accused people upset over the recent looting in downtown Chicago of being upset about the wrong thing during a recent press conference.

“People are worried about looting and there are literal lives being taken away? There are people who are dying and y’all are mad about looting Mag Mile? Get over it!” Alycia Moaton said at the event hosted by the group GoodKids MadCity.

She continued:

These buildings are insured. Materials will come back, but we will not come back if they kill us. What do y’all not get about that? Gucci, Apple store, whatever it is, that stuff can be replaced. But we won’t be replaced. We lose our lives every single day for this cause, and y’all are mad about the wrong shit.

On what appeared to be her Twitter profile, Moaton described herself as a “mad abolitionist” and a member of GoodKids MadCity.

I’m still trying to find evidence that a single Black Lives Matter activist was killed for their cause, much less people losing their lives every day. I suppose if people were being murdered daily for their beliefs, I could at least understand the outrage.

Only, they’re not.

So far, I’ve found one report of a Black Lives Matter activist being murdered. She was raped and killed by a black man, so I’m willing to bet that it didn’t have much of anything to do with her activism.

Yet people like Moaton are still claiming that people are losing their lives every day, yet the media never calls on them to back up that claim. Are black men and women dying every day? Yes, but so are white folks and every other ethnicity. Are black people losing their lives to violence at a higher rate, though? Oh, absolutely, but they’re often killed at the hands of black people, not white police officers.

So no, I’m not going to get over the looting. I’m not going to just roll over and shrug because these stores have insurance. Them having insurance isn’t a license for rampaging mobs to take crap that doesn’t belong to them. It’s no justification for smash-and-grab robbery.

I’m not going to get over it and neither should anyone else. Especially those who aren’t able to earn a living because some mob thought they had a right to take stuff that didn’t belong to them and destroy the store in the process. The store’s insurance didn’t really help them all that much, and how many of those lives shattered by that are black lives?

Black lives matter, but only when it’s convenient, apparently.