Nonviolence fucking matters.

You’re at a protest. Someone shows up and wants to smash some shop windows.

Whether they’re an earnest knucklehead or something far more sinister doesn’t matter — tell them to fucking stop.

As we head into a day of protest — April 5, 2025 — across the United States, I think about how effectively violence is used to the dual purpose of delegitimizing the political intention and moral imperative of the protestor — and likewise to destroy and scatter the protest movement.

In the first case, that of delegitimization, we can look at the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the fact that they were overwhelmingly peaceful: Of more that 7,750 protests from May to August 2020, 93% did not involve violence, vandalism, etc.

Yet there is a public perception, at least in some sectors, of those protests as a mass of chaotic riots and destruction.

This reading of the record and the data is at best maximalist distortion, and propaganda at worst, and in either case enables extremists to publicly disregard, deny, denigrate and propagate lies about the purpose of the protest movement and its participants.

Agents provocateurs add fuel to the fire. A brief survey of Internet search results provides a bunch of interesting links:

• An article on the Waging Nonviolence website takes a historical look at how instigators infiltrated protest movements in the United States.
• A MarketWatch article reports on a Federal investigation on domestic extremists and foreign agents engaging in incitement and destructive acts to turn public sentiment against 2020 police-brutality protests.
• A 2024 report in Politics & Rights Review, a Canadian academic journal, goes into detail on the use of agents provocateurs in Europe to “erode democracy and free speech.”
• A 2021 book, How Agent Provocateurs Harm Our Movements, from the International Center of Nonviolent Conflict, offers “some historical examples and a few ideas on reducing the risk” … it’s available for free as a PDF download.

It’s more than just using agents provocateurs to delegitimize protest, of course. It’s also about enabling authoritarian reaction.

Remember, kids: This is Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman and January 6 country — all exonerated by the courts and government.

They, and legions of like-minded stochastic individuals and regular, irregular, authoritarian and paramilitary group configurations, can’t fucking wait for a protestor to throw the first — or even second — punch.

In the face of this ravenous appetite, nonviolence amounts to a radically transformational confrontation with abusive power.

In our vengeful, rage-addicted, punishment-obsessed society, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 6 principles of nonviolence comprise a truly radical text, even in their most basic, once-sentence iteration. I reprint them here in summary:

• Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people. 
• Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding. 
• Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people. 
• Nonviolence holds that suffering can educate and transform. 
• Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate. 
• Nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice. 

Nonviolence fucking matters.