The argument was that the protests were “mostly peaceful,” with a claim that 93% of the Black Lives Matter protests were not about violence and looting. It was an important argument, as it sought to calm concerns that protests were not only doing inexplicable damage to innocent lives by burning down buildings and destroying livelihoods that people, regardless of race or ethnicity, spend their lives building, but violently attacking individuals who got in their way.

Peaceful protests garnered support. Violent protests, looting, lost it. But violent protests caught people’s attention. Violence imposed a cost on the “normies,” whether by destroying their businesses or costing them peaceful sleep in their suburban homes. Peaceful protests might be annoying to the extent they close down roads and denied them to other citizens who had the right to use them, but violence made headlines.

By the dubious statistics of peacefulness, unclear whether screaming at diners through bullhorns at restaurants or chanting in the middle of the night on a quiet residential street, but shy of burning down a home, counted as violence, served to offset the actual violence. The right tipping point, enough violence to keep the protests in the news, but enough peacefulness to claim they weren’t riots, was key to maintaining the pressure.

It appeared that this toxic mix was due to the infiltration of “insurrectionary anarchists” into Black Lives Matters protests. It did not happen by accident, according to New York Times editorial board member Farah Stockman.

Take the word of the anarchists themselves, who lay out the strategy in Crimethinc, an anarchist publication: Black-clad figures break windows, set fires, vandalize police cars, then melt back into the crowd of peaceful protesters. When the police respond by brutalizing innocent demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets and rough arrests, the public’s disdain for law enforcement grows. It’s Asymmetric Warfare 101.

For the crowd of peaceful protesters, they were peaceful. For the black bloc anarchists, it was an opportunity to wage guerrilla warfare under cover of peaceful protest. That police response couldn’t differentiate was a feature to them, not a bug. It made for terrible optics, harm to innocent people and engendered increased outrage toward the police and the state. That was their point.

If that is not enough to convince you that there’s a method to the madness, check out the new report by Rutgers researchers that documents the “systematic, online mobilization of violence that was planned, coordinated (in real time) and celebrated by explicitly violent anarcho-socialist networks that rode on the coattails of peaceful protest,” according to its co-author Pamela Paresky. She said some anarchist social media accounts had grown 300-fold since May, to hundreds of thousands of followers.

“The ability to continue to spread and to eventually bring more violence, including a violent insurgency, relies on the ability to hide in plain sight — to be confused with legitimate protests, and for media and the public to minimize the threat,” Dr. Paresky told me.

What this meant for those who came to protest peacefully was twofold. They weren’t engaged in violence and looting so they couldn’t stop it. And they had a very different mission than the anarchists, so there was little they could do to prevent them from turning a peaceful protest violent. They appeared, struck and disappeared, leaving the peaceful protesters to take the rubber bullets that were meant for them. Collateral damage in the war against government.

Not that the anarchists were antagonistic to the cause of Black Lives Matter, to the extent there was any actual end game to the protests, but that wasn’t why the anarchists were there. They just wanted to burn it all down.

So the Black Lives Matter organizers were innocents, striving to make their point through peaceful protest? Not exactly.

There’s an even thornier truth that few people seem to want to talk about: Anarchy got results.

While I feared that the looting and arson would derail the urgent demands for racial justice and bring condemnation, I was wrong, at least in the short term. Support for Black Lives Matter soared. Corporations opened their wallets. It was as if the nation rallied behind peaceful Black organizers after it saw the alternative, like whites who flocked to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after they got a glimpse of Malcolm X.

But it only works for so long. Insurrectional anarchy brought “diminishing returns,” as it lost its shine, and support began to fade. Was this the end of violence and looting at protests? If so, would the peaceful protests fade into obscurity, because nobody writes front page stories about another peaceful protest.

Not yet, according to Patrice Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, who tries anew to contort American history from Crispus Attucks to twisting MLK’s condemnation of violence with the outtake  “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Her point is to conflate protest with violence, and justify why it’s the American way for black people.

There is a humorless irony here, and a potent reminder for every self-defined “patriot” who decries the “looting and rioting” of this past summer. The ideals of life and liberty that our nation holds dear — and the landmark moments in our history that have helped more fully to realize those ideals — were shaped and won by the protests and sacrifices of Black Americans.

Does that mean “looting and rioting” are “protests and sacrifices of Black Americans”?

All such protests rely on a core assumption: that societies believe in — and universally agree to abide by — shared social contracts. Thus, “(if) the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots,” Dr. King ultimately concluded, “the hardened criminal would be the white man.” Dr. King recognized, in other words, that the real looters were the people devaluing Black bodies.

If white people broke the “shared social contracts,” then “the lawbreaking of a few days of riots” pale in comparison. While the protests may not be in the news at the moment, that doesn’t mean there will be no more “looting and rioting” coming. And the BLM organizers aren’t letting the insurrectionary anarchists be the only ones burning it all down. After all, aren’t white people the “real looters,” so who has cause to complain?