> On the other hand, can’t these things also legitimately arise from disenfranchised groups without needing to point to a boogie man?

I think that's the crux, they do, constantly! We have "real riots" in Spain all the time, and protests, both peaceful and violent ones. We have experience of the actual process of seeing people getting more and more frustrated, and things slowly bubbling until it reaches a threshold, then bubbles over.

This doesn't seem to be that. There is zero political parties/groups involved, which is very uncommon, we have strong groups that are always up for causing some property damages and similar things, when these "real riots" happen, but none of these were involved.

When you have basically groups of individuals all acting in uniform way, based on the same misinformation, with zero association or relation to our existing political factions, then it's quite easy to see that things didn't happen as they "normally" do, that's why people are asking questions right now about it.

This is because they are baffling. I still don't understand BLM. Those women came out of nowhere; everybody organic who initiated the initial Ferguson protests was executed, and the media went all in. I am a black American and I know very few black Americans who participated, but tons of white liberal types. All of the black American people I know of who tried to get involved and started their own local chapters of BLM got no support or money from the national organization, other than disapproval of protests that they wanted to do on their own about local issues that they cared about. The national organization was drowning in institutional money.

Everything about it was just bizarre. I still can't deny that it was a color revolution to unseat Trump, and I wish I could.

Also, I still have a weird video of some strange masked and "tactically dressed" man who walked into the middle of the protests in some town and just started breaking the windows of businesses (an Auto Center iirc) without speaking to anyone who was actually protesting (peacefully), while they were yelling at him to stop. He then just leaves, and while one guy is walking after him and questioning him, he threatens the guy until he stops following.

There's also the weird French stuff where "black bloc" people are doing damage or in one case throwing a flash bang grenade, police rush in, a few words are exchanged, and then this "black bloc" leave with the police.

The blaming of the Russian Chinese anti-Semitic mullahs is the real conspiracy. What it looks like to me is that people may be engineering protests to justify crackdowns, or turning existing protests violent in order to shut them down. The masking that has been done since the "black bloc" started ruining protests and escalated greatly after covid just makes it too easy. Also the fact that these protests are generally slacktivist and not organized, so people don't expect to know each other. They get messages on social media that say that there's going to be a protest about some subject, and they feel obligated to show up - but they have no connection to each other.

It's weird that that's how it's expected to be now. This "protest" ritual has gone to the limits of artificiality. The "No Kings" "protests" in the US are directly run by Democratic contractors, and they text spam relentlessly from voter lists (I've gotten dozens, if not a hundred or two.) It isn't like grassroots people get together, discuss their grievances, and decide to coordinate a protest. It's completely top-down, coordinated with elections, and has no articulable grievances, just slogans.

Alienating, isolating, dislocating people, and shattering communities and families has resulted in people who are completely subject to centralized control. The state thinks the most dangerous issue in the world is that people might be able to speak to each other in an unmediated fashion. Can a state like that ever be happy about family, friendship, or community?