 One of the beautiful things about looting and rioting is that it just immediately makes people's lives better. They get things that they would otherwise have to work for weeks or months to get. They get them in an instant. The writer and activist Vicki Osterweil is the latest and most strident defender of the violence and destruction that's accompanied more than three months of protests following the death of George Floyd. Osterweil argues that in the last years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life, as his focus moved beyond desegregation and voting rights and towards promoting socialism, he had a change of heart about looting and destruction as a tool for social change. Though he wasn't calling for violent revolution, she writes, neither was he chastising or rejecting rioters anymore. Others have pointed to the famous King Line. The riot is the language of the unheard. In reality, King was unwavering in his commitment to non-violence. This summer, we are going to have this kind of vigorous protest. My hope is that it will be non-violent. I would hope that we can avoid riots because riots are self-defeating and socially destructive. He tried to make his position crystal clear in that same 1966 interview with 60 Minutes Mike Wallace. I will never change in my basic idea that non-violence is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom and justice. And less than a year before his death, King delivered a lecture addressing skeptics of non-violence following the 1967 riots. Many people feel that non-violence as a strategy for social change was cremated in the flames of the urban riots of the last two years. Yet King doubled down, calling for massive, sustained, non-violent civil disobedience. In this world, non-violence is no longer an option for intellectual analysis. It is an imperative for action. King considered violent protests to be self-defeating because as he argued in 1968, every time a riot develops, it makes a right-wing takeover more likely and helps the segregationist, George Wallace. Vicki Osterweil writes admiringly of the nationwide riots that followed King's assassination as an act of pure mourning, grief, and rage that perhaps felt so natural, so immediate, so appropriate, even those who would normally marvel at their scale fell quiet. These uprisings are widely understudied, theorized, or historicized, she writes, and the silence on the part of historians, scholars, and activists has been deafening. But the Princeton political scientist Omer Wassau has studied the 68 riots in detail, finding that they allowed Richard Nixon to beat Democrat Hubert Humphrey in that year's presidential race. As King understood, media coverage was why looting and violence backfired. When protesters engaged in violence, that predicted a headline about riots tomorrow, a headline that was much more likely to focus on crime and disorder, and public opinion moves very closely with that. So when the newspapers are talking about civil rights, civil rights becomes the most important problem in public opinion surveys. And when newspapers are heavily covering crime and riots, crime and riots become the thing that is the most important problem. And so the tactics that are employed by protesters can really make a powerful impact on how the media tell the story, which in turn shapes public opinion. Some media outlets have opted to downplay the violence and destruction. But King's warning and Wassau's research still resonate today, as polls show a sharp downward turn in approval ratings of the Black Lives Matter movement in recent weeks, especially in swing states like Wisconsin, even before riots hit Kenosha. And Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden seems to fundamentally understand that. Riding is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Which might help explain how he's maintained a lead so far against an incumbent who's often fanned the flames with his rhetoric. If a city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them. A riot is the language of the unheard. When King said this, he wasn't excusing riots, but imploring observers to acknowledge the unjust conditions that contributed to their emergence in the first place. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. The paths forward to social change couldn't be more clear. Persistent, nonviolent resistance as practiced by Martin Luther King Jr., who helped achieve historic civil rights legislation, or rioting and looting promoted by activists who believe we need to argue and defend every tactic that might help us overturn this miserable world of white supremacy, anti-blackness, sysheteropatriarchy, capitalism, empire, and property.