That is exactly what they are and what I've always said. (They are also the substitute "masses" or "real Americans" given that too many of the real ones still don't conform to spec; it's one reason why there are more shows about them than about anything else in "real life.")
Every protest I've ever seen comes with its own ridiculously well-paid group of professional anti-protesters. There they have been, right in front of you, after all your years of paranoid speculation (or false parallels to US activities in other countries), and their paymaster
isn't Soros, it's your own town government, often with your approval.
These professional anti-protesters also happen to be
a.
a gang and a cult with rituals and uniforms and an officially sanctioned self-heroizing ethos (more aggressively and totally a cult than almost any group of protesters anywhere, making the white middle-class nicepeople ritually shedding their privilege on the sidelines of the present uprising look like the minor mostly harmless spinoffs of liberal Protestantism and New Age la-la that they are),
and
b.
extremely violent and prone to riot and mayhem.
The contexts for the present uprising are legion. They are found in the political economy and society, in the racist reality, and in the C19 lockdown-prompted crisis. In regard to the main proximate cause, however, every explanation is confusionism and distraction and disinfo, except for the obvious, the one that the protesters themselves tell you every minute:
Police forces engaged in constant generalized and specific brutalizations of communities based on race and class for many years. This was a matter of policy, training, professional culture, group "solidarity," the psychology of those likeliest to recruit themselves, and a kind of social mission (to suppress the perceived insubordination or threat of democracy to the republic, to provide a kind of exemplary terror against populations considered especially threatening). Some of this brutalization was excess, most of it was systemic and in conformity with policies such as the "war on drugs," "broken windows," zero-tolerance, nudge-based cooptation psychology, etc.
During this time the police were the only municipal and state public services that saw stable and increased budgeting. All other social services were cut. Cops were sent in to act as security forces in the schools. The "schools-to-prison pipeline" became a well-known phrase. Millions of people became the objects of an ever-expanding carceral state, even decades after crime rates plunged to historic lows, and private for-profit involvement in this industry mushroomed. During this time, they were increasingly militarized. Many exemplary incidents of excess and terror were recorded on video, and sparked justified but localized outbreaks of rage, until finally, as has happened in many other eras (choose your metaphor) the final straw breaks the camel's back, the dam bursts, the bucket overflows, the water boils.
Even then, the first night of protests is peaceful, and most protests begin peacefully, until the cops initiate their usual, predictable, ultra-violent, humiliating, and arbitrary forms of crowd control, mostly in the ways they have been trained to do, with a bit of enthusiasic or neurotically driven excessive force. Then, at least this time, at least for a number of days, things slipped out of their control.
.
