Half of Republicans aren’t sure how violent the No Kings protests were

I’ve been traveling this week, so the amount of attention I’ve been able to pay to the world around me is diminished, no doubt to my benefit.

That said, the poll result below did come to my attention, and I thought it was worth elevating. In short, YouGov asked Americans whether last weekend’s almost-entirely-peaceful protests were mostly peaceful or mostly violent. And most Americans correctly said that they were mostly peaceful, because they were.

But the results among Republicans do stand out. Twice as many said they were mostly peaceful as said they were mostly violent — but, again, there’s no evidence of significant violence at all, much less nationally. Still, 1 in 8 Republicans think the protests were mostly violent, a claim that you might be forgiven for allowing to color their complaints about the rampant violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. Those, too, were mostly peaceful, but incidents of violence have been amplified for years — including in recent Fox News coverage — in an effort to cast all of those events as dangerous and illegitimate. Now that sentiment has bled over into last week’s events, which are perhaps described by Republicans as violent simply because (like the 2020 protests) they understood to be hostile.

Of course, we must also note that 50 percent of Republicans say they aren’t sure how violent the protests were. This may be a function of limited coverage among media outlets most consumed by Republicans. Or it may be a function of the pattern — present among both parties — of feigning ignorance instead of conceding an inconvenient point. If you are a Republican who opposes the protests and knows they weren’t violent, you might simply say “man, who’s to say” when prompted to evaluate what unfolded.

The real tell here will be how the protests are viewed in the future. It took time for the 2020 protests to become summarized as uniformly violence-soaked and wantonly destructive, just as it took time for other false narratives about American politics to take root. When your perceptions of the world are uniformly filtered through a partisan lens, what you see necessarily diverges from reality.

Photo: A No Kings march in New Jersey. (Jeffrey Hayes/Flickr)