If you're watching the news lately, it feels like déjà vu. Cities burning. National Guard in the streets. Protesters clashing with police. Sound familiar? It should. We’ve been here before—most recently in 2020. And if we don’t get smart about what’s really happening, we could end up somewhere far worse.

Let’s talk honestly about where we are, how we got here, and where this road leads if we don't change course.

Remember the 2020 BLM Riots?

The Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 were the costliest civil unrest in American history. According to insurance data, they racked up between $1 and $2 billion in damages across more than 140 cities.

Minneapolis–St. Paul alone suffered $500 million in damages. About 1,500 properties were hit, and 60% of those were uninsured. That means business owners—many of them immigrants—lost everything. Some neighborhoods still look like war zones, years later.

In Atlanta, one weekend cost the city $10–15 million. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Add up emergency response costs, police overtime, barricade setups, and the cost of restoring basic services—and you start to see the long tail of destruction.