Some much-needed pushback:

The Ferguson Riots Are Nothing Like The Original Tea Party Protests

If you were reading left-leaning commentators over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, you probably saw a rather strange argument: that looting, arson and rioting in Ferguson, Missouri in the aftermath of the decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown was defensible on the grounds that it was equivalent to the Boston Tea Party or the Stamp Act Riots. The problem with this parallel is that it is at best willfully ignorant of history, and at worst a deliberate call for an escalation to violent revolution.

Given the emotions running high over the Brown case, protests were inevitable, and it was also inevitable that some protesters would get out of hand, as happens with angry crowds. But what happened went well beyond protests, to looting and arson of a Little Caesars pizza joint, a small cake bakery, an antique store, a beauty shop, and other businesses, some of them small concerns owned by local [black] entrepreneurs.

Among the various efforts made by people on the Left to justify or defend this, we had a Time Magazine column, celebrities and other Twitter users and even a teachers’ guide pushing the parallel between the Ferguson rioters and colonial protests against taxation without representation.

There are four major problems with justifying the violence in Ferguson by reference to the Boston Tea Party and the Stamp Act Riots, either in moral terms or in terms of the effectiveness of this sort of protest.

Click through for the details.