Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke last week at the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism in Washington, D.C., to highlight instances of political terrorism around the globe. He offered a grim summary of “far-Left” violence in numerous Western countries over the last 75 years, noting that these particular acts of terrorism always seem to receive disparate, if not favorable, treatment from the media and governments at large compared to others.
“A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil,” Rubio said. “It is. But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary, well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism.”
He is absolutely right, and it’s a problem that extends to how these matters are treated in court. Take the infamous “summer of love” riots in 2020 surrounding the death of George Floyd. Rubio said that “city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror,” but something he did not mention is that in many cases the city governments actually paid some of the rioters for their trouble.
The City of Denver on Wednesday is appealing to the Supreme Court and has requested a stay on a 2022 verdict requiring the city to pay more than $14 million to twelve plaintiffs involved in the 2020 riots who, based on the jury’s decision, were victims of excessive force from the police. Earlier in the week, the City of Denver approved a separate $2.9 million settlement to other protestors who were involved in the riots, and the city claims that in total $22 million has already been paid out in settlements related to the George Floyd lawsuits so far.
In the request for a stay on the verdict, Denver argues that testimony was allowed in the trial by lay experts who were not present at the scene and who simply reviewed video footage of chaos involving unrelated plaintiffs and unrelated defendants in this case. This argument forms the basis of the appeal and is a compelling one. At the time of the original trial, the City of Denver had already incurred an estimated $4 million in property damage in the downtown area.
These are staggering figures, but is Denver alone in this? Absolutely not.
Several cases are still working their way through the legal system, but a conservative estimate is that well over $100 million has so far been paid out to protestors involved in the 2020 riots. An article from the Guardian in 2023 cites that at the time, at least nineteen cities had already agreed to payouts eclipsing $80 million. These cities included New York, Philadelphia, Denver, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Oakland, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Washington, D.C., and Portland. Notice a trend? Here is another article citing a $9.25 million payout to protestors in Philadelphia, and here is another citing a $2 million payout to two protestors in Atlanta. The list goes on and on. Justin Hansford, a professor at Howard University School of Law, called the total number of settlements “unprecedented.”
“I have never seen a wave of settlements for police brutality like this in American history,” he said.
The City of Seattle in 2024 agreed to pay $10 million to multiple protestors also found to be the victims of excessive force.
Of note, Seattle also agreed to a settlement of $3.6 million to the business owners of the infamous CHAZ/CHOP area of the city. So, which is it? The police should allow violent criminals to take over entire zones of the city, or should they police them, using force when necessary, to restore public order?
An estimated one to two billion dollars in property damages were calculated across the country as a result of insurance losses from the 2020 riots. Making these riots the most devastating loss to property due to civil unrest in the nation’s history. Add in the settlements paid out to these protestors over the last six years, and you arrive at truly astounding figures.
Now, an important distinction. You may recall that earlier this year the Department of Justice under the Trump administration announced the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which could be used to pay restitution to people who were improperly targeted or prosecuted by the federal government in a politically motivated fashion. The media pounced and immediately announced that there was nearly unanimous and “widespread bipartisan backlash” against the fund. Why? Because the fund could be used for the utterly duplicitous act of paying out settlement money to the J6 rioters.
Former Vice President Mike Pence stated, “The idea of creating a fund that could compensate people who assaulted police officers and vandalized the Capitol that day is totally unacceptable.”
Former DOJ Inspector General Michael Bromwich called the fund “an attempted political payoff to criminals … and wide open to people who committed crimes of violence on Trump’s behalf.”
Donald Ayer, the former deputy attorney general who served during the George HW Bush administration, said the fund is “outright theft.”
“Trump and his DOJ have decided that they’re going to give money away to his supporters who will claim some sort of personal abuse when they, in fact, have been the abusers,” Ayer said.
Oddly enough, there do not seem to be any statements from these individuals condemning payouts to the rioters from the George Floyd protests.
On June 2, 2026, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the Anti-Weaponization fund was officially dead after pushback from both aisles of Congress, the media, the courts, legal scholars, etc. So, there you have it. There are other ways that the J6 rioters could be provided with restitution for the clear violation of their constitutional rights, but it is compelling to see just how differently these events were treated broadly by the media and politicians.
The Trump pardons of many of the J6 protestors, while controversial, were arguably much more justifiable than just never prosecuting rioters in the first place, as Rubio noted of the 2020 protestors. We can all agree that it is frustrating for tax dollars to be spent on payouts for rioters of any kind, but to some of our leaders, I guess it just depends on which side of the aisle you are on.
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