There’s also the fact that liberal protests don’t tend to be armed, (sort of goes hand-in-hand with liberals hating guns,) but white supremacist protests tend to be heavily armed. People noticed during the civil rights era that unarmed protests got violently busted; Cops had no qualms about firing into unarmed crowds to get them to disperse.

But heavily armed protests were politely watched from across the street. Because if you fire into an armed crowd, you may take out two or three protestors but then the entire rest of the protest can return fire.

This is exactly why the Black Panthers got started. People recognized that armed protests were allowed to continue, so they began arming protestors.