An encouraging moment from last night in NYC. Although (a) one of the protesters later claimed he thought the “looters” were undercover NYPD detectives acting as agents provocateurs to make the demonstrators look bad, which, ah, okay, and (b) there’s been enough damage to Target outlets already that the company’s being forced to go dark notwithstanding last night’s heroics. Dozens of stores will close temporarily across the nation (but especially in Minnesota) until things calm down. The Brooklyn store is among them.

This isn’t the only footage of protesters confronting vandals:

BuzzFeed has a slew of clips posted to Twitter by black protesters documenting white agitators showing up to their demonstrations to wreak havoc. Who are those white people? Theories abound:

Anderson said there were “several people” who were behaving like that at the protest, some of whom he believed are “right-wing conservative individuals who just don’t give a damn about black and brown people, or want to make this movement look bad.”

“It wasn’t black and brown folks that were antagonizing police. It was white people throwing stuff at them,” he said. “And then when they kept throwing bags of urine, cans, and water bottles, that’s when the police snapped and they started tear-gassing innocent bystanders.”

It’s politically convenient to blame “right-wing conservative individuals,” another false-flag theory, but in all probability these are mainly black-bloc/Antifa droogs turning out to exploit a breakdown in law enforcement.

Or maybe they’re just “YouTube stars” out for a lark?

Whatever the answer, there was some truly horrendous nastiness last night as the mobs ran wild:

The cops are starting to lose their minds too:

No doubt there’ll be new footage ranging from the depressing to the horrifying to show you tomorrow. Until then, sit with this.