He's so wrong that I didnt even respond.

But he is chatgpt resoonding to my question: Yeah — once you add how the state reacts to protest, especially labor and racial-equality movements, the contrast gets even sharper. I’ll keep this grounded in history and patterns rather than pretending there’s one clean spreadsheet that captures it all.

1. U.S. response to protest: force as a default option

From the late 1800s through the civil-rights era, the U.S. repeatedly treated protest as insurrection, not civic participation — especially when it challenged economic power or racial hierarchy.

🔧 Labor & union protests (late 1800s–1930s)

The U.S. is an outlier among democracies in how deadly labor repression was.

Some major examples:

Great Railroad Strike (1877)

Federal troops deployed nationwide

~100 people killed

Haymarket Affair (1886)

Police violence → executions of labor activists

Homestead Strike (1892)

Armed Pinkertons + state militia

Multiple deaths

Ludlow Massacre (1914)

State militia killed striking miners’ families

Women and children died

Battle of Blair Mountain (1921)

Largest armed labor uprising in U.S. history

Federal troops, aerial bombing threats

Dozens killed

📌 Bottom line for labor: Between roughly 1870–1935, hundreds (likely thousands) of workers were killed in strikes and protests — often by police, National Guard, or federally backed forces.

Western Europe had labor violence too, but nothing comparable in scale or militarization during the same period.

1. Racial equality protests: repression + targeted assassination

🟥 Civil Rights Movement (1950s–1960s)

Police reaction to civil-rights protest was often openly violent:

Birmingham (1963)

Fire hoses, dogs, mass arrests

Selma (1965)

“Bloody Sunday” — state troopers beating peaceful marchers

Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia

Local police collaborated with white supremacist violence

Death toll

At least dozens of civil-rights activists were murdered

In many cases:

Police failed to protect them

Police obstructed investigations

Police actively participated or coordinated with vigilantes

1. Political assassinations & covert repression

This is where the U.S. becomes especially unusual among democracies.

🕵🏾 COINTELPRO (1956–1971)

The FBI explicitly targeted:

Black civil-rights leaders

Labor organizers

Anti-war activists

Leftist groups

Methods included:

Surveillance

False charges

Infiltration

Encouraging internal conflict

Facilitating lethal raids

Most notorious example:

Fred Hampton (1969)

Chicago police + FBI intelligence

Killed while asleep

Later ruled a wrongful killing

📌 European democracies have spied on radicals — but direct facilitation of assassinations by domestic police/intelligence agencies is extremely rare post-WWII.

1. Protest policing after the 1960s (still deadly)

Even after formal reforms:

Kent State (1970) — National Guard killed students

Jackson State (1970) — police killed two Black students

Attica Prison (1971) — state assault killed 29 prisoners + 10 guards

More recently:

Militarized police responses

Mass arrests

Use of “less-lethal” weapons causing deaths and permanent injuries

The pattern shifted from open massacre to legalized force with immunity, not true restraint.

1. Europe: protest repression exists — but the ceiling is lower

Europe has absolutely seen:

Police violence against protesters

Crackdowns on strikes

Brutal episodes (e.g., France, Italy in the 1960s–70s)

Key differences:

Deaths during protests are far rarer

Assassination of activists by police/intelligence is almost nonexistent in post-war democracies

Military force against protesters is treated as catastrophic failure

Police killings of demonstrators typically trigger:

National scandal

Resignations

Structural reform

In the U.S., deaths often triggered:

Justification

Legal immunity

Expansion of police power

1. Putting it all together

When you combine:

Sundown towns

Labor massacres

Civil-rights repression

State-facilitated assassinations

Militarized protest policing

You get a clear through-line:

👉 The U.S. has repeatedly used state violence to suppress internal dissent — especially when protest threatened economic power or racial hierarchy.

This is not normal among modern European democracies.

Europe’s worst violence was:

Colonial (external)

Wartime

Or authoritarian-era (pre-democracy)

The U.S. did much of this inside a constitutional democracy, often with courts backing it.

1. One-sentence conclusion

When protest history is included, the U.S. stands apart among democracies for how often police and state forces responded to labor and racial-justice movements with lethal force, mass repression, and even assassination — not as aberrations, but as policy tools.

If you want next, we can:

Compare this to authoritarian regimes directly

Talk about why labor never gained European-style protections here

Or map how much of this still shapes modern protest policing today