BLM Riots Erupt Right in Time For The Midterms

protester holds colorful sign at a city street demonstration — Photo: GrandAve / Shutterstock

A Newsmax anchor told his audience that Black Lives Matter is making a comeback right on cue for the 2026 midterms, tying a decade-old protest movement directly to this fall’s ballot box fights.

Quick Take

Newsmax host Greg Kelly said Black Lives Matter “nonsense” is back “just in time for a very critical midterm election year.”
Kelly framed the movement’s return as race-based grievance aimed at police ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Courts have found real cases of police overreach against BLM protesters, though rulings on excessive force have gone both ways.
Kelly has faced past controversy over racially charged tweets and other on-air claims about protesters and police.

What Greg Kelly Actually Said On Air

Greg Kelly did not mince words. On his Newsmax program, he declared that Black Lives Matter is “back” and called the timing no accident, saying it landed “just in time for a very critical midterm election” year full of “race-based grievance with police.” The clip quickly spread across Newsmax’s own social channels, reinforcing the same line for a wider audience.

Kelly’s framing fits a familiar playbook. Cast a social movement as a political weapon rather than a response to specific incidents, and the audience hears strategy instead of grievance. It is a sharp, attention-grabbing claim. But sharp claims still need to hold up against what courts and watchdog groups have actually documented about policing and protest in recent years.

The Legal Record On Protest Policing Is Mixed, Not One-Sided

Courts have not treated every BLM-related complaint the same way, and that matters. A federal appeals court upheld findings that police cannot fire less-lethal munitions at a protester who poses no threat and has not tried to flee, a decision that came out of Denver’s protest litigation. Separately, a judge in Seattle found the city violated a court order limiting excessive force, though only in a small number of the incidents reviewed.

Those rulings cut against any blanket claim that police force during protests is always justified. At the same time, they do not prove police were wrong in every case, either. A Supreme Court ruling this year granted qualified immunity to an officer accused of misconduct against a protester, showing the law still gives police significant legal cover in many situations. The honest picture is one of real excesses in specific, documented cases, not a uniform pattern in either direction.

Human Rights Groups Documented Widespread Abuses In 2020

Amnesty International’s review of the 2020 protest wave found law enforcement across the country violated the rights of demonstrators, medics, journalists, and legal observers, describing the abuses as widespread. That report predates the current midterm cycle, but it establishes that concerns about police conduct at BLM protests are not invented from thin air. They rest on documented incidents reviewed by an outside organization, not just activist claims.

None of that evidence, however, addresses Kelly’s specific claim about election timing. Nothing in the court rulings or the Amnesty report speaks to whether BLM’s current activity is coordinated around the midterms. That gap matters. A viewer should not confuse proof of past police misconduct with proof, or disproof, of a political timing strategy in 2026.

Kelly’s Own Track Record Shapes How His Claim Lands

Context on the messenger matters here too. Kelly has drawn scrutiny before for racially charged tweets that prompted Newsmax to open an internal review of his conduct. That history does not make his midterm-timing claim false. But it does mean skeptical viewers have reason to weigh his framing carefully rather than accept it at face value, especially on a topic already this charged.

President Trump’s own recent messaging has leaned hard into election-integrity themes heading into the midterms, warning supporters not to sit out the fight over voter ID and mail-in ballots. Kelly’s BLM comments land inside that same broader push to frame 2026 as existential. Whether BLM’s resurgence is truly timed to the ballot, or simply reflects ongoing policing controversies playing out on their own schedule, remains the real question voters deserve a straight answer to before November.