Someone already addressed your comment about political contributions, but...

But a more interesting point you made is the perception of protests. You picture them as... well, US protests. You get a cute little march with people giving cops flowers and then it escalates to "riot", which is already on the other end of the going straight to violence spectrum I find so weird.

Because anything in the US that isn't giving cops flowers gets escalated by cops and bad actors. Stick a few people in the crowd with molotovs and now the cops have an excuse to start swinging batons and shooting people with beanbags.

The escalation point of a protest in my mind is a strike (which, weirdly, your relatively rich media people just successfully and very publicly did, and are still doing). The next step after that is a general strike.

A lot of people don't have the money to strike right now. Additionally, corporations have a lot of sway with local governments and sometimes building managers/landlords. They're comfortable and entertained enough that it doesn't feel urgent enough to risk being jailed, fired, and possibly evicted; and they don't have the money to risk everything going south (and it probably would). I've seen other people make this comparison, so you mighta heard it before, but it's like boiling a frog. If you do it slow enough, the frog won't realize it's dying. It's honestly dystopian as fuck.

Sure, I hear that there is likely not enough public support for that in the US. You seem to see that as part of the system that prevents nonviolent action from being useful, but surely the lack of support discards the option of violent action as well, right? When you talk violent or revolutionary acts you also need public support. If people aren't willing to put real pressure in other ways you're also not going to round up the capitalists using sticks and handguns any time soon.

I think part of the hope is that if you go straight to violence, it'll put pressure on people to pick a side, effectively shaking the fence or knocking them out of their "frog daze" to make them wake up to the reality they're slowly being boiled alive.

Another part is that it might give them hope that they can actually change things, motivating them to join the cause. When you watch protests regularly escalate to violence because of cops or suspected plants while resulting in little to no improvement, you become jaded and hopeless. Look at how much effort it took to get states to start taking cop brutality seriously; and that was something a majority of Americans probably agreed was a huge issue that needed to be addressed sooner rather than later. Yet it took a hell of a lot of effort and a mini rebellion, and we still have issues in many states with police brutality.

Finally, violence against your oppressors, or the thought of it, gives you a feeling of power. When you feel powerless for long enough, the thought of finally having enough power to destroy the people responsible for the state of the world is, quite frankly, intoxicating.

These aren't the only reasons people might have for wanting violence, I'm sure America's culture of rebellion and violence is another part of it, but I think those are probably some of the more common reasons.