Progress does not happen without blood and death.
people who spout this rhetoric are so willfully uninformed it's ridiculous
you point to other events and times and say, "well what about this time, a decent president got elected and he passed some really good reforms that amounted to some significant progress, and it all happened relatively peacefully through the normal electoral processes"
and they say "NO there were people who DIED at protests and DIED under the old systems he reformed, which was necessary to promote his rise to power!!"
and it's like oh ok, so that was just minor amounts of death here and there to highlight a problem, not actual violent revolution, so really you're advocating that we keep carrying on as we always have with a few outlier deaths here and there