{"id":21025,"date":"2020-07-19T14:12:22","date_gmt":"2020-07-19T18:12:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=21025"},"modified":"2020-07-19T14:14:25","modified_gmt":"2020-07-19T18:14:25","slug":"everyone-needs-to-know-that-blm-is-about-riots-and-violence-and-stealthy-terrorism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=21025","title":{"rendered":"Everyone Needs to Know that BLM is about Riots and Violence and Stealthy Terrorism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stop pretending the BLM protests were peaceful<\/h1>\n

<\/p>\n

Are journalists deliberately ignoring the effects of these devastating riots?<\/h3>\n

BY MICHAEL TRACEY
\nUnHerd<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Having spent the past month traveling around the United States \u2014 from major cities to the\u00a0countryside \u2014 the scale of the \u2018movement\u2019 which erupted in late May after the death of George Floyd is almost incomprehensible. According to the\u00a0New York Times<\/a>, which relays their finding with obvious excitement, the \u2018movement\u2019 (its precise contours seldom defined) \u201cmay be the largest\u201d in U.S. history.<\/p>\n

That is certainly plausible. In which case, it would presumably be important to document how ordinary Americans, especially those most directly affected, perceive the \u201cmovement\u201d in question.<\/p>\n

Scan almost any of the popular media coverage over the past six weeks and you\u2019ll find that journalists have been steadfast in their depiction of \u201cprotesters\u201d as unassailably \u201cpeaceful.\u201d While the vast majority of those who attended a\u00a0state-backed demonstration<\/a>\u00a0or some other event spurred by the \u2018movement\u2019 are unlikely to have committed any acts of physical destruction, the term \u201cpeaceful protest\u201d doesn\u2019t seem to quite capture the impact of a society-wide upheaval that included, as a key component, mass riots \u2014 the magnitude of which have not been seen in the U.S. since at least the 1960s.<\/p>\n

From large metro areas like Chicago and Minneapolis\/St. Paul, to small and mid-sized cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana and Green Bay, Wisconsin, the number of boarded up, damaged or destroyed buildings I have personally observed \u2014 commercial, civic, and residential \u2014 is staggering. Keeping exact count is impossible. One might think that a major media organisation such as the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0would use some of their galactic journalistic resources to tally up the wreckage for posterity. But roughly six weeks later, and such a tally is still nowhere to be found.<\/p>\n

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MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR<\/span><\/p>\n

How US journalism lost its spine<\/h5>\n

BY\u00a0MICHAEL TRACEY<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

A standard retort one often hears is that \u201cthe riots\u201d must not be conflated with \u201cthe protests,\u201d which is technically accurate in certain contexts. But the distinction is not as obvious as the\u00a0media like to make out<\/a>. In many locations, police and fire services were diverted to accommodate these massive protests, which in turn created a vacuum that enabled the outbreak of riotous activity. As one resident of Minneapolis\u00a0explained to me<\/a>, emergency services told him that they would simply be unavailable during the weekend of 29-31 May, while other locals recounted with amazement that police were totally absent as their neighbourhoods burned.<\/p>\n

In Milwaukee, a man\u00a0described<\/a>\u00a0being chased down by rioters after getting off the bus on his way home from work. He saw no difference between protesters and rioters; the flippant idea that these groups can be so neatly disentangled is wrong.<\/p>\n

This view is just as likely to be espoused by black people and other minorities as anyone else (the Milwaukee man was black), which renders the media\u2019s strident insistence to depict the \u2018movement\u2019 as entirely peaceful incongruous with the perceptions of working-class Americans (of all races). So many of them experienced what transpired more as a painful tragedy than any kind of wondrous harmony.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the resulting destruction may have set their majority-minority neighbourhoods back economically for months or years, if not longer. Most had already been struggling due to the pandemic, with the riots interrupting fragile reopening plans. To exclude the perspectives of these people from popular media narratives amounts to a kind of purposefully obfuscatory, moralising snobbery. Talk about \u2018erasure\u2019.<\/p>\n

So why, exactly, has the scope of these riots been so assiduously downplayed, and the opinions of those who experienced them first-hand been largely ignored? A number of potential explanations ring true. For one, media elites desperately do not want to undermine the moral legitimacy of a \u2018movement\u2019 that they have cast as presumptively righteous. And highlighting that urban minority populations are generally less enthusiastic about a movement whose mantra is \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d would be embarrassing for obvious reasons.<\/p>\n

The white liberals and Leftists who claim to be so sensitively attuned to the feelings of minorities clearly spend very little time actually talking to working class non-white people \u2014 or at least those who happen to fall outside their activist cohort. If they did, they would be saddened to discover that, unlike them, working class non-whites frequently express \u201csmall-c\u201d conservative cultural attitudes.<\/p>\n

For instance, black Americans whom I\u2019ve spoken to on the street across America in randomly-selected encounters were\u00a0almost unanimous<\/a>\u00a0in their approval of the National Guard deployments to their neighborhood during the riots. If anything, their main criticism was that these deployments came too late to prevent the destruction.<\/p>\n

This certainly makes the emotional meltdown of coddled 20 and 30-something journalists, who seriously claimed that they were \u201cendangered\u201d by a U.S. Senator\u2019s\u00a0NYT column<\/a>\u00a0advocating for a military presence to maintain order in cities, look especially disconnected and bizarre. So one could understand why the media would be reluctant to feature the \u201cvoices\u201d of minorities who take an alternate view.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also the barely-hidden fear that properly depicting the after-effects of these riots would somehow \u201chelp Trump\u201d during an election year. Even if it could be established as true that reporting on a historically significant event would \u201chelp\u201d the incumbent president, refraining from such reportage on that ground would obviously be wildly improper from a journalistic perspective.<\/p>\n

But even from a raw political standpoint, it\u2019s almost certainly not even true. Trump\u2019s inability to convert this post-riot political environment into some kind of electoral advantage is an irony unto itself, given the theme of his inaugural address \u2014 which ominously (but not entirely unjustifiably) invoked the specter of \u201cAmerican carnage<\/a>\u201d. For all the non-stop hysteria painting Trump as some kind of maniacal fascist, it truly is a lousy fascist who fails to leverage widespread social unrest and instability to consolidate power.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, Trump is also currently presiding over a disastrous federal pandemic response, and rapidly shedding support among elderly voters. So if one insists on behaving purely as a partisan actor \u2014 which many contemporary journalists certainly are \u2014 any fatuous \u201cwould it help Trump?\u201d calculation ought to be irrelevant.<\/p>\n

Trump or no Trump, the lack of adequate coverage is the true affront. It should be more widely known that large swathes of a major American metropolis, Minneapolis\/St. Paul, still\u00a0lies in rubble<\/a>\u00a0over a month after the riots. And the main perpetrators of this destruction \u2014 namely those who committed the most incendiary arson attacks \u2014 were, by many accounts relayed to me directly, white Left-wing activists. Refusing to seek out and accurately present this information reflects the mainstream media\u2019s propensity to operate under predetermined, politicised assumptions that are antithetical to any rightly-understood conception of journalism.<\/p>\n

Travelling around Minneapolis, one frequently sees the anarchist \u201cA\u201d symbol\u00a0scrawled<\/a>\u00a0on charred and\/or boarded-up buildings, as well as catchphrases like \u201cViva La Revolucion<\/a>\u201d \u2014 expressions typical of Left-wing activists. Indeed, it\u2019s abundantly clear that there was a strong\u00a0ideological<\/em>\u00a0component to these riots, one that\u2019s also been under-emphasised by the media, again likely because of the belief that it could in some vague sense \u201chelp Trump.\u201d I spoke to numerous residents who are convinced that white out-of-towners were the ones who instigated the most severe chaos, after which locals latched on opportunistically. Marianne Robinson, a black woman who has resided in Chicago\u2019s South Side for decades, asked me if I was familiar with \u201cantifa\u201d and blamed them for the riots.<\/p>\n

Flora Westbrooks of Minneapolis<\/a>, whose hair salon was burned down, was likewise convinced that the perpetrators could not have possibly been familiar with the neighbourhood given her longstanding community ties there. The theory might be a tad over-simplistic, but it does seem at least partially accurate. A (white) rioter I interviewed, who was present when the Third Police Precinct building in Minneapolis burned,\u00a0remarked<\/a> to me that he found himself in jail alongside people who came from as far as Missouri, Florida, Colorado, California and other distant states. He said they ventured to Minnesota out of a mixture of thrill-seeking and inchoate political grievance.<\/p>\n

A police officer on foot patrol in Chicago\u2019s heavily-black West Side remarked to me how perplexed she was by the lack of coverage of the damage in these neighbourhoods. Indeed, a simple drive around such parts of Chicago reveals a stunning number of boarded-up establishments, many of which appear like they will never return. The officer mused that she enjoyed the social-work aspects of the job \u2014 I watched her greeting various street-dwellers by name \u2014 and so, far from seeing the \u201cDefund the Police\u201d slogan and other expressions of animosity as an existential threat to the Chicago Police Department, regarded it as so detached from her everyday experience that she wasn\u2019t even bothered. Over the course of my ten days in Minneapolis, I didn\u2019t see a single officer on foot patrol, which is highly unusual for a major American city.<\/p>\n

In Chicago, at the peak of the riots during the last weekend in\u00a0May<\/a>, there were a record-breaking 18 homicides in a single 24-hour period \u2014 the most since such data started being collected in 1961. I mention this not to make a knee-jerk \u201cwhat about black-on-black crime\u201d point, but simply to ask in general terms: why wasn\u2019t this historic occurrence featured more prominently in the coverage of these protests?<\/p>\n

Something extreme just happened in America. I could give dozens of additional examples of reportorial tidbits which don\u2019t align with the prevailing media narrative that has flourished in the wake of this \u201cmovement\u201d. And if you hadn\u2019t seen it directly, would you ever know?<\/p>\n

___
\nhttps:\/\/unherd.com\/2020\/07\/the-ugly-truth-about-the-blm-protests\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stop pretending the BLM protests were peaceful<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}