Michelle Obama Dishonestly Claims ‘Only a Tiny Fraction’ of BLM Protests Have Been Violent
The former first lady claimed President Trump was “stoking fears about black and brown Americans” by blaming, in part, what she described as “an overwhelmingly peaceful movement for racial solidarity.”
With polls showing support dropping for Black Lives Matter and their protests, the push is on to rehabilitate the movement in an effort to stave off the possibility it could hurt the Biden-Harris presidential ticket one month from now.
Helping lead the charge to portray BLM in the most flattering of lights is Michelle Obama. The former first lady released a 24-minute video Tuesday titled “Closing Argument” where she tried to make the case for Joe Biden by, among other things, trotting out the usual Democrat accusations of racism against President Trump.
One argument she used in order to “prove” her point was in bringing up the supposedly “peaceful protests” that have taken place in Democrat-run cities like Portland since the death of George Floyd.
In what appeared to be an appeal to working-class white voters, Mrs. Obama talked about how it must be “frustrating to hear some folks” (presumably protesters) “say that you’re the beneficiary of privilege”:
It is frustrating to hear some folks say that you’ve been the beneficiary of privilege, that the color of your skin gives you a headstart. That is the reality for far too many hard-working decent Americans.
Trump is trying to capitalize on that frustration, she alleged, “by giving folks someone to blame other than them” and “stoking fears about black and brown Americans” by blaming, in part, what she described as “an overwhelmingly peaceful movement for racial solidarity.” There was “research”, she said, that backed up her claim:
But right now, the president and his allies are trying to tap into that frustration and distract from his breathtaking failures by giving folks someone to blame other than them. They’re stoking fears about black and brown Americans, lying about how minorities will destroy the suburbs, whipping up violence and intimidation and they’re pinning it all on what’s been an overwhelmingly peaceful movement for racial solidarity. It’s true, research backs it up. Only a tiny fraction of demonstrations have had any violence at all.
Watch:
.@MichelleObama on BLM riots: Trump is “pinning [violence] on what’s been an overwhelmingly peaceful movement for racial solidarity; it’s true, research backs it up; only a tiny fraction of demonstrations have had any violence at all … What the president is doing is … racist.” pic.twitter.com/7wBsmACiCQ
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 6, 2020
This is a maddeningly dishonest and misleading claim that the mainstream media and fact check organizations, of course, will not dig into because they, too, have been touting the same U.S. Crisis Monitor study Obama is likely referencing.
But as Professor Jacobson pointed out last month, the study, which concluded that 93% of all BLM protests were peaceful, in effect really showed just how widespread protest violence really was “considering it takes just one riot to devastate a neighborhood and destroy businesses for years to come”:
If almost 1 in 10 protests is a riot, that’s an astounding percentage considering that it takes just one riot to devastate a neighborhood and destroy businesses for years to come. The Report provides no comparison to other protest movements as to the violence frequency, but can you recall a movement that had so much violence over so long a period of time in so many places?
And as Byron York pointed out at the time, the report showed there were “nearly 570 violent demonstrations–riots–in nearly 220 locations spread all across [the] country”:
Princeton University group studies 3 months of Black Lives Matter protests. Intent is to show they are 'overwhelmingly peaceful.' But report reveals nearly 570 violent demonstrations–riots–in nearly 220 locations spread all across country. https://t.co/it60GBbTZT pic.twitter.com/Ph8iECyHIf
— Byron York (@ByronYork) September 5, 2020
John Sexton at Hot Air also made a great point in response to the study’s claim about how only 7% had been violent:
If there are 100 protests and 7 of them turn violent, you could say the rate of violence is 7% which is apparently what this research did. But you could also look at those seven violent protests/riots and find that within those there were many individual acts of violence. For instance, in some cases police wind up arresting a dozen or more individuals during a riot and that doesn’t count all the violent behavior (throwing rocks, using lasers, vandalism, etc.) for which no one is ever caught or punished.
When there is rioting and looting in a city like New York or Chicago, there are likely hundreds, possibly even thousands of individual criminal acts taking place but so long as it all takes place as part of one night’s “protest” the researchers would count that as just 1 bad night. In other words, the data Michelle Obama is relying on here is obscuring as much about the violence as it’s revealing. Maybe only 7 percent of the protests became violent but that 7 percent represents thousands of violent and destructive acts doing billions of dollars of damage over a period of just a few months.
Keep in mind, too, that the Crisis Monitor report looked at the three month period between May 24th and August 22nd. The Kenosha riots started the day after that, and there have since been riots in cities like Rochester, NY, Lancaster, PA, Louisville, KY, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Violent riots are still happening nightly in Portland, too.
Democrats and the mainstream media are gaslighting the hell out of this issue for obvious reasons. As noted earlier, support for the movement and the “unrest” that flows from it is declining steadily.
Because of that, the MSM will ramp up the sugarcoating on riots in the coming weeks and will approach stories about them from the “Republicans pounce and seize” angle rather than engage in any real meaningful analyses of what’s happening.
But try as they might, the issue isn’t going to go away. Republicans will make sure of that – and so will Black Lives Matter extremists and their Antifa allies who are assisting them in orchestrating the chaos.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
She would look so much better with a tiny fraction of violent adjustment to her teeth.
More and more people are starting to believe that Michael’s marriage had to be arranged -for big bucks…..
Snark
Or not……..
The left HAS to ignore the violence of the riots – racism is the only arrow they have left to counter President Trump.
That fraction is 999/1000……..
If you count a three-month long continuous riot in Portland or Minneapolis as “one riot,” I guess you could make that claim.
It also depends on your definition of “violence.” If some mob surrounds me at an outside venue and puts a bullhorn in my face demanding that I raise my fist in solidarity, that is violence.
Yes, it is, but there have been many BLM protests just as misguided but completely peaceful.
BLM violence and hypocrisy define the movement, their bald faced racism, their gleeful violation of other people’s civil rights, completely discredits BLM.
What completely discredits BLM, even if there were no violence at all, is that it’s founded on a lie. Its central premise is a lie. There is nobody significant who thinks black lives don’t matter. There is no police force whose members think that.
That black lives matter as much as anyone else’s is so obvious to all normal people that it doesn’t need to be stated, and it certainly isn’t a suitable subject for demonstrations and sloganeering. Can you imagine a mass protest movement whose slogan is “Water is wet?!”
The whole premise of BLM is that the default presumption in racist Amerikkka is that black lives don’t matter, that the default opinion of policemen is that black lives don’t matter, and as a result policemen and others are killing black people in situations where they would not have killed anyone whose life did matter. And that is simply not true. It is not happening. So even if BLM were completely peaceful it would still be discredited.
Most of us are familiar with the Margaret Mead quote “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” It has a common sense to it, and can be considered a variation of the “80:20 Rule”; where 80 % of some result comes from only 20% of the inputs. The unspoken assumption of the Mead quote is that the change brought about by “a small group” will be a good or positive change. More likely than not however, “a small group” can even easier make a very bad change; as it is always easier to tear down and destroy than it is to build; thermodynamics confirms that. One could be crude and say “It’s only a small turd in the punchbowl”, but the damage is huge.
Like the Bolsheviks in Russia?
I had the pleasure of meeting and visiting with Margaret Mead several times. And elderly conservative and very successful friend and mentor, Charles Stewart Mott, was also present.
I have been eternally grateful to CS Mott for a wealth of knowledge he shared.
Only a tiny fraction of bombs dropped in WWII were atom bombs.
I’m going to steal that argument.
“Our bombing of Japan in WWII was ‘mostly nonatomic.'”
Meanwhile back at the Democrat Party DC chicken ranch…
Rep. Kevin Brady
@
SABOTAGING THE ECONOMY
@realDonaldTrump
simply confirmed the worst-kept secret in DC:
@SpeakerPelosi
had no intention of agreeing to anything that will improve our economy ahead of the election.
She’s abandoning small biz, airline workers, & $ for schools, hospitals, daycare.
The American people need to make the Democrats pay at the ballot box for electing her as Speaker.
Both Obama and Hillary are worse than Pelosi, others given any power such as the Squad, would like a chance to be worse.
NONE of our Tea Party rallies had a single incident of violence. Yet we were called terrorists.
Occupy Wall Street was another leftist “mostly peaceful” group. I still have a picture in my stuff of an OWS protester defecating on a police car.
What is needed is to “follow the money” that pre-places the pallets of bricks, soup cans, leaf blowers, etc at the “mostly peaceful” protests. I suspect you will find the Ford Foundation- and Soros-backed organizations as the funders.
I always keep at the ready my treasured Zuccotti Love photo to remind me of the deep thinkers who intend to take over and run my life,
https://thegatewaypundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/zuccotti-love.jpg
Correction, should read ruin lives.
That’s a lot of tiny to cause $2B in insurance damage, maybe another billion in uncovered liability.
This “tiny fraction” destroying lives we should ignore. However, we have to turn our lives upside down because of a much, much tinier fraction who get their lives destroyed by Covid.
This is a very good point.
The violence is a feature, not a bug, of the demonstrations, a critical component of the overall goal to seize power. The complicity of Democrat mayors in the destruction of their cities is perhaps the worst part of this. “It Can’t Happen Here” might need a re-write.
Kamala is Michelle ‘Light”.
She might even believe what she’s saying.
There’s evidence in her wedding album that she’s easily fooled.
Don’t argue numbers with them. That’s a childish game.
It’s not about the percentage of peaceful vs violent behavior. It’s about supposedly peaceful protesters giving cover to the terrorists and thieves who destroy whole neighborhoods, just because they can.
The claim that “Only a tiny fraction of demonstrations have had any violence at all” is not dishonest, it’s just irrelevant. Yes, there have been thousands of peaceful protests, both by anti-American agitators and by gullible fools who believe their propaganda. There have been so many of these that the hundreds of frighteningly violent riots constitute “only a tiny fraction” of the total. That’s no consolation to the victims of that “tiny fraction”. It doesn’t dilute their violence and make it less shocking, less frightening, or less the public face of the BLM movement and the Democrat Party.
It would have been different if the BLM leadership and the Democrats had from the start publicly disassociated themselves from and condemned all cases of violence, rioting, and anti-American rhetoric — as well as Antifa, whether as a movement or as an idea. It would have been different had Democrat mayors and governors not been giving Antifa violence a green light for years. BLM would still have been a lie, but it would have been a peaceful lie. But that didn’t happen. And now the voter backlash is coming.
My backlash was revved up by persecution of Zimmerman, Wilson and a rather long list of similar outrageous cases.
I have always hated that woman
Inconsistent use of statistics. 7% is small but when those 7% turn violent or destructive it’s closer to black swan talk.
This is why COVID can legitimately be viewed as dangerous with much less than 7% death rate. The “worst that can happen” is very bad so appropriate caution makes sense.
Any pro-lockdown person to argue that 7% is a small, but acceptable, fraction should be asked why they are pro lockdown considering the much smaller risks of COVID
2 billion dollars ….. Devastated black neighborhoods and cities. Just collateral damage to the collective. from a multi-million dollar mansion on Martha’s, one can’t hear the suffering .
Thanks again for another photo of a look inside a toilet when someone before you forgot to flush.
The best way to separate BLM wheat from BLM chaff is to start shooting looters, rioters.
The best illustration of the granularity hack they’re using is optical.
Everybody’s seen photos of the nightside globe from space showing near everything looking lit up by that bad, evil light pollution. But, what’s the grain size? What’s the threshold of “lit?” A I R there’s even dynamic demos showing what changing grain size n threshold looks like.
Think of it like a checkerboard in which if there’s any light in a square, you turn the whole thing light. But, what does that mean for granular experience on the ground? Looking at the space picture, what’s the light-up grain size vs people’s on the ground experience. If the grain size over the earth is a checkerboard square, plenty of people in lit up squares could be in hard dark.
Or, if the lensing n grain is right, you can have plenty of people blinded by the light who look to be in the dark — the circle swept by a lighthouse is way bigger than what the beam lights up this instant. So, for “mostly peaceful” riots do we count only where somebody’s getting brained this instant, or do we count the sweep of violence, or the sweep of might-be violence?
People are afraid of possessed goblin hordes wherever they assemble, however long they last. People are afraid planning their routes, arranging their homes, stocking gear n supplies even if no hordes afe around, or have come at them yet, let alone them getting personally brained. People right now are stockpiling n planning how they’ll survive the hordes coming post-election.
I think the riot n extortion grain size reaches to something like wherever people are changing their behavior. Maybe wherever there’s impact on general economic activity. I think the antifa-hijacked riots in Portland, Seattle, Mineapolis, Kenosha, Rochester n others each and all lit up the whole US with changed behavior. Every night of every one of those was violence, reaching the whole country.
Michelle Obama is picking thresholds, definitions, n grain size convenient to the argument she’s advocating. Real people in their real lives are experiencing something very different.
Very interesting analysis. People do not like violence, do not like being afraid or like having to change their behavior. Do you think the exact same feelings surrounding Covid is why Trump has a serious re-election problem? Unfortunately, in a year or so Covid is likely to recede in importance, while the radicals’ violence will not.
Trump has a “serious re-election problem” only because the press keeps hammering over and over that he “does.”
I think a lot of the bad Kung-Flu info is a form of hacking the granularity of the risk, to keep people all something, something, something.
The notion is something like: people are uncomfortable, so it must be the president’s fault, so vote for the other guy.
They systematically won’t aim for stuff that could give people local, personal resolution of uncertainty, or individual mitigations. “Facts” about aggregates are difficult to trace to personal circumstances; the way those are being developed more so.
The only way blacks can make sense out of their situation is to openly and blatantly lie to themselves. Ergo by definition they’re going to lose. Everytime. Be it in debate or battle, such lying is always a precursor to defeat. And for what? So they can be lazy and not work. At least not at real jobs that require competence. But only in affirmative action jobs. Hence not work at all. All so they can be kept, like pets. But because of their nature no one wants to keep them. What a pathetic situation they find themselves in. Their path leads only to destruction. Self inflicted defeat. For I will not work to pay their never ending rent. There must be an end. Exile or death. It’s the only way.
I cannot not count the number of times that an Affirmative hire has been backed up with a non Affirmative assistant who does the real work.
Ironic, because on the D presidential ticket, they flipped that script. Oh, the horror. The horror.
There is another alternative – eliminate public employee unions, which even FDR opposed. Then have universal school choice – the money follows the child. This creates a pathway out of the urban public school ghetto – shall we say the modern plantation, by design – for those who want to escape. Little chance of that happening, but over a couple of generations I bet it would make a visible difference.
If Michelle Obama believes that the “protests” were “overwhelmingly peaceful,” she also believes that property damage from the “protests” was trivial. As property damage was trivial she should be glad to pay out of pocket the property damage from the “protests.”
I’m sure that her husband agrees that they already have enough money and they should start sharing. Paying for the damages the “overwhelmingly peaceful” protesters caused is fair, is it not?
In the movie Jaws, only a tiny portion of the beachgoers were killed by the shark.
That “Tiny fraction” caused more than $2 billion in damages. And it was mostly white people. Even Michelle hates white people – so she shouldn’t have too much problem with that.
Another point: Counting the number of protests ignores the attendance at each. Yes, there have been thousands of completely peaceful protests, but I’d bet their average attendance has been far smaller than that of the mere hundreds of violent riots.