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:
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”:
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. —
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY