What’s new? More protesting, more rioting, more violence, more deaths, more dishonest political pandering, and more propaganda. There must be an election around the corner or something.
We’re about 2 months away from the 2020 elections, and we’re entering the desperate, last-minute, Hail Mary pass phase of U.S. politics. I touched on this a little in my last post, but I’m going to go a little more in-depth with this one.
As previously stated, the Democratic establishment seemed to be banking on capitalizing on Covid fears to wrangle votes, while the Republicans were sticking to the tactic of stirring up fear from the violence occurring in mainly Democrat-run cities. Of these two tactics, it seems things ended up working out more in favor for the Republicans. Kamala Harris, who has spent the last 3 months on twitter sticking to the topics of Covid and the USPS ordeal, finally tweeted this out:
She literally hasn’t said a peep about the ongoing violence for at least the last 3 months. I scoured her twitter before writing this to check. It seems either a) she wasn’t aware this was going on, or b) the Democrats were intentionally avoiding this topic until now. She isn’t stupid, there’s no way she’s this out of touch, so one can only assume the Democrats were just ignoring this problem for whatever reason. Keep in mind, this has been going on for months, and the death toll from these riots is currently over 30.
My guess would be that Trump’s constant focus on the riot violence was having a more successful impact in the polls than the constant focus on Covid that Biden and Harris were pushing. It feels like most people have essentially moved on with their lives, and learned to live with Covid. They aren’t subject to the same fears they had months ago before the protests and riots reached fever pitch. The Democrats finally realized they were out of touch by continuing to focus on Covid all these months later, and needed to pivot to a new fear.
All modern politics are driven by fear. Politicians generally don’t run on platforms of change and new ideas, because then they have to follow through with those promises, and politicians tend to fail horribly at actually following through with their campaign promises. Invoking fears of the bad things the other party will bring, while promising to be the antidote to those very fears is far easier. People are inherently tribalist and easily persuaded by these tactics. Obama ran on a platform of not being Bush, then just doubled down on the wars and government spying he claimed to be against once he was in office. To this day, people are still willing to overlook all of this because of political tribalism.
Trump’s focus on the riots was having a greater impact, so now Biden and Harris are finally going to focus on the riots too. The previous tactic had been to either downplay, or outright ignore that they were even happening. Here is how MSNBC and CNN have consistently and quite comedically been downplaying the riots for months:
The ignore and/or deny tactic no longer works in an age where everyone has a smartphone and every event is recorded. The legacy media really needs to enter the 21st century and realize this. People can watch endless videos of carnage all over twitter and youtube, free of any fabricated media narrative. Lying only works when you have complete control over the flow of information, which the media no longer does.
If the Democrats had addressed this violence sooner, instead of pretending it didn’t exist, they’d be in a much better place right now. This tactic is not effective:
Now the game plan has switched to “Acknowledge the rioting, but blame it all on Trump”.
This would be a great point, if not for two major problems: 1) There were a record number of riots during Obama’s presidency, and 2) This completely absolves responsibility from governors and mayors.
According to wikipedia, there were *checks notes* 29 separate riot events during the period where Biden was Vice President. By comparison there have been 8 under Trump so far. I’m sure conservatives blamed those riots on Obama/Biden, but did Biden take responsibility for them? I’d put my money on “doubt it”. He wasn’t to blame though. If a riot breaks out in Miami, the mayor of Miami needs to handle it. If problems arise in Maine, that’s state governor is in charge. We have mayors and governors for a reason. Biden has been in government for 45 years. He’s well aware of all this.
If there have been 90 days of rioting going on in a city, that mayor is to blame for not being able to handle that issue. That mayor can request federal assistance, at which point the president comes into play. There’s absolutely no point in having a mayor if they don’t do anything or aren’t responsible for the city they were elected to run. Passing on the blame doesn’t make you a good leader. Just because Trump does it, doesn’t mean you’re justified in doing it.
Yet this is what they’ve continually done. Failed at handling the problem at hand, then pointing the finger at everybody else. A few of these mayors have egged this stuff on, until it showed up in their neighborhoods, at which point they predictably started to take it seriously:
Quite noble to let the poor areas get wrecked, then call in the calvary when the danger gets a little too close to the “off limits” zone where you live.
Here’s quite the “life comes at you fast” moment. Portland mayor Ted Wheeler felt the need showboat with a letter of refusal for federal help:
And this is what happened later that day:
Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey was at this phase back in early June. He downplayed the issues of violence, pandered at every opportunity, and was subsequently booed out of a public square because he wouldn’t agree to abolish the police. This is where he’s at now:
A huge part of the problem here is that nobody has been willing to acknowledge the difference between protests and rioting. Both have been going on for months now. The protests, consisting of the overwhelming majority of people, have largely been peaceful. The riots are being perpetrated by an entirely different group of people. The Democrats have been unwilling to acknowledge this for whatever reason, and the Republicans have capitalized by conflating the two:
I’m sure Kamala Harris was referring to the actual protestors here. The ones gathering, holding signs, chanting, or whatever else. This is not to be confused with the rioters, who go out with the sole intention of destroying property and looting. Kamala, being a cop and all, should definitely know the difference between the two groups. Most of the people offering to bail out protesters, actually mean protesters. Both protesters and rioters were being arrested for different reasons. This tweet is intentionally misleading.
Tweets like the one above are able to be misleading because the other side has done a fabulous job of not condemning the rioting and constantly downplaying it. In his defense, Biden finally spoke up about a month ago, though I’m not sure where this response was posted. He never spoke out on this topic on his twitter account until August 30th.
Perhaps the reason they didn’t condemn this earlier is because the “rioting is good” crowd on the left are quite a vocal bunch. But once again, these types of folks love the concept of rioting until it comes too close to where they live:
The pro-riot crowd tends to be overwhelmingly white and middle class. They also tend to hold Marxist, and/or communist beliefs. Absolutely none of them is pro-Biden, so it’s strange that the Democrats or any Democrat voter would parrot these sentiments. Anyone doing so is essentially acting as a useful idiot to broadcast someone’s else’s political beliefs all over social media, and these political beliefs aren’t going to benefit Biden’s campaign.
In the wake of these riots being condemned, I’m also seeing a lot of conspicuous narrative pivoting to blaming the riots on everyone but the ones doing it. It’s like we’ve passed the denial and anger stages, and now we’re sitting firmly in the bargaining stage. The riots aren’t being denied any more, but now we’re trying to cope by blaming them on the family dog. All of a sudden the pro-business, pro-capitalism, evil right wingers are infiltrating cities and destroying stuff, and not these types:
It’s cute that people have the gall to blame the rioting on everyone except the people openly justifying and cheering on the rioting. The irony of that last tweet is that the rioting started over one person, but now has a death toll of over 30. Then we have this guy:
The book being referenced is called In Defense of Looting by “white Marxist academic, Vicky Osterweil”. Yes, more white Marxist kids advocating for the destruction of poor communities. It’s a pattern that just keeps repeating the longer you go digging around. Meanwhile, here’s how actual black people tend to feel about all these kids running around destroying shit:
I also haven’t been able to find any proof of substantive change due to riots. In articles by outlets such as Vox, Bustle, and The Hill, the changes presented tended to be minor concessions that didn’t fix the issues that led to the riots in the first place. Things like “investigations”, people being fired from positions, or police diversity hiring. The fact that we’re more than 25 years removed from the L.A. riots and we’re still stuck in this endless cycle is kind of proof positive that riots haven’t had the payoff people would like to believe.
Unfortunately, studies tend to show that riots ultimately have a net negative effect in their wake:
In the wake of violence and lawlessness, we tend to end up with increased police presence and policies that are more oppressive in nature. It shouldn’t require a study to highlight the logic behind this. If you break into a bank, they don’t decrease security in the aftermath.
Ultimately, policy change is what alters how government works. The ones doing the rioting will claim that only violence brings about change, while simultaneously acknowledge they are attempting to achieve goals like “abolishing the police” via policy change. The difference here, is that they are attempting to meet that goal through violence and intimidation instead of through voting. The actual alternative to policy change is overthrowing the government, which nobody is attempting, or realistically capable of doing.
Of course there are policies being put forth, but nobody seems to care about policy change when it matters. The media doesn’t cover it because it isn’t sensational, and the establishment politicians don’t amplify it because it limits their power, and the problems these polices aim to fix don’t affect them. The rioters don’t care, because it’s more fun to remain politically ignorant, role play as a revolutionary and set mailboxes on fire.
Here’s a bill that was written 3 months ago that has evidently been sitting on the Speaker of the House, aka Pelosi the millionaire mummy’s desk collecting dust:
Everybody’s favorite punching bag Rand Paul was in the news recently for being harassed by a group of our intrepid, yet not terribly informed protestors:
The irony of this is that he introduced the “Justice for Breonna Taylor Act” back in June, so he’s quite familiar with her name, and even knows her family. Might help to educate yourself a little before you start indiscriminately hounding people out in public:
Maybe these goofballs should be swarming Nancy Pelosi and hounding her to bring that qualified immunity bill up for a vote. They probably won’t because it’s highly unlikely any of this is actually about reform of any kind. It feels like most of this is just performative at this point, and will just continue until we get that “regressive backlash” the study above mentioned. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that.