https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1288551480694382592?s=20
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This is up there for one of the most disgusting examples of perverse and murderous police culture that we’ve seen, which is really saying something.
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I think it’s ridiculous that the guy lost his job, and I don’t find his tweet particularly racist, although using “race riots” to describe what happened after MLK was killed is a weird choice.
With that said this article devotes a LOT of time to “and he’s right!”. I think it’s just fundamentally backwards to look at public opinion/voting behavior surrounding protests and make prescriptive statements about how protestors should behave. You won’t find this surprising, but IMO the media is far and away the driving factor behind public opinion in situations like these, and they also happen to be the people who have no stake in the underlying conflict beyond profiting from their coverage of it.
Systemic behavior of the media that leads to public backlash against protests:
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Disproportionately covering the aspects of protests that involve property destruction. Having a reporter live on scene watching people steal sneakers but nobody across town talking to the “peaceful” protestors.
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Having their reporters coordinate with the police live on air. “Oh, the officers are directing me to this area where it’s safer, I don’t want to be between the police and the protestors”. This is problematic because it means the news organization is reliant on good relationships with local authorities, and also because it gives the impression that the protest is an inherently violent place and that the media is relying on the police to keep them safe.
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Devoting exponentially more coverage to protests, especially those involving property destruction, than they devote to the underlying cause of the protests. George Floyd would have had, at best, a handful of panel segments devoted to his murder if it weren’t for the protests, and those would have had a handful of reasonable republicans tut tutting about how he was no angel. This leaves the public justifiably not understanding why people are burning shit down.
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Consistently airing unedited live footage of police and government officials’ public statements while making little effort to provide the same sort of platform to protestors. It’s easy to sway public opinion in your favor when you get an hour of free uninterrupted airtime every day to get your message out.
On top of that you have the myriad problems that infect every other aspect of current news media - underlying baked in racism, an extremely narrow range of acceptable views that will get coverage, news staffs that are overwhelmingly comprised of privileged people who went to elite schools and carry with them the biases you’d expect from someone with that background, consolidated corporate ownership of all major media, and direct distribution of talking points from the political parties to the media that covers them.
So like - do some people who otherwise agree with the Floyd protestors get turned off by property destruction? Of course. But all of those people developed those opinions by observing the protests through a very specific prism, and it makes a lot more sense to target that prism, which is an organized group of entities with public names and faces, than to yell into the void about how protestors are hurting their own cause.
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GLGL
Godspeed, Chads.
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I want to like that but I also want you to not get shot, so be smart out there too. Clearly you’ve got the brave part covered.
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I’m friends on FB with the people leading the protests here, saw the video where Maga dipshits standing on the concrete sign with posters and then BLM people get up there and get arrested. Good people protesting here, this is same place i attended last protest I went to.
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I’d love to see a semi-organized protest at a local beach. Everyone who can agrees to go to a certain beach with their kids, umbrellas, and coolers and stake out their spot by pounding a protest sign into the sand. The optics of cops taking aggressive action in that setting would be…something.
https://percolately.com/kkk-member-threatens-protesters-identified/
The internet has its moments.
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And he was fired the next day. He was a dealer at a casino.
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That is incredible. Literally three seconds.
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Whoever was filming and telling him off did an amazing job. Probably took hours for him to get his tail out from between his legs.
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Still large protests going on in Portland. No thuggish violence or vicious weaponry though, something must have changed.
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PSA in honor of my son passing his driver’s licensing test, DON’T TALK TO PIGS!
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Damn shit was popping off in Calibama.I was on the way back from a afternoon hike and some time spent chilling by the creek and I saw this. Apparently there was a large protest and the cops came out in force. I heard there were like 200 cops from different police forces around the area. Sorry for the poor quality I was trying to be sneaky as I was next to a group of cops and being harassed is a real worry. Didn’t get a shot of the like 40 plus cops coming out of stater bros with helmets/batons. No full riot gear though. Heard the ground of protestors was around 300 and that they will be back tomorrow.
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Surprising there was such a large protest in a super racist town like Yucaipa, I checked out their twitter and they’ve been calling out Yucaipa as a racist town. Apparently we have our own proud boys militia group that was threatening to run over/shoot peaceful protesters.