As I wrote yesterday, the legacy media are gullible rubes who desperately want to believe their own lies about the racist, Marxist conspiracy sweeping the woke world, Black Lives Matter. Especially that it’s all just “peaceful protests”.
“Peaceful protests” has been the Big Lie of 2020 from the legacy media.
In my three decades as a media critic, this summer’s huge effort by the press to cover up the endless rioting by George Floyd’s mourners has been its most shameless and shameful episode yet.
Until very recently, a remarkable number of naive Americans had fallen for the mainstream media’s repetitions that the Peaceful Protesters were not—repeat, not—looting and burning. The MSM has been in such flat-out denial mode that it hasn’t even bothered to concoct exculpatory euphemisms for the riots, such as Retail Mourning, Do-It-Yourself Reparations, or Arson for Equity.
But there’s nothing the legacy media love better than trumpeting some dodgy ‘study’, no matter how obviously bullshit it is, if it just happens to validate their own prejudices. The latest bit of pseudo-scientific taradiddle that’s got the legacy media wetting their undies is one that, however improbably, claims that BLM/Antifa really are just a bunch of huggy-bunny hippies. I’ve already reported on the basic innumeracy and uncritical credulity of Newshub’s journos, but with each passing day another hole is shot through of the fast-sinking “peaceful protests” ship of fools.
There have been riots in almost 220 different cities. Now, to you and me, riots in approximately 218 places might sound like a lot, especially since there were multiple riots in many of these locations. For example, ACLED records 69 separate riots in Portland.
If you look at the data behind this report, you will see this leftist group has characterized 617 incidents in the U.S. since the death of George Floyd as “riots,” with 598 falling in the subcategory of “violent demonstrations” and 19 of “mob violence.”
It’s also certain that the report has (deliberately?) undercounted the number of violent events. For instance, the report claimed that, during its brief, chaotic existence, Seattle’s CHAZ/CHOP “autonomous zone” featured only “peaceful protests”. The truth is that, in its sorry 23-day existence, CHOP sent crime spiralling by 525%, including two murders, numerous shootings, as well as assault, rape, arson and looting.
Any ‘study’ that gets such a gigantic fact so completely wrong is clearly junk.
Even with all the leftist biases, this is an eye-opening database for the sheer quantity of bad behavior it documents.
Because the media has spent the past half decade warning about the purported vast menace posed by the violent right while imposing a virtual embargo on all reporting about the much larger forces of the violent left, many credulous readers have assumed that the disorder must be due to right-wing “outside agitators.”
This is the other bouncing baby Big Lie of “peaceful protests”: the blatantly ridiculous claim that any violence – and they’re not saying there was any, because they all know that there wasn’t – was caused by dastardly “right-wing” provocateurs.
In reality, there was almost negligible rightist opposition for the first three months of rioting. The basic pattern has been the same all summer:
—A black criminal, such as George Floyd in Minneapolis, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, or Jacob Blake in Kenosha, resists arrests and thereby comes to grief at the hands of the police.
—Local black youths begin to joyously loot neighborhood stores.
—The next night, white Antifa arrive and break glass, set fires, and attack the police.
—Gangs launch expeditions against expensive stores in white neighborhoods.
In fact, up until Kyle Rittenhouse bagged a couple of armed Antifa thugs in what has all the appearances of a self-defence shooting, the right were conspicuous by their judicious absence.
Ordinary American “deplorables” in “flyover” country might have started packin’ their pistols and showing any wannabe Antifa types who were stupid enough to show up in rural communities the quickest road outta town, but otherwise the ‘right’ have wisely left the (Democrat-run) cities to their own devices.
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