The unrest that was initiated by George Floyd’s death at the hands of police has been described by left-leaning media incessantly as “mostly peaceful”. This is a phrase that can be used so as not to disturb the casual listener and to cover the media as it is close enough to the facts so that they are not technically lying. There are countless fun (or disturbing) variations on stories using the “mostly” model.
- Seung-Hui Cho, member of Virginia Tech Class of 2007, lived a mostly peaceful life.
- During the summer of 1863, Gettysburg, PA was a mostly peaceful town.
- The Charlottesville protests were mostly murder-free.
- The burger I ordered at McDonalds was mostly hair-free.
- The airplane pilot had a mostly successful career.
- The hot pocket was mostly reheated.
- The local pool was mostly poop-free.
- (A bit more political?) The police force in America is mostly made up of good cops.
A weather reporter might tell you to expect a “mostly sunny day” and this is an adequate description of the day, because you and the weather reporter have an unspoken agreement that the part of the day that is not sunny is instead merely cloudy or a bit rainy. If the weather reporter were to tell you that a day was “mostly sunny”, but did not inform you that the non-sunny part was a tornado or a hurricane, would you not suspect that the weather reporter did not have your well being at heart?
This phrase “mostly peaceful” is utter nonsense, and for reasons, the left-leaning media feels obligated to paint the unrest that occurred all over the country and is still ongoing in Portland, OR in a positive light. There are protests and there are riots, but depending on which media you are watching, you may be told that only one of the two is occurring (Fox = “riots”; MSNBC, CNN = “mostly peaceful protests”).
In Washington DC, BLM demonstrators took to the streets in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake. Some demonstrators decided to target diners at outdoor restaurants. They marched the streets shouting, “Fire, Fire, Gentrifier” and “No Justice, No Peace” (yes, the demonstrators themselves are declaring that they are not peaceful, not even “mostly peaceful”). Upon encountering diners, they demanded each to raise their fist to demonstrate allegiance to the movement (if this strikes you as disturbing you are not alone). I have seen peaceful demonstrations… this ain’t it chief.
Don Lemon changed his tune recently by saying that the riots must stop, and Joe Biden must address the violence; he infuriated conservatives because his apparent reasoning was that “it is showing up in the polls, it is showing up in the focus groups”. It seems like the kind of thing that is meant to be said behind closed curtains in Joe Biden’s war room, but not for all the world to hear on CNN. Don Lemon is right: people are starting to notice. However, as usual, the media and the politicians are unable to acknowledge that they were wrong to initially support it and to explain why the violence and the rioting must stop.
If you are paying attention to this blog, you have seen that I have been writing essays about what I believe to be the beginning of the second American Civil War. It seems that perhaps the narrative of mostly peaceful protests is ending (see P.P.P.S.), and many will act as if it never existed or as if it ended exactly when the protests stopped being “mostly peaceful”. The fact is that it never should have existed, and we need to hold those who pushed that narrative to account.
P.S. The nation should have its eyes on Portland right now, and reporters should be flooding the scene, but the only time we as a nation were paying attention is when the Federal officers were operating outside of an acceptable manner of policing and pulling people into unmarked vans with little or no explanation. While that was troubling to watch, there is so much more to be observed. If you were to perform a quick Google search, good information would be hard to come by and I am massively underqualified to give you an essay piece detailing the goings on there since the George Floyd killing. If you are interested, I would direct you to a podcast called The DarkHorse with husband and wife Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. They are evolutionary biologists and ex-professors that live in Portland and do a good job of sifting through information, and even perform some firsthand investigation of their own.
P.P.S. If you pay attention to this blog, perhaps it feels to you that I am taking it far too easy on the conservative side of these stories. Using this essay as an example, I could have gone into the insistence of right-wing media that all of these BLM demonstrations are riots. It is not that I see a lack of problems with the conservative side of the coin, but rather that I can more easily write as a liberal trying to reason with other liberals.
P.P.P.S. A report was published last week that has excitedly been referenced by the many media outlets interested in painting the BLM protests in a positive, non-violent light so perhaps this narrative is not dying. As tone deaf as ever, publications such as CNN ran the headline “Report finds 93% of racial justice protests have been peaceful”. Read the above essay again if you want to know how I feel about this. I glimpsed the report and sure enough, it is activism masquerading as scholarship. In the introduction alone, they make claims that do not belong in an academic paper. In the next section they outline the high profile police killings of Black people since the start of the BLM demonstrations, and they are presented with abstentions of important facts (George Floyd resisted arrest) and misinformation (the police were, in fact, at the correct home in Breonna Taylor’s killing). It is in this way that the authors of the report reveal their goals to be social justice rather than objectivity and truth. For this reason and the fact that their methods of data collection are ambiguous, it may not be worth it to put much stock in the numbers that they have published.
P.P.P.P.S. I want to point out all of the inaccuracies and misrepresentations of the aforementioned report, but that would take a lot of time and probably result in a pretty boring post. I will only point out the largest hypocrisy in the whole report: they point out that in Portland, OR the amount of protests that encountered police “use of force” went up after June ended. What they do not point out is that it went up from 25% to 40%. Are you seeing it yet? Okay, here it goes. This shows that the police in Portland have been MOSTLY PEACEFUL towards the demonstrators. Bam!
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