r00kieAnd you're making the chicken or egg arguement. Which came first? Let a pull out some video evidence with context to support which one ever one fits are narrative! Ridiculous that people just can't acknowledge that political violence is an issue for the extremes of each end. Political tribalism sucks.
How could it
possibly be a chicken-egg argument when the argument I was making was that they are completely different and not at all equatable nor connected?
Simply put, what happened at the Capitol and what happened during the BLM protests have gulf of differences between them.. many many degrees of separation, not to say the least of which was the effect of the police on the situation and the politicization of either. If you want to chicken-egg it, then BLM was one of the things that eventually lead to the Capitol insurrection due to conservative media politicization of everything their voters deem scary - not due to equal competing political tactics from either side. That's the closest connection you can make between the two.
BLM is not exactly what I'd call political. It was largely targeted towards police violence against people of colour.. Many people of both parties and of all ethnic backgrounds kinda hate the cops. They're authoritarian jerks. The only people who seriously like them are narcs or those who are related to them. However the demographics of right wing conservatives in America very much don't align with the plight of African American communities. Particularly those that exist within cities, far away from the conservative voting base in rural areas and non-diversified suburban fringes. Sure, some democrats attached themselves to the whole thing - often in
incredibly cringeworthy fashion - but ultimately, the Democratic party as a whole didn't take on a lot of the demands of BLM at all, or even offer any real support for them.
You didn't see high profile democrats seriously calling for defunding the police, or a restructuring of the economy or property with some sort of massive investment in the well being of people of colour. It was at best, pretty damn hollow support. The DNC were and still are far more focused on Healthcare/Covid, Infrastructure, jobs, economy, etc... with the list of social policies being very much secondary - which is partially why they haven't even come up for a vote yet. Democrats span too broad of a coalition - making it generally spineless and lackluster when it comes to nationwide social policy stuff.
Conservatives can rally around single issue voters (guns, god, taxes, scary brown people) and the Democrats just can't do the same in most circumstances - fully latching onto BLM was never going to work for the Democrats, and they really didn't. The best they can do is rally voters around improving healthcare (and wouldn't you know it, the only major thing they've really been able to do since the Clinton Administration has been healthcare-based)
Shit, dude the Democrats are such wimps... most of them ran
far away from same-sex marriage for
YEARS before the supreme court ruled on Obergefell v Hodges... it was only after that ruling that most of them gave it the thumbs up in support. If Roe v. Wade had never happened, I guarantee they'd have been running away from the abortion conversation this whole time. The Democrats are spineless idiots who simply don't know when to politicize things, much less have the ability to do it broadly like the GOP has been able to do.
So yeah, It was natural that the BLM protests would be politicized by the GOP to bolster support. The M/O of the GOP and conservative media is to often paint a picture to rural white uneducated voters that cities and states with Democrat Leadership are hellholes of riots, wanton destruction, drugs, homelessness, unemployment, bread lines, and whatever other dystopian element you could attach, and that if they don't vote GOP, then their small podunk ass town will absolutely get invaded by the same scary scenes.
That's how they operate. It's all fear-based and has been for years. Many former GOP operatives have admitted as much. Rush Limbaugh was screaming about the hellscapes of New York, LA, and Chicago years before Fox News even existed, all while, if anything, the inner cities of most American metros have improved tremendously since then (yes - they have), often in part to extremely popular social policies of progressive politicians who have increasingly gained power in the major cities.
The Capitol Insurrection was a political event from the start and egged-on by fear-driven rhetoric from conservative politicians themselves, so there's no question about the political nature of that event, but BLM didn't become political until the right wing used it as another scare tactic.
