Entry 2378, on 2024-12-17 at 19:19:15 (Rating 4, News)
One of the main reasons people have used for rejecting Trump as US president is the unrest which happened on Jan 6 after he lost the 2020 election to Biden. Now, there are various problems with that result, but I am going to assume it was legitimate in this post. Even if it wasn't, I think it would have been better for the country for Trump to have just conceded, and let things proceed normally.
I used the more neutral term "unrest" above, because I think other words are too biased in either a negative way (insurrection) or positive (peaceful protest). Whatever you want to call it, I wanted to try to show that it wasn't quite as problematic as many people think.
So let's do a comparison between the Jan 6 activities and similar "unrest" associated with the left, in this case the BLM protests. I'm sure many people thought the BLM protests were justified, but I have shown fairly conclusively they weren't in past posts. But even if some people thought they were "doing the right thing", so did many people involved on Jan 6 as well. So let's do a comparison of the two events...
BLM involved over 500 individual riots over a long period of time (seven months), where Jan 6 was a single event over a short time period (a few hours).
The BLM riots resulted in over 20 murders committed by participants, but Jan 6 involved none. And 2037 police were assaulted by the BLM mob, but just 140 were on Jan 6 (any number other than zero is bad, but the lower number is at least preferable to the higher one).
In the BLM riots hundreds of small businesses, which had no connection to the alleged problem at all, and some of which were owned by black people, were destroyed. In Jan 6 no private property was damaged. In addition over 150 federal buildings were damaged by the BLM protestors, but only one by the crowd on Jan 6.
The BLM protests resulted in between $1 billion and $2 billion worth of damage, but Jan 6 only did $1.5 million in damage.
Many BLM rioters were bailed and released, but the Jan 6 people were arrested, charged with the most extreme crimes possible, and jailed. The media constantly supported BLM but exaggerated and criticised Jan 6.
Whether Trump encouraged the protest or not is debatable. I mean, he definitely encouraged protest but he did ask for no violence. Many left wing politicians actively encouraged the destruction carried out by BLM.
Now, there might have been some delusional people at both incidents who thought they could create genuine change: either changing the government or eliminating the police, but neither of those was really going to happen, and we really have to believe that people were either caught up in some sort of fake act of heroism, or were just trying to make a point, or were totally corrupt and were there for their own benefit. In particular many of the BLM protestors looted items for themselves that had nothing to do with the alleged reasons for the unrest. At least the Jan 6 mob seemed to have a genuine political purpose, even if it was untrue or at least poorly informed.
Notice again that the primary industry involved with the fake narrative - that the Jan 6 protestors were evil insurrectionists and the BLM protestors were heroic battlers for fairness - was the media. The outrage was manufactured! I really believe that the biased reporting and ideological activism of the mainstream media is the primary source of many of the problems in the world today. And this has primarily happened since journalists were university trained.
The universities are the original source of the postmodernist nonsense we are only slowly moving away from now, and while the media are becoming far less relevant we should all be very concerned that teachers are generally university trained too. Many of them are spreading their insidious woke ideology to the next generation.
We might be beginning to win some battles against woke-ism, but the war is far from over.
Comment 1 by Anonymous on 2024-12-18 at 16:25:06:
But have you forgotten that Trump wanted to illegally take over the government? That's why it was an insurrection. The protestors were just reacting to a police killing.
Comment 2 by OJB on 2024-12-18 at 16:34:22:
Well, yes, that is the story the anti-Trump crowd (including most of the mainstream media) are pushing, but as you might be able to tell from the title of this post ("Manufactured Outrage"), I think it is fake. My point is that, if you look at real stats and actual facts, rather than attempts at guessing motivations and exaggerated claims, the Jan 6 "unrest" was relatively trivial compared with the BLM "unrest". The outrage was manufactured. See what I mean?
BTW, I don't like any form of protest which involves violence and destruction, so I'm not excusing Jan 6. I'm just saying it wasn't as bad as the media pretended it was, and BLM was orders of magnitude worse.
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