Being Targeted

I don’t suppose anyone on your block managed to get a photo of the truck, from which the license plate number could be retrieved? It might be worth asking around.

It’s hard for a died-in-the-wool northern ‘Yankee’ to
relate, perhaps. The only time I’ve spent in the South
was on military bases, which are somewhat removed
from issues of racism. But I would indeed never want
to spend any time in a region which cozens attitudes
that are still in support the Confederacy.

Best of luck changing those attitudes.

Sorry you have been made to feel insecure. That is not right.

As for BLM, I would urge people to carefully assess the past of this organization prior to endorsing it. Their history is not that long that this should take an undue amount of effort. Consider their activities pre-Trump in New York, Dallas and Milwaukee and likely other places I am less familiar with.

If you want to put a sign in your yard in favor a group that has tolerated (at the very least) threats of racial violence and acts of racial violence repeatedly as well as incitements of up to lethal violence against law officers in its protests, well that is your choice. BLM has had clear attributes of a hate group during its brief existence. And that is without even mentioning the very distinct Marxist aims of its leadership.

Eric,

My poster is a statement, not a sign for an organization. Since you think that I have checked. There is a loose organization of that name existing since 2013 with 15 chapters in the US and Canada. Officially it supports nonviolence, despite whatever may have been said by somebody connected to it.

The Disappearing Backlash to Black Lives Matter

Americans are slowly, but surely, growing tired of broad societal injustices—and less susceptible to the right’s mechanisms of racial resentment.

The New Republic – June 10

… Polls since the protests against the killing of George Floyd began have consistently shown broad public support for the (BLM) movement.

One of the latest, published Tuesday by The Washington Post, shows 74 percent of Americans support the protests, including a 53 percent majority of Republicans. That poll also produced a figure much more striking than the headline result. While the Post found that Americans were about evenly divided on the question of whether the protests have been mostly peaceful or mostly violent, a 53 percent majority of those who believed the protests were mostly violent supported them anyway. The Post also reported that 69 percent of Americans believe Floyd’s killing reflected “broader problems in treatment of Black Americans by police.”

That finding, the Post’s Scott Clement and Dan Balz wrote, “marks a significant shift when compared with the reactions in 2014 to police killings of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo., and New York.”

All this is consistent with another survey published Wednesday in The New York Times, which showed that support for Black Lives Matter has jumped dramatically since the protests began. “Over the last two weeks, support for Black Lives Matter increased by nearly as much as it had over the previous two years, according to data from Civiqs, an online survey research firm,” the Times’ Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy wrote. “By a 28-point margin, Civiqs finds that a majority of Americans support the movement, up from a 17-point margin before the most recent wave of protests began.”

None of this should be terribly surprising—public opinion on race has swung dramatically to the left since the protests in Ferguson in 2014. Within just a few months of those demonstrations, in fact, the percentage of Americans who believed the country needed “to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites” jumped over a dozen points to a 59 percent majority of the country. In their poll write-up, Cohn and Quealy reference figures from Monmouth that show 76 percent of Americans now consider racism and discrimination a “big problem”—a 26-point increase, they noted, from 2015.

Some pundits have dubbed this shift the Great Awokening and focused heavily on the white liberals who’ve been responsible for the bulk of it. But it should be noted, too, that opinions on race shifted even among Republicans. The Washington Post’s poll on the protests, for instance, showed that 47 percent of Republicans believe Floyd’s killing was the product of systemic racism in policing, compared to just 19 percent who said the same of killings in 2014—a 28-point leap despite years of efforts by conservative pundits and politicians to brand Black Lives Matter as a hysterical, if not dangerous, movement driven by hyperbolic activists. …

… Mitt Romney caused a stir this week by tweeting “Black Lives Matter” and joining demonstrators in a march on the White House.

That was a publicity stunt, of course, and it remains to be seen whether the empty symbolism of kneeling policemen, kente stoles, and the moderate reforms now supported by Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike will give way to more fundamental shifts in the way Americans think about the role of law enforcement. Joe Biden, it should be said, has responded to the demonstrations with a reiteration of his support for giving more federal dollars to police departments, not fewer. But what we can say with some certainty is that the mechanisms for inducing white backlash, as we’ve understood it in modern American politics, are fundamentally broken in important ways. The upheaval of 1968 was over half a century ago, and the underlying dynamics of American politics—from the ideological polarization of the electorate to its demographic composition—have changed in innumerable ways since then.

For example, while Republican candidates in the Obama era, right up through Donald Trump, have ridden the erosion of support for Democrats among rural and white working-class voters to electoral success in the last decade, we’ve also seen a significant erosion of Republican support in suburban America. Democratic success in the suburbs during the 2018 midterms was attributed largely to Trump’s unpopularity. While that was undoubtedly a factor, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the Republican Party has not won an outright majority of the suburban vote in the last three presidential elections. In a 2017 piece written more than a year before the midterms, Politico’s Charlie Mahtesian noted that while Trump had eked out a narrow plurality against Clinton among suburbanites in 2016, the ground was clearly falling out from under the GOP in these onetime strongholds. “A combination of demographic change and cultural dissonance is gradually eroding its ability to compete across much of suburbia, putting entire areas of the country out of the GOP’s reach,” he wrote. “It’s a bigger crisis than the party acknowledges, a reckoning that threatens Trump’s reelection and the next generation of Republican office-seekers.”

In short, America is already in the middle of a broad and electorally significant cultural backlash against radical politics. But it’s a backlash against the right, not the left. On a remarkable range of cultural and identity-political issues—from LGBT rights to immigration—the conservative movement has either lost outright to the left in the court of public opinion or adopted positions extreme enough to alienate important constituencies like Latinos or white college-educated women. Commentators whose political instincts were shaped decades ago might insist otherwise, but in the here and now, the right is losing the culture war and losing it decisively. …

U.S. “governments at multiple levels are failing at their most basic duty: keeping citizens safe.”

Culture war or not, into the abyss we go. I suspect that the local police departments will be unable to protect citizens form the militias when their q induced psychosis takes over.

To Dilbert D.,

If you get any of that stuff, you will have to take it outside of the bar to smoke any of it. Maybe you can share some with MH, if not Eric.