Westboro Baptist is literally one family of handicaps that everyone hates. BLM is a crowd of thousands chanting to kill cops. It's entitled twats shutting down airports and freeways, putting people's lives at risk because they can't see past their own ego. It's deified criminals held up as saints by the entire main stream media and even high level politicians. It isn't a few bad eggs doing this, it's the majority.
BLM is a decentralized movement in the same vein of feminism and Anonymous. The people who are the popularized members of these organizations are usually the worst, because there's no incentive to give fame to people like Shaun King who are academics, journalists, pastors, and community leaders that support the movement. But there is no
actual organization, and anyone who ideologically aligns with the movement is implicitly a member.
Pew Research showed that 40% of white people and around 2/3 of black people in the US support BLM. If the rioters out in the streets represented the 'majority' of BLM, our country would literally be on fire because tens of millions of people would be rioting. You can say that a good percentage of those people who support BLM are not necessarily 'members', but then you're just invoking the No True Scotsman fallacy. You're essentially saying that only the violent members of BLM are the
real ones, the non-violent ones are just phonies.
The fact of the matter is that the goals of BLM aren't just to eliminate police brutality against blacks. The movement does not just fall apart because you've made the observation that unarmed police shootings are not significantly different between blacks and whites when normalized by crime rate. Whenever an unarmed black man gets shot by a cop, the killing isn't just an issue because of the racial component, but because it's symbolic of the conflict between minorities and law enforcement that creates a self-perpetuating cycle of crime and violence. When these communities see people thrown into the prison system by the War on Drugs and then shot by cops whose salaries are paid for by civil forfeitures, it creates an incredible amount of resentment that boils up whenever another person gets shot. I know people at Ivy League universities who are hugely involved members of BLM, and their conversations revolve more around the prison system than anything about ballistics and whether Treyvon 'had his hands up' during the shooting.
I don't even see riots as a legitimate form of protest. Every time it happens, it hurts the movement and makes people less willing to change their ideas. But if the occasional BLM riot is reason enough to completely ignore these problems, then that's seriously forgetin unfair. There have probably been more riots over wage disputes and football than anything BLM has started, but you don't see people generalizing 40% of the country as 'terrorists' over union membership and football. Hell,
riots are literally some of the most celebrated parts of our history, and you don't see anybody saying 'hey, it didn't count because some of their members broke stuff'.
Yes, some of the members of BLM are just violent idiots looking for an excuse to destroy property. Yes, the movement has some demands that will be ineffective in resolving police brutality. But this isn't new. The Civil Rights Movement was filled with
tons of race-related riots, and many were started by people on the same side as MLK. Everyone loves to romanticize the Civil Rights Movement as a bunch of peaceful marches, but it was even more violent and controversial than what's happening today.
Likewise, back then, people had the exact same complaints about Civil Rights Activists as they do about BLM, that it's 'too disruptive', and it 'hurts the movement'.You can call out all the bad eggs of BLM as much as you want, but 40% of white people already support the movement and it
usually only takes 3.5% of a nation participating in a social movement for it to eventually succeed. BLM will succeed in changing our law enforcement system, and it will be remembered through all the journalists, writers, Ivy League students, and activists that helped it do so. You can either see the big picture, or you can just be that tribal grandpa that talks all about the uppity' mondays from the '60s whose protests blocked up the streets.
