The mainstream media won't call out "left wing" violence (it stops just at white supremacy); a Washington Post video about Floyd protests may show why

 

OK, the media is demanding that Trump condemn white supremacy.  Mitch McConnell did so early today.

When the Proud Boys got mentioned in the debate, Trump made the odd comment for them to “stand by” or “stand down”, as if they were his own militia to take down violent Leftists.  At least that’s how is sounded.   And then Trump went on to castigate the thuggery violence of some on the Left.

A lot of us have a bone to pick with the media.  Exactly (beyond a very few obvious examples) who is a “white supremacist”?  It is true, there are covert cells of extremism on the extreme right (wanting a white “ethno-state” and dominance of others to spread among themselves, essentially fascism) and some are capable of mass violence with weapons. We saw what happened in Charlottesville in 2017.

But opposition to Leftist intersectionality or critical theory does not make someone dangerous or a white supremacist.

The mainstream media justifiably reports the threats posed by those who organized Charlottesville.  But the MSM seems to dismiss the destructive violence left in some cities (Portland, Kenosha, Minneapolis, and the “anarchy in Seattle of the Chaz) in  numerous cities, mainly as a result of police overreaction resulting in shootings of black citizens, although in many of the cases there are serious issues of the behavior of the people who were shot just before the incidents, and an unwillingness to recognize that police have little time to react in emergencies.

Indeed, the videos of people marching into neighborhoods or commanding outdoor diners to join protesters’ causes, and the tone of anger in the protests (like many videos from News2Share) suggest that left-wing protesters are responsible for most of the destruction (as does some revolutionary rhetoric common in Marxism). 

Indeed, some rhetoric from the far Left maintains that violence is necessary to protect its own people (mainly, right now, black, and sometimes Latino or indigenous people).  It also maintains that police behavior is so untrustworthy that everyone must drop what they are doing and become an “ally” in stopping it. 

That means businesses and sometimes private residence owners must accept the personal sacrifices they are conscripted to make (however extra-legally) by the need for revolution.  They have been on the wrong side.  And the mainstream media does seem to ignore this aspect of it.

However, there is considerable controversy over how much of the actual destruction is caused by people affiliated with “Antifa” groups.  Particularly in Minneapolis, it seems that most of the destruction was from outside groups, and law enforcement finds that a lot of it is gang related or generally opportunistic crime (indeed from the unheard) rather than organized political violence from the Left (like Communist behavior in the past in other countries).  It’s possible that some right-wing elements could try to red-pill the violence, too.  However, there does seem to be plenty of evidence that the far Left is responsible for more of the thuggery in some places like Portland (as with Andy Ngo’s reporting), where it seems as though the PB have periodic confrontations with supposed Antifa groups.

The Washington Post has a video to this point, for Minneapolis (where I lived 1997-2003, and which I visited around Oct 1 of 2019, staying in the Moxy Hotel on Lake Street near the scene of the chaos (about 2 miles).

On the other hand Harmeet Kaur (CNN) warns about the use of term of "outside agitators" in describin protest violence, as there is evidence of substantial social media organizing by extremists on both sides (CNN) and a second story by her mentioning Joel Finkelstein. 

The pressure the far Left places on tech companies and major advertisers to get more mainstream individualistic people to join their cause (“allyship”) contributes to this impression that the Left is contributing to the physical chaos.  There’s a bit of irony: “allyship” might be like a “group test” substitute for a future social credit system. 

 There's also something to say about the "Black Lives Media" wordmark, which social media influencers and the corporate world has been pressured to promote, which then gets mentioned as the source of destructive rioting by some commentators (like Tim Pool).  BLM is definitely identarian and even authoritarian, but it is far from clear that it is directly involved with the violence, whatever the claimed associations with some forms of Marxism.