2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumWhy is this murder of police being treated so much differently than Jarad Miller's murder of police?
Jarad Miller was a right-winger who, along with his wife, murdered two police officers in Las Vegas a few months ago. He was an avowed anti-government extremist.
Why didn't the right get up in arms at people like Cliven Bundy, who called for a "range war" and various Tea Party activists who have called for anti-government violence, for provoking Jarad Miller?
Why didn't Republicans and police unions make that link? Why are these links only being made to people who are protesting the deaths of unarmed blacks?
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Las_Vegas_shootings
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2009/10/08/63166/anti-obama-violence/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/13/nevada-bundy-cattle-ranch-armed-protesters
Pakid
(478 posts)This is America where being Black or Muslin is a crime At least that the way our joke of a media plays it!
I think this is the small open window racists needed to start hating on black people again.
truebluegreen
(9,033 posts)Kalidurga
(14,177 posts)They said the couple were uber liberals.
Onlooker
(5,636 posts)I did a search and can't find any examples of that. That said, I could see them blaming liberals if at all possible rather than taking personal responsibility, but I think for the most part they took pride in calls for a range war, threats to use violence when Obamacare passed, etc.
Kalidurga
(14,177 posts)Igel
(35,356 posts)Because the background "movement" that the killers are said to have belonged to was fringe.
From our perspective, there's a monolithic "Tea Party" composed of people that are all alike with all the same views. This is, of course, a bit of derangement because there are various Tea Party groups within what was a larger movement with a fairly wide range of views on some topics. (It's rather like saying the "left" is a monolithic movement, from the Socialist Workers Party to left-leaning Democrats. Which, of course, the rightmost 5% or so of American society fervently and honestly believes, and is a like kind of derangement. When your group boundaries are made of 5 ft thick titanium alloy and 50 meters high, it's hard to have a clear view of the other side.)
In any event, the fringiness made the connection difficult.
The recent protests weren't fringy. Having as one's foes "police" and "cops" and even "pigs" and decrying the entirety of the police force as oppressive, militarization of American society, etc., etc., wasn't all that fringy. Or, if it was fringy, it was popular among a rather large contingent of Americans.
The symbols of the protests were also invoked as the motivation for the killings. Explicitly.
So while the attitudes may be similar and in some ways mirror-image, the mainstreamness of the parts of the movements involved isn't.