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Notes -
https://www.newsweek.com/video-appears-to-show-new-ice-shooting-in-minneapolis-11411971
Ice shooting round 2 has kicked off. Numerous rumors already flying around but will be a bit before we have facts I imagine.
Initial thoughts, this reminds me of 2020 in the leadup to BLM. Remember Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor? I think the Arbery shooting was in February and Taylor in March and then Floyd of course came at the very end of May. In retrospect there was a clear agitation by the media, and it took them about 4 months or so to rile people up enough for mass action. The first case (Arbery) didn't do it and. neither did the second. I think we're seeing a similar agitation by the media for Spring/Summer 2026. I don't think this case will do it (it's a White man that died), but be on the lookout for something in April that finally activates people.
Arbery is the case that SHOULD have rallied people, he was just a jogger that got shot for being in the wrong neighbourhood. Breonna was in the wrong place when her dipshit boyfriend shot back at police. Instead the rallying point was an overdosing career criminal who got recasted as a gentle giant, because he providing the spark for 4 years of US anger at Trump which was accelerated by COVID and progressives thought they could harness the energy for their revolution. They did, they succeeded, and the revolution failed. This next revolution will fail again, whether it will fizzle early or burn cities again is another issue.
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Nah, that one a once in a quarter century event. The left learned that BLM, and civil unrest in general, ultimately was a failure. They didn't get any of the sought policing reforms (except perhaps body cams , which have only hurt their cause by showing the arrests and homicides were justified ) and it arguably killed wokeness, too. Also, the liberal establishment is not going to break the law over White deaths--that is only reserved for blacks.
You are neglecting the principal agent problem. 'The left' is not a unitary entity to learn, or judge success for failure.
A lot of people got very rich from BLM and associated advocacy funding. A lot of agitators got experience, social credibility, or organizational relationships and boosts to their careers in the party-NGO patronage complex. That BLM-unrest harmed the Democratic Party, or even 'killed wokeness' outside of the democrat political machines, does not mean that those inside the political machines felt it was a failure. Survivor bias alone, mixed with the bromides of 'lived experience,' gives a basis for many to go 'it worked well enough for me / here.' It's not like there's ever a shortage of socialist-adjacent politicians arguing this time will be different.
'The liberal establishment' is in the midst of a party civil war only barely papered over by Trump as a unifying antagonist. That civil war is because of a lack of consensus on what went wrong, or what is wrong. Many of those partisans may be
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I would counter that it was a wild success. They demonstrated they can riot with impunity and use this to threaten their opposition at will. Wokeness (just universalism) is further entrenched. Two steps forward one step back is a very successful long term strategy.
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I am not saying that there were no media trying to fan the flames, but what did end up riling the BLM protests was videos of what a jury would later rule was a cop murdering a Black suspect over minutes, while his cop buddies prevented onlookers from interfering.
Against a setting of COVID lockdowns, this was clearly enough to start race riots. The parts of the media itching for blood did not have to do a lot of spinning, distributing the video via the usual platforms (which is their job) was quite sufficient.
That's how modern propaganda works though. In a country with 340 million people, you don't need to make things up whole cloth. Just find that one outlier incident that suits your narrative and blast it out for weeks until people are suitably outraged.
There's a reason normies were blasted with the George Floyd footage for weeks, but not the Irina Zaretska video, which was arguably even more horrifying.
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