The politicians and press continue to struggle with defining the disruptions.
For some time now we have been getting fed the regular message that these violent riots we are witnessing in Minneapolis, and abroad, are not what they appear. The leaders and experts, eager to transfer blame, have been making the statements that the bad agents who are provoking violence are from outside their area. The attempt to avoid responsibility for the unraveling protests and how leadership allowed destruction, even the overthrow of a police precinct, is now facing an uncomfortable reality.
It is appearing that the perpetrators are actually locals.
As the looting and violence that had erupted this week on the streets of Minneapolis spread out to dozens of cities across the country the local politicians struggled to both make sense of things and sound competent. There is an effort to push the narrative of oppression while at the same time excusing responsibility from the very leadership trying to show support. They want to claim institutional racism while refusing to look into their very institutions provoking the strife.
The aftermath in Minnesota has the local politicians desperate to explain away how they lost control of their communities by claiming they were overrun by outside professional anarchy groups. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey made this claim:
We are now confronting white supremacists, members of organized crime, out of state instigators, and possibly even foreign actors to destroy and destabilize our city and our region.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz gave a press conference yesterday where he explained his delayed call for National Guard support was that he recently suspected that the riots were being provoked by white supremacists and drug cartels from out of state. Partner Mayor Melvin Carter, from the city of Saint Paul declared that, ‘’Every single person we arrested last night, I’m told, was from out of state.’’ State Attorney General Keith Ellison has also echoed this storyline.
These claims are now withering under the analysis of actual data. A local news station resorted to efforts not seen with much regularity from the media this past week — it committed an act of journalism. Channel 9 News on KMSP actually looked into the arrest records from Hennepin County and discovered that all but a handful of the dozens of people taken into custody had local addresses.
Melvin Carter later gave a presser where he completely backtracked from his prior claim of one hundred percent outside agitators. The jail records show that 75% of those arrested in his city were also locals. Carter attributed his error to being improperly notified on the matter during an official police briefing.
The narrative that all of this strife being seen is a cooked-up conspiracy on a national scale in order to create strife and appeal to Donald Trump supporters has taken root, with many media members pushing this theory. One such example was from Reza Aslan.
White Supremacists=Trump Supporters. These are Trump supporters burning and looting. https://t.co/DKyvP6mUJk
— Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) May 30, 2020
What is so amusing from these journalists who traffic in the facts (ahem) is that they could easily avoid embarrassment by doing the rather easy effort of basic research. Or less effort than that. They could prevent themselves from being so easily mocked as hacks if they so much as just watched the television reports of the riots.
“White Supremacists”
Suiuuuure… https://t.co/h9ePtdVA9f pic.twitter.com/iLXNA5Wc6m— Brad Slager: aka Wuhan Solo (@MartiniShark) May 31, 2020
