Michelle Obama Does Extreme Mental Gymnastics on Protest Violence in Attack on Trump
Michelle Obama’s litany of lies keeps getting longer.
The former first lady has a well-established reputation for twisting the truth to suit her political viewpoint — as the Daily Caller demonstrated again just last month — and finding racism where no one, including herself, had seen it before.
But in a video shot on behalf of the Joe Biden presidential campaign that deliberately mingled distorted fact with liberal fiction, Obama took the gaslighting of America into a whole new realm:
The violence that has plagued the country for months, playing almost nightly on television screens and incessantly on social media, represents only a “tiny fraction” of the protests occurring in the U.S., Obama said.
And President Donald Trump and his supporters are clearly “racist” for arguing otherwise.
.@MichelleObama on BLM riots: Trump is “pinning [violence] on what’s been an overwhelmingly peaceful movement for racial solidarity; it’s true, research backs it up; only a tiny fraction of demonstrations have had any violence at all … What the president is doing is … racist.” pic.twitter.com/7wBsmACiCQ
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 6, 2020
Obama’s statements were part of a 24-minute “closing argument” posted to YouTube Tuesday by the Biden campaign.
“They’re stoking fears about black and brown Americans,” Obama said. “Lying about how minorities will destroy the suburbs. Whipping up violence and intimidation. And they’re pinning it all on what’s been an overwhelmingly peaceful movement for racial solidarity.
“It’s true, research backs it up,” she said. “Only a tiny fraction of demonstrations have had any violence at all.”
That’s great to know. It’s also irrelevant to the “overwhelming majority” of Americans who’ve been watching their country being attacked from within since May, when a suspected counterfeiter named George Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis.
It’s a good bet it’s irrelevant to each and every one of the victims of the violence that Obama so blithely dismisses, whether it’s the families of murder victims like retired police Capt. David Dorn in St. Louis, or small business owners like a woman in The Bronx, New York, who took to social media to accuse Black Lives Matter protesters of wanton destruction because “you wanted to loot the store. You needed money.”
In the mathematical worlds of proportions and percentages, the demonstrations might be peaceful. In the real world of flesh and blood, dollars and cents, where buildings burn and men and women die, they’re anything but peaceful. Obama’s statement is a lie.
For Obama, however, those losses of lives and livelihood are apparently negligible – the results of only a “tiny fraction” of protests she claims are for “racial solidarity.”
And that’s where a second lie comes in.
To most Americans, “racial solidarity” was what the Rev. Martin Luther King was striving for when he preached in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech – trying to convince the country to commit itself to building a society where it’s the content of character, not the color of skin, that’s important.
That’s not the game anymore, and even liberals know it. A group that calls itself “Black Lives Matter” is not pushing racial solidarity, even if its most violent adherents seem to be young white people – probably idled through a combination of closed colleges and their own arrogant laziness.
A group that accosts strangers in public — motorists on the street or diners in restaurants – is not fostering “racial solidarity.”
It’s fostering violent intimidation, bullying and brutality. In other words, it’s behaving as leftists have behaved since the French Revolution.
As The Daily Wire noted, Obama’s claim that only a “tiny fraction” of protests descend into violence appears to be based on a Princeton University study that showed that 93 percent of demonstrations between Floyd’s May 25 death and Aug. 22 have been peaceful.
The problem, of course, is that there were more than 2,400 demonstrations throughout the country during that time period. And that, as the Washington Examiner’s Byron York pointed out, leaves an awful lot of room for murderous mayhem in the name of bogus “racial solidarity.”
Princeton University group studies 3 months of Black Lives Matter protests. Intent is to show they are ‘overwhelmingly peaceful.’ But report reveals nearly 570 violent demonstrations–riots–in nearly 220 locations spread all across country. https://t.co/it60GBbTZT pic.twitter.com/Ph8iECyHIf
— Byron York (@ByronYork) September 5, 2020
That might not be a bad record for warlord-ridden Somalia, but in a country that prides itself on the rule of law, it’s a disgrace. Yet it’s one Michelle Obama and her crowd are seemingly proud of.
Michelle’s arguments had plenty of critics taking apart the obvious logical problem:
Only a miniscule amount of people who contract Covid-19 perish, yet we call it a deadly disease (insert usual disclaimer about any life lost is a tragedy). You can’t have it both ways.
— Pat Waite (@patwaite) October 6, 2020
Regarding the percentage of “peaceful protests” who was the genius that said the alcohol volume in his drink was only 7% so was free to drive?
— Gavid Hayes (@Gavin_B_Hayes) October 6, 2020
“Only a tiny fraction have been violent”
Only a tiny fraction of nazis were involved in the holocaust too.
— generic_kat (@MorasyidT) October 6, 2020
“Tiny fraction”? Sorry, sweetie, God gave me eyes and you have no power over my mind. I cannot & will not be gaslighted by these people.
— JM McConnell “We’re on our own.” (@jmmcconnell2016) October 6, 2020
Now do how often a person gets shot by police. #Therules
— Judson McCulloch (@JudsonMcCulloch) October 6, 2020
Obama knows what she’s saying of course. She’s never been a stupid woman. Her intended audience — the college-educated white women Democrats are counting on this election — probably see the problem too. An argument as obviously faulty as the one Michelle and the Princeton study authors are pushing isn’t really designed to convince anyone.
It’s to provide cover – moral, possibly intellectual – to American liberals who see with their own eyes what the left is doing to the country, yet want some semblance of an excuse to maintain their own preening superiority over Trump supporters. They want to be able to keep their up own self-conscious virtue signaling without facing the reality of what they’re unleashing.
“Only 7 percent of demonstrations turn violent,” liberals can tell themselves as they vote for Biden and Kamala Harris, and every other Democrat on the November ballot whose election will mean nothing but endless trouble for the country.
“That means the progressive movement is overwhelmingly peaceful. Michelle Obama said so.”
She said so, all right. And no matter what the statistical argument is, it was a lie: a lie so blatant, only a liberal could pretend to believe it.
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