violent protests Archives - Dr. Rich Swier

Americans across racial lines remain overwhelmingly opposed to violent protest to “improve the situation of black Americans” with 73% of respondents indicating it tends to “hurt” that cause, according to a new Gallup poll released Wednesday.

The poll found a higher percentage of white Americans opposed violent protest (79%) than black Americans (59%). Both groups overwhelming agree that nonviolent protest helps blacks, with 78% of whites supporting it and 72% of blacks.

Gallup based data on June 8-July 24 survey of U.S. adults.

The polling company noted that “Since Gallup last polled on this subject in 1988, there have been meaningful increases in the percentages of Americans saying that nonviolent protest, violent protest and economic boycotts, in particular, can help. Opinions on the effectiveness of legal action are little changed.”

In 1988, 79% of overall respondents were opposed to violent protest.

The poll also found that Americans don’t tend to sympathize with violent protesters who engage in “looting or property damage” with only 41% of overall respondents indicating so. However, the question did uncover an apparent racial divide on this issue, with 60% of black Americans finding sympathy and only 38% of whites doing so.

But sympathize or not, only 12% of black Americans and 8% of white Americans say violent protest is ever justified.

“The survey was conducted during a period of nationwide protests,” Gallup noted, that included both nonviolent and violent responses to the death of George Floyd after his arrest by Minneapolis police.

Another recent poll indicated that 77% of Americans are “concerned” about the spike in violent crime in American cities.

Gallup conducted its survey by telephoning 1,226 adults living in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Because the pollsters oversampled black responses “to represent racial and ethnic groups proportionately to their share of the population,” the margin of error varies.

For overall results that margin of error is ±4 percentage points, with a confidence level of 95%. For black American respondents the margin of error is ±7 percentage points with the same confidence level.

COLUMN BY

DAVID KRAYDEN

Ottawa Bureau Chief.

RELATED TWEET:

More violent behavior from BLM protesters in DC overnight. pic.twitter.com/OeNtf6Y0k5

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 28, 2020

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My latest in the American Thinker:

Everyone knows it: the death of George Floyd was just a pretext. The rioters who continue every night to wreak havoc in Portland, and who are poised to engage in new orgies of destruction all over the country don’t know much and care less about Floyd. They’re quite open about engaging in a “revolution” with the goal of destroying the existing order and replacing it with an authoritarian Marxist regime. But what we are seeing today is not new. Its seeds were planted decades ago. Now the question before us, if we want to preserve the United States as a free society, is what we must do to counter this violent, hate-filled movement.

There will be no easy fix. The Left’s long march through the institutions began in the 1960s and has ended in total victory; only a reverse march through the same institutions will ultimately overcome the catastrophic effects of the Left’s advance. The leftist stranglehold on the educational system is a big part of the problem: the Antifa and BLM barbarians of today learned their hatred at our colleges and universities. Our children have been taught to hate the land of their birth. Who didn’t think this would bear bitter fruit? There was some indignation among conservatives over the 1619 Project, which portrays the entire American enterprise as racist, oppressive, and hateful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, but that was just the culmination of decades of miseducation and propaganda disguised as education. I wrote Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster as an antidote, to remind Americans, or show them for the first time, the heroes who made America great — and the failures and sellouts who got us into this fix.

But the education most of the rioters have received has made them abjectly incapable of thinking rationally and evaluating claims on the basis of their logical coherence and supporting evidence. No amount of careful reasoning, no amount of evidence is going to convince most of the rioters that their rage is based on false premises, because they have been carefully educated throughout their lives to feel rather than think, and to believe that America is a nation of deep injustice with a shameful history and an equally condemnable present. It doesn’t matter that the claims that the rioters and their defenders are making are false. It doesn’t matter that police brutality affects people of all races. It doesn’t matter that thoroughgoing civil rights legislation has made “systemic racism” a thing of the distant past.

There is much more. Read the rest here.

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DAVID KRAYDEN