Arcadia
Member
I'm old enough to have voted in the past few presidential election, so I'm not having childhood amnesia from early 09- early 17. That Harvard analysis may be true, but that is beside my point - Obama didn't film those videos, Obama didn't start BLM. I witnessed first hand the start of the outrage before it became "mainstream". Your post heavily implies that Obama is a huge influence or aggressor in the outrage against the police and that's far far from the truth. He surely acknowledged the problem, stated there had to be solutions, but the insinuations I interpret from your post seem to place a heavy blame on the president for the anti-police sentiment and that's ridiculous from my perspective. I was active on liberal and democratic havens and I never once saw anything Obama said or did influence the people who truely fueled the flames and reached out to hundreds of thousands expressing their disdain for police. The actions of the police, the videos, the liberals and the media had a substantially larger impact than anything I've seen from Obama. I am in full agreement in other viewpoints that the media and their wall to wall coverage of mass shootings is very bad, and evidence shows it may increase the odds of the next mass shooting occurring. If that I have little doubt. As one who was very active in communities who seemed egregiously anti-cop, Obama was hardly a factor in their justifications.
Before President Trump, President Obama was the most divisive President in history. He was constantly lending his weight to criminals in matters before any details or facts were ever revealed or known, including Michael Brown and the Baltimore rioters. He supported Black Lives Matters, inviting them to the White House, even with their vitriolic chanting in the streets against police. He never publicly asked them to stop, tone it down, etc. But it was Obama’s rhetoric about the police that kept the flames stoked. Every time a video popped up, or a story broke….where was Obama?….in front of the camera saying things like…”the cop acted stupidly” and “the death of Michael Brown stains the heart of black children”. This, of course, before he knew the facts. Do I need to explain the psychology of this and why this is harmful? You're smart, Kod. I know you understand why this is not the thing to do. And just hours before five officers were killed in Dallas, Obama was once again stoking racial animosity, saying that the deaths of two blacks at the hands of police in Louisiana and Minnesota were "symptomatic of the broader challenges within our criminal justice system, the racial disparities that appear across the system year after year." He was constantly planting the seed and stoking the flames that police were out there aiming to kill black people because it was a symptomatic problem within police departments across the country. AND IT WASN’T TRUE. But he made it sound like it was true. Every time he opened his mouth. So, did he not know the facts? Or did he know and purposely mislead? Either way, his statements caused harm. Irreparable harm.
No, Obama didn’t film those videos. He just liked to comment on them before he knew anything about them. As Kory pointed out, he was prone to comment PRIOR to details being released. Never in favor of the police mind you. Stir…stir….stir. But if he was so bent on commenting early before knowing any of the specifics of the case, then it should have been to say that what may seem incriminating in the initial video may not be what it appears, that the police may not have done anything wrong...let's wait for investigators to do their job. He should remind everyone what happens when people jump to the wrong conclusions, i.e. Ferguson, MO. But did he ever do that? No, he did not. My post doesn’t heavily imply Obama influenced the outrage against police. It flat-out states it.
But the context of my original post was to say that there are no moral high-grounders here. Eight years of Obama style divisive politicking is what got Trump elected. It was important to point out how we got here and why the other side, the Democrats, the liberals, are not innocent in today's hate-filled political climate. They are the other side of this coin. That was my main point. And it was an important one to make.