Many Americans may have noticed by now that aren’t any articles from any of the national news outlets refuting the narrative of the Black Lives Matter movement, or even criticizing it in any way. Equally, there are no articles from any of the outlets that suggest the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests spread COVID-19 during any of the demonstrations.
There are countless headlines that claim the protests did not spread COVID-19, there are even some headlines that claim the protests actually slowed the spread of COVID-19, but there are zero articles even remotely suggesting the movement was responsible for the spread of the virus.
It seems that in order for the national and international news outlets to determine if certain protests spread the virus, it really depends on who’s protesting what.
In July of 2020, the NY Times officially conceded this point.
“Public health experts decried the anti-lockdown protests as dangerous gatherings in a pandemic. Health experts seem less comfortable doing so now that the marches are against racism.”
Pick any one of the anti-lockdown protests that occurred in the summer of 2020, and you will find a variety of top articles suggesting that these protests were ‘superspreaders.’ But after hundreds of thousands gathered for a summer of protests and riots, the medical community, the media, corporations, and every institution applauded their activism.
On May 30th, more than 1,300 public health officials signed a letter in support of the demonstrations, and many medical professionals even joined the protests. Public health experts and the media claimed the ‘pandemic is why the protests must continue,’ while also declaring that ‘racism is a much bigger public health crisis.’
“White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” states the letter, before adding, “Black people are twice as likely to be killed by police compared to white people, but the effects of racism are far more pervasive.”
“As public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission,” states the letter. “We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States.”
The letter then claims that ‘stay-at-home’ protests shouldn’t be treated the same because they “not only oppose public health interventions but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives.”
Mark D. Levine, a top health official in New York said last year that if there is a second spike in coronavirus cases, “racism” will be to blame, not the thousands of demonstrators gathering in close proximity.
In February of 2020, prior to the string of protests, the same doctor urged New Yorkers to congregate in large numbers to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year parade as a show of “defiance” against the COVID-19 “scare”.
As riots and protests swept across America last summer following the death of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation took in just over $90 million last year, according to financials obtained by AP.
The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation ended the year with a balance of more than $60 million, after allegedly spending approximately $20 million of its assets on grant funds and other charitable giving.
The BLM foundation’s individual donations from its main platform traditionally averaged around $30.00, with more than 10% of donations being recurring. However, AP noted that the foundation’s report does not state where the money went in 2020 and that BLM leaders declined to name prominent donors.
Last year, the foundation’s expenses were approximately $8.4 million, including staffing, operating, and administrative costs, along with activities such as civic engagement, rapid response, and crisis intervention.
Critics argue that the foundation has increasingly moved away from being a Black radical organizing hub and has become a philanthropic and political organization run without democratic input from some of its earliest supporters.
Several chapters, including those in cities including Washington, Philadelphia, and Chicago, were notified last year of their eligibility to receive $500,000 each in funding under a multiyear agreement, according to records shared with AP. However, only one group in Denver signed the agreement and received its funds in September.
A group of 10 chapters, called ‘#BLM10,’ rejected the foundation’s funding, and proceeded to complain publicly about the foundation’s lack of transparency in a letter released Nov. 30.
“For years there has been inquiry regarding the financial operations of BLMGN and no acceptable process of either public or internal transparency about the unknown millions of dollars donated to BLMGN, which has certainly increased during this time of pandemic and rebellion,” the letter states. “To the best of our knowledge, most chapters have received little to no financial support from BLMGN since the launch in 2013. It was only in the last few months that selected chapters appear to have been invited to apply for a $500,000 grant created with resources generated because of the organizing labor of chapters. This is not the equity and financial accountability we deserve.”
Blackrock and Vanguard Own Their Movement
Across all of the mainstream news outlets, there is one singular narrative about all of the hot-button issues being debated in America today. From Black Lives Matter, January 6th, Antifa, and Immigration, to COVID lockdowns, masks, and vaccines – there is a reason why every outlet has the same message.
Without the help of the singular narrative from the media, fabrications like Michael Brown’s ‘hands up don’t shoot,’ and funding from almost every major international institution – the Black Lives Matter movement would have never survived.
A quick look at mentions by the outlets like the New York Times of phrases like ‘police brutality,’ shows that coverage of the matter exploded under the Barack Obama administration.
Right around 2010 to 2012, sensational headlines about all the matters pertaining to race, started to regularly populate the front pages of every major outlet, and never stopped exploding since then.
Corporations, institutions, and the media outlets that create the narrative and pre-approved messages, are all owned but just a couple of corporations and every one of them helped keep the movement afloat.
Just a cursory look at Yahoo finance reports shows that Blackrock, Vanguard, and Berkshire Hathaway own effectively everything in the country. They own the companies that own the media, they own the social media companies, they own the vaccine makers, they own the major banks, and in turn, they own the narrative.
A Movement Built and Based on a Lie
The movement became nationally recognized for street demonstrations following the 2014 death of Michael Brown where the popular false slogan ‘hands us don’t shoot’ became famous.
The movement gained international attention and support from nearly every institution and major corporation after the death of George Floyd.
Around 25% of the people killed by police yearly are black Americans, and around 50% are white. Hundreds of more white Americans are killed by police every year, but black Americans are shot and killed by police at a higher rate compared to their population percentage.
The rate at which black Americans are killed by the police is what the national media uses to mislead those who click on their headlines, but there is one major omission that has led to nationwide destruction for almost a decade.
FBI data show that for every 10,000 Black Americans arrested for violent crime, 3 are killed, yet for every 10,000 White Americans arrested for violent crime, 4 are killed. Black officers on black perpetrators account for many of the incidents.
This means that when the crime rate is controlled for – which translates into the chance someone has of having a police encounter – no racial disparity in police shootings can be found.
The current scientific consensus after controlling for the rate of a police encounter is that there is zero racial bias or disparity in deadly police incidents.
A Long List of Scientific Papers Disprove Racial Bias in Police killings
Lott and Moody (2017), Using one of the most comprehensive lists of police shootings compiled, find blacks suspects are not more likely to be shot by white officers than blacks after controlling for a whole host of variables and finds no support for racially-based discrimination by white officers.
Cesario et al. (2018) – We know blacks are overrepresented compared to their % of the population in police killings, but that isn’t the right benchmark. Blacks also commit more crimes which makes them more likely to find themselves in scenarios involving police, and that alone means they’re more likely to “act out” and lead to a justified police killing. Using various metrics of crime (murder, violent crime, weapons violations), and looking at all fatal shootings, they found a consistent anti-white bias in police shootings. Disaggregating the data and only looking at unarmed victims shows blacks still usually not being discriminated against and, in fact, being shot less than you’d expect.
James (2016) did a lab experiment with police officers and found officers took longer to shoot blacks than whites in their scenarios (1.09 to shoot a white, 1.32 seconds to shoot a black), and they were more likely to wrongly shoot nonaggressing whites than nonaggressing blacks.
Johnson et al. (2019) looked at 2015 data and found that black and white cops were equally likely to shoot blacks.
Fryer (2016, revised 2018) found no racial bias in police shootings, though he did find bias in police use of force. The data was limited to Houston, though, and most studies on police use of force show no bias or even the reverse.
Goff et al. (2016) found no bias in police shootings but did find a bias in the police force (like Fryer). However, when they controlled for violent crime, whites were actually more likely to experience the use of force than blacks were.
Phillips and Kim (2021) found that Citizen race/ethnicity and gender were not significant determinants of officer-involved shootings (OIS).
Wang and Fan (2021) found no significant evidence to conclude that racial discrimination occurred during fatal police shootings.
Maguire (2020) reports that among those who had force used against them, African American suspects were significantly less likely than white suspects to be injured. The risk of injury for other racial and ethnic groups is about the same as the risk for white suspects.
Davis (2019) found Finally when assessing how factors like police officer’s race, age, years of service, or place of residence influence the decision to shoot an armed or unarmed suspect in the decision-making process in shoot/don’t shoot simulation scenarios. They found that some police officers displayed implicit bias, but there was no activation of the bias against the Black male suspects. The participants shot armed White males more quickly than armed Black males and the aforementioned factors did not have an effect on the decision to shoot/don’t shoot an unarmed Black male.
Ross (2015) found a racial bias in police shootings & was widely reported in media. There are critical issues that weren’t reported though: It didn’t use incident level data, making it subject to the ecological fallacy. Further, it used odd metrics of crime (like assault and weapons violations), when crimes like homicide are more appropriate because those crimes typically include a body and have much less police discretion in terms of arrests etc. These crimes also are more violent than weapons violations, which may not meaningfully predict how likely someone is going to run into the police in a violent encounter (if a black with a CCW accidentally walks into a gun-free building, that’s technically a violation but isn’t violent and may not predict a violent encounter with a cop like stabbing someone would). This paper isn’t too convincing because of that.
