A project called the “US Crisis Monitor” has recently released a paper claiming Black Lives Matter is a peaceful movement. According to the project, 93% of all BLM protests from May to August were peaceful. That's a blatant lie, and I'll explain why - and if there’s anything I learned from 5 years working with public policy in a Latin American country, is how to spot bad methodology being used to push a lie.
The first thing to look at is the definition of terms - the M.O. of a lying bureaucrat usually consists of stretching those, so that whatever numbers they find fit the narrative they’re trying to push. In this case, we have to look at how they define a “BLM protest” specifically, and “demonstrations” and “political violence” in general.
The first problem lies in the paper’s method of associating a protest with a movement. They claim to do so based on whether there is a “salient identity” to a demonstration. What exactly does that mean? It means it’s a subjective choice, based on how it looks to the researcher. In concrete terms, if there’s a bunch of people with signs saying “Black Lives Matter”, their protest will be considered a BLM protest, regardless of whether it was organized by the movement or not.
As I’ve explained before, BLM has adopted a “mass line” strategy, and thus created a peaceful movement around itself that acts as a political shield. This pseudo-research puts that strategy to practice - if BLM burns a city down, yet a random, peaceful group across the country happens to include a bunch of “Black Lives Matter” phrases in their signs, then 50% of BLM protests that day were peaceful. This is a big problem, but it could have been an honest mistake.
The researchers then consider any group of three people taking to the streets to protest as a demonstration, and treats them all equally, without taking the amount of people in consideration to arrive at their final measurement. That means if me and two neighbors go out to protest our mayor, and write “Black Lives Matter” on a couple of our banners, we now count as a BLM protest. If 9 of these micro-protests happen in the same day BLM burns a city to the ground, 90% of protests that day were peaceful.
Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Well, it gets worse.
The researchers define “political violence” as violence which has been explicitly committed for political purposes, stating that violence motivated ”by personal or purely criminal motives, is excluded”. That means if people start looting and thrashing a store during a BLM protest, the protest was peaceful. That means if you shoot someone in the face during a BLM protest, and they weren’t in an organized counter-demonstration, the protest was peaceful.
As if this wasn’t ridiculous enough, the research constantly cites newspaper articles as evidence for their claims - blatantly ignoring their academic duty to check and link the newspaper’s sources. That means all these manipulated definitions are not even made to distort reliable data - they’re made to distort whatever the New York Times or CNN said. At this point, the research seems to have been done by a bunch of angry teenagers trying to prove a point - the scary part is that it was done by professional academics of the Austin and Princeton Universities, and funded by branches of the US, Dutch and German governments.
1024.227 SRY