But why are the aligned on this issue now when they never were before? Because after the Great Recession people were beginning to align against them outside of their predetermined demographic categories. These narratives and the way we talk about them don’t arise organically, they’re constructed and pushed out intentionally to serve a political purpose.
Less than 20 years ago the same people unanimously told us that the war in Iraq was good and necessary. I don’t think these institutions and in many cases the exact same people have suddenly become interested in doing the right thing.
> But why are the aligned on this issue now when they never were before?
Major institutions were brought around by activist pressure to pay lip service to racial justics issues before by thr Civil Rights Movement; BLM isn’t unique in that.
> Less than 20 years ago the same people unanimously told us that the war in Iraq was good and necessary.
No, the people positions of influence supporting BLM do bot consist exclusively of people who were Iraq war supporters.
Why would it have to be exclusively? That doesn’t even make any sense, nothing works that way. There’s still a HUGE overlap.
Regardless, if you actually quantify it over time, there is a sharp uptick in discussion of race and identity politics in general shortly after Occupy Wall Street. The same rhetoric was used to attack Bernie Sanders and his supporters despite from the 2016 primary onward.
Is it technically a “conspiracy theory” to suggest this is intentional? Sure. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true, or that this is purely a coincidence.
Because “the same people” isn’t the same thing as “a group that includes some of the same people”
> There’s still a HUGE overlap.
I see no evidence of that.
> Regardless, if you actually quantify it over time, there is a sharp uptick in discussion of race and identity politics in general shortly after Occupy Wall Street.
I see no evidence of that.
That’s very much not my memory, and doing a review of the easily verifiable facts (like Google Trends), I can see that various racial justice issues saw a turn from a preceding long gradual decline to gradual increasing interest about a year before OWS which continued long past (some dropping off a bit after 2016), and then took a sharp uptick around the beginning of 2020.
> The same rhetoric was used to attack Bernie Sanders and his supporters despite from the 2016 primary onward.
So was anti-gun rhetoric and lots of other things pertaining to core Democratic constituencies that other candidates had better relationships with. That's... kinda normal politics.
Less than 20 years ago the same people unanimously told us that the war in Iraq was good and necessary. I don’t think these institutions and in many cases the exact same people have suddenly become interested in doing the right thing.