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Comment by coffeemaniac | Hacker News Reader

> Almost everyone, deep into trad Republican groups, agree that the Floyd killing was a sickening murder, a symptom of a broken system, and Something Needs To Be Done.

I need you to know that this is not the case. A not insignificant portion of the right does not feel anything wrong was done in this case, and would prefer for police to "crack down." Some will openly discuss that they need to publicly concede that there is A Problem in order to suggest ineffectual solutions to it which will satisfy politicians and pacify mass movements.

The rest of your comment is very correct, but it should be mentioned that bad actors exist and not every American's ideal version of America is completely rid of police murders.

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> I need you to know that this is not the case.

What is your source or qualification for saying this?

I know of several conservative groups that did infact hold or participate in protests against George Floyd's death in the days after. Pretty much everyone in them agrees, even now, that while the case is not quite as clear-cut as some would have you think, it was still wrong to kneel on his neck for 10 minutes after he was already under control.

The right-libertarian circles have been banging on against the militarization of the police and their unaccountability for decades now. Check out Radley Balko in particular, and the books he's written and the articles for reason.com. That's what conservatives saw this as.

Things did kind of turn over the weeks after. This was when the left's narrative that it was a racism problem took hold, the rhetoric escalated into "Defund the Police", and protests into some areas turned into riots and large-scale property destruction. This caused the right to de-emphasize those concerns and put more emphasis on the defense of the police.

Naturally, the Left is incentivized to dig up the most outrageously extreme version of those arguments and try to portray the entire Right as thinking like that. I do not know you or your ideology, but I suspect your source is Left-wing articles that seek to portray the Right in this way. If so, you ought to be aware that it's never a path to truth to view any group only through the lens of their enemies.

Agreed on Radley Balko.

He is the best writer on police brutality, AFAIK.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/radley-balko/

https://twitter.com/radleybalko

Indeed, IMO he's covered many sides of this issue very much in need of attention. Sadly, per the point of the article, it doesn't offend enough people or fit neatly enough into a right-wing or left-wing outrage machine, so it doesn't get a huge amount of attention.

> Pretty much everyone in them agrees, even now, that while the case is not quite as clear-cut as some would have you think

I think you should dig into this a little deeper, because I think it is disingenuous to portray their take as just being somewhat suspicious of the case. When I dug deeper with my conservative friends, they think that Floyd is a "thug" and drug addict, and fall short of saying that he definitely had what happened to him coming, but that's the implication.

> This caused the right to de-emphasize those concerns and put more emphasis on the defense of the police.

But that's the choice, isn't it; faced with a choice between property damage, however minor or even theoretical, and human life (or the serious injuries incurred by protestors and journalists who had rubber bullets fired at their eyes), conservatives immediately turn around and defend the police.

The police can read between the lines as well as anyone else, so they interpret that as the voters ordering them to go out and injure as many protestors as necessary until the protests stop. Which, of course, escalates the protests.

(How is Radley Balko conservative? It's very hard to tell from that twitter feed)

I'd say Radley Balko is libertarian. The intersection of doctrinally libertarian viewpoints with main stream American politics is complex at best. For what it's worth, I often see his articles shared in right-wing circles favorably. I haven't really heard of him having much of a following in left-wing circles. It doesn't sound very helpful to our political scene to be highly concerned that somebody can't be easily placed in a bucket of right-wing or left-wing.

On the other, to borrow some of the left's standard viewpoints, I could say that it's a very privileged viewpoint that property damage is inconsequential compared to injury. How many lower-class people will suffer from losing their mode of transportation, having their home rendered unsafe, or even having "luxuries" that were sources of comfort in a difficult life destroyed? How many people started out in poverty and spent a lifetime building a business from nothing so they could rise into the middle class, only to watch it be destroyed by privileged mostly-white rioters in response to something that they had nothing to do with, that happened in a completely different city? And it certainly isn't like rioters haven't intentionally attacked, injured, and in a few cases killed, both citizens and law enforcement officers as well.

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