Do you think all of BLM is manufactured?

Smolett it now seems was faking it, but what conclusions are you drawing from that?

What I find disturbing about events like the Smolett case (also Covington Catholic, "A Rape on Campus", etc) isn't that one person would fake such a thing, but that so many would eagerly promote and support a claim that fit their agenda without questioning it.

How many of the people promoting it do you think knew, or should reasonably have believed, it was falsified?

In the case of Nathan Phillips and the students from Convington Catholic, video evidence was available if they'd cared to investigate.

In other cases, they should have withheld judgement until they did know.

Isn't part of the outrage though that only straight white males enjoy the benefit of "withheld judgment" and an expectation of getting a fair hearing?

And I'm not just talking about the court of public opinion here— the point of BLM is that many POC don't even get the benefit of the doubt from law enforcement when lethal force is in play.

Let's not be sidetracked by BLM and all the surrounding controversy. Focusing on the issue, not the politics: are black people less likely to "get the benefit of the doubt from law enforcement when lethal force is in play"?

One does get that impression from a superficial examination of the stats, but Roland Fryer, professor of economics at Harvard and himself a black man from an underprivileged background, looked deeper and concluded that, if all other factors are the same, police are actually more likely to shoot white people:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/13/why-a...

(Postscript: in my personal opinion, this divisive issue is unproductive. Why can't we oppose the aggressive policing of America (a problem that undeniably affects people of all races to some degree) without making it a racial issue?)

Because it is a racial issue. Arguing otherwise is just advancing the standard "all lives matter" response— telling the occupant of a burning building that "all houses matter" as the firetruck busily sprays the building next door and ignores the actual inferno.

There's a pretty widely-cited and thoughtful rebuttal to the Fryer paper, which I'd encourage you to read in its entirety: https://scholar.harvard.edu/jfeldman/blog/roland-fryer-wrong...

"Even if one accepts the logic of statistical discrimination versus racial bias, it is an inappropriate choice for a study of police shootings. The method that Fryer employs has, for the most part, been used to study traffic stops and stop-and-frisk practices. In those cases, economic theory holds that police want to maximize the number of arrests for the possession of contraband (such as drugs or weapons) while expending the fewest resources. If they are acting in the most cost-efficient, rational manner, the officers may use racial stereotypes to increase the arrest rate per stop. This theory completely falls apart for police shootings, however, because officers are not trying to rationally maximize the number of shootings."

"It is a failure of journalism that the New York Times heavily promoted this study without seeking critical perspectives from experts in the field. Fryer makes basic methodological errors, overstates the quality of his results, and casually uses the term 'racial bias' in a way that is nearly guaranteed to be misinterpreted by anyone who isn’t an economist."

All lives do matter. The lives of white people killed by police do matter. Why would you insist 100% of coverage be about your personal (racially scoped) cause?

"All lives matter" is not suggesting the "firetruck" should ignore the "house next door" (black victims of police violence).

BLM, on the other hand, is suggesting exactly that: the firetruck should ignore the white victims.

I'm just some guy on the internet, so my words won't mean anything to you; you'll need to hear it from someone you're able to hear.

But your argument is against a strawman. No one is asking for white victims to be ignored, and no one is asking for "100% of coverage" to be about injustices against blacks. Obviously the lives of white people murdered by cops matter, but those murders get attention and sympathetic coverage by default. Those are the crimes where people start to ask whether policing as an institution needs to be reformed, instead of asking whether the victim was wearing the right clothing or was sufficient subservient or had just committed a petty theft. All that BLM activists and their sympathizers are asking for is to see similar coverage across the spectrum. That so many whites see this as an attack is just indicative of how much work there is yet to do.

Is that a reason to do the same thing to others?

It's a reason to be cautious about making hand-wavy dismissals based on a handful of counterexample cases when some of the underlying outrage is based on real, systemic injustices.

The initial reason for the first BLM rally was a lie. This was well known and well documented early on, yet the BLM movement kept repeating it.

https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/18/lies-black-li...

Yeah. BLM keeps picking the wrong hill to die on with respect to the specific examples of police brutality they try and protest but the core message of "police need to stop being so trigger happy" is hard to disagree with.

Ah, the impartial source of (checks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Sadler ) Special Assistant to President Trump?

The article does seem to cite quite a few third-party sources (and some first/second-party ones like WaPo). Are you suggesting those sources are automatically invalid because of the person citing them?

Yep its just an ad hominem attack with no critique of the content/facts

Black people have some very legitimate complaints they can make about the police. Laquan McDonald is the first one that comes to my mind.

BLM as an activist group was really built on two cases though: Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. In both cases, the truth of the situation was grossly distorted in the initial media reports, and never really got corrected in most people's minds.

The summary truth of Michael Brown is that he was in the process of being caught for a robbery, he fought with the officer for his gun, and got shot.

The summary truth of Trayvon Martin was that he was in the process of being caught for burglary, he fought with the neighborhood watch guy, banged his head against the concrete, and then the neighborhood watch guy pulled out his gun and shot him.

The criminal justice system actually worked in all three of these cases. Darren Wilson was not charged, George Zimmerman was acquitted, and Jason Van Dyke was convicted of 2nd degree murder.

Where did you get the idea that Trayvon Martin was committing burglary when he was shot?

You've specifically picked left-wing examples, but let's not forget that the right is equally as guilty at manufacturing faux outrage as well.

See the non-existent border crisis and migrant caravans as the most recent example. Other things I can think of run from Obamaphones to endless Benghazi investigations to "But her e-mails"

This is amplified on the right not just by social media, but by self-styled provocateurs like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. The left doesn't really have any comparable outrage provokers. (Rachel Maddow maybe?)