My take is that nothing gets done because Congress is incapable of doing things. At all. There is nothing special about doing nothing on police brutality. It's just one more thing on the pile of unaddressed things.
It's been this way for a long time now, and that is why Presidents now try to rule by executive orders.
A large portion of the right were happy to spread justifications for Floyd's murder and defamation of Floyd's character all over social media.
If you'd like evidence, search r/The_Donald archives, r/Conservative or the thousands of conservative groups on Facebook.
I'm not sure social media reflect "a large portion" of any political spectrum.
Not that I have a poll to offer, though some have surely been done.
I base what I say on most conservatives I'm aware of saying so. I can't think of any "name" conservative who has said the opposite.
I mean yes but also... Plenty of us just got and unprecedented $1200-2400 from Congress just a month or two ago... they clearly can act when motivated.
Ever hard-head in Congress could have a conversion experience this week from attending John Lewis's funeral, and somewhere next year some guy with a gun or knee could repeat the Floyd killing.
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.
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.
He is the best writer on police brutality, AFAIK.
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.
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)
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.
It is much easier to discredit a split second decision, mistaken identity, justify feeling threatened in so many other cases, but there it is, a man immobilized on the street with a knee on his neck, people standing around objecting to what’s happening, time, so much time to consider actions when there was no reasonable threat.
Yes ...
> Then everyone would agree it was indeed very brutal and racist, and something would get done.
No, because there's an entire counter-news faction out there insisting that absolutely every person killed by police deserved it, that it is unacceptable to ever hold police accountable for deaths of anyone under any circumstances, such as shooting a handcuffed guy on the floor or firing blindly into a darkened apartment, and that everyone complaining about racism is some kind of Maoist.
Recently I watched some of the Live Aid 25th anniversary coverage. The huge charity appeal was sparked by Michael Buerk's famous report on dead and dying children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYOj_6OYuJc
I couldn't help thinking that if you filmed that today it would vanish from the social media melee in a couple of days. It was shocking then. It might not even be the most shocking thing somebody scrolls past today.