I never said they were all liberals, I said the protesters were predominately supporting left-wing ideas, which they were, and that the left-wing is the side that tends to support them, even mainstream news outlets like the Huffington post or New York times.Mystic Warriors wrote:Manokan Republic wrote:No I assumed the majority were left-wing because it's a left-wing idea; I didn't think nor say all were left-wing. To be fair though something like the majority of black people vote democrat, but that wasn't why I assumed it.
Then you were wrong on both accounts. It is not a left wing idea and not all were liberals, if you can even prove something like that.
It's not a very difficult thing to understand that the side most preoccupied with police violence and that is mostly supporting riots is on the left. But, if you want to dig deeper, here is what some politicians had to say on it at the time. Clearly, the mainstream left had one opinion, and the mainstream right had another, and we can see which side they fell on. This isn't to say all liberals and conservatives, or Democrats and Republicans, thought a certain way, only showing that a good volume of mainstream individuals did.
"Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton said that the violence resulted from the breakdown of economic opportunities and social institutions in the inner city. He also berated both major political parties for failing to address urban issues, especially the Republican Administration for its presiding over "more than a decade of urban decay" generated by their spending cuts.[144] He maintained that the King verdicts could not be avenged by the "savage behavior" of "lawless vandals". He also stated that people "are looting because ... [t]hey do not share our values, and their children are growing up in a culture alien from ours, without family, without neighborhood, without church, without support."[144] While Los Angeles was mostly unaffected by the urban decay the other metropolitan areas of the nation faced since the 1960s, racial tensions had been present since the late 1970s, becoming increasingly violent as the 1980s progressed.[citation needed]
Democrat Maxine Waters, the African-American Congressional representative of South Central Los Angeles, said that the events in L.A. constituted a "rebellion" or "insurrection", caused by the underlying reality of poverty and despair existing in the inner city. This state of affairs, she asserted, were brought about by a government that had all but abandoned the poor and failed to help compensate for the loss of local jobs, and by the institutional discrimination encountered by racial minorities, especially at the hands of the police and financial institutions.[145][146]
Conversely, President Bush argued that the unrest was "purely criminal". Though he acknowledged that the King verdicts were plainly unjust, he said that "we simply cannot condone violence as a way of changing the system ... Mob brutality, the total loss of respect for human life was sickeningly sad ... What we saw last night and the night before in Los Angeles is not about civil rights. It's not about the great cause of equality that all Americans must uphold. It's not a message of protest. It's been the brutality of a mob, pure and simple.""