In a recent podcast, Michelle Obama, as she continues to shed her "no red state nor blue state America but just United States of America" skin to reveal a ruthless, myopic partisan looking to settle scores from fights unknown while making clear to those paying attention how America became so much more divided after the Obama presidency, complains that the opposition to the protesters is "once again patently false, morally wrong, and racist."  After all, she insists, the violence is committed by just a "tiny fraction" of the protesters.  This tiny fraction concept has become as virulent a propaganda tool as the selective edit.  Those incidents fortunate enough to be deemed a "tiny fraction" are isolated incidents, outliers that can neither be enlarged to represent any other larger group nor be enlarged to foreshadow a growing trend.  So when leftist groups advocating for causes that leftist leaders ardently support demonstrate, leaving destruction and mayhem in their wake, the left insulates itself from any responsibility by invoking the "tiny fraction" clause.

However, in those not so immortal words of Michelle Obama, the tiny fraction excuse is patently false, morally wrong, and even racist.  First of all, the assertion of a tiny fraction is an absurdity.  An estimated 570 riots were violent during the George Floyd protests, 19 people died during 14 days of those protests, and approximately 2 billion dollars of damage has accrued from all this peace.  The magnitude of damage from a tiny fraction strains credulity, especially given the opportunity for live viewing of so many of these riots, in which looters and harassers are clearly more than small fractions, while the other participants, if any, cheerlead with venomous gusto.  Furthermore, even if one accepts the assumption that big damage comes from tiny fractions, the groups involved still are far from blameless.  The destruction from and the culpability of the involved groups are not binary.  The damage incurred is on a continuum that ranges from verbal harassment to murder.  Imagine if one were a member of a group that commits any of these acts with such brazen pride; the individual averse to criminality would either strenuously demand that such actions be condemned and prohibited or stray far from such a group and disassociate absolutely.  Yet this is never done.  Even though the destruction is far worse than the destruction, in terms of lives and livelihoods, during protests than what is being protested, the left takes little interest in the destruction of that alleged tiny fraction, failing to investigate or extirpate.

There is no moral purity, not at an individual level or at a societal level.  Typically the presence of trace amounts of impurity fail to prevent societies and individuals from reaching extraordinary levels of inspiration and achievement.  If we punish members of society for failing to achieve perfection or societies for failing to eliminate all criminal behaviors, nobody will be safe from persecution.  The tiny fraction idea is therefore legitimate, but double standards are applied.  The same malicious double standard that is transforming our legal system into two tiers based on political affiliation is hard at work here with a willful refusal to accurately determine and report the size and scope of any illicit act.  The mindless propaganda that alchemizes the lawless lone wolf into menacing behemoths of right-wing hate somehow encompassing large, lawful, honorable segments of our population while metamorphosing unrestrained, unreflecting swelling masses of rage with tentacles reaching into upper echelons of leftist power into tiny fractions is a dangerous, divisive double standard.

Contrary to the Lewis Carroll misperceptions and machinations of the left, it is actually their grievances that are mostly if not all tiny fractions.  Considering the overall population or even the numbers of members of subgroups such as political conservatives, there are very few racially motivated police killers, white supremacists, right-wing militia groups, neo-Nazis, Russians on social media influencing the votes of Americans, and serial sexual assaulters. Furthermore, these fractions continue to shrink over time, and the ties to any larger discernible political group are challenging to find even if we allow six degrees of separation, which will likely reach Kevin Bacon before reaching any veritable Republican.

In contrast, the threats from the left are anything but tiny fractions.  The cancel culture is not a tiny fraction.  The radicalized faculty at the university is not a tiny fraction.  The indoctrination of socialist ideas and identity politics and white privilege in schools is not a tiny fraction.  The falsehoods and half-truths spread by the media are not a tiny fraction.  The high-tech crackdown on dissenting speech is not a tiny fraction.  The division created by falsely accusing and demonizing one part of the population while exaggerating the malice and damage to provoke the rage of another heavily indoctrinated, hyper-sensitized part of the population is not a tiny fraction.  And it is self-perpetuating, since the isolated outlier incident serves as the basis for rioting and the bottomless pit of grievance and recrimination, which in turn continue to be dismissed by adversaries as tiny fractions.

And so the cycle goes on endlessly, increasing in severity with each new cycle and enlarging the hairline cracks of division, growing so deeply and quickly that it may not be able to be halted, much less reversed, until the hairline cracks along gender and racial and class lines become a seismic fissure threatening to permanently tear the country asunder.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.