I don't know about others here, but long before Obama was elected with 44 percent of the White vote I thought racial discord was long behind us. The beginning of discord can be traced to July 22, when Obama said about the July 18, 2009 arrest of Henry Louis Gates by a White cop, "I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home, and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately." The Agitato-In-Chief began his campaign to divide the US along racial lines and demonize the police 6 months after his election. It didn't stop there, but I believe that was the first shot?
Most of this stuff going on now today is free-floating anger/anxiety about COVID/shutdowns, etc, focused in on the isolated problem of random incidents of police unjustly killing people projected onto every cop. Gates thing was stupid of the police, but the problem with Obama wasn't that he stirred the pot. It was that he was "above the fray" and didn't even engage on the issues except in passing and with nothing more than a comment here and there.
I think he's a pot stirrer. Here are the incidents of civil unrest from Carter through the Obama era. Carter - 9 Reagan - 4 GHW Bush - 6 Clinton - 8 GW Bush - 9 Obama - 30 I collected the above in 2017. I'm sure Trump's tally is well up there by now, haven't looked yet, but here's the link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unrest_in_the_United_States
I appreciate that you have a factual basis to note a trend but I do not draw a direct line between Obama and those incidents. Now GWB didn't meet a spending bill he didn't like in the name of the war on terror. Insane amounts of money was being doled out. When I saw our local PD got armored vehicles for the SWAT team I was WTF. It isn't like we have radical terrorists in these parts. The greatest threats Muslims commit is selling beer and cigarettes to 16 year olds. In addition, SWAT learned fairly quickly they really hate riding around in the back of the tuna can so now we have it "in case needed" and they otherwise use the black windowed SUV's. That was when the militarization started.
