The George Floyd incident was hijacked from police accountability to racial conflict by Black Lives Matter
To put it bluntly, bullshit. How can you hijack something that is inextricably linked? The war waged by the police on anyone who is poor or isn't white long predates BLM, trying to separate calls for police accountability from addressing that as well is absurd and reeks of deliberate misdirection. Police can trace their lineage back to the strikebreakers and slavecatchers of old and until we acknowledge and address that any attempt at 'accountability' is going to be at best half measures.
As to the main topic of your post, my money is on either large scale repression/democide or civil war here in the US in the near future. There's already plenty of democide going on now, China's going after the Uyghurs, the military in Burma is going after everybody, Eritrea is a nightmarish modern Sparta, North Korea is undergoing another manmade famine that may soon exceed the one in the 90s, Russia is treating Ukrainians like the USA did Native Americans, could keep going but you get the idea.
If you look back in history there's a nice correlation between economic downturns and upswings in oppression, unrest, and all the various -cides. There's also a correlation between pandemics and economic downturns, and while correlation and causation are two different critters it seems like we've got all the necessary conditions for widespread death and disruption. Personally, I think we've just seen the tip of the iceberg the last few years and it's going to get much worse.
On a side note, I'm slowly working my way through 'Shake Hands With The Devil,' which is enlightening and infuriating look at indifference and inaction towards the Rwandan Genocide.
Police as we know them trace back to space patrols and Tammany Hall. This does not alter the fact that BLM activists killed the possibility for progress by making it all about race and driving away potential allies in the process.
I saw it from my conservative community. "That George Floyd thing was fucked up, but now people are rioting, vandalizing, burning buildings, and calling me guilty by association because of my skin color? That's fucked up, too, and maybe we need police to handle this kind of thing."
It was counterproductive at the key point when progress was possible. Police brutality is not a racial issue, or at least far from just a racial issue.
Once again, bullshit. If your 'progress' doesn't involve addressing the racist policing tactics that have driven the overwhelming majority of calls for accountability, then what the hell are you even addressing?
Waco and Ruby Ridge are about the only instances where race wasn't inextricably linked with the calls for accountability and that all seemed to disappear with the nitromethane and ammonium nitrate that got the Murrah Building.
If Waco and Ruby Ridge are the only counterexamples you can think of, perhaps you are not paying attention yourself?
I'm not saying racism does not exist or is not a problem or even isn't the motivation behind many laws and police abuse cases. I am saying it is not the root problem, and people who focus myopically on race to the exclusion of everything else to the point where they lash out against potential allies are shooting themselves in the foot.
Waco and Ruby Ridge are the only ones that generated much noise for accountability and they got muted with ANFO. Not saying it stopped with that but the bandwidth got mighty narrow.
Mind giving an example of 'where they lash out against potential allies'? I'm starting to suspect that at least part of the disparity in our views of all that is due to how shit gets spun in the media. I can't attest for anywhere else but that was not the case down at the square here in Louisville. Not that you could tell by watching the evening news but we had no control over that. It was solidarity in action and there was a lot of people who learned what that meant for the first time there. Race was definitely the dominant issue there but it was far from the only issue and they repeatedly emphasized this. In the years since many of the same people have turned out for other causes as well.
When the feds got done poking around here they confirmed just about everything we were saying about LMPD, not only in regards to race but also how they treated the mentally ill and women.