This Democratic work is hard work, but it has its anchor in the hard work that we do on ourselves.

I believe a coalition of the decent, a coalition of the decent,

is absolutely required for the fundamental transformation of this society.

And that begins with looking ourselves squarely in the face. Hello and welcome to Why is this happening with me your host Chris Hayes.

On May 25th of this year, you will be hearing this podcast after that date has passed.

It will be the fourth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of

Minneapolis police officers.

And not just the anniversary of his death but an anniversary of the protests and unrest that was unleashed in the wake of

his death.

Depending on how you count it,

they may have been the largest civil rights racial equality protests of all time.

Sort of stunning statistics about the number of people,

tens of millions of people that took the streets in all sorts of places in states that we think of as

progressive and states that we think of as conservative in all sorts of different areas.

And also interestingly, and this was something that was borne out by the polling at the time,

despite the fact that many of the protests did feature things like property damage that the police precinct in Minneapolis was burned down that people's windows were smashed, despite that by and large the protests pulled quite well. They were quite popular and that is not the usual case.

Most of the time large-scale protests at the time poll poorly in fact recently in the wake of student

campus protests against the Israeli war in Gaza and the US support thereof.

People have been recirculating polling about the Vietnam War or

pulling on protests on the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement at the time, which were by

and large unpopular. And partly, it's almost tautological because a protest

is a means of agitating and creating tension

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