Thank you for the well thought out and even handed response! I feel I owe you some clarification. :)

If Black Lives Matter is not about black lives, but about rioting against Trump, then why would they keep protesting if Biden were elected?

Portland is the whitest, liberalist city in the entire country with no significant history of police brutality against black folk that I’m aware, yet their protests have been the most continual and the most violent. This fact has to be squared with the narrative somehow. Here’s how to square it, and this fits with the impression I get from people I know who are active in the protest circuit in Atlanta:

BLM is very diverse. The black folks protesting on the ground in most places, particularly urban areas with a high black population such as where I live, are protesting for black lives explicitly. These don’t like Biden. Particularly the black men.

The white folks in white liberal west coast cities (Portland, Seattle) are protesting to undermine or destroy the entrenched capitalist colonial state and replace it with anarcho-communism. This is Antifa, and Antifa adjacent protesters such as in Portland. They hate Biden too. They might hate Biden more than anyone else in the country does, even the alt-right. But they’ve got a lot of hate to spread around.

Then the majority of white protesters are out there to virtue signal to their other liberal friends that they’re part of the cause, and also because we had a strange paradigm going on in the early Covid summer where “leaving your house was murder” but then somehow protests were safe when other gatherings weren’t, so they needed an excuse to get out of the house. These are the less extreme liberal majority, and they’re out there mostly because they’ve been driven to the brink by Trump trolling them for four years. (which is very not nice and a dumb thing to do as a leader) They’re also the ones that are driving the boat politically, and the ones that think the protests are going to magically end when Biden gets elected.

But there will be more officer involved shootings of black men in December. And January. And so on. They will never end, because of the fundamental nature of American crime, so the two smaller factions (black people, Antifa) are still going to have all the same motivation to protest, and in some cases riot, that they have now.

So Biden doesn’t get off the hook. Electing Biden just switches which president is on the hook. And given how Kamala Harris was an extreme authoritarian cop who was on record trying to defend convictions that she knew were false, she’s not likely to let Antifa continue to burn stuff. And Biden is going to follow her lead, because he’s old and doesn’t really understand what’s going on. The Biden Harris crackdown on violent protests may in fact be more brutal and significant than the Trump one has been. Trump has been relatively hands off (outside of Twitter bluster) unless protesters literally try to burn down federal buildings. In fact, there’s an interesting case that Trump has held back using federal force to quell the protests explicitly to give them enough space to turn violent, because violent protests lead to more Republican voters, mathematically speaking.

So what happens after the first officer involved shooting of a black man post-inauguration? You tell me. I’m interested to hear your speculation.

I’m sure that he will address things with more tact and grace and given that this isn’t always his strong suit, that says a lot about the current president. I think Biden will make some progress along the lines of changing the police systems overall, but like the changes that Obama made, they won’t happen overnight or nearly fast enough for a fed up portion of society.

Tact and grace are not going to cut it. We had eight years of Obama, who was one of the most tactful, graceful presidents on record in my opinion, not to mention he was black, and there was no significant change in policing in the country during his term. I’m not a huge fan of any president, and I’m particularly critical of Obama’s foreign policy which I consider to be a global humanitarian disaster at least as bad as W’s, but his tact and grace were unquestionable.

But yes, it’s going to be messy with Biden too. Just not the level of chaos we’ve seen with this administration.

Trump is absolutely a mess maker, no doubt about that. He’s a shit leader, because a shepherd is not supposed to be cruel to half his flock, even verbally. I agree the total number of protests and protesters will likely drop under Biden, for reasons above, but the rate of violent protests won’t drop I don’t think. It might increase, again for reasons above.

Where Biden is going to be very untactful, and risk an even bigger disaster than we have going right now, is with gun control should some Q nitwit start shooting politicians. That is a powder keg much nastier than BLM, and the Democratic leadership at all levels don’t have any idea the sense and scope of any of it. They don’t even understand what the things are that they’re trying to ban, nor the scope of ownership of them.