The latest series of polls show the same pattern.

The American public isn’t ready to support most of the Black Lives Matter agenda, such as defunding the police or tearing down statues, even as support for BLM remains high.

What explains this disconnect? Two things.

1. The media has served up a false narrative of peaceful protests by concerned citizens while minimizing the violence or attributing it to agitators and random people. It has vastly underreported the violent content that conservatives tend to see while amplifying personal narratives.

2. Republicans and conservatives have failed badly at messaging. It took forever to shift the narrative from outrage at the police even in conservative circles. And even once the narrative shifted, conservatives remained obsessed with Antifa, while being hardly willing to discuss BLM. While Antifa is a seriously violent presence at protests, the name is meaningless to most of the general public. And when the GOP and conservative activists went on about Antifa, they were not pushing back against BLM.

The disconnect shows how much heavy lifting there still is to do. The key area of attack has to be to shatter the big lie that BLM is fighting racism, that its cause is just, or that its rallies are peaceful.