New Confederate Flag?

[Pope George Ringo II]

5. I start with the assumption that half of these are just people trying to get out of tickets

And I'm not philosophically opposed to law enforcement having a close relationship with the community. But if I've got my chronology right, BLM started as such in August 2014, and "Back the Badge" stuff predates that. I'd swear I've seen it for years, but "Back the Badge Bull Riding" started in 2013, so we should be able to say it doesn't trace its roots directly to BLM.

Now, the Blue Lives Matter stuff strikes me as an explicit reaction to BLM and a "Kill all the brown people you want" kind of thing. And if you want to say the huge uptick in BTB is a response to BLM, or that BTB may have started before BLM but it was always a racist dog whistle, I'm okay with that too.

But I really do think any public display of law enforcement support on a car is as much about trying to weasel out of tickets as anything else.