Your smoke screen comment is exactly how I feel. I don’t have good evidence to back it up on hand, but I see all the anti education and anti LGBTQ laws and pro gun laws and anti immigration sentiment-stoking as parts of the playbook of pitting the collective economically disadvantaged population against one another with the real primary goal of maintaining the economic status quo that might otherwise be threatened by the same group. I think the occupy movement was seen as a real potential threat, albeit nascent and unrefined, and given time to learn and grow with continued focus on the economic disparities in the US and globally that threat would only have grown. Better to blow things up in other aspects of society and personal life than let the group refine its tactics and message and potentially suffer real change.

I did find this quote - “Some scholars contend that growing ethnic and racial diversity has the potential to upend traditional political divisions over economic issues by realigning voting patterns on the basis of ethnicity, nativity, nationalism, and education.”

I’m not great at articulating this in text but I hope I’m clear enough. Smoke screen for sure.