You're hoping mobs are logical and rational. They are emotional. If the largest gang of openly racist, sexist, homophobes started beating women, no whites, and lgbt, and they wore Pittsburgh Pirates shirts as gang attire, police would quickly be using pirate attire as probable cause for stop and frisks, the media would create a narrative that only evil people wear pirates stuff. Sure, you could be a fan, but the mob against these violent jerks is going to convince you to wear different attire. They are going to say, "you're the small minority. Pick another team. Just don't wear any team clothing."
Meanwhile, you're going to notice that nobody is publishing stats without an agenda to show whether pirates stuff is even correlated or significant to crime, without having an agenda and poor morality. Clearly the clothing is not what made them do it, but even medical doctors struggle with correlation and causation, one and 2 tailed student t tests, and statistical significance.
But if the media paints a narrative, the mob will eat it up.
The reason to paint such a narrative might or may not be to keep the poor divided and keep issues off of leadership. Create as many divides in the bottom 90% as possible, red vs blue, city vs rural, liberty vs (illusion of) security.
Just nobody look to see if GMS screwed Greece in 2006, and never got caught, and the ripples are just now being seen everywhere. Nobody ask why GMS isn't going to jail like the EnRon guys. Nobody ask why HSBC is still laundering cartel money and the US govt gave more guns to cartels than to the national guard.
The national guard does 2 weeks a year, they borrow guns from active duty for those 2 years. The California National Guard has less guns than the government gave Mexican drug cartels "to track the guns." They're not super incompetent at tracking the guns, this is just the time they got caught. Nobody "caught," them giving rifles to ISIS, etc etc.
So, let's talk for weeks about the guy who shot 9 church people and how this can justify curtailing the rights of millions of Americans instead of talking about how over 9 FBI agents went missing from LA County jails because the Sheriff doesn't like rats exposing how cops are getting drugs and cell phones inside prison.
It's the 4th estate. That's why we're going to talk about a flag for years, because it's another way to divide and conquer.