Defund the Left!

Last month I made the suggestion that we disarm the police. This was a proposal for a sort of “reverse gun control” and was the third in a series of four essays written in response to the way the Prime Minister had shamelessly capitalized on the suffering of the families of the victims of the Nova Scotia shooter to ban the sale and ownership of a large number of rifles based solely on their outward appearance. The police in Lethbridge, Alberta had made fools of themselves on May 4th by drawing their guns on a girl dressed up for “Star Wars Day” and carrying a toy gun as a prop. Since the police have been the biggest supporters outside the political left, of the excessive and unnecessary firearms restrictions that the evil Liberal Party of Canada loves to impose, primarily on Canadians in the prairies and other rural areas, I figured they deserved to have the tables turned on them.

Some people thought the proposal to be a rather radical one. It was not, though. Not really. Radical, despite its derivation from the Latin word for “root”, is generally used to indicate that something is a major break away from what is customary and traditional towards what is novel and unprecedented. My proposal would bring the policing aspect of the Canadian branch of the great tree that is the British Commonwealth tradition back in line with the trunk. Police in England do not traditionally carry firearms. My proposal, therefore, could only be called radical in the archaic sense of “having roots” which is seldom if ever used today.

By contrast, the anti-white, anti-police, hate movement known as Black Lives Matter has come up with a proposal that is truly radical in the modern and contemporary sense of the term. “Defund the police” and even “abolish the police” are the slogans at the forefront of their most recent round of protests and riots. To defund or abolish the police is to defund or abolish law and order since the police are by definition those whose office it is to enforce the law and maintain order. To call for the abolition of the police is to call for chaos. It is appropriate, in a dark and twisted sort of way, that the thugs and crooks and hooligans and other low-life scum who are smashing windows, looting stores, burning down buildings, and tearing down monuments, would be in favour of something that amounts to chaos. It is difficult to understand why anybody else would treat it as a serious proposal.

Black Lives Matter claims that the institution of the police is deeply embedded with racism towards blacks in the United States and towards Indians in Canada. The evidence does not bear this out, but the news media has been distorting the facts to make the same claim for so long, that most people believe it. The supposed racism of the police is the basis for the movement’s call to defund or abolish them. To protect blacks from the police, the police need either to be abolished or to have most of their funding transferred to social programs of various sorts.

Now that we have seen what stupid people do in lieu of thinking let us look at what someone who knows what he is talking about has to say on this matter.

David Clarke Jr., was sheriff of Milwaukee Country, Wisconsin from 2002 to 2017, and a career law enforcement officer long before that. He is himself black. His take on defunding or abolishing the police is very different from that of the Black Lives Matter thugs.

In an interview with WorldNewsDaily earlier this week, Clarke said:

The biggest losers in all this will be poor black people in crime-ridden ghettos. The police are the only thing standing between them and violent criminal predators.

Clarke is, of course, right about this. Poor black neighborhoods, especially in large cities, have been afflicted with much more crime, especially robbery and homicide, than other neighborhoods for decades now. This, and not “police racism”, is the reason they are arrested and on the receiving end of police violence in numbers disproportionate to their percentage of the population. This is not a case of black neighborhoods being invaded by white criminals. It is overwhelmingly black-on-black crime. When police use force against black criminals it is primarily black victims whom they are protecting.

Clarke, therefore, was also right when he went on to say of the “defund the police” proposal:

You'd have to loathe black people to do that to them.

What Clarke has pointed out here is a particular example of a general observation that has been around for a long time - revolutions usually make things much worse rather than better for those in whose name they are carried out. The saying “a revolution eats its own children” goes back to the French Revolution when it aptly described the way the factions of the Jacobin Club, after sending the king, queen, aristocrats, and prelates to the guillotine, began turning on each other and denouncing each other as “enemies of the people” or “enemies of the Revolution”, until eventually even Robespierre himself, literally lost his head. The masses, however, fared even worse than the revolutionary leaders. The most general form of this observation goes back to Aristotle in his Politics, 2, 370 years ago. It was because revolutions so consistently made things worse rather than better, Aristotle argued, that the better constitutions are marked by their security and stability, and the best constitution would be the most secure and stable of them all.

Who in their right mind thinks that black people in the United States or Indians in Canada would be better off rather than worse of if there were nobody to investigate when one of them turns up having been murdered? Or that they would be better off rather than worse if there were nobody to call if their house or store were broken into?

Since they are the mostly likely to be victims of these and other serious crimes, somebody would have to be completely off his rocker to think they would be better off without the police. Liberals and progressives have been jumping on the “defund the police” bandwagon, but that is merely the same point worded another way.

There are a lot of reforms than can and should be made to law enforcement. This is not one of them.

A short time ago – it was just last month – the same people who are now calling the police racists and demanding that they be defunded and abolished, were insisting that they be given more power to go around ticketing people and imposing exorbitant fines for ordinary, everyday, non-criminal behaviour, such as shaking hands, going to church, or going for a walk in the park.

Never before has the late Sam Francis’s concept of “anarcho-tyranny” – a synthesis of anarchy and tyranny in which the ordinary protection of the rule of law is withdrawn (anarchy) and unjust, arbitrary, and oppressive rules are imposed (tyranny) – been more applicable. It is precisely what the left has been demanding.

Who do we talk to about defunding the left?