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?

Brief Thoughts on Assorted Matters

- A country over which neither a king nor a queen reigns is not a real country.

- Democracy is not the safeguard of liberty, it is royal monarchy that protects the freedom of the people from the tyranny of elected politicians who think they can do whatever they want to the people because they act in the name of the people.

- The most misogynistic remark that I have ever heard is that a woman ought to be a feminist because she is a woman for this is the equivalent of saying that women qua women are irrational, out of touch with reality, humourless, self-righteous, obnoxious and tyrannical.

- Liberals are always using the expression “it is about time” to refer to laws that nobody dreamed of passing until the day before yesterday, that are neither necessary nor just, and which negatively affect large numbers of people for the sake of the convenience of a small handful. It is apparent that they do not know what these words actually mean.

- The Liberal Party is, and always has been, the most American political party in Canada, and the Trudeaus are the most American of the Liberals, albeit in a Hollywood lefty sort of way, being basically the Canadian equivalent of the Kennedys.

- The greatest lie in the history of mankind was the one the serpent told to Eve in the Garden of Eden. The second greatest lie was Thomas Jefferson’s “all men are created equal.”

- There can be no freedom without order, and no order without hierarchy.

- We are constantly being told that we need to build bridges rather than walls. Homes require walls not bridges. Either the bridge advocates have put no thought whatsoever into their metaphor or they do not think of their country as their home.

- There may very well be something to the frequently heard accusation that capitalism unshackles Avarice, but socialism institutionalises Envy, which in the traditional ranking of the Seven Deadly Sins is the greater of the two.

- The same people who think it a heinous and barbaric act for a government to take the life of a murderer as the just penalty for his crime believe that women should have the right to take the lives of the unborn children growing in their wombs and that people who wish to kill themselves should have the right to force another person into complicity in this action.

- While of all the sins and wickednesses in the world there are undoubtedly many that are much worse than that of being romantically and erotically attached to a member of your own sex, the very worst of the Seven Deadly Sins has always been thought to be Superbia or hubris as the Greeks called it, the English name of which is Pride. Think about it.

- Whenever a progressive, forward-thinking, person dismisses an idea, custom, or institution as being “old-fashioned”, “archaic”, “out-dated” or the like, this ought to be taken as evidence on behalf of its retention or revival.

- For decades we have been told that enlightened and humane people do not believe in corporal discipline by parents or teachers and today, after all these years of timeouts, we are witnessing the complete collapse of parental authority. Do you think these two things might possibly be related?

- The retributive theory of justice in which the courts exact penalties owed to the law by criminal offenders has been condemned by the more-enlightened-than-thou as being atavistic but surely treating these offenders as human Guinea pigs in experiments in behavioural corrections is far more cruel and inhumane.

- It is impossible to work for the good of generations yet to come without a proper and pious reverence for the generations that have preceded us.

- The word “hate” used to refer to the wishing of harm, violence, death and destruction on someone or something but progressives now seem to be using it to refer to all disagreement with their goals.

- We are now being told that we must consider a person to be whatever sex he, she, or it says that he, she, or it is. Does this mean that we have to consider JFK to have been a jelly doughnut?

- A morality of rules for the sake of rules themselves is just legalism. True morality, as the Latin root of the word suggests, is about the development of a character of good habits or virtues so that men can make wise and right decisions.

- Have you ever noticed how all the proposals of those who loudly proclaim their great compassion for the poor would make everything much more expensive for everybody, hurting the poor the most?