It may be interesting to hear rational Democrats try to explain away the insane demands of their radical counterparts, but we really don’t need clarification. When those radicals call for defunding and abolishing the police, they mean exactly what they say.
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They showed it in Minneapolis, where the city council recently announced plans to defund and dismantle the police department. And they showed it in Seattle, where they now control a large part of the city, declaring it a no-police zone. What’s so remarkable and ominous is that they’ve managed to convince so many naïve followers that our police departments are endemically racist and must be abolished.
The current anti-police hysteria erupted after the death of George Floyd, a black man killed while in police custody. Virtually everyone who watched the video agrees that it was a clear case of police brutality. The resulting outrage was compounded by another incident in Atlanta, in which a black DUI suspect was shot and killed by police just a few days later. But was racism the driving force in these incidents?
Of course, it’s possible that they were racially-motivated, but so far no one has offered a shred of evidence to support that argument. Racial antagonists argue that systemic racism is well established by the statistics, and that incidents like these only confirm it. Mark Twain had this observation about statistics, “Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.” We know they can be cherry-picked and manipulated to support both sides of the same argument.
Those two deaths became racially charged incidents because radical anti-police elements, in concert with the Democrats, made them so. They fueled the growing mistrust of police with inflammatory remarks like this: “If he were white, he’d still be alive today.” That is pure conjecture. One exhaustive study by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that the race of a suspect had no impact on a police officer’s decision to use deadly force. If skin color makes any difference in incidents like these, it’s how the public perceives them. The truth is, if George Floyd had been white, his death would have gone virtually unnoticed.
Those who thrive on racial division scavenge around our society for anything they can use to fan the flames of racism. They find it in police confrontations, and in our monuments to historic figures who lived 160 years ago. They find it in misspoken or misinterpreted words and in off-color jokes. They divine it out of the names of our athletic teams, in their mascots, in our trademarks, and in classic movies, and in children’s cartoons. And they attach it to our president, the man who brought economic bounty to the entire country, including minority communities, and the man responsible for the First Step Act, which overwhelmingly benefited black prisoners of our justice system.
They tell us there are no words to describe the assault on minorities today, so they’ve invented new terms, like “woke,” “white privilege,” and “white guilt.” By distorting, exaggerating, and exploiting anything they can find that might be construed as racist, they’ve only expanded the racial divide.
Those who remember the racial turmoil of the 1960s also remember real racial indignities and injustices, like discrimination and segregation, separate seating on busses, and separate bathrooms. In those days, “separate but equal” were the terms spoken by people like 1964 Democrat presidential candidate George Wallace and Robert Byrd, another Democrat, who, in 1946 had written these words to a KKK grand wizard: “The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia.” Byrd was eventually elected to congress after renouncing those views, but he could hardly be described as “woke.” As senator in 1964, he joined fellow Democrats opposing the Civil Rights Act.
But the Civil Right Act did pass. The Voting Rights and Fair Housing Acts were passed. Affirmative action, quota systems, and scores of other programs intended to help minorities were implemented. For many years thereafter, America enjoyed relative racial harmony.
Things turned around very quickly, though, not during the Trump Administration, as Democrats claim. According to Gallup polling, in 2008, just prior to Barack Obama’s election, 51 percent of Americans were either very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with race relations. By 2017, as Obama was leaving the White House, the percentage of Americans satisfied with race relations had fallen to 22 percent. Donald Trump didn’t create this problem, he inherited it.
But why did race relations suddenly deteriorate during those Obama years? Did police collectively decide to ignore all those laws and policies established decades prior? Did those historic monuments that had stood innocuously for so many years somehow become imminent threats to race relations? Neither of those things happened. Only public perception changed, helped along by Obama and the Democrats.
It began subtly in 2009, when Obama announced that police had “acted stupidly” by arresting a black Harvard professor over a minor incident. Later came the riots in Ferguson and the grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer who had shot a black suspect. Obama revealed his own biases when said of the anger and the riots, “…It’s an understandable reaction.” He later sat down with representatives from Black Lives Matter for their input. That’s the same group that had advocated the killing of police officers. Despite his privileged upbringing and his election to the presidency, Obama shared their belief that police are racially biased, that they treat black and white suspects differently. He used his bully pulpit to convey that belief to the public throughout his eight years in office. Democrats continue to push that narrative today.
Systemic racism in this country ended half a century ago, but anti-American elements, aided by dupes and Democratic provocateurs, are working hard to keep that illusion alive. They may not all have the same ultimate goal, but their efforts to abolish our police departments will result in chaos, and those who acquiesce to them will be accomplices.
