In my July 12 commentary – “Folks, If Crime Stats Begin Rivaling Covid Stats, Trump Wins! So Shut Up, AOC!” – I denounced Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for condoning looting as a way for people to get food to eat. After all, we see looters time and again fleeing with non-edible items like TVs, computers, smartphones, jewelry, designer clothes, and designer shoes.
Far more troubling, though, is that she was sanctioning plainly irresponsible and lawless behavior. Not to mention that, in doing so, she gave credence to President Trump’s ranting-and-raving caricature of the Black-Lives-Matter protesters she champions as just a bunch of marauding anarchists.
Incidentally, AOC touts “Defund the Police!” as the organizing principle of criminal justice reforms that are supposed to better protect and serve Black and Latinx communities. But I fear it’s only a matter of time before crime becomes so rampant that people in those communities begin crying
Refund the police! Refund the police!
It also speaks volumes that the “brains” behind BLM policies like defunding the police are “latte liberals” who don’t live in communities they want to strip of police protection. This, at a time when reports show that those communities need more (reformed) policing, not less.
No doubt these liberals fancy themselves too progressive to have anything in common with a political troglodyte like President Trump. Yet defunding the police seems born of the same kind of careless ignorance and arrogance that has Trump defunding the Postal Service, thereby threatening the timely delivery not only of millions of mail-in ballots but also of millions of life-saving medicines.
The latter, of course, is just collateral damage. Because, say what you will about Trump, he intends defunding the Postal Service to be the organizing principle of the voter-suppression strategy of his re-election campaign. (Apropos of this, I refer you to “PSA: Vote Early in Person to Prevent Trump Throwing a Monkey Wrench in Biden’s Win,” August 6, 2020.)
By contrast, the BLM policy of defunding the police has already forced thousands to “pension out” — before getting fired — from police departments in big cities like New York, Chicago, and Seattle.
In fact, nothing is more ominous in this respect than Carmen Best, Seattle’s Black chief of police, resigning in utter disgust on Tuesday. She cited the “lack of respect” defunding the police shows her and others who risk their lives every day to protect and serve. David Brown, Chicago’s Black superintendent of police, has been venting similar frustrations on TV almost daily lately. How is he supposed to stop wilding crime sprees with a drastically reduced and fatally demoralized police force, whose members looters regard as little more than stressed-out social workers? Therefore, I fear it’s only a matter of time before he resigns too.
Hell, even Reverend Al Sharpton, my perennial political piñata, is denouncing the manifest absurdity of and inherent danger in defunding the police. But, just as a political matter, you’d think it might have occurred to one of those bird brainiacs that “Reform the Police” would prove a far more effective slogan; that is, given their declared intent to improve community policing and implement criminal justice reforms.
Yet my denunciation of AOC provoked so much backlash that I’m still nursing the virtual scars. I learned the hard way that the wokeness she spouts, perhaps even personifies, has become a cult-like orthodoxy. Nothing betrays this quite like Democrats now being every bit as afraid of criticizing AOC as Republicans are of criticizing Trump.
Meanwhile, she and her band of wild-eyed progressives seem blind to the truth and consequences of crime sprees raging across the country pursuant to their clarion call, Black Lives Matter. Not only are some of these looters parroting AOC’s rationalization for looting; they are projecting it as a categorical imperative for life in the urban jungles they hope to rule.
A Chicago Black Lives Matter organizer defended widespread looting in the Windy City over the weekend, calling it ‘reparation.’
‘I don’t care if somebody decides to loot a Gucci’s or a Macy’s or a Nike because that makes sure that that person eats. That makes sure that that person has clothes …That’s a reparation, [organizer Ariel] Atkins said. ‘Anything they want to take, take it because these businesses have insurance.’
(New York Post, August 11, 2020)
Frankly, commenting on mass looting as a method of reparations for the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow risks dignifying it too much. It’s bad enough that this rationalization reeks of ignorance and portends more lawlessness. But it also sanctions a form of recompense that amounts to Blacks stealing breadcrumbs that fall from the white man’s table.
Clearly, these misguided looters are too blinded by loot to see that reparations envision a real-life Trading Places. Specifically, it places Blacks at the head of that proverbial table, deciding how the food laid out will be apportioned. Then again, why should we expect them to see this if even AOC, their doe-eyed leader, can’t?
Regular readers know that I’m an unabashed liberal whose views align more with those of the leftist Bernie Sanders than the centrist Barack Obama. But I believe in calling a spade a spade. Defunding the police is a spade. What’s more, this self-immolating “cancel culture” — that tolerates no criticism of views championed by “influencers” like AOC — is also a spade.
Think about it folks, she’s condoning BLM protesters looting “white people’s stores” in the name of racial justice and economic equality. So is it really a stretch to imagine AOC condoning them squatting in white people’s homes…?
I have in mind the infamous land reforms the late Robert Mugabe implemented in Zimbabwe, which amounted to little more than kicking white farmers out of the country and giving their farms willy-nilly to Blacks. The all-too-foreseeable result was a banana republic that could no longer even grow bananas to feed its starving people.
Just sayin’.
Related commentaries:
crime and AOC… vote early in person… reparations… Zimbabwe… George Floyd thread…
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Thursday, at 8:57 a.m.