“Resources are hemorrhaging. Our city is bleeding at this moment. I’m trying to do all I can to stop that bleeding.” — Medaria Arradondo, Minneapolis police chief, after 74 people shot dead and 500 wounded, the worst crime spike in 15 years, begging the city council for money to bring in outside police manpower — the same city council that voted to defund his police department five months before, quoted in The [Minneapolis] Star Tribune, 11/13/20

“The number one concern that people brought to me in my race that I barely re-won was defunding the police… If we are classifying [the election] as a success from a Congressional standpoint, we will get f–king torn apart in 2022.” — Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D, VA), leaked audio from conference call between Nancy Pelosi and her members after Democrats nearly lost the House, quoted at sfgate, 11/6/20

Every bit of fallout from this idiotic “movement” has been totally predictable. When leftists landed on “defund the police” as their supposed societal reform in response to the death of George Floyd last May, the media celebrated. Because the left is lawless, the drive-bys love fomenting revolution, and they made sure the anti-cop mantra spread like wildfire. Accompanied by actual fire.

The results were as inevitable as night following day. Minneapolis imploded. And in city after city, the same cause led to the identical effect: massive crime. This Washington Post headline about Oakland, CA puts it in a nutshell: “Protesters Want to Defund Police. Homicides and Violence Are Spiking.” Well, shazaam. Every sentient being foresaw that. As Jamar B. Nelson, a Minneapolis anti-violence advocate said, “These criminals feel like they can do anything, shoot people in broad daylight, because they aren’t scared of the police stopping them.”

The hot summer of blue city riots and looting and arson and mayhem was the natural consequence. By August, Minneapolis cops were telling residents to “be prepared to give up personal belongings to robbers,” according to The Daily Wire: “Do as they say.” And by September, The New York Times was reporting that the city council’s “pledge to dismantle the Minneapolis police collapsed.”

The members “would like a do-over,” noted The Times. One said, yeah he had pledged “to end policing as we know it,” but he only meant the words “in spirit.” Another said the language was “up for interpretation.” So the whole thing “became a case study in how idealistic calls for structural change can falter.” That’s liberal-speak for: leftist ideas fail the reality test. Which is what happens every time they’re tried.

Amazing. Here we had Democrats, Black Lives Matter suck-ups, lecturing everybody about how evil, how destructive the police are. The blm Marxists, who told us we need to “fry ’em like bacon,” were the guiding lights for Democrats on how we need to “reimagine” policing.

Turns out, the left had no idea what that meant, either. They put forward half-ass notions of unarmed “social workers” and “homeless advocates” being sent out on domestic calls instead of cops. To negotiate, somehow, with criminals and addicts and the mentally ill. Which is pure lunacy. Cat Brooks, a defund-the-police activist, admitted to The Washington Post: “Even as an [anti-police] abolitionist, I can say in this moment … I don’t know how to deal with pedophiles or rapists or real killers. That’s not my bailiwick.” So, that’s basically a shrug from the defund crowd.

And people in the actual communities most affected by the liberal defund-the-police geniuses — minority neighborhoods — instantly hated the idea. According to Gallup, 81 percent of black Americans said they don’t want less police presence. That basically tracks with the national average. Normal Americans of all races and creeds support police.

You know who we need to defund? Not the police. We need to defund the left — including the media. I don’t want to reimagine life without the police in any way, shape, manner, or form. But I can happily reimagine life and government without the totalitarian left.

Think about it. The moment talk bubbled up about defunding the cops, everyone in the media glommed onto it. There wasn’t any reaction of scorn or disbelief, “What is wrong with you?” “Are you people kidding?” Talk of defunding police departments across the country was the number-one issue on Twitter, for elected Democrat media hits, talking points for leftists. Even as we saw assassination attempts on cops, journalists went along with the defund craze as though it was the enlightened position of the day. The media treated it with all seriousness, doing reimagine-policing analysis and defund-the-cops commentary as if these were legitimate policy proposals. The New York Times even ran an op-ed, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.”

Donald Trump was the lone voice on the national stage declaring what a horrible idea this is, and what a dangerous mistake it is — the exact position of the vast majority of the American people.

Which the Democrat Party finally was confronted with on Election Day. They ran into the brick wall of united public opinion, after having happily danced with their left-wing activists during the campaign. Now, all of a sudden, the finger-pointing and internecine fury within the party is fierce.

According to The Washington Examiner on 11/16/20, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D, TX) declared: “Defund police, open borders, socialism — it’s killing us.” As reported in The New York Post on 11/8/20, Rep. James Clyburn (D, SC) compared the impact of “defund the police” to the backlash against “burn, baby, burn” in the 1960s: “John [Lewis] and I sat on the House floor and talked about that ‘defund the police’ slogan and both of us concluded that it had the possibilities of [losing] the Black Lives Matter movement.” Sen. Mark Warner (D, VA) said, “I think … using terms like ‘defund the police’ have led to Democratic losses in this last year,” as reported in The Hill on 11/14/20.

As the rest of the Democrats blame them for coming up short on November 3, the progressive wing of the party is back on its heels. Their first instinct is denial: “Nobody I know who is running for office talks about defunding the police,” claimed Bernie Sanders on 11/15/20, according to The Hill. His protégé, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY), used the same dodge on cnn: “Not a single member of Congress that I’m aware of campaigned on socialism or defunding the police in this general election. These were largely slogans or they were demands from activist groups.”

Except for one tiny detail: it was aoc herself who led the charge, explicitly asserting over the summer, “Defunding police means defunding police.”

aoc particularly is under fire from her caucus, and she’s been all over the media defending herself. In another appearance she rejected the whole idea that “defund the police” is unpopular. But if it is, it’s only because people are racist. “There are swing seat Dem incumbents who cosponsored the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, etc. and if I’m not mistaken every single one won reelection,” she tweeted. “So the whole ‘progressivism is bad’ argument just doesn’t have any compelling evidence that I’ve seen. When it comes to ‘Defund’ [the police] & ‘Socialism’ attacks, people need to realize these are racial resentment attacks.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D, MN), who on May 25 demanded, “We need to completely dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,” now just blames Republicans because voters held her party accountable for the left’s actual agenda. According to The Washington Free Beacon, Omar complained, “This myth that the Republicans are using to develop a narrative to start to create a wedge between Democrats is really something we can’t allow to stick and that narrative to get hold.”

Well, it’s going to stick. Especially now, as Fox News reports in “aoc’s New ‘Squad’ Members Want to Defund Police, Much More,” because with the incoming Congress, Democrats have gained at least three more of her ilk:

• Mondaire Jones (D, NY), who says, “Congress must cease all funding that militarizes police forces … and abolish cash bail.” He says dismantling white supremacy involves “moving funding away from police departments and toward programs that … address the roots of systemic inequality.”
• Jamaal Bowman (D, NY), who calls for “shifting funding and resources from police departments, jails, and prisons [to] new agencies designed to protect public health.” He wants a “National Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate, document, and assess the federal government’s role in America’s history of racism.”
• Cori Bush (D, MO), wants to defund not just the police, but the military. “If you’re having a bad day, just think of all the social services we’re going to fund after we defund the Pentagon,” she tweeted just before the election.

This is where the energy of the Democrat Party is coming from — its anti-cop, Marxist base. On 11/10/20, House Majority Whip James Clyburn was quoted by Fox News: “[If] we are going to run on ‘Medicare-for-all,’ defund the police, socialized medicine, we’re not going to win.”

Depends who’s counting the votes, I guess.

Cartoon ©2020 Pat Cross patcrosscartoons.com