Introduction
A lot of people are being distracted by the stupid element in all of this. They see, for example, that the Minneapolis City Council actually voted to defund their police department, or the mayor of New York City saying that he wants to cut funding for their policing back, and so on, and they think to themselves that this is the dumbest policy proposal they have ever heard.
But it is not a policy proposal; it is a power grab. And it is not stupid. Thus far, it appears to be working.
Not Whether, But Which
You have heard me say before, echoing the late R.J. Rushdoony, that it is “not whether, but which.” Not whether a culture has a god, but which god it will have, not whether we will impose morality, but which morality we will impose, and so on.
And so it is not whether we will have police, but rather which police we will have. Not whether certain actions and words will be policed, but rather which actions and words will be policed. The choice is between a police that is generally accountable to elected leaders, who in turn are accountable to voters, or a police force who are accountable to no one except themselves and their own disordered ideology.
The choice is between the rule of law and the law of rule.
The Left, as always, is playing a ratcheting long game. And so they are not proposing that we actually try the social experiment of trying to get along without any police. That will end in stupid, as we are seeing in Seattle. This where the Naive Brigade of Antifa captured an area of Seattle, cordoned it off from the cops, let in a bunch of homeless people, who proceeded to steal their food. Okay, so not everyone on the Left is thinking in terms of the long game. Not everyone on the Left is even thinking.
But at least they took the first step in becoming an actual country. They got control of their borders and built a wall. There’s that.
What to Look For
These people are totalitarian fascists, and they are insisting that they have a divine right to be the police. They also want to be the judge, the jury, and the executioner. This whole destabilization move is so that they can move into the vacuum once they have created it. And when they have become the police, you can rest assured that all that talk of defunding will go the way of the whistling wind.
After we have reached the requisite chaos levels in the streets, start to look for articles appearing in respectable places — and here’s looking at you The Atlantic — suggesting that perhaps it is time to have a national conversation about the need for a national police.
What they want is a police force that they think they can get control of. And I also hope it is obvious that it is essential that they not do so.
Played Like a Violin
In the meantime, photos of collapsed and craven white people have been circulating, where they have been down on their knees begging forgiveness from blasphemous blacks — blacks who think they are actually worthy to sit in that chair. Much has been made of the fact that these whites have been begging forgiveness. But I wish to ask another question, a follow-up question. Do you think they got some? Are they forgiven yet? Are we done? Has the reconciliation begun?
No, this is not the beginning of reconciliation. This is how eternal lack of reconciliation starts.
This is the Great Hamster Wheel Con. You can see it in the precise terminology that is being demanded. No, you must not say anything so insensitive and inflammatory as “all lives matter.” You must say it in the way appointed — hands behind back, toes pointed slightly outward, and enunciate clearly: “black lives matter.” Very good, Georgie.
No less a personage than J.D. Greer, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, has told evangelical Christians to echo the black lives matter shibboleth, and to argue that all lives matter represents an inadequate response to the demands of the moment. And Joel McDurmon continues to miss the entire point of biblical law on this issue, which is not a good look for a theonomist. You do not effectively counter the abuse of “justice for some” with “justice for a different some.” You counter it with “justice for all.”
And as you recite, you may not refer obliquely to the fierce commitment the Left has to the slaughter and sale of unborn black children by saying something so retrograde as “all black lives matter.” No, you must recite the catechism that has been appointed for you to declaim.
But the reason many of us are starting to kick is this. We know that the required verbal formulation is going to change. The thing they are demanding that you say today will be a sign of your incorrigible racism ten years from now. That is, if you are chump enough to say something like black lives matter in the year 2030, when you should have said sable, there will be no one to blame but yourself. As everyone who keeps valuable information on their computer knows, you should change the passwords often.
When I was in high school in Ann Arbor, we had ourselves a race riot. On that occasion, I came out of my home room classroom to see a line of cops with billy clubs running by. I walked around to the front of the school, where an attorney for the rioters was already declaiming about something important. As a result of our tumult, there was a city council meeting (I think it was a city council meeting) that I went to. At any rate, it was one of those official meetings where it was packed out, and standing room only in the back, where I was. Now this was a time when some people still thought it was acceptable to refer to blacks as colored people, which someone up in front did. To my right a young, angry black man snarled, “What color were they, purple?” I don’t recall if I replied to him, or only thought my response. But it was something like: “I don’t know. Let’s ask the people from the NAACP.”
We could move seamlessly from colored people to Negro to blacks to African-American to persons of color, which is way too close to colored persons for me, and then to whatever is next and not even come close to touching the problem. And this is because changing the rules every few years is part of the program of destabilization.
And destabilization is not something reasonable blacks want as they are seeking reconciliation with reasonable whites. No, destabilization is something the cultural commies want, as they use blacks and whites and our tangled history together as pawns.
Why All Lives Matter So Much
All lives matter is a rule of law slogan. Black lives matter is an affirmative action slogan.
When Lady Justice is blindfolded, and there really is a commitment to equal treatment under the law, the conditions are created under which ethnic harmony can be worked out. But when Lady Justice has her thumb on the scale, she has been corrupted, and we are now being ruled by Dame Folly, right out of the book of Proverbs.
The argument for affirmative action is that previous injustices need to be “made up for.” But there is a difference between paying owed restitution, which is biblical, and having incompetent refs in a basketball game make up for a series of really bad calls in the first half by making equally egregious calls in the other direction in the second half. That is not the way to any kind of harmony, but rather the way to the two basketball teams having a brawl in the parking lot after the game. The answer to injustice is justice, not a countervailing injustice.
Put another way, who are you talking to? Where is the admonition being directed? Those who say all lives matter are talking to the laws, to the courts, to the admissions departments. They are saying, in effect, that they want to insist on equal weights and measures. Those who say that black lives matter, while rejecting all lives matter, are saying that they are demanding unequal weights and measures. If someone throws a brick through a store shop window, they want to give that person a legal pass, provided that person was upset about something and the “something” was a grievance approved by them. This is wickedness, and the fact that it is propagated by dunces doesn’t make it any less wicked.
In other words, the choice is between the rule of law and the law of rule. Their arbitrary and capricious rule. Their angry and bitter and envious rule. Their lawless rule.
A Brief History
One of the reasons why this whole tumultuous time will not usher in a civil rights utopia has to do with the conscience of white America. Let me explain.
Jim Crow America was an obnoxious mess. And the America of that time is not located back in the history books next to the War of the Roses — it is still within living memory. It is within my living memory. Pardon my language for a moment as I illustrate that I know what I am talking about. I grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, a town with a segregated school system. I went to the white elementary school a couple miles from my home, and my sister, three years younger, after desegregation, went to the black elementary school a block or two away. It was not at all unusual to drive by houses that had little black lawn jockeys out on the front lawn. I remember a grown-up white man explaining to me once that another name for Brazil nuts used to be nigger toes. I remember a grown white woman calling black babies pickaninnies. And the kind of thing I am describing here was more or less taken as matter-of-fact, just the way things were. And that kind of thoughtless dismissal of the dignity of a despised black caste, that kind of institutionalized and systemic contempt, was repulsive to God. And because I have a special class of reader out there, the kind that doesn’t read carefully or well, but quotes me with disgust and verve, let me repeat those last three words — repulsive to God.
But it was also a time that was primed for transition. What I mean by that is that even though it represented very common and very public attitudes, it was also the case that white America, taken as a whole, had a really bad conscience about the whole thing. Now I accept and agree with Caldwell’s argument that the 1964 Civil Rights Acts was an awful piece of legislation, and that it was the source of many of our current troubles. But it was a piece of legislation that was aimed at a very real problem. There was a bait-and-switch involved, and it side-lined our original Constitution, but the reason this bad legislation passed was because white America determined to stop being hypocrites about racial equality.
The rhetoric of the civil rights movement at that time resonated with the troubled conscience of white America. White America was not living up to the standard of “justice for all,” and knew it. But what exactly was the sum and substance of that rhetorical appeal? Here it is in a nutshell: “All lives matter.” When MLK said that he looked forward to the day when men would be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin, he was saying something that secured actual buy-in. And that sentiment, detached from King, and expressed in our current debates, would be denounced as incorrigibly racist.
Put another way, there really was white privilege before the law, and under pressure white America decided to surrender that rigged privilege before the law because it was inconsistent. The replacement for this white lives matter approach was supposed to be all lives matter.
And white America this time doesn’t have the same kind of bad conscience that they did in the fifties and sixties. Those craven whites begging for forgiveness today do have a guilt problem, but it is the guilt of their sex lives projected onto the politics of race relations. When it comes to the relationship of one ethnic tribe to another, if the powers that be insist that we have a system of ethnic privilege, then at some point all the different tribes will decide that it ought not to be the privilege of that other group. They can be prevailed upon to accept a cosmopolitan “justice for all” system that seeks to adjudicate fairly. But if you insist that one group accept a subordinate status permanently, you are simply sowing the seeds of future conflict.
So Defund the Thought Police
So what we really need to do is defund the thought police. If we don’t like what we are getting, then we should stop buying it.
The central element in the proposal to defund the thought police, on a practical level, is the urgent need to defund higher education. We need to turn the money supply to that baby completely off. The need of the hour is to turn that spigot all the way to the right. That is where the radicalization rot is all coming from. The kids filling the ranks of the rioting mobs are not coming from our nation’s 4H clubs, but rather from our English departments, funded by you, you little tax-paying gink.
Now given the nature of the case, it is not likely that any of our established leaders are likely to call for that, or vote for it, or support it in other ways. There is too much superstitious reverence paid to higher education in this country, even though it is not higher, and it is not education. There is a great deal of inertia left over from previous eras when people used to learn things at university. So even though the Left is now being manifestly transparent about what they intend to do, and even though it is manifestly apparent where their radicalism is being hatched, there is still reluctance on the part of the establishment to counter it in the way it needs to be countered.
And yet, defunding higher ed has to happen. Fortunately, the universities can be defunded even though there is no political will to defund them. The death spiral is near regardless. The higher education pricing bubble was getting ridiculous as it was, online competition is for real, and the COVID scare chased a bunch of students into trying online education, which is going to deflate enrollment numbers something fierce, and then the rioting made attendance at a number of schools a dicey business.
So if the wise men don’t defund the thought police, that might be all right. The fools look to be willing to do it all for us.
When looking at the state our nation is in, confronted with a vat full of ugly like this, it is easy for Christians to say, “Lord, have mercy.” And you know, I think that’s exactly what He is doing. He is doing what should have been done decades ago, but which we were unwilling to do. So He is intervening.