The left and the right have been battling for months over who can scare average Americans the most. Ordinary Americans were decidedly unimpressed by the photos of the QAnon team in capes and horned helmets posing in the U.S. Capitol. Ordinary Americans may be irate at Washington, but they love our country and don’t want to see our national monuments turned into a party for weirdos. People reacted the same way when irate leftist rioters desecrated war memorials to our nation’s heroes in Washington last summer.
The question for leading Republicans and Democrats is who has the strength to break away from the hopeless parts of their bases and capture the American voter who, at this point, is simply looking for the least crazy solution. This week, Democrats appear to have given that voter to Republicans.
This shouldn’t be news, but we need police. The whole “defunding” idea is crazy. It also goes without saying that most police officers are honorable, hard-working people who try to do a really solid job that involves risking their lives for relatively little compensation. We owe them a debt of gratitude. And if our political leaders treat police too unfairly, they can simply force some of these honorable police officers out of work.
People have noticed the left’s contempt for police. It hurt Democrats at the ballot box in the last election, and it will hurt them even more in the next. None of this is to say that there aren’t problems with American policing, or that we don’t have racist police. There are problems; there are racist police; and there are legitimate reforms worthy of debate. But the left’s proposed solutions reflect an anti-police bias. It might work for the patrons of anti-fascist bars in Portland, Oregon, but it won’t work nationally, even in 2021.
It especially won’t fly in black and Latino communities, which tend to have higher crime rates. When Minneapolis cut its police force last year, many citizens from minority neighborhoods complained. They know the value of an effective police presence. Democrats with private security who live in safe and sound neighborhoods can come up with crazy “defund the police” ideas all they want without consequences. In reality, such left-wing comments drive some voters into the arms of a Republican Party that is still too inept and leaderless to develop policies that capitalize on this active.
This week, the tragic shooting of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant by a Columbus, Ohio, police officer became the latest racial controversy. As in the case of the George Floyd tragedy, the facts in this case were recorded and anyone could analyze them. While the Floyd video made viewers feel irate at the (now convicted) police officer, the Columbus video had the opposite effect. Contrary to initial media reports, the shooting victim was not unarmed; not only was she armed, but she also tried to stab another teenage girl as a police officer approached her. We may learn more, but the video itself at least shows robust evidence that the officer acted out of necessity.
The insanity of the American left was fully exposed after the Bryant video. National news outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times ran headlines and tweets even after the webcam video that failed to mention that Bryant was armed with a knife and lunged at another teenage girl when he was shot. National celebrities like Lebron James personally attacked a police officer even after the stabbing video was released. There is a huge difference between a story about a cop shooting an unarmed black girl and a story about a cop shooting someone who is about to stab an unarmed black girl with a enormous knife. Crazy is not the kind of attitude that can ignore that.
Race is the most sensitive issue in our country. The surrounding area burned down; businesses were looted; and people died in race riots. The cop in question is a real person, not a cable TV character. His life is now in danger, largely because the media and celebrities have mischaracterized his actions by omitting key facts. Deliberately withholding facts that could aid diffuse a racial situation is more radical, but many public figures do it.
It’s solid to understand why news organizations and celebrities are so keen to stir up racial unrest that they’ll twist the facts to do it. There aren’t many explanations for this kind of behavior. Ratings are down after Trump, so maybe they can’t aid but sensationalize the story as much as possible. That would be a pretty cynical perspective. The prevailing theory on the right is that stoking racial division is the left’s only hope for building a majority political coalition. That’s even more cynical, but this week’s actions don’t lead to many other viable theories.
America is still fairly evenly divided politically, but Democrats hold sway in Washington. President Joe Biden made a robust point of understanding that during his inaugural call for national unity. But he — or his staff — seems to be doing everything they can to push back on the unity agenda. Voters will decide in two years whether they want this shift to the far left. I wouldn’t bet on it.
