Two recent news stories bring up some observations regarding the public’s view of law enforcement. First, the repulsive white supremacists—Nazis and KKK in Charlottesville, VA. and second, the nearly as repugnant radical, leftist agitators in Durham, N.C., including, the radical leftists Workers World Party, Democratic Socialists of America, and ANTIFA (anti-First Amendment… oh, I mean anti-fascists—yeah, right!).
Much derision has been heaped on the cops’ handling (or not handling) of the riots in Charlottesville, which resulted in the tragic death of a young woman at the hands of a mob of despicable white nationalists.
Even some conservative commentators are critical of the cops for not intervening in the violence. People need to remember something: it’s not the cops on the riot lines who decide when to act. Those officers were no doubt fighting with every molecule of their beings to tamp down the instinct to act. Police officers at potentially violent scenes like this, planned controversial events, are most often given orders for conduct and rules of engagement before being deployed. If officers are not acting to stop rioters, it’s because politically-driven superiors have ordered them not to act. I know it happens in Seattle, too—a lot.
In Durham, the cops also “failed” to act when protesters took it upon themselves to destroy public property and tear down a Confederate monument. Now, I have no love lost for the Confederacy that fought to preserve the vile institution of slavery. Think about it. I’m a libertarian! I believe in the sovereignty of every individual human being. In America, just because some piece of property offends you, you don’t get to destroy it.
For example, in Baltimore, authorities removed Confederate statues, but they are being reinstalled at nearby Civil War battlefields. This form of display is in a much better context, anyway. Rather than being publicly displayed in a town common or in front of a public building, which is an implicit act of honoring something or someone, the statues now serve a legitimate historical purpose: to remind us of what can happen when some Americans ignore the rule of law and a nation splits apart.
The Durham incident is also a reminder, once again, of who comprises the left: While watching the coverage of the radicals toppling the statue, I saw signs reading and heard the crowd chanting, “No cops! No KKK! No fascists USA!”
President Trump has suffered from asserting there were good and bad on both sides. Frankly, I’d like to hear more about what he meant by the “good” on the white nationalist side. But President Trump is infamous for words coming out differently than from what he’d intended. However, that anti-cop sign and chant, and the groups’ commitment to ending America as it exists, verifies the “bad” on each side comment. Equating the KKK and fascists with America’s cops is absurd, but some, even in the mainstream left, tolerate or accept, or, even further, endorse this notion.
There seems to be a noteworthy difference between right and the left. The left attempts to conflate white nationalists with all Republicans, conservatives, and Trump supporters. The problem is all of these right-wing groups routinely condemn Nazis, the KKK, and other white nationalist groups. To the contrary, the left, including the Democratic Party and a Democratic President, respectively, invited the mother of a robbery suspect who assaulted and then tried to take a police officer’s gun to their national convention and radical minority groups like BLM to our White House.
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