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History of “Defund the Police”
I was reading a far-right piece hating on the moderate Democratic Party candidate for the US Senate in Michigan, Abdul Al-Sayed, that experts agree is an absolute moderate. The Islamophobic hate piece had dug up 10 of his moderate positions.
One of the moderate positions was “I believe we need to defund the police.”
Another position was: “[D]ecarceration generally is really, really critical.”
Now, I know that defund the police and decarceration mainlined in World War COVID in the campaign to canonize St. George Floyd, but, I thought, there had to be a back-story. So I asked Grok.
The phrase was not invented in 2020. It drew on decades of prison- and police-abolition organizing that treated policing as part of a larger “prison-industrial complex”
The history is the usual sort of activist narrative creation. It starts with W.E.B. Du Bois arguing that prisons and white-dominated police forces were “rooted in slavery and racial control.” Then, in the late 1960s, the Black Panther Party called for “community control of the police”. In the 1970s–1990s. Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and others expanded the critique from prisons to policing. Then we get 2014 and Ferguson and Alex S. Vitale’s 2017 book The End of Policing.
Whatbout Google Search? It has a three-point program, starting with “long-standing Black feminist and abolitionist organizing”, then proceeding to “Scholars and activists noted that modern policing models trace back to 18th-century slave patrols in the South and 19th-century efforts to control urban labor in the North”. It ends with “Alex S. Vitale’s 2017 book The End of Policing”.
Yeah. Whatabout Vitale’s book? Grok says:
Vitale argues that modern U.S. police are not mainly a public-safety service that has gone off track. He treats them as a tool of social control whose historical job has been to manage inequality—by race, class, immigration status, and political dissent… His preferred path is to shrink the police’s mandate and replace much of it with housing, mental-health care, schools, harm reduction, and community programs.
In other words, the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis were all about the funding:
Local groups such as Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block had already been pressing the city to cut police budgets and shift money to social services[.]
It’s always about the funding. We devoted activists don’t want no stinkin’ money going to racist-sexist-homophobe white policemen. We want the funding to go to compassionate DEI unionized social-service workers. Get it? Pure Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt friend/enemy distinction: fight the enemy and fund our friends.
And, of course, the whole thing is wrapped in the basic left-wing narrative going back to whenever that is now encoded in the Allyism meme that “we are fighting for the oppressed against the white male oppressors”.
And there is the fundamental culture of women, who don’t fight the foe, but “expect to be protected”. They just say: “I am never talking to her again” and don’t really see the point of policemen and prisons until they actually get attacked by a thug.
See, the guy approach to Lindsay Clancy is that if she kills her kids, she’s outta there, and a life sentence would be the compassionate option. But women, especially educated women, think about Clancy’s feelings and the need for more mental health services.
One fine day, we’ll see a return to the ugly truth about police and prisons. In our modern cities we really don’t know what to do about feral young men, except arrest and imprison them. Social services has nothing to do with the case.
Back in the day, before cities, I imagine that the men in the community just “took care” of problematic young men, and the women knew not to ask questions. I have no idea what the men actually did with the feral young men. I wonder what Margaret Mead thought about young men Coming of Age in Samoa.
| Wed, 30 Sep 2026 21:38:32 GMT |
Sarah Hoyt Warns of “The Breaking Point”
Because I’ve been reading Björn Merker and his Perishing Promise, about how our lefty friends have been trying to “perish” the “promise” of Victorian Britain for the last century or so, I’m coded for parallel narratives. And today up popped Sarah A. Hoyt, the SF writer, with “The Breaking Point”.
She is making a similar point, that the left is busy trying to force us into their mold. She says it won’t work.
Their worst illusion is that they can infinitely tweak humans and human societies to be exactly what they want them to be.
Hoyt says No! She comments on the progressive faith that they fixed racism and sexism. So the “tweak” philosophy must be right.
The progressives — I know, I’ve talked to them — of today point to early victories, like racial integration of society and the acceptance of women in business environments.
But Hoyt says no. Integration probably would have worked after the Civil War, except the South determined to stop it. That meant that the Civil Rights movement had to undo the government-mandated racism of the previous century.
As for women in business, women were always there, in some form or another. Lower class women worked by their men’s side and upper class reared women with no other prospects often took jobs… up to and including manager. Also women always owned businesses, etc.
So, in the end, you can’t “tweak” societies from the top down. That’s just not how the world works. For backup, she quotes Alexandria Brown, @alexthechick: “humans are not widgets”. Here’s the X-poast.
This thread. People are not widgets. People are not a resource. People are not financialization opportunities.
Keep acting like they are and keep mocking those who point this out and the obvious consequences will ensue. As. They. Should.
It’s not just people, Hoyt asserts. There is culture.
And cultures are not widgets. They’re structures of modus vivendi arrived at by evolution in much the same mode as biological evolution, to be the best suited to a people and their environment. Now a lot of them are poisonous, counterproductive or have passed their sell by date.
Cultures will adapt, in the end, “to new technology or new information”.
but governments and “intellectuals” putting their thumbs on the scale doesn’t change them. It only breaks them.
And cultures at the breaking point revert to their most fundamental.
Because people, and cultures, are not widgets.
The interesting thing about Sarah Hoyt is that she was born in a village in Portugal a few miles north of Porto. But guess what: she read children’s writer Enid Blyton as a child, and that inspired her to become a writer. Then she moved to the US and became a science fiction writer.
Do you see the point. Hoyt has journeyed, in one lifetime, from pre-industrial village culture all the way to our present post-industrial intellectual culture.
I would guess that, having lived the “way things are” culture of a rural village, she understands the importance of culture to humans, in a way that our lefty friends do not.
To put it in Merkerian terms, our lefty friends believe they can transform an existing culture with their notion of “overthrow”. Hoyt’s wisdom is that that’s not how humans, or the world, works.
Perhaps we should all just go and reread Kipling’s “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”. When he writes that “the Dog returns to his Vomit” I wonder who he means. I guess that if he were writing today instead of in 1919, there would be more talk of the Gods of the Activist Overthrow than the Gods of the Market Place.
Remember how it ends?
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Yes. And Aldous Huxley didn’t write Brave New World till 1932. Of course, they both got it from Shakespeare’s Tempest. Miranda:
O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t
| Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:40:12 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Ruling Class gotta have a war.
Crimes of the Left: Driving working class off the road to the middle class; misdirecting women in the public square; making war on middle class culture and values; taxing business and ordinary people and enslaving them to ruling-class crusades to save the world.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic:
