The Leading Edge Of Progressivism Again: "Defunding" The Police: From *Never Heard Of It* To *It's Policy Now* In Record Time

I tend to keep an eye on the crazy left, obviously. Everybody knows they're anti-cop, and aim to decrease prison populations and whatnot. We even agree about some of it--e.g. deparamilitarizing police departments. But I'd never heard it stated so specifically, and in slogan form--"defund the police"--before a couple of days ago. I filed it away in the ol' noggin yesterday for my next discussion/argument with a lefty friend. The other side of said noggin' said: C'mon, you know that's not fair. Joe Biden et al. aren't going to "defund" the police--that's one of those ideas that will live and die on the lips of the craziest of the crazies on the left...

  Well, never underestimate how quickly ideas on the left move from Never heard of it status to It's law now, bigot. One notable example: I'd never heard the leftist doctrine that men who consider themselves "trans" are actually, literally women until a couple of months before the Caitlyn Jenner case hit the news. Seemed like, by the time I even heard that assertion, there were already demands to misuse pronouns and let dudes into girl's public restrooms--and talk of codifying such things into law.

   Anyway: it is, of course, creepy as hell how much influence the super-duper-crazy wing of the left has on the rest of the left. But ignoring that for the time being:

• First: God bless federalism and the laboratories of democracy. You go for it, NY/NYC. The rest of us are eager to see how that works out for ya.
• Second: I know nothing whatsoever about the funding of police forces. Are they overfunded? Sure as hell could be, for all I know. They're as likely to be overfunded as underfunded, I guess.
• Third: ...Eh...well...third is actually a concern. I tend to worry that social work and social work education are one of the primary vectors along which leftist craziness spreads... So I'm not wild about them getting more money and influence.

   But anyway. I don't see that de Blasio's plan is stupid--though I know nothing about what NYC does and doesn't need. Empirical question. Be good to see how this turns out.

   Though, if you made me bet, I'd bet: train wreck, I guess. They could be headed back to the bad old days of rampant crime. I'd guess that the Minneapolis effect will be the successor to the Ferguson effect...

   Now, back to the metapoint: one of the things you should most fear about the contemporary left is its puerile passion for radical, untested change. As long as its limited to a state I don't live in, it's an interesting experiment. But it's probably also a blueprint for disaster. Remember: we're talking about ideas spawned by an extremist, antirational, antiliberal, totalitarian movement that thinks that riots are a form of free speech. (Our free speech is violence; their violence is free speech.)  And, furthermore, a movement so ignorant of and downright averse to the facts that it accepts the open season myth--something that thirty seconds of Googling debunks. Either that or it thinks that society should be radically reordered on the basis of roughly ten unfortunate cases per year.

   But, anyway: let the experiment begin, I guess.