Local control of the police is vital to the preservation of American democracy. Police officers and sheriff’s deputies swear an oath not only to serve and protect their communities but also to uphold the U.S. Constitution. Ideally, the police should serve as guardians of public safety and as defenders against government tyranny. Leftist elites detest these safeguards of liberty. The woke oligarchs are the tyrannical faction the American founders had the foresight to protect us against by establishing a constitutional federal republic.
A central feature of any totalitarian regime—Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Communist China—is a national police force under total control of the central government. Totalitarians nationalize the police not to control crime, but to control their citizens. This is what the leftist elites envision for America and they are working hard to make it happen. The rampant lawlessness, violence, and chaos that has engulfed our cities since the summer of 2020 directly results from their scheme. They want to create dysfunctional local police departments as a pretext to nationalize all law enforcement.
Policing in every major city is in crisis—the rule of law has collapsed, people are not safe, and the war on cops is escalating.
Let’s take a look at where we are, the current policies of the Democratic Party that got us here, the historical context of the Left’s assault on the police, and what we need to do to defeat them.
I’ve seen personally how leftist ideology and training have seeped into and undermined policing. But as a former police chief myself, I’ve also learned how to build a highly effective organization based on American values and community policing principles.
The leftist elites’ pro-criminal, anti-victim, and anti-police policies have undermined the rule of law and unleashed an unprecedented wave of violence and murder. In addition to shootings and homicides, organized robberies and lootings of large stores have spread from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Minneapolis and Chicago and even into the suburbs. All are jurisdictions dominated by Democrats, controlled by radical leftist prosecutors, and patrolled by police departments that have virtually abandoned proactive law enforcement.
As cities disintegrate into chaos, righteous anger from average Americans has Democratic politicians running for cover. Desperate to avoid voter retribution, some mayors are feigning genuine concern by “refunding” the same police departments they have vilified and dismantled in collaboration with Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists since 2020.
Of course, refunding is much better than defunding. But these tepid efforts will have minimal effect in stopping crime and disorder. In cities where Democrats hold sway, the Left has already inflicted devastating, long-term damage.
They have done this in three ways.
First, Democrats, working with Black Lives Matter and the corporate left-wing media, have undermined community trust in the police by perpetuating the big lie of “systemic police racism.” Delegitimizing the police has made it almost impossible to build community partnerships.
Demonizing the police as racist oppressors and murderers also stirs up hate, putting a target on the back of every cop in America. In 2021, 73 police officers were “feloniously killed,” 346 were shot, and ambush shootings of police increased by 115 percent—the deadliest year on record. This was a deeply disturbing increase from 2020, with 311 officers shot and 47 killed by gunfire.
The first three months of 2022 have been even more horrific. Seventeen police officers have been killed by gunfire and 101 have been shot, a 46 percent increase from 2021. Shockingly, ambush-style attacks are up 36 percent from last year’s historic 115 percent increase from 2020.
Second, police morale has been crushed. Thousands of veteran officers have retired early or quit, and recruiting enough new officers has proven impossible. Lacking support from political leaders and community members, officers have pulled back from proactive policing.
Portland, Oregon, led by a radical Democratic mayor who joined the rioters during the summer of 2020, has been a leading collaborator in the movement to defund the police. The dismantling of the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) is a prime example of the destructiveness of leftist policies upon policing operations, legitimacy, and officer morale. PPB is at its lowest staffing level in 28 years as officers continue to bail out. Backtracking in desperation on their “defund” agenda, the City of Portland recently attempted to entice retired officers to rejoin the department. Only two of 81 eligible officers even expressed interest in coming back.
Why? Low morale, which according to the city’s survey, is the result of failed leadership. Sixty percent of surveyed officers agreed that they “did not feel supported by the senior leadership . . . .” Ninety-eight percent said that the radical leftist “city government has made their work more difficult.” Seventy-nine percent agreed or strongly agreed that citizens are “less likely to treat PPB officers with respect than a year or two ago,” and 80 percent said that citizens are now less likely to comply with police instructions. Not surprisingly, the study concluded that “With this loss of legitimacy (or power), comes a loss of morale; their (police officers’) desire to engage with the community is lost, too” and that the “exodus” of officers from Portland will continue.
How dysfunctional is the Portland Police Bureau? In October, a mob of 100 Antifa thugs laid waste to downtown Portland, causing $500,000 in damage to banks, stores, and shops. Eerily similar to the mayor of Baltimore’s orders to her police department to give the mob “space to destroy” during the riots of 2015, Portland’s woke police leadership directed officers to be spectators. Not one rioter was arrested. The Portland Police Bureau is broken. Leftist Democrats are working to do the same across the country.
Third, the infestation of George Soros-funded state’s attorneys in big-city jurisdictions has sabotaged crime-fighting and justice. Well financed by the anti-American, globalist billionaire, these rogue prosecutors in jurisdictions such as Los Angeles County, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Cook County, Illinois, “reimagine” the criminal justice system by dropping thousands of felony cases, failing to charge violent criminals, refusing to prosecute many categories of crime, and letting dangerous offenders out of jail.
The Soros plan is extremely effective in dismantling the rule of law. Hard-left prosecutors simply nullify the hard work of police officers who arrest dangerous criminals by refusing to indict them and putting them back on the street. As I have observed elsewhere, the objective of the Left is not to reform policing—but to destroy it.
Black citizens in blue cities have been the primary victims of this engineered lawlessness. America’s crime pandemic saw a 30 percent surge in homicides in 2020, the largest increase since the FBI began keeping track. Almost 10,000 homicide victims were black, 56 percent of all victims despite constituting only 13 percent of the U.S. population. The percentage increase of black homicide victims was twice that of white victims. The murder surge continued in 2021, with 12 major cities, all Democrat-led, recording historic highs in homicides.
This catastrophe of crime and chaos has not happened by chance. To effectively fight back, we must fully understand the threat. The war on cops, public order, and the law is part of a devious but brilliant leftist plan to destroy American civilization, known as “the long march through the institutions”—and its roots are deep in Marxism.
It’s a long story—but here’s the Reader’s Digest version.
Capturing the Institutions
Karl Marx predicted that conflict between workers and capitalists made socialist revolution inevitable. Following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, communists in the 1920s expected working-class revolutions to overthrow capitalist democracies throughout Western Europe. It didn’t happen. So, they went back to the drawing board.
The key Marxist theoreticians were Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist, and a group of German Marxist intellectuals who became known as the Frankfurt School. They concluded that a socialist overthrow of the capitalist democracies could not happen while the working class still believed in the legitimacy of their society and supported its traditional values. Because the primary social institutions—education, media, law, family, and religion—taught and reinforced these values, such institutions would have to be captured or destroyed before political overthrow was possible. This new take on the theory of communist revolution became known as “Cultural Marxism.”
When Adolf Hitler came to power, the German academics emigrated to the United States, set up shop at Columbia University, and later infiltrated other educational institutions. Out of Cultural Marxism emerged other pernicious academic “disciplines,” including critical theory, which in turn spawned critical race theory.
Communists seek to exploit a society’s most vulnerable weaknesses. They identified the fault line in the United States as race and, almost a century ago, made fomenting conflict between blacks and whites their primary strategy. Traditional Marxist theory was revised, replacing its original class-based framework of capitalist/exploiter versus worker/exploited with a race-based framework of white-oppressor versus black victim. The New York Times’ “1619 Project” is just the latest manifestation of this schema.
Cultural Marxists also understood that the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs underpinning Western democracies, particularly the United States, were the most powerful barriers to socialist revolution. “Any country grounded in Judeo-Christian values can’t be overthrown until those roots are cut,” Gramsci proclaimed. “Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity . . . in the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”
Sound familiar? Marxists have been marching through America’s institutions for the past 70 years. They have used the Cultural Marxism playbook to perfection and made immense strides.
So, here’s where we stand.
In education, leftists almost completely control our universities. Public schools indoctrinate children with state-sanctioned racism and gender-perverting ideology.
The ruling class media have become the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party and leftist elites. Their primary functions are to perpetuate the myth of systemic racism, instigate racial conflict and hatred, delegitimize the United States and its founding principles, and demoralize patriots.
The traditional nuclear family has been decimated. Forty percent of all children are now born into families without a father in the home, including 70 percent of blacks, 52 percent of Hispanics, and 28 percent of whites. Children’s innocence is being corrupted through perverse sexualization in school curricula, the Internet, and popular culture. Hollywood and mass entertainment are almost exclusively leftist. Even professional sports are under leftist control.
The Democratic Party has been captured by the radical Left. The FBI and U.S. military are increasingly radicalized. In one of his first acts, Joe Biden ordered all federal employees to undergo racial indoctrination programs.
The Big Tech oligarchy censors and suppresses all speech, news, and information that does not serve the interest of the ruling elite. Corporate America has funneled millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter Marxists and coerces employees to undergo race-based reeducation.
The only two remaining cultural institutions not yet totally compromised are religion, which is being rapidly infiltrated, and law enforcement, which is hanging by a thread. Let’s take a look at some of the programs and ideologies that have undermined policing in America and what needs to be done to fix it.
A Policing Success Story:
Legitimacy and Procedural Justice
While recent external attacks have shaken American policing, other forces have been at work for years, undermining and subverting the institution from within. This arguably started during Barack Obama’s administration, with Attorney General Eric Holder acting as his point man.
Before Obama effectively declared war on the police, law enforcement agencies across the United States had been making significant progress in improving officer behavior and building effective police-community partnerships. This was accomplished by implementing training in “police legitimacy” and “procedural justice,” both concepts developed by social psychologist Tom Tyler.
Legitimacy is the belief that the police should be allowed to exercise their authority and maintain order. It is achieved when people accept their obligation to defer to police authority based on trust and believing that police are honest, and their actions are appropriate and morally justified.
Procedural justice is the “roadmap” to achieving legitimacy through positive police interaction with citizens. These police actions include allowing people an opportunity to explain their side of the story; taking a neutral disposition; making decisions based on the law and facts instead of personal bias; treating people politely, with dignity and respect; and, finally, explaining clearly the reason for police decisions and actions. Experience has shown that legitimacy is increased when people believe the police have treated them fairly and with respect, even when the final outcome is not in their favor.
At the forefront of these policing innovations was the Chicago Police Department (CPD). By 2012, CPD was leading the way, and had developed a 40-hour training program that 8,400 CPD officers would complete by 2016. Police departments across the country and worldwide came to Chicago for training and to become certified as trainers for their departments.
As a Chicago police lieutenant, I completed the training in early 2015. I recognized its value in reenergizing veteran officers who may have become cynical or burned out and correctly orienting new officers at the start of their law-enforcement careers. Importantly, through its emphasis upon communication and treating all people fairly and respectfully, legitimacy and procedural justice greatly helped to transform police-community relationships in positive ways. I brought Chicago’s groundbreaking policing philosophies with me when I took on the role of chief of the Martinsburg, West Virginia Police Department in October 2015.
CPD’s program was a major success, resulting in significantly fewer use-of-force incidents and citizen complaints against officers. This presented a unique opportunity for improving American policing. But instead of promoting it as the primary training focus, it was sabotaged by the Obama Administration, which identified a new priority: implicit bias training.
Not only did Barack Obama do more to divide Americans by race than any president in our lifetimes, he was also the most anti-police president in history.
Obama’s self-righteous anti-police rhetoric and bogus claims of systemic racism fueled hatred of the police and prepared the groundwork for the war on cops. He legitimized Black Lives Matter in the public consciousness—excusing their mob violence and inviting BLM leaders to the White House, even though they had regularly chanted for the murders of police officers. Race-based demonization and anti-police propaganda has only accelerated with Joe Biden in office, even as Biden has made a show of walking back the “defund the police” rhetoric.
The Implicit Bias Scam
The fact is, Obama tore down law enforcement from the outside and subverted it from the inside. He poisoned the way the American public saw the police and the way police departments saw themselves. In 2016, Obama and Holder mandated so-called implicit bias training for 28,000 members of the Department of Justice and began to aggressively push it into state and local police departments.
Implicit bias training is derived from Harvard University’s implicit association test (IAT). The IAT measures and compares how quickly a person responds to positive and negative words by clicking a computer key when viewing a black or white face. Its inventors claim that timed differences in reaction, measured in milliseconds, reveal unconscious racial prejudice. Advocates further claimed that “implicit bias” causes police officers to discriminate against black people, including racial profiling, unjust arrests, and disproportionate use of force. These claims are not grounded in science and have been thoroughly debunked.
The implicit association test and implicit bias training are colossal scams. As a psychological testing instrument, the IAT fails two basic scientific standards—it is not reliable, and the results are not valid. The same person taking the IAT may score significantly different levels of “bias” every time the test is taken. And the test is absolutely unable to predict bias or discriminatory behavior in the real world.
But the implicit bias training scam has become a billion-dollar business and now pervades law enforcement. The New York Police Department jumped on board early, with 36,000 NYPD officers taking implicit bias training at a cost of $5.5 million. The program continues even though NYPD’s own study showed no change in officer enforcement behavior. The wasteful misdirection of billions in taxpayer dollars is a disgrace, but the true evil of implicit bias training is much worse.
Implicit bias training and the racist ideology of critical race theory go hand-in-hand. The false belief of the entire implicit bias project is that racism is an unconscious psychological phenomenon in all white people, fostered by white supremacy, and manifests in every human interaction. This is also the central tenet of critical race theory. Both maintain that all white people are racist—regardless of their behavior. So it’s hardly surprising that implicit bias training has paved the way for the poison of CRT indoctrination in federal agencies and police departments. Both the FBI and the Austin, Texas Police Department have programmed their members with CRT’s racist, anti-American ideology.
How Implicit Bias Training Subverts Good Policing
Implicit bias training combined with the myth of systemic police racism are antithetical to the true purpose of the police. When a police department embraces the lie, its mission is subverted. How can officers be motivated and confident in serving their communities and making a difference if they simultaneously believe that they are unconscious racists? Or worse, with CRT indoctrination, if they believe their department serves the interests of systemic racism and white supremacy? They can’t.
Implicit bias ideology and CRT undermine policing in four distinct ways:
They waste precious resources of time, money, and energy, replacing training that really matters. Vitally important training, including hands-on defensive tactics and proper handcuffing techniques, realistic “shoot-or-don’t shoot” scenarios, de-escalation methods, and mental health crisis intervention skills—all of those things go by the boards.
They destroy morale. Officers who have been taught to believe they are unconsciously racist and that their organization is systemically racist will doubt the very legitimacy of police work. They also know that every interaction and mistake will be scrutinized by the community, media, and their department administration only through the lenses of implicit bias and racism. Officers hesitate or pull back entirely from taking proactive or decisive police action.
They poison the basis of trust necessary to build police-community partnerships. Reinforcing the myth of systemic police racism provides a default excuse for Democratic elected officials, leftist community organizations such as local NAACP chapters, and some churches to not join in partnership with the police. Who would want to partner up with racists? The only relevant question becomes, “What is your department doing to address implicit bias and systemic racism?” And if an incident occurs that they don’t like, “What additional actions will your department take to address implicit bias and systemic racism?”
They prevent an honest evaluation and response to black crime. Critical race theory falsely maintains that racial disparity is proof of racism. But arrests are the result of criminal behavior—not race. Blacks commit 52 percent of all homicides in the United States while constituting only 13 percent of the population. When crime is committed disproportionately, arrests will also be disproportionate.
Critical race ideology identifies blacks as perpetual victims of white supremacy who lack the agency to change their status and cannot be held personally accountable for their behavior. Celebration of imaginary victimhood and evasion of responsibility perpetuate social pathology by preventing the correction of the actual root causes of crime and disparities, including fatherless families and dysfunctional cultural values.
The impact of culture and the importance of individual responsibility are vital. In a memorable speech 14 years ago, President Obama said children who grow up without a father are “five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.” Brown University economist Glenn Loury points out that a doctrine attributing the pathology of violent behavior to racism is “laughable,” and blaming disparity in educational achievement on systemic racism is “an absurdity.”
These are toxic theories and practices but sadly, the entire law enforcement establishment promotes implicit bias training and the pressure to conform is powerful.
What We Did in Martinsburg—
And How It’s Being Undone
Can a police department resist the pressure and take an independent path to excellence? The answer is yes. I was chief of the Martinsburg Police Department in West Virginia for five years, until I retired in 2020—and we did it. Instead of going down the self-destructive path of implicit bias training, we developed a model of community policing, strategic enforcement, and innovative police-community partnerships.
Based upon this solid foundation and a community policing philosophy, we adopted body-worn cameras; trained all officers in police legitimacy and procedural justice; revamped and developed state-of-the-art policies, including use-of-force; trained in hands-on defensive tactics; integrated reality-based “shoot-or-don’t shoot” scenarios in deadly force training; and certified officers in crisis intervention training for dealing with people in mental health crisis. We significantly reduced all crime—and major crime fell by 50 percent. Tackling the opioid crisis, we developed an innovative Drug House Ordinance and shut down 63 drug houses. MPD launched a unique partnership with elementary and intermediate schools with every officer regularly visiting classrooms to interact with students, totaling more than 5,000 officer-student contacts per year.
The results of our community policing philosophy, policies, and programs were exceptional. The Martinsburg Police Department demonstrated the difference between building a police department upon a foundation of truth instead of a foundation of lies.
Yet, in certain respects, Martinsburg is an outlier. And its successes—and the successes of other departments scattered throughout the country—are coming under increasing pressure from would-be “reformers” who would set back public safety in the name of “progress,” “justice,” and “equity.”
Local police forces are being dismantled. The government establishment’s goal of federalizing law enforcement is supported by the Biden Administration and is being implemented in our major Democrat-run cities.
The Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 were a turning point in the American public’s perception of the police. Our nation witnessed two phenomena never before thought possible. We saw a national political party encourage, support, and help instigate urban riots, violence, and destruction on an unprecedented scale. And second, Americans witnessed entire police departments in places like Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis effectively surrender to anarchy and retreat in the face of the mob.
The BLM riots resulted in $2 billion in damage from burning and looting, leaving at least 25 people dead and more than 2,000 police officers injured. This was the real armed insurrection—supported by Democrats, the leftist elites, and the ruling class media. Black Lives Matter and Antifa mobs functioned as the storm troopers of the Democratic Party. Their violence was planned, funded, and coordinated.
A clear signal was sent to lawbreakers that support for criminality reached the highest levels of the Democratic Party. Vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris solicited contributions for the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF), an ultra-radical bail project designed to get rioters back on the streets almost as soon as they were arrested. In Minneapolis, MFF bailed out multiple violent offenders, including two rapists (one who had kidnapped his victim and one who raped an 8-year-old girl), vicious armed robbers, a burglar who had tied up and brutally beaten a 71-year-old woman, and a domestic abuser who was later arrested for murder. Harris helped the MFF rake in $35 million—effectively keeping the jails empty of rioters.
Democratic mayors in Portland and Chicago ensured continued violence by publicly refusing President Trump’s offer to send in federal law enforcement officers to assist local police. Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, a partisan Democrat, refused Trump’s help to stop the riots in Kenosha that soon turned deadly and led to the arrest, trial, and acquittal in November of Kyle Rittenhouse.
Law-abiding Americans were shocked by the violence and the complete failure of the police to stop it. Police officers stood by as passive observers while lawless mobs destroyed, looted, and burned. Few arrests were made. The police abandoned their mission of maintaining peace, order, and public safety. Mobs ruled the streets.
Several images explain why many demoralized citizens have lost faith in the police.
In an epic failure of leadership, Minneapolis set the tone for the rest of the country. Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo abandoned citizens to BLM looters in large areas of the city. He instructed officers not to respond to desperate 911 calls and ordered units not to go into areas “where they are at risk of harm.”
After abandoning his city, Arradondo abandoned his department—surrendering the Third Precinct police station to the mob, which it then burned and destroyed. The pathetic videos of MPD officers fleeing their own police station while being chased down the street by BLM and Antifa thugs were disgraceful. In Minneapolis, the Thin Blue Line separating lawful society from chaos had been erased. Honest citizens could no longer expect the police to protect them.
Also, the media highlighted videos of police chiefs, high-ranking police supervisors, and mayors marching, kneeling, and chanting with Black Lives Matter Marxists. Normal Americans and rank-and-file cops were dismayed. How could police leaders publicly show support—literally bending the knee in some cases—for a radical movement that believes in the abolition of police and prisons, openly advocates the murder of police officers, and worships cop killers?
Unresolved Questions
How can this total collapse of police leadership be explained?
It’s a complex question. For some of these chiefs, I believe that they were simply afraid to do the right thing. But for many others, I’m afraid they may no longer know what the right thing to do is. The cumulative and corrosive effects of the leftist ideology of implicit bias, critical race theory, and the pervasive lie of systemic police racism have caused many police executives to doubt the legitimacy of the police mission.
If you believe that the police are systemically racist, then you no longer believe that the police are the good guys. Just as there are now radical leftist elements within the leadership of the U.S. military, there are undoubtedly police leaders who have embraced the racist, anti-American critical race ideology.
The paralysis of the police as an institution to resist the 2020 Black Lives Matter insurrection—their tolerance of violence and chaos instead of reestablishing order—demonstrates the power and danger of internalized leftist propaganda.
The 2020 riots were not spontaneous, and it was not the police who stopped them. The violence was eventually turned off—but it could be turned back on again. A Congress under new leadership must fully investigate the organized violence of 2020. There is a lot we still need to know.
For example, who is funding BLM leadership, staff, and professional activists? How does Antifa organize and function? Beyond releasing and refusing to prosecute rioters, what other connections exist between Democratic elected officials (Soros D.A.s especially) and violent offenders? What was the full extent of the ruling-class media’s role in promoting violence? Finally, what are the explanations of the Democratic mayors and their police chiefs who ordered their officers to stand down and allowed their cities to burn?
While Democrats are continually working to undermine policing from within, they are also implementing their plans to “reimagine”—read: dismantle—policing. Joe Biden in June and again in February announced his gun violence prevention plan. Central to the reimaging scheme is the concept that “gun violence is a public health crisis.”
The “public health” response to violence dismisses the central role of the police, substituting cops with social workers. The idea is to deemphasize and eliminate traditional law enforcement. Keeping criminals out of jail is the new priority—working with “at-risk” individuals (drug dealers, gang members, and ex-convicts) seeking “conflict resolution.” Violence is “reimagined” as a disease for which an individual cannot be held personally responsible. Instead of telling these young men that they are expected to conform to rules of civilized society, obey the law, or be held accountable, the new message is “it’s not your fault.”
The Biden plan has targeted 15 major cities for reimagining. For a preview of what they want public safety to be once it’s dismantled, take a look at Baltimore. The city recently unveiled its Comprehensive Violence Reduction Plan, the first implementation of a total “violence is a public health crisis” crime reduction strategy since Biden’s announcement. The ideology and jargon of critical race theory and Black Lives Matter messaging are woven throughout, and it is openly hostile to the police.
We already have a pretty good idea of what the elites will do if they can convert 700,000 sworn police officers and sheriff’s deputies into a de facto or bona fide federal police force. The partisan manner in which the Justice Department has responded to the January 6 protest compared to six months of infinitely more destructive 2020 riots says it all.
A leftist takeover of local law enforcement would nationalize the kind of depraved political partisanship we have witnessed with the Justice Department’s decision to ignore the sadistic beatings of peaceful political protesters on January 6 by D.C. Metro Police and the whitewash of the unjustified ambush shooting and killing of Ashli Babbitt. Federal police would be used as political, speech, and thought police—just as a corrupt FBI is being misused to crack down on American parents for protesting the teaching of racism, pornography, and pedophilia to their children.
How to Save Policing in America
Here is a four-point plan.
1) We must fight to drive anti-American, racist indoctrination—both implicit bias training and critical race theory—out of policing. Then, replace the leftist elitist poison with a massive and continuous training program in police legitimacy and procedural justice—in every city police, county sheriff, and state police department in America.
2) We must organize and vote out of office every Soros-controlled and radical leftist prosecutor. If we don’t, the battle will already be lost because by decriminalizing crime and keeping dangerous offenders on the street, these subversives will continue to sabotage every positive thing the police accomplish.
3) A new Congress, ideally with new leadership, must launch a comprehensive investigation into the 2020 riots. This should be conducted concurrently with a new and legitimately bipartisan investigation into what really happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The full extent of FBI involvement in the violence remains a mystery. And the details of the Justice Department’s whitewash and coverup of the unjustified ambush shooting of Ashli Babbitt by Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael Byrd must be made public.
4) When these investigations are complete and the truth finally comes out, the findings should be summarized in booklet form and taught as a civics lesson in every American high school. Barack Obama often spoke of “teachable moments.” This can be a teachable moment for future adults and patriots to learn that American democracy is precious, fragile, and always at risk from enemies within and without.
Admittedly, some of this will be difficult to accomplish in cities dominated by Democrats. But we have no choice but to fight. Nothing is impossible. How many people would have thought a year ago that critical race theory and its offshoot curricula would be banned in school districts throughout the country—including in deep blue states?
Fighting for the police and preserving the rule of law in every Republican state is also crucial. In this fight, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is leading the way.
Of all America’s governors, DeSantis has been among the most outspoken in his support for police and the rule of law. “Make no mistake: the reason that you have such huge spikes in crime in many parts of the country is because of not standing up for law enforcement, having weak policies where you’re letting people out, and you’re not prosecuting people who are committing habitual offenses,” DeSantis told an audience last year. “That is clearly causing disastrous consequences.”
Under DeSantis, Florida enacted the “Anti-Riot Bill,” increasing penalties for crimes committed during violent assemblies and protecting law enforcement officers and law-abiding citizens. The Florida law also makes it more difficult for municipalities to defund the police.
In Florida and every Republican state, we need to take it to the next level.
People are waking up. We must stand up now to hold the line, save our police, and win the fight to take back our country and save the republic.