Liberals’ response to last week’s Capitol takeover has confirmed my suspicion that they don’t really believe that all cops are bad. ‘I think our pledge created confusion in the community and in our wards,’ she said.“ Another councilor, Phillipe Cunningham, said that the language in the pledge was ‘up for interpretation’ and that even among council members soon after the promise was made, ‘it was very clear that most of us had interpreted that language differently.‘ “ Councilor Andrew Johnson, one of the nine members who supported the pledge in June, said in an interview that he meant the words ‘in spirit,’ not by the letter. Interestingly enough, the Minneapolis City Council, which voted to “dismantle” the city’s police department after Floyd’s death, seems to agree with me: To me, it always felt like “defund the police” was a buzzword slogan that got out of hand, one that most people believed in spirit but didn’t fully buy into literally. The entire summer, the conversation around “defund the police” was completely baffling to me, a prison abolitionist whose primary voting issue is criminal justice reform. And what did the BLM protests earn? Widespread elimination of police use chokeholds and no-knock warrants, two harmful but ultimately minor policies in the grand scheme of things beyond that, little beyond lots of promotion of the politics of austerity and plenty of well-wishes from corporations. What have the Capitol rioters gotten in response? An attempted rush at a new Patriot Act and the banishment of their political leader from social media. While the motivations behind the former were far more admirable than the latter, they were both ultimately pointless, aimless, disorganized “movements” that not only failed to accomplish any semblance of progress toward their goals, but also have actually ended up pushing people in the opposite direction. The last year in this godforsaken country has seen perhaps the two most high-profile protest events of the 21st century: last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and last week’s attempted right-wing insurrection at the US Capitol Building.
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