In 2022, I wrote that the efforts to defund the police were a Trojan horse that would ultimately benefit authoritarianism. Time would indicate that I was correct.
I laid out that argument in Defund the Police Movement Is an Authoritarian Trojan Horse, The Sedition Papers #9: Back the Blue vs. Defund the Police, and later in Paint Me a San Francisco: The Somalia Fallacy.
No police were defunded. Some may have suffered a reduction in the rate of increase, but politicians and media called that a decrease. As I wrote at the time:
“When government increases its budget by less than they increased it last year, they call it a decrease!”
THE TROJAN HORSE
The defund-the-police movement was accompanied by a media onslaught of property destruction, crime, lawlessness, and chaos. Those images were presented as the natural result of questioning police power. The same media would then show us why we actually needed to fund the police more.
In Paint Me a San Francisco, I described:
“The 24 hour news media pumping violent anarchy on the streets 24 hours a day…”
The point was not that the state would voluntarily dismantle its own enforcement arm. The point was to link opposition to militarized law enforcement with crime, destruction, and chaos until people demanded more funding, more police, and more authority.
Even progressives have either gone silent or changed their stance completely on the idea. By 2022, President Biden was telling the country:
“The answer is not to defund the police. It is to fund the police.”
The movement did not weaken the state. It helped create the impression that questioning police power leads inevitably to chaos—and that the only answer to chaos is more authority.
Government, corporations, and media are three branches of the same poisonous stream. One provides the money, one provides the strongmen, and one provides the propaganda.
I believe in free markets. I do not confuse free markets with the giant corporations that fund government, depend upon government, and would not exist in their present form in a free market. Another article on that subject is coming soon.
THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE
The media sells you an illusion of choice. If you don’t want chaos, you must “back the blue.” If you question militarized law enforcement, you must support disorder. If you’re against militarized police, you must also stand against private property and cheer as Antifa destroys it.
You are presented with opposing packages of beliefs and told that you must choose one whole package or the other.
As I asked in Back the Blue vs. Defund the Police:
“The anti-government right wants to expand the police while the authoritarian left wants to abolish the police?”
RED AND BLUE VS. YOU
Today, the political tide has turned. More people are looking for honest liberty, but they’re still being shown a false choice.
To the young person or the everyman, it can look really strange.
You have the so-called limited-government side. They claim they want limited government, individual liberty, and a free market. But to be on that side, you have to want war, entangled alliances with Israel and others, and militarized law enforcement.
Or:
If you don’t want those things and you believe in peace, free speech, and other civil liberties, then you’re lumped in with the so-called civil-liberties side—a bunch of communist libertines. They claim to hate government but chastise you if you don’t explicitly trust the government with your healthcare and protection.
This is all by design.
People group together and then lump others in with the opposing group. What you get is political team sports, where people argue over which side is better.
The best side—the side of liberty, common sense, and morality—is lost to the mob-rule mentality we are told would devour us absent “our” democracy.
We are told that without “our democracy,” we would fall into chaos and into the hands of strongmen. But we already have the chaos, the strongmen, and the gaslighting propaganda used to convince us that choosing between them constitutes freedom.
THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE
There is an alternative.
Stop drinking from a contaminated government stream and follow me for AntiState Content.
About the Author
Mike Shaner is the founder of Black Market Cattle Company and River Cade Farms. He writes about faith, liberty, food freedom, family, self-reliance, rural life, and building outside centralized systems.