It was a bit of a jarring thing to hear during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union, coming from Biden himself. “We should all agree: ...
It was a bit of a jarring thing to hear during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union, coming from Biden himself.
“We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training. Resources and training they need to protect their communities,” Biden said.
This got rapturous applause — from both sides of the aisle:
This isn’t what we expected here at The Western Journal, given the fact we’ve been hearing plenty of defund the police rhetoric over the last few years.
Now, we know what defunding the police will do: skyrocket crime, demoralize law enforcement and frighten urban residents. No one is going to co-sign that slogan today. It wasn’t too long ago, however, that things were much different — something GOP Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs highlighted during a hearing on Tuesday.
In a video compilation to kick off the presentation before the House Judiciary Committee, Biggs reminded everyone of what high-profile Democrats were saying just a few years ago.
“Democrats now say they don’t support defunding the police … But here’s the truth,” the text at the beginning of Biggs’ video, which kicked off the “Reimagining Public Safety in the COVID-19 Era” hearing, read.
There were members of “the squad” — five of them, actually — calling for defunding the police.
Minnesota Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar said the Minneapolis Police Department should be “dismantle[d].” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “Defunding the police means defunding the police” in response to New York Police Department cuts she didn’t think went deep enough. Missouri Rep. Cori Bush said she was behind the movement, as well.
After an unarmed man named Daunte Wright was shot and killed last year by Minneapolis-area police during the trial of officer Derek Chauvin — eventually convicted of murdering George Floyd — Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan tweeted, “Policing in our country is inherently & intentionally racist” and said there needed to be “No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can’t be reformed.”
Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Presley , who’s kind of like the annex to the squad, also said that “yes, I support the defund movement.”
Then there was now-Vice President Kamala Harris. After her presidential run, Harris was asked by “Good Morning America” host George Stephanopoulos about Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s plan to reduce Los Angeles’ police budget by $150 million and to shift that money into health and training initiatives for youth.
“I applaud Eric Garcetti for doing what he’s doing,” Harris said.
Garcetti would soon see homicide rates skyrocket to the highest levels in over a decade. Late last year, an LAPD union boss warned people to stay away from the city because of the crime rate and said “Los Angeles is like the movie ‘Purge,’ but instead of 24 hours to commit your crime, they have 365 days to go out and commit their crimes.” So no, that didn’t age well.
And then there was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who advocated for what’s become defund-lite: the concept that some police functions can be better served by other people.
“There are some issues that we ask police to do — like mental health issues or policing in schools and all the rest — that perhaps we can shuffle some of that money around,” Pelosi said.
With a little bit of time left to run, the presentation was cut off. Here’s the full video if you want to take a look:
To be fair, at least “the squad” still reps the “defund the police” tagline. Almost every other Democrat in Congress has disavowed it or pretended they were saying something that they weren’t.
It may be jarring to hear Biden loudly declare that we need to “fund the police, fund them!” during the State of the Union. It’s just as jarring when you see the two people clapping behind him — Harris and Pelosi — praising the very movement he was disavowing in that moment.
That’s because it was a profoundly terrible political decision. “Defund the police” would have been bad branding in any other year, but it was doubly awful when the crime rate spiked and police were retiring all over the place. As if Americans didn’t usually know Democrats were usually to blame for countenancing lawlessness and handcuffing police, the Democrats made it easy for them this time.
It doesn’t matter how many times President Biden chants “fund them, fund them” during the State of the Union or how loudly his fellow Democrats clapped. When we needed them to help make Americans safe, they were running around doing the opposite.
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