“Defund the police” is not the slogan of people who sincerely believe that black lives matter. Rather, “defund the police” is the program of communists who want to establish a totalitarian police state. In the last year, they have made much progress towards their goal. As lawful, constitutional policing in the United States is defunded and rendered ineffective, the new rulers of the streets are the communist mobs. They exercise their power by assaulting or murdering political opponents; by extorting, looting, and destroying businesses; and by making it clear to all that the only political assemblies allowed are the ones the communists choose to allow.
Mob violence as the replacement for civil policing was the method of the Red Guards in Maoist China, of the turbas divinas in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, and the colectivos in today’s communist Venezuela.
The roots go back to the Weimar Republic in 1920s, to the brownshirts organized by the National Socialist German Workers Party (“Nazi” for short.) The national socialist brownshirts often brawled with German communists, who were international socialists. The Weimar communist mobs, who called themselves Antifaschistische Aktion, are ancestors of today’s so-called “Antifa.”
Then as now, there was little practical difference between fascism and communism. The brawls between the supporters of Stalin and Hitler were mostly about semantics—and about which group would get to run a mass-murdering totalitarian government. Indeed, many Nazi street fighters were recruited from the communist party. Whether as national socialists or international socialists, the mobs spread terror and thrilled in murder and mayhem.
The same is going on in the United States right now.
The leading organization promoting “defund the police” is the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation, Inc. It was founded in 2012 by Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. It has never actually cared about black lives, except as a pretext for the destruction of the American republic and its replacement with communism.
An organization that really did believe that black lives matter might take into account what black people think about their own safety. A Gallup Poll taken in June-July 2020 asked “Would you rather the police spend more time, the same amount of time or less time as they currently spend in your area?” Among blacks, 20% said “more time”; 61% said “same amount of time”; and only 19% said “less time.” Other racial groups had approximately similar answers. Even among the 19% who said “less time,” there were likely many respondents who did not want “no time.”
But thanks to Black Lives Matter corporation, what minority and other vulnerable communities are getting right now is much less policing. Some police departments have been partly defunded. Many departments are understaffed because of early retirements, as good officers have been driven out by the hate campaign against the police. Most urban departments are far less proactive than they used to be. They may eventually respond to a 911 call, but when they see a gang of young males perhaps casing a store, the police are now more likely to drive on by than to stop and investigate.
The effects are predictable: a sharp increase in homicide rates in urban areas, including Denver and Aurora. The victims are disproportionately poor and black. The national pullback in policing started after the Ferguson, Missouri, riots in 2014; intensified after the 2015 riots in Baltimore; and became a national catastrophe after this summer’s anti-police riots.
Black Lives Matter Global Foundation, Inc., purports to oppose systemic racism. But that’s a lie. The Castro-founded military dictatorship in Cuba has long been notorious for its persecution of black people—not to mention the regime’s many other crimes against humanity. When Fidel Castro died in 2016, a BLMGF essay extolled him, concluding “Fidel vive.”
The communist regime in China has always practiced systemic racism, in decades of genocide against the many non-Chinese ethnic groups trapped in the communist empire, including Uighurs, Tibetans, Mongols, and Hui. The Chinese Communist Party’s genocide against racial minorities didn’t stop a BLMGF corporate spinoff, the Black Futures Lab project, from taking funding from a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party—namely the Chinese Progressive Association, a Marxist organization in San Francisco.
The BLMGF corporation has admitted its communist orientation. In a 2015 interview, founder Patrisse Cullors described herself and cofounder Alica Garza as “trained Marxists.” In a 2018 interview, Cullors recounted her year of studying Marx, Lenin, and Mao, under the guidance of the Labor Community Strategy Center, a pro-communist organization. Her mentor was Eric Mann, formerly a leader in the Weather Underground, an extreme-left terrorist organization of the 1960s and 1970s.
Alicia Garza, according to promotional material from her publisher Penguin Random House, “describes herself as a queer social activist and Marxist.” She also describes herself as a great admirer of Joanne Chesimard, who after being convicted of murdering a police officer escaped to Cuba.
The third BLMGF cofounder, Opal Tometi, advocates strongly for Venezuela’s communist tyrant Nicolás Maduro. According to her, the Maduro regime’s notorious theft of elections is actually “a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world.”
Communism has always sought the destruction of all civil society, of everything that stands between the individual and the communist dictatorship. That includes the family. As Karl Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto, “Abolition of the family!” Or as Black Lives Matter corporation put it, BLM and its “comrades” work to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure…”
Lately, BLM has been trying to scrub its websites and other publicity materials of some of its Marxist rhetoric. As Ronald Reagan observed of communists, “the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat.”
So it is no surprise that BLMGF is now trying to hide its communism—now that people are discovering the difference between the slogan “black lives matter” and the communist organization BLMGF.
“Defund the police” is also touted by Angela Davis, a now-aged communist professor who is venerated by BLMGF and other American communists. Yet Davis is a strong supporter of police violence—as long as the police state is run by communists. When East Germany was under the jackboot of a puppet communist regime controlled by the imperialist Soviet Union, Davis was hosted by the regime and sang its praises. On the eve of a trip to the Soviet Union, Prof. Alan Dershowitz asked Davis to put in a good word on behalf of the Jewish prisoners in the Soviet gulag. She replied that the Jews were “fascists” and “Zionists” who deserved to be in prison.
American communists, including BLMGF and Davis, are big supporters of police states, including Cuba, Venezuela, and China. Nobody who studies Marx, Lenin, and Mao as role models could be otherwise.
So today’s “defund the police” should be understood as an intermediate measure, from the communist perspective. The more the existing society is destabilized, delegitimized, and demoralized, the easier it is to replace it with a communist dictatorship. As of today, American police officers are a big impediment to the communist dream. The vast decent people who try to keep the peace in a free society—just the opposite of the thugs and bullies who comprise the police in communist regimes.
In the last several years, and especially in 2020, BLMGF has been quite successful in its attacks on the police. While it hasn’t gained formal command of municipal police departments, it has a good substitute: politicians like Michael Hancock in Denver, Bill de Blasio in New York City, and Muriel Bowser in Washington, D.C., who ensure that when communist mobs rampage, riot, and loot—and when communists assault noncommunists for exercising the right to assemble—the police response is tepid.
In cities all across the United States, the real police under the rule of law are being displaced by violent mob “police,” who rule the streets whenever they choose. A thrifty proposition for taxpayers, since instead of having to pay taxes for police who operate under the rule of law, the mobs—like their Brownshirt and Red Guard predecessors—work for free, their only remuneration being whatever they loot and steal.
Needless to say, BLMGF, Inc., advocates for gun control. All communist regimes are predicated on a monopoly of force, of keeping people helpless against the communist police and military violence. Although many gun control advocates are not personally racist, gun control in America has always been racist, starting with the first gun control law in the American colonies—a 1619 Virginia statute against slaves having arms.
A genuinely anti-racist organization might have a lot to say about how gun control laws past and present have been used against black Americans. An organization that truly opposes slavery would have a lot to criticize about the Chinese Communist Party’s slave labor camps in Xinjiang. An organization that truly opposes unjustified police violence wouldn’t idolize the worst police states in the world.
For decades, the Independence Institute has been working to improve American policing—not to defund and destroy it. Back in the 1980s, we opposed the excesses of the so-called “War on Drugs,” at a time when few others dared to speak out. We have published hundreds of thousands of words about reforming oft-abused programs like civil asset forfeiture and the proliferation of offensive military equipment in civil policing. Back in February 2020, I testified in the Colorado House Judiciary committee in favor of a bill to allow Coloradans who were victimized by unconstitutional government action to have a remedy in Colorado courts. Although squashed by House leadership, the bill was—with significant improvements—enacted in the special session this summer.
If you’re against systemic racism, then you might applaud the decades of work of the Independence Institute’s Education Center Director, Pam Benigno. Thanks to her, many disadvantaged students, of all colors, have been liberated from monopoly schools and have thrived at schools of choice.
The Independence Institute is a true social justice organization. Communist organizations are the opposite. If you want civil liberty, the rule of law, public safety, and fairness for people of all colors, then stand with the Independence Institute. And if you would prefer that the United States were much more like Venezuela and Cuba, then support the work of the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation, Inc, starting with “defund the police.”
