By Theodore Shoebat & Walid Shoebat

The only thing that stands between peace and mob rule is the law and the ones who enforce it. This would be the police, and this is why we are witnessing an unprecedented attack on the police. This is the only reason as to why we are seeing these activists pressing for “police reform” when they really want to diminish the police’s authority to enforce law and order.  

There is a trend growing against the police, and there is also a push to democratize the police, or to have the police department completely under the control of ’the people’ who would be represented by a commission of radicals. This civilian oversight would make it easy for people to accuse the police of “civil rights” abuses and would make the leeway towards the persecution of the police. They want to make it easier to prosecute officers by lowering the standard of evidence for accusations of civil rights abuses against the police; they want a mob of activists to act as the inquisition towards officers, providing the conditions for the breakdown of police authority.

Of course, these people are not outright saying that they desire for a revolution against the police; but rather they are demanding for “civilian oversight” to dictate their demands to the police. This “civilian oversight” would consist of Left-wing activists who already have a “defund the police” (or even “abolish the police”) ideology, and they will only work to overpower the police by not only making unreasonable demands (don’t shoot at people who are waving a knife at you or a civilian), but to also exert efforts to punish officers for shooting people justifiably. A favor towards criminals and an enmity towards law enforcement is the love of lawlessness, and nothing good can come out of such. But this attempted revolution is occurring incrementally, lest they shock people too much. We see this incremental move in the city of San Antonio, where an attempt was made to remove the police union’s collective bargaining and to impose more civilian oversight on the police department. We are talking about Prop B., which did not win in the referendum, but not by a landslide (51% to 49%), nothing to be proud about and only a warning sign of a rising trend towards revolutionary thought. 

In the current system of San Antonio, the City and the police union negotiate a contract every five years that determines important things like wages, health care, and disciplinary procedures. If Prop B (or something like it) ever passes in the future, it would provide the avenue and the opportunity for the mob to gather enough support for voting for defunding the police by demanding the reducing of police funds. The Prop B movement, which is directed by a group called Fix SAPD, claims that they don’t want to defund the police but simply want more “community oversight” over the police. As Fix SAPD’s Deputy Director Ananda Tomas, says: “This is about the community being able to have a stronger voice in policing … This is the only way that we can have a say over policing in our city and create a contract that has better community oversight, that has less officers fired and brought back, that has a disciplinary system that works.” But if there is community oversight, that means those of the “defund the police” persuasion can petition for what they want, and if they have enough people, they could succeed in what they demand.

Under Prop B, the police would lose their bargaining power and the City would have the authority to set the terms of employment as it sees fit, which would chip away a piece of the police’s power. Now, while the City would (technically) have the power to determine the contract for the police as it wants, this would be quite difficult to accomplish because (as in any negotiation) both sides need to feel satisfied. The City cannot just leave the police unhappy and declare what it desires; the cops would need to have their demands met to some extent. Nonetheless, the dangerous element of Prop B is that it would be an incremental step towards stripping away the political leverage of the police. As we read in San Antonio Report:

“Meet and confer gives the City a significant upper hand. City Council could just set the terms of employment as it sees fit, something that would be unlikely, because the City could lose police officers if the terms aren’t attractive.”

It would also be a small step towards democratizing the authority of the police, since it allows for citizens to petition against police contracts that they don’t find favor with. While this would still be based on a petition and not necessarily very effective, it is nevertheless an incremental move forward placing the police’s bargaining rights under the complaints of a mob. 

Under Prop P (according to a St. Mary’s University School of Law professor) “the City of San Antonio would have the upper hand in contract negotiations under meet and confer”. So, what Prop B wanted to do was give the upper hand to the City over the police union. Although, as an option, the City could still negotiate the contract with the police department under Prop B, but at the same time it wouldn’t have to and could just just dictate the terms of the contract.

Moreover, Prop B would have allowed civilians to petition against police contracts, meaning that Prop B would have provided the opportunity to manipulate enough people with anti-police propaganda to gather enough signatures against the police department’s contract. What Prop B would have done is give an incremental advantage over the police to the mob. By the mob, we are not talking about the average person who wants the police to have sufficient authority, but anarchists and Left-wing radicals who are waging war against the established system and want to supplant it with their own utopianism which does not exist anywhere but in their warped heads. These people are agitators and exaggerators who make outlandish statements with no basis in reality, but they make them for no other purpose than to stoke up rage.

The organization, Fix SAPD, tries to paint itself as moderate as they claim that they only want “police accountability” and are not working to abolish the police. But to make an entire ideological movement over police misconduct in San Antonio doesn’t really make sense when you look at the actual numbers for police shootings in this city. For example, in the entire county of Bexar (wherein lies San Antonio) which has a population of over two million people, there were just nineteen cases of officers shooting at people. In eleven of those cases, a person was killed by officers; in sixteen of the nineteen cases, the person being shot at was armed with a weapon. In other words, these killings were justified.

But, an entire ideological movement has been formed against the police over eleven people being killed by cops justifiably, in a county of over two million people? The outrage over the police in San Antonio is unfitting to say the least. In simpler terms, it just doesn’t make sense. All of this outrage against a police force that has killed 90 people since 2016 does not add up. It does make sense, however, that there is an ideological motive that stems from political radicalism, and this can be seen in the list of organizations that are supporting Fix SAPD. One of these organizations is Our Revolution, which was founded by Jewish socialist politician, Bernie Sanders, and is currently chaired by Jewish unionist Larry Cohen. The president of Our Revolution is Nina Turner, a politician and agitator who enjoys making over the top exaggerations fueled by a vicious emotionalism and which stokes up anti-police sentiment. For example, in June of 2020 — amidst the hysteria of the George Floyd riots — Turner called the police an occupying force of black neighborhoods:

“The history of the police has not been one of ‘protect and serve … It has been one of ‘occupy,’ it’s been one of that says ‘they are bad, they are evil, they’re poor, we must be there at all times.’”

If black neighborhoods are under an ‘occupation’ by the cops, it is as if Turner is portraying black areas as being divided from the rest of the country, and cops are merely an occupying force like soldiers in Iraq. If the police are an occupation force, then that means blacks are a separate nation. It is a rhetoric of polarization; and what she accuses the police officers of, she is doing herself, seeing officers as evil and as an enemy. But, if black communities really see the cops as racist or as singling them out, such rhetoric is found inadequate in the face of the fact that 61% of blacks want police presence in their neighborhoods to remain the same. And these numbers were not found by some conservative media outlet, but by Gallup Center on Black Voices. So how could the police be an enemy of blacks, or of the people, when the great majority of people are happy with the police?

Also on the staff of Our Revolution is Jewish Left-wing professor, Huck Gutman, the Former Chief of Staff for socialist Senator Bernie Sanders. Gutman is also a commentator on poetry and on his own website presents a poem by Soviet writer, Vladimir Mayakovsy, which states:

“Listen,

comrades of posterity,

to the agitator

the rabble-rouser.

Stifling

the torrents of poetry,

I’ll skip

the volumes of lyrics;

as one alive,

I’ll address the living.

I’ll join you

in the far communist future”

So, it just so happens that people talking about “police accountability,” in a country where there isn’t a police problem (but a criminal problem) want us to revere the criminal and to have dreams for a communist future. The activists who want us to see the police as enforcing racism, want us to revere a regime that killed tens of millions of people. This is not surprising. All radical revolutionaries need chaos to capitalize upon so as to usher in their revolution. If you diminish the police, you increase violent crime. With the weakening of the police force comes the rise of private security which would be afforded by people with enough money, which means poor areas would be the ones most heavily troubled by an increase in the crime rate. With such divisions, those who are in the most dire situation would be the most vulnerable to revolutionary thinking, and since it would be the wealthy classes who would be the most protected from the violence, then the propaganda would be against the rich, and class warfare would then be promoted. Taking advantage of chaos to foment revolution has always been a strategy of the communists. In 1919, Leon Trotsy saw the violence of World War One as an opportunity to advance the communist revolution: “Bloody chaos still stands over Europe. The old is combining with the new. Events pile up on events; and blood accumulates on blood. But from this chaos, ever more resolutely and boldly emerges the idea of the Communist Order”.

It is not surprising that there are communists who are in the ranks of Our Revolution. The Communist Party USA admitted that they have members in Our Revolution working for the Bernie Sanders campaign:

“Members were involved with Bernie Sanders campaign and are continuing their activism in Our Revolution, Swing Left, Indivisible, Working Families Party, statewide groups like the New Virginia Majority and local Democratic Party groups and 2018 electoral campaigns.”

It is not to our amazement that communists would be collaborating with Our Revolution. Its founder, Bernie Sanders, is an open socialist. A socialist utopia cannot come to fruition without revolution, and a revolution is sparked through a green light to the mob. A mob is never satisfied; you can give them the world, and they will declare their rule over the earth and kill the person who gave it to them. You can give them the whole earth and they will simply burn it down. Mobs stand victorious over the society that gave them power, after they ruin and burn it to the ground. Mob rule is seen as a means to fanatical utopianism. Hence why these fanatics are demanding for complete civilian oversight to be imposed upon police departments. Hence why one of the supporters of Fix SAPD is a Left-wing organization called Campaign Zero, which wants the police to be ruled by a mob. For example, on its own website Campaign Zero has a list of demands for the police. One demand is: “Establish an all-civilian oversight structure with discipline power that includes a Police Commission and Civilian Complaints Office”.

One of the “powers” of this “civilian oversight structure” would be to “determine policy for the police department based on community input and expertise”. In such a system, the only people who would be giving “community input” would be people who despise the police; it would be people who think that an officer who shoots and kills someone trying to stab someone (or the officer) with a knife is a ‘murderer’ who needs to be arrested and tried. Just look at how the mob frothed their hysterical rage against officer Nicholas Reardon because he shot Ma’Khia Bryant when she was trying to stab another woman.

The mob wanted to crucify officer Darren Wilson because he shot Michael Brown after he tried to use his service weapon against him. No matter what the story is, no matter how justified the officer is in killing an assailant, the mob is never happy. The reason why is because the mob wants something outside of what it claims to want. The mob claims to want justice, but it only cries this out because it wants to do injustice against its neighbor. The mob claims to want equality, but what it really wants is to be above everyone else. A mob is only angry because its not in power.

Once the mob gets in power, all of its former cries for justice are dissolved in the injustice it perpetuates; all of its plaintive cries against inequality are disintegrated in the cries of those it torments, as it works to manifest the nightmare that he sees as utopia, to manifest an idea that only exists in its warped head. The only people who would want to be on a civilian commission to judge the police would be people who despise the police, and thus the concept of civilian oversight pushed by Leftists has only a motivation towards mob rule over the police. Campaign Zero wants the mob to have the power to “evaluate and fire the Police Chief, if needed”, and of course this same organization demands for “full-time, competitive salaries for all members”.

Thus you will have a mob judging the police based on its own hysterical mentality (an officer is a murderer if he kills someone for trying to kill him or others) while being paid for. It makes one wonder if, when they say “defund the police”, what they really want is for police funds to be reallocated to their own pockets. Also, Campaign Zero wants the civilian commission (the mob) to have the power to “make disciplinary and policy recommendations to the Police Chief”, and if the Police Chief does not listen, then the commission can “compel the Police Chief to explain why he/she has not followed a recommendation”, and if the Chief still doesn’t acquiesce then the civilian commission will “decide cases where the Police Chief does not follow recommendations”. So these “recommendations” are not recommendations at all, but orders, since if they are not followed then the mob overrides the Chief. Other than the fantasy of coercion, Campaign Zero also wants to make it easier to find officers guilty in the courtroom: “lower the standard of proof in civil rights cases against police” .

This means that officers who kill people justifiably could still be tried for murder with arguments like ‘just because the person was armed with a knife and was swinging it at you don’t mean he deserved to die.’ This mob wants to make it easier for criminals to terrorize, and they want to make it difficult for cops to kill the tormenters. Ultimately, what these ideologues are doing is setting up the conditions for revolution. They will say that they don’t want to ruin the cohesiveness of society, but they are nevertheless doing just that when they call for a complete democratization of the police under the pretence of a police problem which does not exist in the United States.

An entire ideological movement over an hysterical view of the police, calling for Left-wing activists — who are excessively and vitriolically critical of the police — to rule over the cops, and to, with a lower standard of evidence, make accusations of murder and brutality at officers even when they justifiably use deadly force — all of these things are merely a way to wage war on the institution that keeps society stable and safer: the police department. One of the symbols of authority in modern society is the police badge, and if enough people despise it, then enough people hate authority, and the conditions for revolution would only further ripen. While the ideological underpinnings of this movement can be found in Left-wing thought (such as Marxism), there is a deeper historical root for this tree of rotten fruit: the Enlightenment, the very thing which sprang to life both Right-wing fanaticism and Left-wing lunacy. We have discussed in depth the connections between Right-wing radicalism and the Enlightenment, but there is also found in the hysteria we see today a parallel with the Enlightenment radicalism that led to the French Revolution of the late 18th century. What these fanatics are calling for is for the mob to rule over one of the institution that carries out violence to enforce the authority of the state, and to democratize this would be to have a mob demobilize it and diminish its power to purge away criminals. In the Enlightenment there was a call to have the state completely controlled by ‘the people.’

The reason why they pushed this was because by popularizing democratization they would then set up the conditions for a revolution to overthrow monarchy. For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the ideologue who heavily influenced the French Revolution, envisioned an entire assembly of the people dictating the laws of the government: “the Sovereign can never act but when the people are assembled.” Rousseau went so far as to affirm that once a society obeys a governor then they lose all integrity as a people: “If therefore a people promise unconditionally to obey, the act of making such a promise dissolves their existence, and they lose their quality of a people; for at the moment that there is a master there is no longer a Sovereign; and the body politic is destroyed of course.” (See Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, part 2, ch. 3)

In other words, since the people are the sovereign, there can be no king since monarchy is antithetical to the idea that the people are the rulers. Thus, while Rousseau is not exhorting for the overthrow of the monarch, he is advocating for the conditions that would lead to revolution. In the eighteenth century, it was about democratizing sovereignty; today it is about democratizing the police. Both are attempts at breaking down institutions of governing, and both are a war against authority.

To have a mob of activists dictate the fate of officers and find them guilty of “murder” when they were simply doing their jobs, would be the establishment of mock courts the existence of which would only serve as a facade. What we are witnessing, to use the words of Augustin Barruel when he wrote on the ideological origins of the bloody French Revolution, is a frantic Philosophism, with an entire network of conspirators and their sanhedreins, “eradicating from man every symptom of reason.” (Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinsim, part 1, ch. 9, p. 174).

What we are dealing with is a group that wants to run the mock trial; the scoffers of authority are possessed with that very spirit of the Sanhedrim of antiquity, who pressured the government to slay the Logos, the Mind of God incarnated in the flesh. They were vacuous of reason, and they murdered Reason; filled with madness, they were driven by an hysterical bloodlust, and gazing upon Truth nailed on the cross, Truth was no longer with them; standing upon the mountain that appeared like a skull, and remaining to scoff in the face of cruelty, death became their emblem. Such are the hearts of those today who desire power in the name of freedom. They will, in the words of Barruel, “drag others in their train, craving a servitude termed peace”. (Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, part iv, preliminary discourse).