It was only two years ago that Joe Biden answered a left-wing activist’s question about whether some police funds should be redirected elsewhere with “Yes, absolutely.” Also in 2020, his then-running mate, Kamala Harris, responded to the hundreds of violent Antifa/BLM riots by saying that “they should not” stop. Biden, Harris, and other liberals also never condemned the “Defund the Police” movement or left-wing district attorneys who’ve been putting dangerous criminals back on the streets. But now, with the midterm elections approaching and Democrat fortunes questionable, Biden sings a very different tune.
In fact, in what some have called ultimate gaslighting, on Tuesday he portrayed his MAGA opponents as the ones who are anti-law enforcement.
As CNBC reported yesterday:
President Joe Biden had a message for lawmakers who defended the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol as he touted his Safer America Plan Tuesday.
“Let me say this to my ‘MAGA Republican’ friends in Congress,” the president said, referring to former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan. “Don’t tell me to support law enforcement if you won’t condemn what happened on the sixth.”
“For God’s sake, whose side are you on?” Biden said.
Biden admonished the lawmakers as he called for more funding for police before a crowd at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Investments in community policing and crime prevention are key policy components of his Safer America Plan, and the president urged communities to use federal funds to supplement local police as early as May.
Biden also chided Trump’s supporters in the GOP for claiming the mantle as the “law and order” party while defending the insurrectionists who attacked police officers in Washington, D.C., last year.
“You can’t be pro-law enforcement and pro-insurrection,” he said. “You can’t be a party of law and order and call the people who attacked the police on Jan. 6, patriots. You can’t do it.”
Of course, the January 6 shtick is what might be called, using a magician’s term, misdirection. There are no lawmakers who “defended” the “riot”; there are people who’ve pointed out that it was just a riot (not an “insurrection”) in which trespassing was the main crime and the only person violently killed was unarmed protester Ashli Babbitt.
It also isn’t January 6 defendants who’ve been assaulting, mugging, raping, and murdering innocent Americans in the course of the last few years’ almost historic crime spike. Coddled criminals in Democrat jurisdictions, and illegal aliens invited in by the Biden administration, are doing that.
In fact, it could be said that you can’t be pro-law enforcement and pro-calling January 6 an insurrection, as such misrepresentation reflects contempt for legal definitions necessary for just application of law. Is respect for “law enforcement” reflected in the violation of January 6 defendants’ rights, in their persecution?
(This is even more striking when considering that an actual armed insurrection — CHAZ, the “Capital Hill Autonomous Zone” takeover of a Seattle neighborhood in 2020 — was winked at, and then ignored, by Democrat politicians.)
Biden’s hypocrisy didn’t escape his critics, either. As New York Post columnist Miranda Devine tweeted:
Providing more examples, Fox News related:
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., tweeted, “Joe Biden wants to make it easy for criminals to sue cops, he staffed his administration with defund-the-police radicals, but he wants to pretend he’s pro law-enforcement? What a joke.”
Brigitte Gabriel, a New York Times bestselling author and founder of ACT for America, tweeted, “Matt Cartwright supported defunding the Wilkes-Barre police 2 years ago, now Joe Biden is pretending to call for funding the police in the same city while rallying in support of Cartwright. This is called gaslighting.”
Matt Vespa, senior editor at Townhall, tweeted “It’s great that Dems are pro-law and order AFTER they allowed their people to burn down half the country during the 2020 summer riots and had all their defund the police initiatives burn to ash at the ballot box. 100% authentic 180-degree turn.”
“There is a lot to unpack in Biden’s new attempt to backtrack his party’s commitment to defunding and dismantling police departments across the country,” Congresswoman Beth Van Duyne tweeted.
Yet even if Biden’s current proposals are taken at face value, they miss the point. He’s poised to make a $37 billion budget request to fund law enforcement, and, of course, adequate police funding is imperative. But it’s largely for naught when local Democrat politicians and prosecutors immediately put arrested criminals back on the streets and handcuff police with political correctness — and when Biden says nothing about this.
Moreover, Biden has sought to paint his GOP opponents as anti-law enforcement with not just January 6, but also by emphasizing some conservatives’ post-Mar-a-Lago-raid calls to defund the FBI. The idea is that you can’t be pro-law enforcement and anti-FBI. (Actually, you can — when the FBI has become lawless.)
Of course, it is true that local police and the FBI are both law enforcement. And a buff tabby and Bengal tiger are both cats — but you want only one of them in your home catching mice.
Crime-fighting is meant to be, and still is, almost exclusively a local and state government domain. The FBI isn’t necessary to reclaim the streets from the now-emboldened local criminals; adequately funded police backed by sane D.A.s and local officials are.
But conflating federal and local law enforcement may be the point, some suspect. After all, if you wanted complete federal control, you’d have to federalize local police (which, incidentally, are perhaps the last conservative society-control mechanism). What better way than to discredit local cops, render them impotent via “woke” policy, let crime explode so people become desperate, and then claim the Federales must ride in to the rescue?
Since he “who pays the piper calls the tune,” federally funding local police could be a major step toward eliminating them.
