Saying it with a straight face is a true accomplishment.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he doesn’t know any candidate in favor of defunding the police, even though various well-known leftists he has backed or associated with at some point have parroted the talking point and its accompanying calls to slash police budgets or eliminate departments altogether.
“Nobody I know who’s running for office is talking about ‘defunding the police,’” Sanders said in a Sunday CNN interview in reference to candidates who ran in this month’s election. “What we’re talking about is making police officers accountable.”
Yet members of the far-left group of U.S. Representatives known as “The Squad” have said otherwise, as have new progressives recently elected on November 3.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), for instance, argued that slashing $1 billion from the NYPD’s budget didn’t go far enough.
“Defunding police means defunding police,” she said in a statement. “If these reports are accurate, then these proposed ‘cuts’ to the NYPD budget are a disingenuous illusion. This is not a victory. The fight to defund policing continues.”
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Another Squad member to back defunding the police is Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who supported the Minneapolis City Council’s vow to abolish its city’s police department.
“We can’t go about creating a different process with the same infrastructure in place,” Omar said in June. “And so dismantling it, and then looking at what funding priorities should look like as we imagine a new way forward, is what needs to happen.”
Another “Squad” member, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), used the #DefundPolice hashtag in a June tweet and has called for removing police officers from schools.
Representative-elect Cori Bush (D-Mo.) also committed to police defunding in a tweet just weeks before the election.
“We’re going to defund the police and refund our social services,” Bush tweeted. “Don’t like this idea? Well, we don’t like dead Black & Brown bodies & broken families at the hands of those sworn to protect us. The police have failed at fixing themselves — so we’re going to do it.”
Representative-elect Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) has also called for defunding the police, which he compared to defunding “the occupation of black bodies and the militarization of our communities.”
Sanders’ comments were made as House Democrats debate the direction the party should go following stinging losses on November 3. Republicans are poised to pick up at least a dozen seats in the House, making for Democrats’ slimmest majority since World War II.
The party’s state is in such disarray, in fact, that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is reportedly urging Democrats in her chamber not to accept jobs with a potential Biden administration out of fears it could shrink their majority further.
In this same election, the Squad gained new members. This suggests that there are two simultaneous phenomena taking place in and around the Democrat Party.
First, the party is becoming increasingly radical and socialist, as evidenced by the victories of open socialists (spouting doctrines such as “defunding the police,” the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and abolishing ICE) in safe blue districts.
The second, however, is that, despite the ascendance of the party’s progressive wing (or perhaps because of it), the Democrat Party in general is declining in popularity with the public.
This is seen in the fact that a former bellwether state such as Ohio with a blue-collar, working-class population has now become a reliably red state, as has Florida — where Republicans have made significant gains with Hispanics.
In reality, Democrats were trounced in the election, though they continue to claim victory and a “mandate” for their far-left agenda due to the media’s anointing of Joe Biden as “president-elect.” But is it believable that Democrats as a party could have fared so poorly while the man at the top of the ticket supposedly won by such a significant margin, going so far as to flip red states such as Georgia and Arizona? The strangeness of the situation underscores Team Trump’s accusations of voter fraud.
Election Day may be over, but the struggle against a socialist Left that seeks to radically transform America is just beginning. Patriots everywhere must heed the call to action.
