 As the Black Lives Matter protests continue, I think that it is becoming increasingly clear that defund the police is a winning slogan. It's gaining traction. And as these protests continue to take place, it's evident that they are changing hearts and minds. You know, defund the police is simplistic, it's easy to understand, but yet it's hard to obfuscate and, you know, try to co-opt if you're a politician. And according to a YouGov and Yahoo News poll, a plurality of Americans already believe that we should, in fact, reallocate resources away from police offices and, you know, funnel them towards other sectors of society, such as health care and education. So you know, this is something that I think is working. So we have to stick with this. It's a winning strategy. And if you're confused, then we just have to educate you about this. But I mean, of course, there is this predictable instinct of liberal lawmakers to try to temper people's expectations about what they're willing to deliver. And they're saying, you say defund the police. How about reform the police instead? So for example, Joe Biden said that he doesn't support defunding the police full stop. Jim Claiborne said nobody is going to defund the police and instead called for a quote reimagining of police, which I don't know what that means. And Stacey Abrams very stupidly, I think, said defund the police offers a false choice, except no, it doesn't offer a false choice. We haven't been given a choice, right? The choice up until now has always just instinctively been to respond to crises that cities are facing with more policing. Instead of actually responding to the crisis of homelessness with housing, we just police the homeless. Instead of responding to drug addiction with actual treatment, we just try to police drug addiction. Instead of responding to mental health crises with mental health care, we just try to police these problems away and that one size fits all approach has failed. It's failed. So what false choice do you think that the protesters are trying to offer by saying, let's defund the police? By saying, let's defund the police, they're saying use the money that we spend on policing these issues and actually try to selectively fix these problems by doing more than just trying to police them away because that doesn't make sense. It's not working, right? So I think that this instinct of liberal lawmakers to just try and anticipate what Republicans will say, how they'll attack it and then opt for an incrementalist approach that hasn't been successful, right? And part of the reason why politicians so often are actually able to do this is because the media goes along with what they say, right? I mean, the same thing has happened with Occupy Wall Street. The media took a very simple message of Occupy Wall Street and they tried to obfuscate. They try to make it seem as if the protesters, they didn't actually have a message. But you can't really do that with something as straightforward as defund the police. It means what it looks like. It means defund the police, right? And on top of that, you always see these types of attempts by the media to preemptively water down these policies for the politicians. MSNBC is notorious for this when it comes to Medicare for All. They did nonstop propaganda against Medicare for All and they're basically doing the politicians jobs for them rather than acting as a check on the politicians rather than actually trying to be objective and look at the facts of the matter. So when MSNBC did a segment explaining what defund the police means, I was a little bit worried. I saw this pop up on YouTube and I immediately thought, oh my God, I'm going to have to watch this and I'm going to have to rip it apart. But to my surprise, this segment was a game changer. This was a phenomenal segment by Ali Velce where he actually low key kind of crushes it and explaining what it means to defund the police. Now I know that you can already find explainer videos of people online like myself and David Dole explaining what defund the police means. But the problem is that if you are in that liberal mindset and you are an MSNBC brained boomer who only trusts the hosts, they're on MSNBC because you think that they're more legitimate, they have to say it, right? We have to have them say it. So if Ali Velce is saying this and educating his viewers about what defund the police means, this actually has a real substantial impact, right? Is it forces people to learn what defund the police means and not just instinctively try to turn away and opt for a more incremental approach because defund the police sounds too radical? No. So I'm going to play the clip of Ali Velce and then we will talk about it because I think this is probably one of the best segments I've seen from MSNBC in years and I didn't think I would say that given how horrible their coverage has been in 2020 over a number of issues starting with Bernie Sanders and how they botched that primary coverage but I mean, let's get to this and we have a lot to say after. It has happened again. On Friday night, Atlanta police shot a black man in a Wendy's parking lot, a man who had been sleeping in his car and who was unarmed. The excessive and deadly force used by these officers requires many of us to take a deeper look at our policing systems. You may have heard on calls to defund the police, a move that sounds drastic to some. I mean, how do we function in a society that has no police? So I want to take a moment to step back and understand what defunding actually means. Defunding does not mean there will be no police force. It does not mean we abolish the police so that in an emergency we're left with no one to call. It means reallocating funds in order to solve the problems plaguing our policing systems. Our police departments right now respond to incidents ranging from homelessness to mental health welfare checks to rapes and murders and school shootings and everything in between. Police on average take 10 hours of mental health, sexual assault and hate crime training. You heard that right, 10 hours of training. And they are the first responders to most of those calls, calls that might be better received by people with expert training or at least more than 10 hours of it. Defunding, according to some people, doesn't mean abolishing the police entirely, not getting rid of the good police who work hard to keep us safe. It means we reshape their roles, their training and our expectations of them. Reallocating resources from police departments to social services also isn't a one size fits all solution. A small suburb may not need what a big city needs, but by reallocating police resources to help find targeted solutions to problems facing different communities means we can reinvest in things like housing, public education, mental health care, addiction treatment and hospitals. Feeling safe in our communities does not require a highly combative, aggressive or militarized police force. In Dallas, after a spate of incidents involving deadly force on residents calling for mental health assistance, the city started a program designed to respond with mental health experts. The program has been highly successful. Programs in California dealing with social services in schools rather than police show that not only can these reallocated responsibilities work, but they can work hand in hand with police departments. Police are public servants. Police deserve unions, but not to protect them when they fail in their mission. We should not be pouring millions of taxpayer dollars into policing systems that are discriminatory to large portions of our population. We should be actively working to better our communities and address the root issues. Reallocating some police funds won't take away from the sense of order and calm in our lives. It will allow us to tackle the very real problems we face and allow all of us to feel safer in our communities. That was absolutely incredible. Now I don't know if he was always on the correct side of this issue, but a couple of weeks ago when he was covering the Minneapolis protests on the ground, he got hit by a rubber bullet. Police shot him on air live on MSNBC. We talked about this, so I don't know if that event radicalized him. But regardless, you know, you've got to give credit where it's due. This is a really great explanation. People who watch MSNBC for once might actually come away knowing more and not less about an issue. And that's really encouraging. The most powerful quote here is he says, feeling safe in our communities does not require a highly combative, aggressive or militarized police force. And that is key here, right? Because again, we have responded to issues that society faces with the one size fits all approach. Throw the police on it. They've got this. We've treated police officers as social workers, but that doesn't make sense. That doesn't make sense. And he lists ways that we can use the money that we're giving to police departments to better help society. And these are not arbitrary, you know, things he's talking about funding. So let me get to that quote from him. He says, by reallocating police forces to help find targeted solutions to problems facing different communities means we can reinvest in things like housing, public education, mental health, care, addiction, treatment and hospitals. So he's not just like pulling all of these things out of his ass and saying, I want education funded and healthcare funded. No, what he's saying is we need a more targeted approach. Again, the way that we have addressed the issue of homelessness is not to provide people living on the streets with housing. We've just policed them. We've criminalized homelessness in effect. That isn't an effective way. It isn't leading to a decrease in homelessness. We're just getting more cruel when it comes to mental health. You can't expect, you know, police officers to be social workers and respond to mental health crises when what those individuals need is mental health care, but we have a health care crisis in America, not just with regard to mental health care, but health care, generally speaking. So the problem is every issue that society has, every single thing that cities think they have to fix or find, you know, a solution to, they've always just said more policing. Oh, what's that? There's more mental health crises, more policing. I mean, it is incorrect to think that throwing more police into cities is going to reduce crime. The data just doesn't back that up. As we increase police budgets in cities across the country, that doesn't necessarily lead to a reduction in crime. And it's because we are not appropriately dealing with very specific crises. So I mean, this is a powerful slogan. Defund the police makes sense because it is a very specific call to action for lawmakers. We're not saying reform the police because a politician can say, I reform the police. I voted to reform the police and that cannot really amount to much. Even Republicans are now on board with calls to reform the police, right? So it's really important that we be specific and we not allow Democrats to, you know, wiggle out of this. We've backed them into a corner by saying defund the police. And now we've got to hold them to it. When we say defund the police, it is not acceptable for them to say, OK, well, let's reimagine the police. No. I don't know what that means and I don't want to know what you mean by reimagine the police. We're saying defund the police. Now, do it. Do what we say because we're your boss. You serve us, your public officials. And when we say defund the police, you defund the police or we find someone else who will. So I think that this segment from MSNBC is important because, again, I think that, like, your liberal aunts and uncles who consume nothing but MSNBC and CNN as part of their news diet, they're not going to listen to some tattooed guy on YouTube talk about why we need to defund the police. But Ali Velche, who's wearing a suit and a tie on MSNBC, they're going to listen to that guy, right? So imagine if, you know, mainstream media did a good job on not just this issue, but other issues as well. I mean, you see why there's this disconnect, right? Because when it comes to an issue like Medicare for All, there are corporate advertisers that would be offended. But I mean, I don't see much police unions advertising on MSNBC, so they have no reason to not do a good job here, right? Unless it were to be just to appease Democrats. But they're not here. At least Ali Velche isn't, and that's great. And I commend him for it because this is really important. This is going to do a lot to drive the needle, more so than, you know, a lot of people think.