 All right, I want to talk about dismantling the police, defunding the police, but those are two different views. There is a movement out there to defund, to lower the funding for the police, and we can talk about that. I think there's actually some merit to that. But a bigger story and one that seems to be in play in addition to the defunding goes many steps further than just reducing the amount of money going to police forces. It is actually dismantling the police, doing away with the police, without, as far as I can tell, offering any kind of alternative. Now there have been cases in the past, I found one case in the past, where police force was deemed to be ineffective and unproductive and indeed, shut down. But with an alternative, the alternative being another police force. In this example I found was from Camden, New Jersey, where in 2013 the city of Camden, New Jersey, basically shut down the police force. It fired all the officers, it fired everybody and basically created an alternative, an alternative. Instead of the small police force, where people were paid a lot, and I guess the unions were pretty strong, and a police force that had a very bad relationship with the community and was doing a lousy job because murders were going through the roof, it was among the deadliest cities in the United States in 2012. Instead of that, what they did is they fired all the existing cops. And in 2013 they disbanded it and they replaced it with a new police force that covered the whole of Camden County, had more police officers, paid less actually. But with an assignment of being more involved in what's called community policing, boots on the ground, presence everywhere, and since then the violent rates, the quality of policing has gone up, violence and a lot of other things and violent crime generally has come down and it worked. They replaced what looked like an inefficient, potentially corrupt police force with a more efficient police force with a better strategy for policing that produced better results. And that's great. That's great. I mean, we know this in business all the time. You got a business that's not running well, it's not efficient, it's not productive, but it's still a good business basically. You restructure it and restructuring a business that makes complete sense and it's completely rational and yeah, that's what you do. And certainly I can understand if they're parts of the country where they think that their police force is bad, corrupt, inefficient, overpaid, too big of a budget, overly militarized, lots of reasons why you would think the police need to restructuring, particularly if crime is out of control or if there's racism or racist cops or just bad cops or lots of corruption or lots of reasons, right? And of course what you can do in that case is shut down, fire people, hire new people, you know, a lot of people demonstrate against that and complain because you're God forbid firing people, but that's restructuring and that's rational and that makes complete sense. But that's not what some of the common demonstrators are demanding, they're literally demanding getting rid of the police. Now, I saw this a few days ago on some TV show and they had this woman who said, yeah, we want to get rid of the police force and what are you going to replace the group? Well, we can police our own communities. What does that mean? Well, she didn't have an answer. She didn't know. I thought, okay, you know, some wacko there, you know, some crazy. She doesn't know what she's talking about. She doesn't know what she's, you know, but this can't be, can't be a significant viewpoint, right? It can't be that there are people in places that actually want to close the police and have no police. I mean, can you imagine? We'll get into that in a second. What would happen? But no, it turns out that a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis, Minneapolis is a beautiful city. You know, I've been to Minneapolis many times, driven through Minneapolis many times. I mean, it's a modern city. It's, I think, a city that's done well. I mean, as well as any, I guess Midwest city has done, it's, yeah, I mean, no complaints about Minnesota. I know very little negative about Minnesota, right? But of course, this is where the killing happened a couple of weeks ago, which Floyd was murdered a couple of weeks ago. So there is a majority of the city council, not just any majority, a supermajority, a veto-proof majority, I guess the mayor can veto this, who has now decided that they are going to dismantle the police. And I, you know, I first read it, okay, well, they want to restructure, no, no, no. They want to dismantle the police with no alternative, really, no policing alternative. So again, it's hard to believe. So, you know, I looked for an interview with, you know, with these people, these city council members, and here's just a few quotes, here's just a few quotes. You know, somebody asked them, a reporter asked them, who is the reporter? Let me just see if this is what station this was, if I can forget. I think this is on Fox. Anyway, a reporter asked them, CNN, no, this wasn't CNN. So CNN's Allison Camarota, Camarota, don't know why Allison Camarota, I don't watch TV news. She asked, do you understand that the word dismantle or police free also makes some people nervous, for instance, what if in the middle of the night, my home is broken into? Who do I call? This is the response, right? This is the response of a city council member in the city of Minneapolis, not only city council member, but this is the president of the city council, Lisa Bender. She says, I mean, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors, it turns out some of her neighbors don't want to dismantle the police. What a shock. And she says, and I know, and myself too, and I know that comes from a place of privilege because for those of us for whom the system is working, I think we need to step back and imagine what it would feel like to already live in that reality when calling the police may mean more harm is done. So if when you call the police because somebody's baking into your home and they show up and they catch the cook or they, then that means you're in a place of privilege, privilege. Now privilege is some special thing that the authorities do for you. Privileges of special status, which is bestowed upon you because you're white or you're rich or whatever. Privilege, no special status is granted to you by the police doing their job. That's just what the police should be doing, they're doing their job. Now you could argue that they don't do their job for some people and that needs to be addressed and it needs to be dealt with. If some people call out the police in the middle of that and when they come, they don't catch the burglar, they beat up the people who called them, let's say, then that's a real problem. You don't sacrifice the people who get treated well because it's the job of the police to treat them well. For the sake of people who don't get treated well, the people who don't get treated well, you need to solve that problem. You need to fire the policemen if they do that, you need to restructure the police force if it comes from the top or if it's institutionalized somehow in the police force. You need to actually make changes to solve where they are not doing their job. But here the solution is to get rid of the police so that you, the so-called privileged, will sacrifice for the sake of those who the police is not working for now. I am very skeptical about this idea that the police is not working for them. Remember, these neighbors are the most violent neighbors where there's the most crime. Imagine what would happen in those neighbors if there's no police. Who would suffer the most if there was no police? But let's assume that there really are neighbors where the police really misbehaves constantly and solve that problem. Maybe do like Camden, New Jersey. Replace all the police officers. I'm not against that if it's appropriate and I'm not sure it is. But here the idea is, no, we have to get rid of all police so that those who actually got the police actually doing their job, not doing anything special, not giving you special treatment, not giving you special powers or special privileges, just doing their job, that makes you privileged. That is disgusting, wrong, evil, massive evasion of reality. Now, what do they propose replacing the police with? If the police are gone, what is going to happen? Well, she says, and I quote, we've done an analysis of all the reasons called 911 and have looked up ways we can shift the response away from our armed police officers into a more appropriate response for mental health calls or some domestic violence calls for health related issues. Now, first, why can't you do that and keep the police? Why is maybe there are places in which mental health professionals should be dealing with a call rather than the police? OK, that's fine. What exactly are you going to replace the police with for domestic violence calls? Somebody is going to kumbaya with the couple. They're going to go into therapy as the guy is beating his wife. Sometimes that guy needs to be restrained and put in jail. How do you do that if you don't have an actual police force that does it? Health related issues, yeah, that's what you have ambulances for. Why is it being funneled to the police anyway? I assume some of the calls are related to burglary, murder, assault, threats, the things that you need somebody with a gun, an armed police officer to deal with because the threat on the other side is usually with something like a gun. It's a physical violence threat. Now you should always never use violence unless it's in self-defense, in retaliation or in protection. So the only way to combat violence is with violence that pacifies the bad guy. That's what you need police for. Without the police, how do you do that? Well, we know how it's done. Without the police, local gangs will fight each other. Without the police, there will be an anarcho-capitalist will love this. There will be private police forces fighting each other to the death. And the bystanders who get caught up in the fire in between, who cares? Without the police, the mafia takes over. Just think back to errors in American history where the mafia was dominant in certain neighborhoods. You paid protection to the mafia. You didn't pay somebody has to protect you. Everybody knows that we need protection for criminals. And if the good guys won't protect you, if you can't get protection for the police, then the bad guys will protect you. And the bad guys will protect you while stealing from you, while cheating you, and while shooting at each other without any concern. If you think our streets are violent now, and we'll get to the question of how violent the streets are now. If you think the streets are violent now, imagine what we had if you don't have police. They become orders of magnitude more violent, orders of magnitude less safe, orders of magnitude less livable. I mean, my prediction of the Minneapolis goes through with this, and I don't think it will, I think, that people will leave the city in mass. There'll be a massive exodus from the city. It'll become like Detroit, where everybody who can will get out of there, and the only people left are the people who can't. And with all their so-called good intentions, I doubt there's many good intentions there, they will make life miserable for the least able to cope. And, you know, we've seen what downtown Detroit looked like. I mean, it's got a little comeback in the last few years, but before that, what it looked like, it was complete devastation, like a war zone, complete devastation. That's what they want from Minneapolis. And again, it's not like Minneapolis has this skyrocketing crime rate, and is out of control, and the police are just shooting people left and right. Yeah, something horrible happened, the murder of George Floyd is not justified by any means. But that doesn't mean you have to go nuts and insane and do stupid and ridiculous things, as if those would solve anything. I mean, I think what will happen is that the voters in Minneapolis, as democratic as they are, will vote these idiots out of office very, very quickly. All right, now, she goes on to say, you know, they asked her, so what are you trying to do? Are you hoping by dismantling the Minneapolis Police Department that you will be getting rid of the police department? And this is what she writes as the president of the city council. I think in Minneapolis, watching George Floyd's death and the four, the actions of the four police officers that were involved has been a huge wake-up call for many Minneapolis in Minneapolis to see what many already knew, which is that our police department is not keeping every member of our community safe. It's not, turns out, keeping every member of our community safe. That's true. So let's take an action that guarantees that no member of our community is safe. Let's get rid of all protection. This is exactly this whole idea of sacrifice, altruism. We always have to go for the weakest. The weakest, in this case, is Floyd. He was not being protected by police. So let's get rid of all the police so that those who are so-called privileged don't get any police protection either. It truly is insane. I'm going to speculate about a philosophical reason that might lead people to get to this state of mind, which is insanity, in a minute. But this is what we are, other than altruism, which is obviously underlies this. Now, just in case you think this is maybe just one city council member, they also interviewed Jeremiah Ellison, interestingly enough, who's the son of the Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who ran the Democratic Party years back and was a big fan of Antifa, it turns out. And Jeremiah Ellison, the son of Keith Ellison, he said, just so we're clear, just so there's no misunderstanding, we are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. And when we're done, we're not simply going to glue it back together, we're going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response. It's really past it. No specifics, no details, nothing like that. Can't do that. But they're not going to glue it back together. In other words, they're not going to build another police department. They really want to dismantle this. Now, other than, you know, just hatred and nihilism and just stupidity, what could be driving this? And I came across an article today about Antifa, called Understanding Antifa, it's in a journal called Law and Liberty, and it's kind of a conservative publication. And this article has some really bad stuff in it, I think, about a proper defense of constitutional government. But that's typical, that's conservatives, right? Their defense of constitutional government is people are horrible, people are all sinners, and therefore, we need defense. But we need divided government, because nobody can be an angel, so we need a constitution to protect us from ourselves, from the evil within each one of us. All right, put that aside. But he has an interesting analysis of why people are sympathetic to Antifa, to this nihilistic group that attacks and wants to abolish the police. That's one of their big agenda writers on Antifa. Why would people want to abolish the police? And this writer, let me see if I can find his name. It would be William Smith, who's writing in Law and Liberty articles called Understanding Antifa. He makes the connection to the philosophy of Rousseau, which I thought was really interesting. And I think is the power of ideas. I mean, it makes sense to me, I'd be interested to know what some of the philosophers think of this. But let me run through this explanation and you guys can think about what you think of this. We so believed that in the state of nature, freed from civilization, freed from institutions, freed from traditions, freed from, but the institutions like the police, the institutions that kind of managed our lives in a civilized society. If we were just left to ourselves and allowed to express our natural sentiments, our emotions, then we are basically good, the noble savage. We are noble, we are good, we are virtuous. When we are, quote, free, not free in the sense of free from coercion to live our lives using our mind. No, free of all limitations, free of all limitations in pursuit of our emotions, not our mind, of our whims, not our mind, of our sentiments and desires, not our mind. If you just left us like that, we are all good. For so, according to this article, any institutions, and I'm quoting, that impede, slow and hinder the following of popular passions of youth as malevolent enemies of democracy. So real democracy is not constitutional democracy. It's not a democracy with limits in the power of the majority and what it can do vis-a-vis them in our minority. Real democracy is people doing whatever they want. Now, following, it's ultimately very collectivistic and ultimately somebody has to be guiding this majority in terms of what they do. But let's not get bogged down in details. Somebody like Antifa would like to see true anarchy, where we're all just doing what we want. And there can be a police there because the police is an institution that limits, that has rules, that civilizes. The article says, Russo wished that civilization itself could be swept away so that the human beings might return to the virtuous aboriginal condition that of the noble savage. Now, it's not that any of these city council member or Antifa members have read Russo, although many of them probably have. They went to good liberal universities that probably emphasized Russo. But it is that these ideas in our curriculum, these ideas in the air, they're in the culture among leftists, these ideas are there, hashed, changed, modified for a modern world. But this is Russo. As article continues, revolt against traditional institutions is built into the DNA of Russo's ideas and is the great common goal of all Western revolutionaries to this day. And think about what an institution the police is, a civilizing institution. But one with rules. One is to contraint the whims of the noble savage. One that is necessary to maintaining civilization, a civilization you want to throw out. Now, this is a critique of Russo. Gustav Lanzon writes that Russo's thought, quote, exasperates and inspires revolt, fires enthusiasm and irritates hatreds. It is the mother of violence, the source of all that is uncompromising. It launches the simple souls who give themselves up to its strange virtue upon the desperate quest for the absolute and absolute to be realized now by anarchy and now by social despotism. I mean, it sounds like Antifa. It sounds like the rioters, not the demonstrators, but the rioters. It sounds like many of the more radical leftists. It certainly sounds like the city councilman in Minnesota wanting to get rid of the police. Now, of course, the existential manifestation of Russo in France was the French Revolution, the Jacobians who were influenced by him and to get rid of the institutions, all institutions, the institutions of so-called, quote, privilege. Now, in the French Revolution, there was real privilege. Being aristocrat was privileged. That's the difference. Today, there's no such thing as privilege. I mean, maybe the cronies. But just being white doesn't give you privilege. Being white just means you're treated as a human being. The fact that they might be racism, and some people are not treated as human beings, doesn't mean that when you're treated like you should be treated, that is privilege. That is the opposite. Privilege is when you have aristocrats above the law, special laws are for them. It's not that they're treated like they should be treated. They're treated not as they should be treated. They treated unjustly. They're treated as if they are above the law. So aristocrats truly aren't privileged. Kings are truly privileged. Normal Americans are not privileged. Get rid of this white privilege. Never talk about privilege. It's a disgusting terminology. So in the French Revolution, the solution to getting rid of, to getting us back to the noble savage was not to create sound institutions that could put us on a proper footing for a future like the American Revolution was. No. The focus of the Jacobians, the focus of Rob Speer was to destroy, was to crush, was to behead, was to use violence and destruction to create some egalitarian pure democracy. I mean, of course, all that did was lead to Napoleon. We know that from history. And you can imagine what this is going to lead to on the left. Our own-styled Napoleon is waiting on the wings somewhere. So this is just Rousseau manifest today. And Inran talked about Kant as being the most evil philosopher. And I would say, at about the same time, a little earlier, maybe, Rousseau. Rousseau and Kant are the two enemies of the Enlightenment. Are the two thinkers that try to undermine, destroy the greatest intellectual achievement since Greece, which is the Enlightenment. Rousseau and Kant are the enemies of everything good that we've created in Western civilization. Indeed, they are the enemies of Western civilization. They are not part of Western civilization. They are not part of the Enlightenment. They are the destroyers of Western civilization and the destroyers of the Enlightenment. So for the Rousseauians, it is the institutions that are responsible for the evil in the world. The institutions must be smashed. The institutions must be destroyed. And only that can lead to this egalitarian heaven, utopia that they seek. You know, according to Gavin Newsom, violent riots in California were not caused by individuals. Instead, it was our institutions that are responsible. The left can criticize the violence, or many on the left can criticize the violence. Many of the left can criticize the violence. You hear it every day by saying things like, oh, well, property isn't a life. It's okay to smash property when you're protesting a life being taken because for them, smashing windows, destroying capitalism, destroying the police. I mean, there are those on the left who were offended by the police taking a knee. The police can't take a knee. Institutionally, they can't protest another policeman's violence because as an institution, they are corrupt and evil and bad and must be smashed and destroyed because that's what they've learned from the Rousseau. That's the only way to liberate their noble savage. And what are noble savages do? Well, we know what savages do and there is no nobility in being a savage. None whatsoever. Savages, a violence, emotions are not guides to truth, are not guides to knowledge and lead us to zero some world in which violence is our means of dealing with one another. The savage is the violent. Do away with the police, do away with institutions, do away with civilization and all you get is anarchy. And I mean anarchy, I mean anarchy like the anarchists in the libertarian movement. That kind of anarchy, the anarchy of violence and death and destruction. The violence of might is right, which is all the so-called anarcho-capitalism leads to. The anarchy of blood in the streets. The anarchy of the dark ages with constant fighting. I mean one of the, one of my favorite non-objectivist thinkers out there or at least writers out there is Steven Pinker. And Steven Pinker's documented extensively the degree to which violence has declined over the centuries and is declining today in America as we become more civilized, as we develop police forces, laws and courts, violence has gone down dramatically in unimaginable ways. It's stunning how much we live in the most peaceful period in all of human history. Both from perspective of war, from the perspective of violent crime day to day. It's horrible what the police did to George Flynn. But it's the exception of the war. Over the, since 2015, looking at the actual data, which is collected by the Washington Post. Since 2015, three, I've got the number here, 327 individuals have been shot by the police, killed by the police, who were unarmed, unarmed. 327 over the last five, six years. Well, five years, because this year they don't count. Five years. Now, by some measures, you know, that's 327 people who didn't have to die and that's horrible. But in a country of 350 million, in a country that still has a lot of violent crime, 327 people, it's not that much. It's terrible. And we should figure out why it's happening. We should train the police better. We should do what we can to make it, that number, go down. But because of 327 people over five years, we're gonna dismantle the police department. We're gonna rid of all police. We're gonna abandon civilization. We're gonna abandon progress. We're gonna go full throttle noble savage out there. Of those 327, 138 were white, 109 were black, 50, 70 Hispanic. Not that it should matter. Yes, blacks are disproportionately represented there. Blacks also commit a disproportionate number of the violent crimes in this country. So it's hard to tell what's going on. It's hard to tell from the numbers if it's racism or what's driving it. When it would have to dig into the case by case basis and figure it out case by case. But one thing is clear. We do not have a massive epidemic of police shooting people who are unarmed. Too many, I agree. But it's not an epidemic. It reminds me of the lockdowns in certain counties that had zero cases of COVID, but they locked everybody down just in case. This is true insanity. All right. So you can see ideas have consequences. When we teach who so is an enlightenment figure, we undermine the enlightenment. I'm looking at you, Steven Pinker. When we teach who so is this great philosopher, thoughtful and inspiring and we don't challenge him. We don't present alternatives. When we talk about noble savages and following your emotions and evil of institutions and the constraints, this is what you get. When our intellectuals are Kantians, Russoians, what you get today in the streets, what you get more importantly in city hall is nihilists trying to do away with civilization. And don't, you know, let me be clear. Doing away with the police is the destruction of civilization. So I hope the next election, whatever the city council does or does not do, every single one of those members should be replaced. They should be fired. They should be voted out. Now to the credit of the mayor of Minneapolis, he has actually said he will vote veto this bill. The problem is that right now as it stands, they have a veto-proof majority that is gonna vote for dismantling the police. I guess if you vote for the bastards in, you deserve what the bastards do to you. If you believe in democracy, this is what you get. I mean democracy in the sense of majority rule, no limits, no constraints. So let them have it, no police in Minneapolis, wow. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism, and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist, broods. Using the super chat, and I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show, many of you stepped forward and actually supported the show for the first time. So I'll do it again. Maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. Those of you who don't yet support the show, please take this opportunity, go to uranbrookshow.com, slash support, or go to subscribestar.com, uranbrookshow, and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this going. I'm not sure when the next...