From the Notebook posts are expansions on ideas first published for my Patrons. This one is from July 23rd, 2021
I know this will come as no shock to most of the libertarian-minded in the audience, but the police aren’t your friends. And I sincerely with that wasn’t the case. But the curious case of Tucker Carlson and the FBI tells us this is true.
The idea of the community-based Constable On Patrol (COP) keeping tabs on what’s happening locally and assisting in basic crime prevention today is a comfortable lie we tell ourselves still exists as a coping mechanism for denying the police state we actually live in.
There is a fundamental difference between Law Enforcement (LE) and Crime Prevention (CP). The two ideas could not be more diametrically opposed. One builds community strength (CP) and one actively undermines it (LE).
And it’s one of the real problems we face in unpacking the problems of modern policing, which is itself, a bluff, where 1 arrest can keep a thousand people in line.
This interview with Srdja Trifkovic over at Chronicles Maganize is another prime example of someone properly connecting the dots as to where the root causes of the societal dysfunction in the U.S. (and most of the rest of the world) lies.
Right after the 2015 terrorist attack by two Islamists in Garland, Texas, CNN itself accused the FBI of directly encouraging the perpetrators to act upon their jihadist ideas. The same method was applied two years later to a mentally unstable pizza delivery man [Khalil Abu Rayyan] in Dearborn, Michigan. In other words, FBI agents routinely goad individuals to commit crimes solely in order to turn them into dangerous villains who were stopped in their tracks by the vigilant agency and sentenced to many years in prison. Such ploys of course justify the agency’s very existence by making it look like it is really preventing terrorist attacks.
This apparatus and this scenario—actively seeking out potential perpetrators of crimes, in order to cajole them and then arrest them—is no longer used against potential jihadists. The members of extremist groups within the Islamic community in the U.S. are no longer interesting. The target has shifted to white Americans who support Donald Trump, and who are therefore a priori suspicious as would-be “homegrown” extremists and terrorists. In this context, the very fact that you are a white, heterosexual male, in addition a practicing Christian, especially if you belong to an evangelical denomination, makes you suspicious and potentially liable to surveillance. Let me add that just two weeks ago the FBI directly asked Americans, in a tweet and later on its website, to spy and report on their neighbors, co-workers, and even family members, for so-called suspicious behaviors potentially conducive to what it called homegrown violent extremism.
These practices by the FBI are sold to us everyday on television and in the media as the highest evolution of Crime Prevention, but they are hardly that at all. And I know this will rankle the LEOs in the audience because the world is just so damn dangerous.
I’ve heard this excuse from multiple generations of police now. It started with my father struggling with this transition from CPO to LEO while he worked for the NYPD and became the basic text of endless conversations with family and friends both LEO and LEO-adjacent for the past twenty five years.
But, this practice is anything but CP. It is nothing more than LE dressed up as CP to enforce laws which, in any rational reading of the Constitution, are unconstitutional, e.g. drug enforcement, and therefore serve a straw man argument to justify immoral and unethical behavior.
This conversion from Crime Prevention to LawEnforcement came as a response to the breakdown of society thanks to the very overreach of government itself. Be it Prohibition, enforcement of labor and environmental laws to now literally anything some Karen in the ‘burbs can dream up as a hobgoblin he/she feels entitled to be protected from, all of them have advanced the thin blue line.
The centralization of policing and the corruption of LEOs is as natural a consequence of this as night following day.
But yet we still have this quaint notion that we are still free, that the cops work for us and the FBI isn’t terminally corrupt as an organization, even if individual members are not.
Like with all discussions of this nature there is the critique of the institution itself and what we expect of it and the men and women asked to implement that system.
So, of course there are good people lurking within modern law enforcement agencies. I’ve met many of them. I’m happy to separate the sin from the sinner in the hope that when the time is right those good people within the FBI, county sheriff’s office or even Child Protective Services bureaucracy, will do the right thing and back the people over the institution.
But that is, if I’m being completely honest, a vane hope, rather than a sober look at the reality of the situation. If government is efficient at anything it is in the creation of petty tyrants.
The controversy surrounding Tucker Carlson’s going public with the attempts to marginalize him by Federales speaks to the heart of the divide between modern conservatives and libertarians in this area. Fox News Conservatives are mostly the progeny of William Buckley conservatives who were slowly but surely asked to transfer their allegiance from their local community (and local policing) to that of the country and its police force in the name of the Cold War and the Culture War, a war supposedly of ideology against godless Commies.
Buckley himself, however, was a CIA asset, so this should come as no shock to anyone that he would be the point man to subvert two generations of conservatives into sycophants for interventionist foreign policy and increased draconian law enforcement at home. Conservatives hate chaos after all. Their Conscientiousness (in the Big Five Pillars of Personality sense) can be weaponized easily to fight chaos, and was, especially after 9/11.
And from where this “lolbertarian” sits (more on this later), however, the CIA v. KGB fight was really just two communist factions duking it out for control of the global narrative. We’re still fighting commies today, and some of them in our intelligence agencies just went after one of the only popular voices in corporate media not down with the Commintern.
Because of the influence of Buckley and the massive financial support of D.C. think tanks, as well as the undermining and marginalization of Rothbardian/Misesean libertarians — c.f. the takeover of the Cato Institute by the ‘libertarian’ Koch brothers — there is still this reflexive defense of all policing by conservatives which has intensified thanks to the Democrats’ backing of the looting and rioting of BLM/Antifa which ws used as a psychological weapon to divide people further.
Quickly lost in all of the verbiage surrounding George Floyd was the acknowledgment by everyone that there is something fundamentally wrong with militarized policing methods. Everyone wanted to have that conversation but that was the one conversation we were not allowed to have.
And when you are not allowed to talk about something that’s your clue that that is the goal of the exercise.
This centralization in the hands law enforcement and no longer vested in the citizens themselves policing their communities has corrupted the souls of cops while simultaneously prepping the people psychologically for infinite aggression on their part in any encounter.
Do you go into any encounter with a modern policeman of any variety with anything other than dread?
Shouldn’t you take your Miranda rights very seriously? After all, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
But at the same time the police are just responding to the increased threat of violence and the increased ‘bluff calling’ by ne’er do wells as to whether the police actually have control of the streets or not. These folks are increasingly asked to be in obscenely dangerous situations with their hands tied behind their backs. So, I do sympathize and again am questioning the political and social apparatuses which placed them in those positions in the first place.
These are, after all, real people with real emotions, limits to their self-control and all the deficiencies and strengths we all have.
The truth is they never did have that control over the streets. We did through our support of them but lazily transferred it to them over time and expected somehow for those who rule them not abuse that power? Is this really all the cops’ fault or are we scapegoating them for our own failures and weaknesses?
At the same time, if they are not focused on solving our problems locally and serve a higher, more centralized authority then why are we surprised when the bond between them and the community is broken and we devolve into the situation we are in today, a society based on fear rather than respect.
That breakdown of relations can easily be turned against the police, even the good ones, into a society-destroying mind virus like we have today where ‘dindus’ and disaffected children in black bloc run around spouting “ACAB” rhetoric and spitting in the faces of people who think they are still protecting and serving.
This is why the support for secession is rising rapidly. Secession is a state of mind, not a political process. Opting out of the State’s violence isn’t just a choice, it’s a necessity if we are to regain our sanity and composure.
People want control back over their communities. The good ‘cops’ want to protect their jurisdictions and the people under their care, not to operate in some globally-focused politicized headspace.
In the end, however, secession of this sort is just another coping mechanism to objectify and shadow project our own failings to protect our local communities rather than take responsibility for what we allowed to happen.
This is why the alt-right is wrong to characterize all ‘libertarians’ and ‘lolbertarians.’ They are still fundamentally unwilling to accept that the state grows out of our desire of community but it does not and cannot do anything other than corrupt that community because of its monopoly on the use of force.
In the end, they are just the flip-side, no matter how well considered or constructed their arguments, of the SJW left.
Their unwillingness to engage honestly makes them as irrelevant as the “open-borders at all costs” lolbertarians they make fun of. It’s truly just two Leninist emotional cripples beating each other with crutches, South Park style.
Meanwhile, the FBI intentionally creating political headlines is the highest form of police corruption one can think of. It’s in the realm of the East German Stasi but with the paranoia taking on an active role to advance the agenda of traitors to the country who were placed in the highest civilian offices by foreign powers.
And it was the libertarians of the stripe ignored by both the alt-right and the hard-left that made the hard arguments about how defense is produced and how communities are maintained, who held the answers all along.
Destroy Leviathan. Attack it at its core. And expect nothing from the police other than pain, but be gracious and accepting when you get assistance. End public property. Stop allowing the exporting of crime to peaceful neighborhoods through those public roads you make fun of us about all for the convenience of a fucking Wal-Mart or a strip mall.
That is the conclusion we can no longer avoid in 2021.
Because as this situation gets worse, which it is, the police and the law enforcement officers will come to see themselves as the final arbiters of truth and they will be encouraged to exercise the power to destroy anyone they want, since that’s what their bosses want.
They are already faced with enforcing unjustifiable abrogation of our medical privacy and basic civil rights in the name of dubious public health demands by self-serving politicians. And so far we have yet to see them crack.
What will it look like tomorrow? Next year?
History tells us that many will support this for no other reason than we won’t give them a reason not to.
All Cops aren’t Bastards anymore than any of us are all bastards. But the potential exists within all men to unleash their worst aspects of themselves under extreme conditions. Theirs is not a power anyone should wield, even the most high-minded and moral of men, under these circumstances. I watched my father struggle with it the entire time I was growing up. It won’t matter whether those men will hate themselves for what they’ve done, they will still do it and beat themselves up later.
I welcome all the current law enforcement and law-enforcement adjacent people into this ‘community’ of those wanting to rebuild what was lost. They have unbelievable knowledge and expertise on how to do this right and do it wrong. But it starts by both sides recognizing the others’ humanity and saying no the right way at the right time. The smart libertarian always said, “No one sees corruption like a government employee.” The dumb ones just hoisted their Gasden Flags and damned everyone with their insufferable self-righteousness.
It’s time to really address the corruption of the police and ourselves. It’s time to face down our fears and get to work rebuilding what’s been taken from us, our dignity and security. And it’s time to realize that the last thing we need is more law enforcement and to prioritize the prevention of future crimes against humanity itself.
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