defund the police Concepts

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx · 18 Nov 2025 · 642pp · 142,332 words

“Alright” became its unofficial anthem. Despite deep political polarization, 67 percent of Americans expressed support for Black Lives Matter. The left rallied around slogans like “Defund the police” and “ACAB” (“All cops are bastards”). The right countered with its own iconography, including “Blue Lives Matter” and thin blue line flags, symbolizing law enforcement

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

by Fredrik Deboer · 4 Sep 2023 · 211pp · 78,547 words

enough to say that a rigid sense of acceptable opinion developed among progressives—no opinion more acceptable than the quixotic quest to defund the police. DEMANDS ARE ASSEMBLED The idea of defunding the police has already attracted more debate than I can summarize, and I will deal with it in more depth later. For now, it

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’s sufficient to say that through the tangled and chancy process through which broad social movements operate, defunding the police became the central demand of the Black Lives Matter protests. Protests still simmered across the country, sometimes in defiance of Covid lockdowns. It had become

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clear by midsummer that some kind of central demand was necessary for the movement to make progress. “Defund the police” was, at least, an effective sound bite. Unfortunately, there was little consensus about what exactly it meant. Some insisted that the purpose of Defund was

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, in June, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by Mariame Kaba titled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” The actual merits of defunding the police aside, the fundamental confusion about what was being demanded blunted the force of Black Lives Matter despite its unprecedented media attention and public support. Besides

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demand that became associated with the entire movement for justice that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s death, which became inescapable—“defund the police.” THE STRANGE LIFE OF DEFUND THE POLICE Defunding the police captured the public attention to a degree that I’ve really never seen before for a genuinely radical idea. And I believe it

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hurt the wider cause. I think that, at the exact moment that public support for racial justice was at its zenith, the call to defund the police sapped our attention, sucked the air out of the room, and scuttled the opportunity of more achievable reforms. The exact meaning of

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defunding the police was never entirely clear. A meta debate about what exactly was being called for bloomed—and became notorious. For some, its meaning was straightforward: abolition.

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? by civil rights activist legend Angela Davis also was rediscovered, and it too called for abolition in a literal and concrete sense. By calling for defunding the police, some people meant, and still mean, true abolition. The trouble was that abolishing the police was always, to put it mildly, unachievable. A YouGov poll

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an endless number of local fronts. This reality lent the whole affair a strange atmosphere of unreality; everyone knew that we weren’t going to defund the police, and yet it had become such a dominant bit of lefty fashion that just as many continued robotically making the demand anyway. As I’ve

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part because of the extremely low odds of success for a police abolition movement, many who supported defunding the police insisted that the intent had never been to abolish the police at all. In this telling, “defund the police” means reducing the budgets of police departments, drawing down their resources, and redirecting some of those funds

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to in these proposals, but it’s worth saying that they represent a profound mismatch between the revolutionary zeal of the people who called to defund the police and the actual policy. It also represents a good example of “sanewashing,” an internet term that refers to the process through which radical ideas are

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gradually watered down to be more appealing to the wider public. You will easily imagine how this played out in 2020—the call to defund the police was inescapable on left-leaning social media; decent people who were outraged about Floyd’s murder wanted to support the cause, but the concept of

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to express. So they did some sanewashing and came up with a more palatable version. At times, supporters of the more watered-down version of defunding the police would insist that no one would ever call for total abolition. It was therefore somewhat useful when, in June, the New York Times published the

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, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” That piece, written with considerable brio, does not include anything like a plan. Many liberals and lefties still support defunding the police in the abstract, but there’s little sense of a specific vehicle for how that would be accomplished. A handful of municipalities meaningfully redistributed resources

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away from police in 2020, but no national movement followed. It’s impossible to say what might have happened in a world where defund the police did not become the most-expressed demand associated with the George Floyd moment. I would certainly have been thrilled if “end qualified immunity” had gained

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similar prominence. Supporters of defunding the police, of course, would point out that the effort to end qualified immunity has not seen much more tangible success than the movement to

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defund the police, and they would have a point. As is so often the case, the most essential question is one of the hardest to answer—what are

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to truly abolish prisons, and perhaps someday we’ll have eliminated poverty and need to such a degree that we can abolish policing. Until then, defunding the police strikes me the same way it did during that tense summer: as a distraction from doing something meaningful to mitigate injustice. THE BLACK PROFESSIONAL-MANAGERIAL

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ability to participate in the national political conversation—are out of step with everyday citizens from the constituencies they ostensibly speak for. The concept of defunding the police played out loudly in our discourse, but this phenomenon was driven by elites whose day-to-day lives are far removed from ordinary people, and

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these conversations can necessarily know little about the lived experience of the average Black American. A white liberal in 2020 might have fixated relentlessly on defunding the police, for example, because there was social benefit in appearing to be radical and because they themselves had little to gain from focusing on far more

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they speak for in myriad ways. I’ve already discussed consistent polling that shows that Black Americans are deeply opposed to the basic notion of defunding the police. It’s worth saying that Black Democrats, which many people identify as the heart of the party, tend to self-identify as moderates, not liberals

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.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/06/01/police-reform-america-poll. Some Democrats representing liberal: David Winston, “ ‘Defund the Police’ Still Haunts Democrats,” Roll Call, April 27, 2022, https://rollcall.com/2022/04/27/defund-the-police-still-haunts-democrats/. It was therefore somewhat useful: Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” Those charges

Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History

by Nellie Bowles · 13 May 2024 · 207pp · 62,397 words

dog shelter posted for donations to Black Lives Matter. (I faved it, of course.) Seventh Generation, which makes my favorite toilet paper, posted: “We support defunding the police.” Oreo’s corporate account posted: “Trans people exist.” Pepé Le Pew was cut from the Space Jam movie for normalizing rape culture. The Muppet Show

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a gun in his pants, they can say. The toy gun looked real, they can say. With the help of bystander video and body cams, defunding the police—Better yet, abolish them! Abolition now!—went from a fringe wild idea to the very center of American progressive politics and it went there fast

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is police abolition; pro-choice begins with police abolition, etc. Police abolition was exactly what it sounds like but it was also about a revolution. “Defunding the Police: What It Means and Why Planned Parenthood Supports It,” wrote the women’s health and abortion rights group, who, you would think, had enough battles

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Brown communities they unjustly target.” The nonprofit Sunrise Movement, established to galvanize young people to fight climate change, was now mostly a police abolition movement: “Defunding the police is just one step towards abolition. We’re hosting a 4 day crash course to deepen our understanding of abolition and learn how we can

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members of DSA Chicago announcing the agenda: “DISARM. DEFUND. ABOLISH.” More moderate think tanks like New America joined in 2021: “Why Are We Afraid of Defunding the Police?” Legacy media was there to buoy the movement. The New York Times gave space to the opinions: “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” wrote

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and brought back two years later, and the police budget was increased by some $200 million.) Keisha Lance Bottoms, then Atlanta’s mayor, said that “defunding the police” was about reallocating funding to social services and community initiatives, and added, “We’ve been doing this work over the last couple of years.” (Atlanta

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the suggestions,” said then Atlanta mayor Bottoms in December 2020, after a seven-year-old was killed. Atlanta city councilman Antonio Brown, who voted to defund the police in 2020, had his car stolen by mid-2021. Armed robbers held up a news crew as it interviewed Oakland’s chief of violence prevention

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is pro-defunding, requested special police protection for his Yonkers home after January 6. Congresswoman Cori Bush is, on the one hand, pushing hard to defund the police. On the other hand, she spent $70,000 on private security over just a few months, much more than the average for a congresswoman. She

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to speak, able to help save 11 million people from being evicted,” she said to CBS News. “So suck it up—and defunding the police has to happen. We need to defund the police and put that money into social safety nets because we’re trying to save lives.” * * * ▪ The idea that policing only hurts people

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recalled. Brooke Jenkins ran to serve out the rest of his term and won. Just a few years ago, London Breed had proudly embraced the “defund the police” movement; no longer. In spring of 2022, after the city’s gay-pride parade banned police officers from marching in uniform, Breed announced that, in

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

by Michael Shellenberger · 11 Oct 2021 · 572pp · 124,222 words

some of the largest protests in American history. In Washington, D.C., in 2020, protesters painted giant yellow letters on the street that spelled out, “Defund the police.”4 In mid-June 2020, more than 1,000 protesters marched peacefully under the banner of Black Lives Matter from Mission High School to City

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, someone would start yelling about police brutality. And everyone had a cell phone camera on you.”79 Counter to the claims of those who advocate defunding the police as a way to reduce violence, the evidence suggests that fewer cops may mean more police misconduct, because the remaining officers must work longer and

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thirteen-hour rather than ten-hour shift significantly boosts their prevalence, while back-to-back shifts quadruple their odds.80 The public supports improving, not defunding, the police. In 2020, 58 percent of Oakland residents told pollsters that they wanted to either increase or maintain the size of the police force. In the

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intimate partner and family violence on the policy front burner.” “But then you need Black Lives Matter to be making a very different demand than ‘defund the police,’ right?” I asked. “Of course, you do,” he said. “There is a social movement there, and it needs to hoist a banner proclaiming that minority

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less radical than the radical left. Progressives have, by contrast, a full agenda: Medicare for All, Green New Deal, and sweeping criminal justice reforms, including defunding the police, deincarceration, and drug legalization. Progressives have been on the rise in San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and nationally, and openly stand in opposition to the

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’s progressives will keep voting NIMBY and assuage whatever guilt they feel by supporting more funding for the homeless, voting for candidates who promise to defund the police, and putting Black Lives Matter signs in their windows. 18 Responsibility First In 1893, the historian Frederick Turner wrote a celebrated essay about the importance

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. “George Floyd: What happened in the final moments of his life,” BBC, July 16, 2020, www.bbc.com. 4. Rebecca Tan et al., “Protesters Paint ‘Defund the Police’ Right Next to D.C.’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural,” Washington Post, June 7, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com. 5. Chase DeFeliciantonio, “George Floyd Protest Briefly

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-Level Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings at the County-Level in the United States, 2011–2014.” 49. Franklin E. Zimring, “Should We Defund the Police?” interview, Real Talk Philosophy, June 10, 2020, YouTube video, 20:12, www.youtube.com. 50. Fryer Jr., “What the Data Say About Police.” 51. Victoria

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation

by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler · 14 Sep 2021 · 735pp · 165,375 words

. Yet when cities try to play Robin Hood, as they did in the 1960s, businesses and the rich pick up and leave. Protesters want to defund the police, but wealthier urbanites will decamp for safer suburbs if crime rates start to rise, and the poor and vulnerable will suffer most. If people decide

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governments must also become stronger, and that strength must serve rather than oppress. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, the calls to “defund the police” have become loud. Yet a poorer police department will provide neither more safety nor more respect for the community. The answer is not defunding but

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Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 were motivated by police brutality, but this requires executive reform, not a simple legal fix like defunding the police. We need police protection, but we also need respect for all. The solution lies in a robust reform program that embraces two policy goals: safety

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require a serious and sustained commitment to institutional reform. The politically simple shortcut is to embrace rules like “three strikes and you’re out” or “defund the police.” Governments are quick to do easy things, like imposing occupational licensing requirements or cutting checks to pay for Medicare, and slow to do hard things

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trial found that body cameras “generate small but meaningful benefits to the civility of police-citizen civilian encounters.” The union accepted the cameras. Should We Defund the Police? Defunding the police may seem like a natural response to the lawless behavior displayed by Derek Chauvin. But an underfunded police department will not improve the safety of

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are now held in all 50 states” and that it is “one of the most successful community oriented policing programs across the country.” Some interpret “defunding the police” to mean moving funds from police to other government agencies that can potentially reduce violence. Rashawn Ray of the Brookings Institution notes that “9 out

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’s Murder Tally Skyrockets in 2020.” “security from government overreach”: Meares, “Policing: A Public Good Gone Bad.” “a relationship in which”: Meares, Goff, and Tyler, “Defund-the-Police Calls Aren’t Going Away. But What Do They Mean Practically?” In Boston, for example: “TenPoint Coalition Founder Departs,” WBUR. Coffee with a Cop: Coffee

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with a Cop, “About—Coffee with a Cop.” “defunding the police”: Ray, “What Does ‘Defund the Police’ Mean and Does It Have Merit?” Tracey Meares: Meares, Goff, and Tyler. “funding to recreational centers”: Ray. early childhood programs: Heckman et al., “The

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, August 1, 2017. http://bostonreview.net/law-justice/tracey-l-meares-policing-public-good-gone-bad. Meares, Tracey, Phillip Atiba Goff, and Tom R. Tyler. “Defund-the-Police Calls Aren’t Going Away. But What Do They Mean Practically?” NBC News, June 24, 2020. www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/defund-police-calls-aren

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Private Journal of the Marquess of Hastings. Allahabad: Panini Office, 1907. Ray, Rashawn. “What Does ‘Defund the Police’ Mean and Does It Have Merit?” Brookings, June 19, 2020. www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/06/19/what-does-defund-the-police-mean-and-does-it-have-merit. “Reactions to Plague in the Ancient & Medieval World.” World

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Daboin, Carlos, 232 The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs), 239 deaths of despair, 123 Deaton, Angus, 123 deceitful corporate practices, 124–26 “defund the police” movement, 7, 14, 23, 293–96 deindustrialization, 1 De Lorme, Charles, 44 dengue, 88 Denmark, 197 Derenoncourt, Ellora, 301 DeSantis, Ron, 197 despair, deaths of

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Fitzpatrick, Maria, 314–15 Fleming, Alexander, 37 Florida, 18–19, 197–98, 240, 313 Florida, Richard, 192 Floyd, George death of, 4, 275–76 and “defund the police” movement, 14 and policy reform, 281 protests following death of, 6, 245, 276, 291 video of death of, 275–76, 280 Food and Drug Administration

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. See also Floyd, George and body cameras, 292–93 brutal practices of, 245 and civil rights mandate, 14, 24 and community policing, 294–95 and “defund the police” movement, 7, 14, 23, 277, 293–96 misconduct complaints against, 291–92 mistrust of, 276 and police unions, 3–4, 291–92 racially targeted policing

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life

by Richard Beck · 2 Sep 2024 · 715pp · 212,449 words

, so as to decrease the influence police have over the daily lives of the working poor—government at all levels delivered a clear, resounding “no.” Defunding the police was rejected by every major presidential candidate during the 2020 campaign, including the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. And while the country’s fifty largest cities

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2022, police funding was increasing again in absolute terms as well, a development championed by the Democratic president, Joe Biden. “The answer is not to defund the police,” he said at his 2022 State of the Union. “It’s to fund the police. Fund them!”[66] This is not to say that police

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/2020/06/11/trump-seattle-autonomous-zone-inslee. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64 Fola Akinnibi, Sarah Holder, and Christopher Cannon, “Cities Say They Want to Defund the Police. Their Budgets Say Otherwise,” Bloomberg, Jan. 12, 2021, www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-city-budget-police-funding. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65 Grace Manthey, Frank

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent

by Ben Shapiro · 26 Jul 2021 · 309pp · 81,243 words

, it turned out, were deplorables. When moderate Democrats complained that they had nearly lost their seats thanks to the radicalism of fellow caucus members pushing “defund the police” and socialism, Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) called them bigots seeking to silence minorities.19 Progressive groups including the Justice Democrats, the Sunrise Movement, and

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radicals pushing idiotic positions for the tenuous Democratic grip on power: Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) lit into her radical colleagues for their sloganeering about “defunding the police” and “socialism,” pointing out that Democrats had “lost good members” because of such posturing.59 Meanwhile, radical members of Congress—members such as Representative Alexandria

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ideological insanity of CRT; indulged mass protests against police in the middle of a global pandemic; and fudged on whether they were in favor of defunding the police as crime rates spiked. Afraid of alienating LGBT Americans, Democrats embraced the most radical elements of gender theory, including approval of children transitioning sex; they

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gatherings. Apparently, the virus was itself woke: it would kill Republicans who opposed economy-crippling lockdowns, but would pass over anyone chanting trite slogans about defunding the police. Politicians from the Left—devotees of wokeism—appeared in the midst of mass protests personally. Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) attended a civil rights march

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mere rhetorical flourishes. The overall narrative—that America was evil, and that its police were systemically racist—led to practical efforts across the country to defund the police, cheered on by the media. Police officers, realizing that even a proper arrest, if effectuated by a white officer against a black suspect, could result

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections

by Mollie Hemingway · 11 Oct 2021 · 595pp · 143,394 words

was just the latest proof of that reality. Despite the nationwide violence, the media insisted that the Black Lives Matter movement, which included calls to “defund the police,” was peaceful.11 Throughout his first campaign and during much of his presidency, Trump was known for gathering massive and exuberant crowds. He gave freewheeling

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support from corporations and other elite groups. Its website even proclaimed the movement wanted to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure” and sought to “defund the police.”39 The affiliated Movement for Black Lives, which claimed to be made up of over 150 organizations, called for an end to all policing and

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://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/505913-duckworth-on-trumps-mt-rushmore-speech-on-protecting-confederate. 90. Joseph Wulfsohn, “NY Times Op-Ed Clears Up ‘Defund the Police’ Confusion: ‘Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,’ ” Fox News, June 13, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/media/ny-times-op-ed-clears-up

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-defund-the-police-confusion-yes-we-mean-literally-abolish-the-police. 91. Don Lemon, CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, CNN, July 7, 2020, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

by Yascha Mounk · 26 Sep 2023

a bewildering range of different topics, from demanding that the Biden administration “tear down the wall” on America’s southern border to joining calls to “defund the police.” The ideological transformation of the nonprofit sector is unlikely to be reversed anytime soon. For, driven by the same generational and ideological trends, major grant

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Calls for ‘Affinity Housing’ for Students of Color,” MassLive, Sept. 14, 2018, www.masslive.com/news/2018/09/smith_college_student_pens_let.html). On defunding the police, see “Transformational Public Safety: Reducing the Roles, Resources, and Power of Police,” American Civil Liberties Union, June 8, 2021, www.aclu.org/news/topic/transformational

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.sierraclub.org/campaigns/tell-the-biden-administration-honor-communities-on-the-border-tear-down-the-wall. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “defund the police”: Heather Smith, “What Does It Mean to Defund the Police?,” Sierra Club, June 17, 2020, www.sierraclub.org/sierra/what-does-it-mean-defund-police. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

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groups had a major influence on the left’s ideological makeup. “In recent years, a host of new slogans and plans—the Green New Deal, ‘Defund the police,’ ‘Abolish ICE,’ and so on—have leaped from the world of nonprofit activism onto the chyrons of MSNBC and Fox News.” Jonathan Chait, “Joe Biden

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are far more mainstream than those of the voices that supposedly represent them. While AOC and other members of the Squad have embraced the slogan “Defund the Police,” for example, polls show that most African Americans oppose cuts to police budgets and would like to have more cops patrolling their neighborhoods. (Kim Parker

Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy

by Jennifer Carlson · 2 May 2023 · 279pp · 100,877 words

, “even bigger than the first.” This surge was sparked by a more familiar terrain of racial unrest and rebellion—specifically, the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police uprisings in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. Unlike their lack of experience with pandemics, Americans alive today have not only

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ignoring yet another police killing (also a public health crisis), millions gathered, marched, and sometimes rioted for Black Lives Matter; formed and forwarded calls to defund the police, dismantle racism, and remake America; and joined reading groups and discussion circles on white fragility and racial inequality and engaged their friends and families to

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in American society. Though the Black Lives Matter movement included multiple factions, took shape in various manifestations, and intersected with adjacent mobilizations (such as the Defund the Police movement), gun sellers treated the Black Lives Matter movement as an umbrella, catch-all term for the protests, uprisings, and riots that occurred during the

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adequate for addressing the structural impasses exposed in American society over the course of 2020. Accordingly, he saw the Black Lives Matter protests and the Defund the Police movement as yet further examples of government dependency, rather than a demand for collective transformation: “they want to make a difference but they want someone

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, 105 Cramer, Katherine, 110 Crick, Bernard, 131 critical infrastructure, 44, 67, 211n22 critical race theory, 89 DeBrabander, Firmin, 168 Deep State, 26, 72, 75, 78 Defund the Police, 54, 90, 145 dehumanization, 8, 18, 34, 105, 107–10, 127 DellaPosta, Daniel, 105 democracy: competing US visions of, 135–36, 140, 159–61; conservative