Ironic Circles
The murder of George Floyd in 2020 shined an uncomfortable light on police practices in the United States. The ensuing nationwide protests degenerated into violence and destruction in many instances, pitting progressives against “law and order” conservatives. Amidst this polarization was lost a unique opportunity for the country to unite and reflect on police abuses, but in a round-about manner, we may be getting closer to such an eventuality.
The year 2020 also saw police abuses of a very different kind. Government’s ordered lockdowns engaged police in confrontations with the citizenry unlike anything in living memory. Curfews and quarantines like martial law had police invading homes to count congregated citizens, fining solitary maskless drivers, and padlocking places of worship in flagrant violation of the separation of church and state. Police were called to separate children from parents who choose not to authorize the jabcine which they distrusted. And in 2021 when parents became shockingly aware of the politicized syllabi imposed on children forced into tele-learning and parents confronted school boards about this, law enforcement targeted them as domestic terrorists.
But old habits die hard, and law-and-order conservatives did not take the hint after the litany of police abuses described above. It would take an ex-president getting railroaded by law enforcement for conservatives finally to wake up and smell the tear gas. In the wake of the Durham Report and the manhunts following J/6, conservatives are beginning to realize that unchecked police power is destructive to everybody, not just those inner-city blue voters whom they detest. Even conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza is releasing a new documentary entitled Police State chronicling and criticizing police abuses, culminating in the serialized prosecutions against ex-president Trump.
George Floyd, Donald Trump… obviously there’ll be no one-to-one comparison here, so it’s a matter of apples and… oranges (sorry folks, I just had to! 😊) But if the ex-president – despite his own intentions – can bring conservatives to the same realization which progressives (and of course in greater measure, we Libertarians) have had that greater transparency and accountability must be imposed on law enforcement at all levels, then that could be admirable legacy for a figure otherwise denounced as divisive.
