Meanwhile in Washington, D.C.:
“All cops are bastards” chant Antifa as they March through DC tonight. pic.twitter.com/oJDgpUtKDN
— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) April 13, 2021
At least it’s peaceful. The umbrellas suggest they may get more kinetic at some point, or at least, they expect to.
Not to put too fine a point on things, but if their chant was accurate, they would be neither marching nor chanting. The bastards would’ve silenced them.
Here’s a simple, pretty much rhetorical, question for the reader: Why don’t these people ever swap out the C in ACAB and chant “All Criminals Are Bastards”?
If your answer is some version of “Because all criminals aren’t bastards,” true, but not the point.
All cops aren’t bastards, either. Never were, even when becoming a police officer could be more of a question of who you knew than what you knew.
If you take in the sweep of history, cops are much less likely to be bastards now than they were a century or even a few decades ago. As scholar Dr. Jody Edward Ginn writes in his excellent book on the Texas Rangers, East Texas Troubles: The Allred Rangers’ Cleanup of San Augustine, up to the 1930s, even Texas’ finest were often given the badge for political reasons by crooked criminals in capitol buildings, and they abused the power that came with that badge and gun with impunity. The capitol criminals protected them, even used them to mete out injustice under the same aegis the good Rangers tried to keep the peace. Call those criminals “bastards” and you’d have my sympathy. Ginn singles out one governor, in particular, Gov. Ma Ferguson, for corrupting the Rangers. Her successor had to work very hard to weed all the bastards out.
By establishing civil service standards in the middle of the 20th century, our forebears the left routinely denounce and cancel did away with patronage, lack of objective standards, and the other issues that increased the likelihood a given law enforcement officer might in fact be a bastard. Thanks to them, now police departments reflect as closely as they can the demographics of the cities they serve, and there are systems in place to de-bastardize police departments. Your average police officer today is truly there to serve and protect. They hate the bastardly ones more than most civilians do. They give the good cops a bad name. The other day, Charley Wilkison of CLEAT referred to this in our report on the exodus of officers leaving the Austin Police Department.
He warned strongly against Austin reverting to a “political police department” like it had before civil service reforms made hiring and promotion decisions based on merit rather than political patronage. “These are mistakes we don’t have to make,” he told PJ Media.
Mr. Wilkison, a lifelong Democrat, by the way, is right.
Meanwhile, throw a dead cat at a group of criminals and you’re very likely to strike multiple bastards. I’m making no distinctions here between different types or styles or genres of criminals. They’re statistically much more likely to be bastards than cops. Change my mind.
The collective guilt and othering that antifa and BLM routinely engage in against police officers are more than just mindless — it’s toxic to a nation and leads to nearly unhealable division and violence. My father was not a cop but was in law enforcement his entire career. You say “All Cops Are Bastards,” I will be offended and I’m likely to dislike you for as long as we both shall live. There will be nothing to discuss. You’ll think I’m the son of a bastard; I’ll think you’re a fool. I’ll be the one who’s right.
Once you’ve decided that all members of a certain group are a very bad thing, you’ve set your mind toward making no distinctions between any of them.
They’re all bad. They’re all bastards. It’s quite a bit worse in reality than the old Seinfeld “anti-dentite” routine. In extremis, this brand of collective guilt and open hatred leads to campaigns of targeted violence and even genocide.
These folks hating on all police everywhere never march against violent crime even though it’s on a swift rise in this country, and many of them are far more likely to be its victims than the victim of any altercation with police. These folks never march against, say, terrorists and refer to all of them with a harsh reference to their family tree. It’s cops. Always cops.
Why cops? Why this othering, which can and has and will lead to division and hatred and violence?
Just who came up with this terrible slogan? What was their agenda? Why do they teach people to hate the people who put their lives on the line to stop violent criminals? What’s their end game? Must the rest suffer while these folks unlearn everything our forebears learned the hard way?
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