I resist generalizations, generally. I do not see how anything I said supports your generalized distrust of law enforcement. Maybe I’m just too dense to get it, but I don’t see it. We agree that the ideal we both seek is the rule of law. We only disagree on the extent to which law enforcement has been corrupted. You write it up as though a large scale general failure is underway. I see individual cases of bad apples, surrounded by a whole lot of ordinary LEOs doing their job more or less the way we expect them to.
I believe this discrepancy in perception is not accidental. I believe our law system as a whole is under attack in novel ways that are deceptive even to good conservatives. Credibility of law enforcement is essential to societal order. This conflicts with Marxist Apocalypticism, the belief that some grand conflict is a necessary catharsis to throw off the antiquated ways of the past and enter the Worker’s Utopia.
Toward this end, the left’s media wing is using a devastatingly effective propaganda technique which I call “selective amplification,” where events and trends that may be numerically rare are given disproportionate size by constantly pushing them into the forefront of the public consciousness, conditioning uncritical news consumers to believe the rare is common, the abnormal is normal. The left in our country is playing hardball, and they are not stupid. They know they must divide us and put us at odds with many would gladly be our allies, and this includes our own law enforcement community, the vast majority of whom absolutely do support the rule of law, but who, through selective amplification, can be made to appear otherwise.
Yes there are incompetent police. There always have been. Yes there are police who abuse their power. There always have been. But why now, when a new American revolution is stirring, are there so many stories surfacing about how your local community police officers cannot be trusted? Is it because there are really that many new events, proportionately speaking, or is it because these events are being selectively amplified to divide us from a category of fellow citizens we need with us if we are to win this struggle? The strategy has always been divide and conquer, dilute the response, so that no matter how virulent one particular group may be, the culture as a whole cannot act as one.
For my part, I refuse to cooperate with that strategy. It’s just another way to lose. If there are systemic problems encouraging or rewarding bad behavior, we need to fix that. We don’t disagree on this. But we absolutely *must* find ways to cut through the propaganda and insist on the truth, even if that requires us to be more patient in the development of the latest “police are bad for you” story, because the truth will keep us united.
Either you are part of the problem or you can’t see the forest for the trees. Or maybe you are in denial. Only you know the answer.