Don’t Defund The Police

east coast. So I fly out to basically the rubble of Washington, d C. I actually couldn't even get to my hotel room last night in my car because the National Guard was stationed all around it. What has happened to this place since the last time I was here, Well, it's gone nuts. And on top of that, in DC, they don't even let you smoke a cigar. That's the worst part of all. It looks the crazy Democrats have

banned cigars. But but here's the good news. If you did actually light one up, I'm not sure they have the police officers to come arrest you. They don't, and it seems if the Democrats get their way, then we're going to have even fewer police officers after that. You know, you have spent a good bit of your career in law enforcement. What's your take on this? Because it's it's

at the most local level. The Minneapolis City Council voted overwhelmingly veto proof majority to abolish and dismantle their police department, and you're seeing Democrats at the federal level taking up an anti police legislation as well. So let me try to understate them. This is stark raving nuts. This is insane, like like like, did you see the Minneapolis mayor, the poor lefty guy who's who's trying to like, Okay, what do you want me to say? I'll say whatever you want.

They're like, okay, well you abolish the whole police department. Said wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a second, like they really have lost their mind now mind you, Comrade de Blasio, like, good bye me, we're cutting the cops like your city is literally on fire, right, and they're so lution is abolished police departments. By the way, these are the same morons that want to abolish ice. Yeah, you know, they're just like, okay, let's get rid of everybody charged with

protecting us. That is assinine and it would end up killing a whole lot of people. If you think black lives matter, and let me be clear, black lives absolutely matter, your dumb ass idea to abolish police departments will kill a lot of black lives, will kill a lot of Hispanic lives, will kill a lot of white lives, will

kill a lot of people, and it's dumb. Well, this, I think is the point here, because it's all the people who are saying black lives matter, and the people who are pushing these things are the ones who are pushing a policy that will have a very negative effect on black people. Because we spoke about this a little

bit on the last show. I think there's a study out that the number of unarmed black men who are killed by the police every year is it's not a four digit number, it's not a three digit number, it's not a two digit number. Obviously, every death is tragedy and that's what they're focusing on, But the number of unarmed black men who are killed by criminals is very high. And when the criminals are in the neighborhood, who's going

to take care of it? The police? What is the effect of this going to be in troubled areas around the country. It would be terrible if it happens the victims of violent crime or disproportionately low income. Yeah, they're disproportionately minority African Americans and Hispanics. And we've seen in the past, we've seen what was called the Ferguson effect. You're calling Ferguson when you had riots against the police officers,

and what happened was police officers naturally. Look, if you're a copre you're out doing your job and you realize suddenly, Okay, if I have a citizen encounter and it goes wrong, my whole life is over. My family's over, my career is over. Everything could come crashing down. What cops naturally do is they pull back. They say, you know what, maybe I'll just not engage. We saw in Baltimore after the riots in Baltimore, we saw the murder rakes rates spike. Chicago.

You look at the murder rates in Chicago year after year after year. And so if you end up pulling back the police and not letting them do their job, that means the criminals, the gangmagers, the violent murderers, the rapists, those the robbers have no check on them, and and the people who will pay pay the price. They're not going to be, by the way, Hollywood celebrities in Beverly Hills that they're gonna be perfectly fine and protected. It's going to be it's going to be the people who

are vulnerable that need the police to keep them safe. Yes, we want the police to protect everyone's rights fairly, but if you make the police go away, those who who are in closest proximity to violent criminals, and that that is heavily in low income areas, they're the ones they're gonna pay the biggest price. There's a lot of hypocrisy here. You see this kind of radicalism being pushed by people who will always enjoy the safety and security not only

of the police, but of good neighborhoods. So there's a lot of it. Michael, I got a question. Has Nancy Pelosi fired her police detail? You know, I just Chuck Schubert. No, I haven't gotten worried about that. Has Billed de Blasio? No, No, certainly not. Why not? And by the way, let me be clear, I'm not calling on them too. I don't want them to be killed, but why are they trying to cancel the police protection for their low income residents. It's a police protection for me, but not for thee.

I think that's what we're hearing from a lot of Democrats. Remember de Blasio said that about the gym. You remember that during the coronavirus lockdown, he shut down all the gems and then he opened it up specially so he could go work out, because he said, you know, it's important that I'd be healthy, unlike the rest of you little people. The little people. He didn't quite say, it was just impl This was the mayor of Chicago said, no one can go get a haircut. Do not get

a haircut except for me. I need a haircut because I care about my appearance. And in this hypocrisy, actually on that point in particular ties in with the coronavirus because a lot of what we've been hearing, Remember we did not do any shows in person. We social distance for months, because that's what the public health officials told

us to do. Then all of a sudden, hundreds of thousands of people pour out into the streets in very close proximity in these protests, and the same public health officials who excoriated conservatives for demonstrating in any way peaceably against some of the lockdown overreaches. Those same public health officials encouraged the protests and the riots and the arson that have accompanied them. Now now all of a sudden,

we see a pivot back to backing away again. How are we to understand this if not as as rank politicization of the public health there's actually science behind it. You see, the virus is woke, and this woke virus. If you are if you are protesting with Antifa, if you're arguing for abolishing the police, you can get thousands of you together. You can embrace you, you can you can kiss each other all over the place. You don't need masks and and and the virus. The virus is

actually marching alongside you. Just you need a microscope to see it. But it's sitting there, like anyone's saying, regardless of your politics. You turn on the TV, you see thousands of thousands of people smashed in very very closely, and you're sitting there going, well, wait a second. Everyone said I had to stay home. Everyone said it was the end of the world. If if like my kid went to school, everyone said it was the end of the world. If I went to my grandmother's funeral, that

I would apparently kill the community. Right, And then you turn on the TV and then the same public health officials are saying, oh, no, no no, this is perfectly fine, right. I mean, we were told first, do not wear masks, do not buy masks. Masks are not effective, they're actually harmful. Then we were told we all have to buy masks. We were told that the virus spreads very easily on surfaces, part of the reason why we need to wear the mask.

Then we were told it does not spread very easiland services. We were told initially that asymptomatic people are the ones spreading coronavirus. The World Health Organization just came out this week and said that asymptomatic spread is very rare. So for those of us who are not scientific experts with lots of degrees, how are we supposed to think about this virus after the chaos of the past couple of weeks. Well, look,

let me take both sides of that. On one level, this virus has been hard to figure out, and the experts have genuinely struggled, and so they haven't necessarily understood how it operated. They didn't know what was going to happen, they didn't know how easily it would be transmitted, how it would be transmitted, and I'm look, with a new virus, I'm understanding that the science takes some time to get out and figure it out. And you saw many leaders

trying to protect people and keep people safe. It then became this this woke virtue signally where you know, ostentatiously wearing a mask and shutting everything down became it actually had nothing to do with the science, Like the whole flattening the curve. When's the last time someone actually said the phrase flattening the curve, because we did, we did flatten the curve. And then they said no, no no, no, no, no, everything must stay shut down until a cura is discovered. Yes,

and the virus is eradicated from planet Earth. You're like, wait, that wasn't the explanation you gave before, and then suddenly we didn't know it was or until we want to have giant riots and burn the cities to the ground, right, So that's now it is the political hypocrisy, and also it's elected officials not giving a damn about people's livelihoods, not caring. And by the way, with both COVID nineteen and the riots were seeing the same thing, which is

small business, is being destroyed by the shutdown. Yeah, democrats don't care small business. This is being burned to the ground. Democrats don't care. And not only Democrats don't care. Did you see this editorial writer with the New York Times who said property crime, So burning someone's business to the ground is not violent. It's not violence. How is that? I see? I always thought that when you have molotov cocktails and pitchforks and hammers, when you use that, that's violence.

But listen, I'm not a genius like the people at the New York Times. It is well, look, I'll give you another example. Did you see the ostentatiously named president of the Minneapolis City Council. I love that the Sea Council has a president. But but she was on TV saying, if someone breaks into your garage, if someone is coming and breaking into your home and you call the cops, yeah,

that's your privilege. You're exercising privilege by calling the cops. Like, okay, I want everyone to get this straight, because this is the problem. The lunatic, Yeah, have take it over. They're now saying you don't have a right, You should have no expectation that the police should protect your home from a burglar because of their crazy politics. That's nuts. Well, I want to get your thoughts on this, speaking of the New York Times, because I think there are two

schools of thought on this. One school says the left has gone so insane, encouraging political violence, completely losing all credibility on the coronavirus, that they've gone so crazy that we're now at a tipping point where we're going to swing back in a more conservative direction. I think the other school of thought is we're on the brink of revolution and people are as on edge as they've been

since nineteen sixty eight. The New York Times published an op ed by your Senate colleague Tom Cotton, and it was an op ed about whether or not to call in troops to deal with the riots. The editor who took that OpEd has now resigned from The New York Times. It got such blowback that The New York Times says we cannot publish any opinions that contradict leftist orthodoxy. That

man's name, James Bennett. I believe that's right. And in our last podcast, you and I talked about this, and and you know, look smacking the New York Times is you know, it's kind of low hanging fruit. It is, and and they're so bad that it's easy to point out out how idiotic they are. Yeah, and then they got worse. They literally fired their editor. Why because he dared publish from someone else, not from the New York Times, from someone else and by the way, his name was

on it. Uh huh. Yeah, that the lefties in the news room disagreed with. And it was the reporters. These reporters are little cry baby who we are? Suddenly we're back in like some leftist classroom where the reporters if they hear news they don't like, they start hissing. And suddenly was the New York Times too? You're fired? Let me ask you something. When is the next time the New York Times or any other of these big papers are going to publish any view other than absolute lefty orthodoxy, right,

they are provda. This is a weird inversion here because typically what you might expect is at every news organization there's opinion and there's reporting, and the reporters deal with the facts, right, just the facts, and opinion interprets the facts and gives their point of view. You might expect the opinion people to complain about the reporters. That's a kind of natural view of things. But at the New York Times, it's the allegedly straight objective reporters who are

throwing the hissy fit about an opinion column. This is completely flayed. The reporters are opinion journalists, but they all have one opinion. They're not allowed to disagree. You can't have any other view. And it's the rigidity of it. This is it is very much. It's something of which Communist China would be proud, except making that point that New York Times wouldn't make because that would imply criticism for Communist China. And I mean, it is ridiculous and sad.

And I've often said, look, if there's somebody listening who has some money. Yeah, Sometimes people ask me, all right, what do you read to learn news? And to be honest, I don't trust any place. Every place is biased and ridiculous at this point of view. All so what I try to do is I try to read things on both sides to even it up. I actually the New York Times is unreadable. I will read the Washington Post,

which they're hard lefty, but they they're trying. They're trying a little bit to be objective there, read things like National Review and try to balance it out. But look, I think somebody with resources ought to buy one of these legacy masthead things, like you know, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Washington Post. And you know what I'd do. I'd do an editorial page. I'd have a conservative and

a liberal editor. Yeah, but I have them both empowered to run stories and so instead of and to have debate, to trust the dialectic process. And I'll tell you what i'd do also, as I'd have a conservative on a liberal news editor, because so much of the bias and journalism right comes from picking which stories to run and

which stories not too right. So I'd have a real rock rib conservative and a real flaming lunatic liberal and say, both of you you can have, and so people reading it through the synthesis can actually learn what's going on. None of the supposed mainstream media places are even trying to do, of course not. But you know, as the leftist media outlets run, the people who are not far far radical leftists out don't, maybe we should hire them to be producers here. I don't know. Maybe well they

can come on over. We certainly I think of a more balanced perspective than some of those outlets. But on this point of the left going too far, yeah, I know that you don't spend much of your day thinking about Harry Potter, but Harry Potter actually does play into this a little bit. The author of Harry Potter, JK. Rowling, is a left winger, a left wing activist, a feminist, but she thinks that the left has gone too far. She came out, she had a whole long tweet thread,

and she's signaled this point of view before. Yeah, where she said, Look, I support people who are transgender. I support my transgender friends. I want them to be happy, I want them to feel comfortable. But it is simply the case that a woman is a woman and there's something about being a woman that a man can't be. And she's trying to sort of like the Minneapolis mayor, trying to come to this accommodation with the hard left. They are furious at her. Has it gone too far?

There will be no moderation with the left right, they are it's like Robespierre. Yes, it is the French Revolution and the guillotines are coming. Yea. The guillotines already came for James Bennett, the editor of the New York Times, and others as well. Well there you can't get extreme enough, Yeah, because right now they're out extreme. Listen, a week ago, if I would have said these idiots are going to call for abolishing the police department, was it? Oh? Come on?

But like not possible. It's ridiculous. Look like we're at the point and it will keep going and they will keep consuming themselves. They Part of it is you don't give a damn if they come after you. They do, but but it doesn't you know, it helps that you don't wake up at night going, oh no, what are they saying about me? Now? Oh gosh, right, there's something liberating about this, of course, these folks. And look, you

live in LA don't remind me, senator, please. You and I first got to know each other, among other things, through through friends of Abe. Yeah. Um, you know a group of conservatives underground in Hollywood in entertainment. And I gotta tell you, first time I spoke to friends of Abe, I think it was twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen. Yeah, so six seven years ago about four came out in lam what was striking, And there were some big famous people.

There were people like you know, like John John Voight was there actually Bruce Jenner before he was Cabin Jenner. Bruce was thereative and but you also had lots of lower level folks, people who were writers, people who were gaffers, people who were makeup artists, just kind of all working in Hollywood. And the degree of terror. Yes, it's the

only gathering I've ever been in. The rule is no photographs at all, No one with your phone everywhere else You're always snapping because you know what, if you're someone working in Hollywood and they got a picture of you right of center. This was seven years ago, you could lose your job and destroy your career. That's now journalism

as well, that's the New York Times. If you dare disagree with their propaganda, if you're not woke enough, if you just want to fight against police brutality, but you don't actually want to abolish the police department, right, well, then off with your head. This is a great analogy. This hadn't occurred to me, but you know, you expect

this from Hollywood. We've heard about this for years. But it used to be the case that if you were a serious journalist, you could be photographed with a Democratic senator or a Republican senator. What the past few weeks have shown is you can't. You can't can't you couldn't take a photo with Tom Cotton, or you couldn't run his op ed You really that the lines have been drawn. People are digging in their heels. You mentioned Robespear in

the French Revolution. I did have thoughts of this the other day because ill han Omar, the congresswoman, said that we're going to abolish the police and we're going to have a new imaginative approach to public safety. And you know, the committee that chopped off everybody's head in the French Revolution was the Committee of public Safety. Well, and there is a consistency. The hard left has always been very

comfortable with talitarianism. Yeah, anytime they're talking about abolishing the police, it's not like forces going to disappear, it's just they want the monopoly on who exercise of the force, and that is you know, look, you look at communist dictatorships, whether Cuba, whether it's the Soviet Union, whether China, whether whether Vietnam, I mean vicious murder, torture, oppression, Nicaragua, Bernie Sanders friends down in Nicaraguay. This is consistent. And it's

because they're collectivists, yea. And they're so damn self righteous. Yeah, that they're like the Borg has ordered it. Yeah. And if you dare disagree question, you must be assimilated or destroy Yeah. Listen. On the right, one of the beauties of liberty, there are all sorts of people I disagree with. Great, all right, more like, hey, I don't really want to hang out with people just agree with me. I mean,

that's utterly boring. But not on the left. On the left, it's it's it's like, you know what we're living in the left. It's Handmaid's Tale right right right down to the mask. They're not even aware. They put everyone in masks and they must all say the same thing. And that is statists. Yeah, gonna status, that's what they do. And you're you know, you're seeing some cracks. I mean the fact that this New York Times editor, I think he's waking up to this. JK Rowling, a hardened leftist.

I think she's waking up and saying, gosh, this is not the left that I thought I was a part of. This has gone too far. Either that could be a healthy thing for the country, we would swing back a little bit, or it's all broken and we're just living in the rubble. It wasn't too long ago when the left believed in free speech. Yeah, you know. As you know, I've got a book that's coming out later this year, and it's a book on the Supreme Court. It's called

One Vote Away. It's talking about how all of our rights are hanging literally just one vote away. There's a whole chapter on free speech where it talks about a very famous Supreme Court case where where a guy wore a jacket that said f the Draft, although he didn't abbreviate, and the Supreme Court quite rightly said that he had a First Amendment right to express that view, even if that view was profane, even if it might be distasteful. That used to be a mainstream liberal view. Yeah, no longer.

No longer. Now the left not only is willing to silence anyone who disagrees, they demand right that anyone who disagrees be silenced. That's terrified, that's right. In the last moment or two that we have left. We've got to get through some very important mail, bad questions. The most important one I saw is from Gt. At the top, Senator Cruise, thank you for your service in the Senate. What is your cigar of choice? Monte Cristo number one, monte Cristo number one, it's a great cigar from Captain

of the Silent Majority. That's a Twitter account. Do you support the use of force to protect historical sites and property being destroyed by rioters? I guess that means do you support the police basic like going in and stopping the rioters. I support law enforcement stopping violence, right, Why is that controversial? If you try to hurt somebody, yeah, law enforcement should stop you. If you try to destroy

somebody else's property, law enforcement should stop you. Look, we saw the idiocy reach its peak when in the past few days a statue of Churchill was defaced by the way the original anti fashion. I mean, he literally I couldn't help but send out a tweet and say, okay, look, he only defeated Hitler, defeated the Nazis, saved the free world. But you know, you're young and angry and you got a can of spray paint, so your contributions to humanity

and to equality. And by the way, mister social justice warrior, in terms of equality, stopping the friggan Nazis from murdering people. Frank's pretty highest there. It's impressive, and yet they still wanted to face right right. I see these things used to be uncontroversial, but I guess we're living in very strange times. From Matt, and apologies to Churchill for for going with the money christa number one. Yeah, it's true. You know he did have some other choices. We can

explore those later though. I mean, he has a whole size of cigar named after him. Of the church Shill, will we ever have the gnoles? And what will the knolls be? That? You know, it's funny people ask Michael, what do you want to do? What's your envent? Just that if I could get a cigar named after me, that's it. But I don't know if I'm gonna be able to save the Western world. You know, the day

is young, The day is young. That's true. From Matt Senator, Any intelligent, honest and well reasoned liberals I should follow. I want a more balanced feed. My answer precisely. Look Andrew Sullivan m smart yep um willing to question UM. Someone who used to fit into that was Michael Kelly, who wrote in The Washington Post twenty years ago sadly he was killed on the Iraq war. UM. He wrote some of the best stop heads ever. He wrote I Believe, which if you go back twenty years, laid out the

cognitive dissidance that that that Clinton defenders had to put out. Um. The problem is smart, smart liberals that are actually principled. So many of them have been silent right that it it there used to be quite a few, but or they're no longer really considered liberal, Like I would Professor Alan Dershwitz that that would be an example. You know Dershowitz, drsh was my criminal law professor first year law school. So I I are drive there. It was. It was

pretty wild. I'm a one L in law school. Uh dersh is defending Mike Tyson. Yeah, you know, it was when Mike Tyson's rape trial was going on. I'm like, holy cow, my professor is like defending Mike Tyson. He assigned to us as part of our reading Penthouse magazine because he had written I think it was the cover story in Penthouse think maybe the first time Penthouse had ever not had a woman on the cover. He had Mike Tyson and Dersh had written this long cover story

about him and what he explained he did. What he assigned to us did not have pictures. It was just the text. Yeah, you only read so I can legitimately say we only read it for the articles because we just had the xerox pages. So we were only given the text. There were no pictures of what we were given. But but I remember he told the criminal class he said, look, I could write it off at the New York Times, and you know, a handful of people would read it. But you know, I think at the time he said

Penthouse had a readership of like five million people. And he said, I'm trying to talk to jurors. Jurors are reading. So it was an interesting He was a fabulous professor. And I remember first year law school he said, listen, by any measure, this is Durst speaking. I am in the most liberal one percent of Americans in this country. Yeah. But he would do things like defend free speed and argue for look, he used to muse look Nurschowitz. He's Jewish,

deeply pro Israel. He used to talk about, you know how he would think about if he was hired as a criminal defense lawyer to defend Adolf Hitler, right, and he would kind of agonize about that. Look, I'm glad when I was practicing law, I didn't defend I would not have defended Adolf Hitler because everyone deserves a lawyer. But I ain't working for him, right so, But but it's interesting. He believed in protecting the rights of the accused.

He believed in stopping censorship, he believed in he believed in civil liberty in a way that there aren't many liberals left to do. There aren't and that wasn't so long ago. And now it seems that the world has gone upside down. We'll have to dig into more of that upside down. This. I've got to make it back to my hotel to see if I can get past the National Guard because about crazy things have gotten. But we'll be back here again soon. So my advice is

simply protest on the way and the lecture. That's true. I'll have to find a sign somewhere. I'm Michael Knowles. This is verdict with Ted Cruz. We'll be back soon. This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom and Security Pack, a political action committee dedicated to supporting conservative causes, organizations, and candidates

across the country. In twenty twenty two, Jobs Freedom and Security Pack plans to donate to conservative candidates running for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.