Written by I have mixed feelings about what I’m going to say to you in the following paragraphs. Something is happening which I’ve long cheered for, but it is happening for the wrong reasons, and I fear the outcome. Then again, I never imagined this would happen cleanly or without some amount of fear, so from that perspective you might say everything is going according to plan.
The phenomenon to which I refer, is a growing resentment of law enforcement. Resentment is not nearly strong enough of a word, in fact. Even the word “hate” fails to fully describe what is going on. It is literally to the point of police being gunned down while pumping gas, just for being cops.
Many times across the pages of this website I’ve reveled over the deaths and discomforts of police and other government agents. This has made a great many people quite angry with me, to the point of receiving death threats and hate mail in such volume that I couldn’t read all of them in a two hour podcast. I understand why my doing so makes them upset, because, if I am entirely honest with you, I have the same emotional reaction to what I’m saying that they do. I’ve had some very positive interactions with law enforcement as of late. They even came to my aid. On a personal level, I actually like some of these guys, and I find the conflict of interests here quite unfortunate.
Despite what an uninformed reader may come away thinking from reading some of those pieces, I despise violence. I am anti-government, because the State is the most violent institution mankind has ever conjured. Years of attempting to negotiate peacefully for that institution to cease its unending violent victimization of peaceful people have been quite fruitless, and so at some point I realized violence between free men and agents of the State was, for better or worse, inevitable.
For me though, I’ve attempted to keep this grounded in reason and reality. Every traffic stop is a death threat. All police officers are, by the very nature of their profession, aggressors. So using violence to deter them from their aggressions is quite sensible and decent. We would all do well to see ourselves living in a culture of resistance to aggression.
What is happening today though seems quite senseless. It more resembles a race war than a revolution, and this I can find no pleasure in.