After several weeks on lockdown, during which time I was forced to work exclusively from home, I had developed a savage attack of “cabin fever” worse than any case of the fabled “WuFlu” ever could have been. The walls were closing in, and I ached to break free. Serendipitously, a good friend of mine, one who had likewise been involuntarily housebound, felt exactly the same way.

The two of us decided to leave our domiciles and drive around New York. The atmosphere was surreal, to say the least. A few months in, we started noticing a strange pattern: the heaviest police presence seemed to be concentrated in areas that are low in crime, wealthy, and racially homogenous. We drove just five miles on one road in one direction and spotted four police cruisers and two officers walking the beat, apparently checking on small businesses to make sure they were adhering to the “social distancing” edicts. An hour later, we took the same road back to where we had started, and this time we saw two police helicopters, two police cruisers, and one SWAT truck. There were no protest, everyone had their mouth diapers on, and people were seemingly following all of the Covid mandates. Given the docility of the citizenry, why was there such a heavy concentration of cops?

Under cover of “stopping the spread,” numerous petty tyrants– mostly mayors and governors of various municipalities and states– have seized control in an utterly unwarranted and unconstitutional manner. We are now witnessing a blurring of the lines on what is or is not law enforcement’s duties and who has the right to enforce the law. The public has been socially conditioned to embrace its captors in a patently Stockholm syndrome-like fashion. 

One wonders if all of these developments have truly been as random and accidental as the petty tyrants would no doubt claim, or if they are being rolled out in a conscious and planned manner in accord with the plans of those holding the petty tyrants’ leashes throughout this affair.

Criminalization of Poverty, Revenue Collectors, Nanny State:

A police officer once arrogantly told me, “I can pull you over for anything I want because I know for a fact I’ll find something unlawful.” 

The sad thing is, he’s right. 

When federal laws were first codified in 1927, they were able to fit into a single volume just a few pages long. But by the 1980s, there were 50 volumes of more than 23,000 pages. In truth, nobody knows how many federal laws there are. Many think-tanks believe there are at least 5,000 federal criminal laws on the low end, with upwards of 300,000 regulations that can be enforced criminally. It has become a deep rabbit hole, and attorneys across the United States do not even want to bother with many cases because they are so labor-intensive with so little payoff. 

How bad has it become? In 2003, there were only 4,000 offenses that carried criminal penalties. By 2013, that number had grown by 21% to 4,850. (Mind you, this is just at the federal level.) 

With the current massive consolidation of real assets and an ever-encroaching bureaucracy, those who were middle class will be falling into lower tiers and looking to the underground economy to survive and cheat the system at every corner. A good example is seeing usually poor people jumping the turnstiles in subway terminals or paying someone off the books at a cheaper rate than the law would allow. These are just a couple of countless examples of rampant abuse to circumnavigate the system across the United States. The more people abuse the system, the more the government passes laws to curb the problem, instead of adapting to the socio-economic situation. 

Police and code enforcement commonly target low-income neighborhoods as a good source of revenue. Usually, the poor cannot pass ridiculous car inspections because of a broken catalytic converter or do not have the time to separate paper from plastic. Recently in California, RePlant, the state’s largest recycling redemption center, went out of business. This is a loss of nearly one-fifth of its recycling centers in the state. Can collecting has been a staple for impoverished peoples to make some money and is also a way to keep them preoccupied. What happened to “environmental justice” and elevating people in poverty?

Food sharing is outlawed in fifty cities in the United States, and 53% of cities prohibit sitting or lying down in particular public places. Panhandling is against the law in 76% of specific parts of cities. Bans on sleeping in vehicles has risen by 119%. Collecting rainwater is either illegal or regulated in seventeen states. The new massive push sweeping the land is the ban on plastic bags where if you require one, there is either a nickel or dime tax added onto your bill. All of these policies are a direct assault on low-income citizens.

In Albuquerque, twenty-six people have been killed by the police since 2010, with a barrage of police body camera clips of escalating confrontations leading to either dog mauling, taser zapping, or beatings. In a particularly egregious case, one cop was even recorded shouting “Booyah!” after gunning down a homeless man with an M4 because he was holding a pocket knife, after initially hassling the man for sleeping in a campsite without a permit. In Richardson Bay, California, cops are sinking people’s boats that they live on. (The state does not like the homeless for the simple fact they cannot be taxed or tracked adequately.) 

When Bloomberg was mayor of NYC, he had the audacity to attempt to place onerous taxes on Big Gulps and ban direct donations to food pantries, citing “health and portion control.” It’s no secret that those who enjoy sodas the most are the poor since they generally cannot afford the luxury of “sustainably filtered water from the yak piss-stained snowy mountains of Nepal” or other high-end products sold to the upper classes as ostensible markers of status and clout. The same rule applies to cigarettes, as they too are enjoyed by those who are living in a perpetual nightmare of being impoverished in a country whose tax and rigid edicts are a premium cost to live in the land of the meek and the home of the afraid.

In 2014, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did, topping at $5 billion versus $3.5 billion in burglaries. Such examples as these give sad testimony of an accelerating slide into Third World conditions. In underdeveloped countries, after all, the cops are frequently the criminals. A street cop in the Philippines will seize meth from some teenage drug dealer, only to give the drugs to his wife to flip. In Russia, planting drugs is common. Ethiopia airport security would block a tourist from boarding a flight back home until he or she coughs up X amount of dollars. In France, crossing the nation’s border to grab a criminal is normal. In the United States, though, it’s all under the guise of “Law & Order,” so a police officer is rendered blameless. 

Police officers, supposedly employed to “protect and serve,” are today often little more than revenue collectors and shakedown thugs. They typically spend more time hassling the law-abiding than bringing lawbreakers to justice. Citizens in small suburban towns generally know who the drug dealers are. Do police officers stop them? Usually not. Why? They have to “build a case,” which may take years on end or have no end. How many overdoses does it take before any action is taken? One gets the clear impression that such matters are not a priority to the law-enforcement establishment.

In many instances, law enforcement selectively chooses which malefactions will be punished and which will be ignored. “Operation Flush the John” was a massive sting operation to pinch men looking for prostitutes. The operation published the names and photographs of the arrestees, which humiliated them and destroyed their reputation, regardless of their guilt or innocence. Such a campaign of targeted harassment against alleged “johns” did little to root out the vice of prostitution, nor did it have the effect of landing any of the dangerous and violent pimps in prison.

Moreover, it seems that the modern police officer doesn’t have the word “entrapment” in his vernacular. The amount of lives ruined for DWIs is astounding and is never discussed, as most knee-jerk bootlickers will come to the defense of the system. Such as these will even praise such overreach as “sobriety checkpoints” by declaring that any opponents of such costly and draconian measures must just be irresponsible alcoholics themselves. Meanwhile, Candy Lightner, the founder of MADD, which paved the path for harsher drinking and driving laws, left the non-profit early on, stating that the group had: “become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned,” and “I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving.”

Surveillance State & Covid:

This past spring, a few police departments thought Covid would be the best time to roll out some new toys and test the limits of civil liberties well past their breaking point.

In New Jersey, Chinese-made drones are being used to spy on citizens in places that patrol cars can’t reach, such as city alleyways and neighborhood backyards. A Chinese company named Da Jiang Innovations has manufactured drones for 43 law enforcement agencies across 22 states.

In Baltimore during the first weeks of lockdown, Persistent Surveillance Systems operated planes that captured low-quality images at 10,000 feet covering 32 square miles for 40 hours a week in an effort to aid police in investigations of homicides, shootings, armed robberies, and carjackings. But some have attempted more ambitious in their efforts. In Connecticut, the Westport Police Department attempted to use technology to “flatten the curve” by using thermal imagery to determine who was violating lock down protocol. Fortunately, it was thwarted by locals, but a dangerous precedent was nevertheless set.

My own experience recently prior to boarding an airplane in an airport terminal provides an apt and sobering testimony of how the surveillance state is in the process of metastasizing as never before. Prior to boarding, the airline crew asked for everyone to line up and scan a QR code, not giving any explanation. In addition to this, the flight attendants handed out paperwork during the flight for contact tracing to be viewed by National Guardsman when leaving the destination terminal. Like sheeple, everyone did as they were told, except for me. I did not scan the QR code, and I walked right past the Guardsman, knowing nothing can be enforced. What if my phone was dead or if I did not have one? What was the QR code for? Are the National Guardsman police officers now? 

Other bureaucratic anomalies include health officials visiting industrial plants and the CDC eviction moratorium “cancel rent”. I had no idea the CDC knew a thing or two about tenant estoppels!

The fact is it is none of any police officer’s business to know where you are going, nor is it the governor’s business to regulate how many guests you have in your house. However, when a society is in a constant state of anxiety, kept off-balance and dumbed-down, they become less resistant. Those who resistant are commonly scapegoated as anti-social, selfish, or “conspiracy theorists.” 

Origins of police militarization:

The militarization of the police was first conceived by Los Angeles Police Commissioner Daryl Gates, who became infamous after being cast as the villain by the media during the riots in 1992. After the Watts riots in ’68, the L.A.P.D was facing a changing demographic and urbanization, which led to a sharp rise in crime. 

Then there were gun battles like the Surry Street shootout, The Black Panther Party began establishing strongholds in South Central by barricading themselves in houses. Serial killers were running amok throughout the 70s, and by the 80s, gangs like the Bloods and Crips, numbering up to 15,000 members, were running a well-oiled money laundering operation for drug cartels tied to Colombia. All this which called for the formation of SWAT.

By this time, it had become clear that the days of a cop armed with just a .38 special and checking on some hooligans who stole from the soda jerk were dead. Gates longed for the old America he first experienced, but also took great pride in his heavy-handed approach to “Law & Order.” In 1988 he initiated Operation Hammer, which dislodged the underground economy. Yet all it did was move crime all across the southwest of the United States, in turn giving rise to the “War on Drugs” domestically. Fast-forward to the National Defense Authorization Act of 1990, which started transferring military hardware to local police. This militarization was copycatted tenfold in the following decade’s thanks to a suspiciously-timed rise in domestic terror events. 

Once President Obama took office, the Pentagon had already transferred to police departments tens of thousands of machine guns; thousands of pieces of camouflage, night vision gear, silencers, armored cars, drones, and even mine-resistant trucks. The militarization of law-enforcement was complete. 

A question often raised is, who would want to be a police officer in this day and age? When our escapades started to dwindle in the Middle East, government agencies gave those who served in the military special treatment. If you checked the “veteran” box on an application for the police, you got to go to the front of the line for employment. 

As former military take on law enforcement positions, subconsciously, they do not shake off what they experienced in training or combat. The American taxpayer is all too often viewed as an enemy combatant and not as a civilian. Police officers already have the “Us Vs. Them” mentality, and adding former soldiers to the ranks doesn’t help matters.

The war on terror has now given rise to the open-air prison we experience today. It is a simple fact that what we practice abroard comes home to roost, and now one is unable to decipher a night raid in Fallujah from one in Phoenix. 

“Blue Lives Matter”

Why is there a Blue Lives Matter flag being flown on a piece of public property right alongside the LGBT “Pride” flag? I raised this question to a group of men who would identify as moderate right. Naturally, this conversation descended into ad hominems. I could not engage in a meaningful dialogue as I tried to point out the contradictory views they hold between the sanitary dictatorship and the ongoing civil unrest. 

Let us realize what a flag means; Most of those who hold a libertarian point of view or neutral stance when discussing politics will quickly quote George Carlin’s statement on flags being for the “symbol-minded”. Yet, a flag is similar to a wolf marking a territory. The pride flag represents a “no go zone” for a specific demographic and takes on a particular Zeitgeist (though artificial in its origins). The “thin blue line” emblem also gives off its own spirit of identifying with a totalitarian overtone. In fact, this flag is NOT compatible with the American flag but instead represents an absolute desecration of Ol’ Glory. When Sean Hannity lapel pin is of the punisher (Yay Super Heroes) with black and blue stripes running across it, we have to start asking whose laws and whose orders?

Blue Lives Matter is generally supported by moderate right white suburbanites because they fear Black crime and Hispanic gang activity. They believe the police are there to protect them from things such as BLM and Antifa but do not realize that the same people funding BLM are also making sure social justice is being embedded into criminal justice law reform. It’s a catch 22 for law enforcement, leading to a rise of many good cops into an early retirement (muh pension & 2nd beach house). 

During Trump’s first year in office, one of the first places he visited was Brentwood N.Y, which is dominated by an El Salvadorian community. There had been a decade-long orgy of fearmongering in local papers on the “MS13 gang threat,” which was fostered by the Obama admiration dumping a large population of illegal Central Americans into the town. In fact, there was little local MS13 threat, especially to the neighboring affluent white communities as the Salvadorians rely on the whites for employment and charity. The gang’s crimes were almost entirely isolated within their own community. Nevertheless, the police unions pounced on the opportunity to expand their presence and power, and a justification was found to inflate the already-bloated police budget. 

Let’s understand the mentality of those who say that they “back the blue”:

The family bias- “My brother is a cop! He’s a great guy!”

For God and Country- “The Bible states we should always respect authority.”

Normalcy bias- “Who would protect us if it wasn’t for the police?”

Authority worship- “Just do what he says and you won’t get hurt”. 

Denial of abuse- “This footage doesn’t display the full story! We need to see a different camera angle.”

Finally, good old ad hominem- “If you don’t like it here, why don’t you live in North Korea!”

Realization and future police prospects:

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” – Robert E. Howard.

Our country asked for the nanny state as being an intermediate between our neighbors and us. Over-litigation, a sue happy culture, the paranoia of the other, domestic violence calls, and the lack of solidarity has led to our enslavement. Going forward with such childish yet real concepts as “defunding the police” take root, we will see LARPers and pseudo gangs rise as a means to an end.

Communal forms of law enforcement will take the law into their own hands regardless of an economic collapse much like our American neighbors south of the border. These gangs become the family units for those disenfranchised and from broken homes. We may see the rise of privatization for those who can afford it. High-End communities that do not have the time nor interest in taking an active role in their community will outsource their security. 

We must come to our senses and admit that out-of-control law-enforcement is not our friend, nor is the continued reach of the nanny state in our best interests. We are better off with a scaled back, constitutionally-restrained police force, and a temperamental return to the liberties that we once held dear. Unfortunately, neither of these transformations is likely to take place unless we are willing to fight hard to make them happen.