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"Defund the police" turned my ideological world upside down. In the immediate aftermath of the Floyd killing, I felt compelled as a criminal defense/civil rights lawyer/consultant to give my two cents on what should be done in this area. I donated a significant amount of money to Campaign Zero and recommended that others do the same. While one can critique that organization's data analysis and policy proposals, they fundamentally go about things the right way by trying to be evidence-based and intellectually honest.

Almost immediately, the "cancellation" of Campaign Zero's DeRay Mckesson took place, with Twitter activists (Twactivists??) piling on him for trying to "use the white man's tools to tear down the white man's house." Then, instead of rallying around a leader like Mckesson, the movement coalesced around "defund the police," and the Great Awokening consumed society in a matter of weeks. Mckesson caved to the pressure and all of a sudden became an abolitionist, publishing this rather absurd piece on Medium - https://medium.com/@deray/on-the-path-toward-police-abolition-c8b91137024b - and placing a bizarre disclaimer (which appears to now have been removed) on his website urging would-be donors to contribute to radical abolitionists instead of his evidence-based organization.

I knew instantly from my experience in criminal defense that this was all going to be a disaster and would lead to considerable loss of life. As I said on social media at the time, high crime communities need a lot of things they currently do not have. A power vacuum is not one of them. "Defund the police" calls were not going to accomplish anything other than giving these gangs more power to terrorize their neighbors.

But none of this mattered to the activists. This was all about ideology and not about evidence. When academia and the media jumped on this crazy train, I completely lost faith in the institutions upon which I previously relied to make sense of the world. With this loss of trust, I began second-guessing all of the assumptions I had taken on board over the course of my formal education and informal socialization.

I saw for the first time the deep ideological corruption in fields like criminology, sociology, and psychology that had been there all along. I then went more critically through the Trump narratives, and saw how incredibly dishonest and delusional the media and academia had become (e.g., Russiagate, bountygate). I then saw the same sort of narrative-driven ideological corruption in Covid reporting and policies. Once I saw the dishonesty and ideological fervor, I couldn't unsee it. It was everywhere and everything. While the BLM fervor has died off to some extent, it still dominates most of our sense-making institutions. To the extent it has subsided, it has been replaced by Covidianism, which carries with it the same sort of fact-free scapegoating, moralizing, and destructive policies. The rot runs deep and, like the virus, mutates and adapts to changing conditions. I fear this rot is as endemic and ineradicable as Covid, and has caused and will continue to cause at least as much harm.

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Dec 7, 2021Liked by Leighton Woodhouse

Good work here, sir.

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When crime is rising, it has a way of crowding out most other political considerations. The backlash to "defund the police" is massive right now, and growing. San Francisco's uber-progressive DA is likely to be recalled, by way of example, by the same city that thought it was a great idea to elect him just a couple of years ago. It's starting to feel like "1970s tax revolt" to me, and those of us who are Democrats and who absolutely loathe the Trumpian alternatives on offer had better figure out how to harness this energy and abandon the progressive absurdities that brought us here.

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Thank you for another great article. I think the basic problem is we have more allegiance to sides than sanity, and nuance is completely lost.

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That imprisonment or death line was powerful. Reminded me of the Foucault book “Civilization and Madness.” The idea that we always had madness and never had good solutions, but we’re the ones who stopped trying says a lot about what kind of people we are compared to our ancestors.

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Mr. Woodhouse is brave for stating common sense, I hope he will continue to do so.

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