New York Times: Efforts to Weed Out “Extremists In Law Enforcement” Meet Resistance

Woke progressives are full of demands these days:

• In order to fight climate change, they need the power to tackle our meat obsession.
• In order to fight gun violence, they need a national red flag law.
• In order to fight off “domestic extremists,” they need the National Guard to occupy Washington.
• In order to maintain and expand their grip on power, they need federal control of state elections and to pack the Senate with new states and the Supreme Court with new justices.
• In order to feel safe after the “trauma” of the Capitol Siege, they need the power to impose a political litmus test on the military and to purge “extremists.”
• In order to protect themselves from “trauma” and “misinformation,” they need the power to censor the internet to silence their domestic political opposition.
• In order to fight “domestic extremism,” they need to vastly expand the surveillance state to get around the Constitution and a new domestic terrorism law.
• In order to brainwash your children into hating themselves for being White, they need the power to push critical race theory in public schools.
• In order to get their way in states where progressive activists are a tiny minority, they want to weaponize the power of multinational corporations to veto legislation passed by state legislatures.
• In order to demographically replace Republican voters in the Sunbelt, they need open borders and to resettle refugees from war zones
• In order to fight systematic racism, the Department of Social Justice is putting the police on trial and investigating local police departments
• In order to fight white supremacy, some progressive activists want to dismantle the National Park System and return the National Parks to Native Americans
• In order to dominate cable television, they have floated the possibility of having the cable companies deplatform their rivals because going after advertisers hasn’t worked
• In order to abolish gender, they need to neuter Mr. Potato Head
• In order to cleanse the public square of racism, they need to topple hundreds of public monuments and any monument will do

Is there anything else?

What else do woke progressive activists need from us to bring on their utopia? In addition to the power to determine who can hold a job in this country or fly on a plane or open a bank account or whether the president of the United States can use social media, they also need the power to determine who can be a police officer based on their political affiliations to weed out “extremists.”

New York Times:

“In the battle to stamp out extremism from the ranks of the police, lawmakers from California to Minnesota have proposed solutions they thought were straightforward.

Some laws would empower the police to do more robust background checks of recruits, letting them vet social media to make sure new officers were not members of hate groups. Other laws would make it easier for departments to fire officers with ties to extremists. …

Police officers, like everybody else, enjoy First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly, so the challenge for lawmakers is figuring out how to preserve those rights while barring extremists from infiltrating the ranks.

California is one of four states, including Oregon, Minnesota and Tennessee, along with Washington, D.C., that have proposed new laws to give law enforcement agencies more power to exclude officers with ties to extremism. …

There is little hard data on the number of American police officers with explicit ties to extremism, although senior officials have repeatedly characterized domestic extremism as an accelerating threat. “We have a growing fear of domestic violent extremism and domestic terrorism,” Merrick Garland, the attorney general, said during a hearing on Capitol Hill last week. …

For Ms. Bynum, getting a statement of principle against extremism set into law would be an important first step. “Essentially, you have to move the ball,” she said. …”

Unfortunately, there is a “thicket of obstacles” standing in the way of this.

The First Amendment protects the rights of everyone to free speech and free assembly. The Second Amendment protects the right to own firearms. The Fourth Amendment protects people against unreasonable search and seizures. The Tenth Amendment protects the reserved rights of the states. You have no idea how frustrating it is to have deal with all these f***ing amendments.

Note: If you are reading this and think these people are little to eager to boss people around, you are what “fascism” scholars on CNN and MSNBC have identified as an authoritarian.