Minneapolis officials even put a referendum on the ballot in November 2021 asking voters if they wanted to abolish their city’s police department, replacing it with “a comprehensive public health approach” to public safety overseen by the mayor and the thirteen City Council members. Some 56 percent of voters rejected the radical move and defeated two City Council members who supported the nutty plan in their reelection bids.
The Associated Press reported that according to a preelection poll: “Black voters were less likely to support the proposed public safety department than white voters and are more concerned that cutting the police force would have a negative effect on public safety.”56 That’s understandable. Black people are disproportionately victimized by crime, and so, quite sensibly, are more concerned about having adequate police protection against criminals.
The left thinks, with their true believers in control of legacy media, that they can gaslight people enough to make them disbelieve the reality of their own lives. This news shows that Americans aren’t willing to walk off into their left’s crime-ridden night. No matter, if they fail on this attempt, they will keep trying. After all, it’s not like they’re busy developing policies that solve our problems and make our lives better.
Regrets, They Have a Few
Police departments around the country are having a hard time hiring and retaining officers, leaving many with dangerous shortages in their ranks. For example, in New York City, which has the largest police department in the US, about 3,200 officers left their jobs in the first ten months of 2022—the most since 2002. A shortage of officers led Mayor Eric Adams to announce in 2022 that police patrolling the subway system would have to put in ten thousand hours of additional overtime every day. That incredible amount of overtime is a strain on both the city budget and on officers, forcing them to work long hours and making their jobs less attractive, prompting some to quit.57
In another example, the Memphis Police Department had an authorized strength of 2,500 officers in early 2023 but employed only 1,939 because it was unable to fill many vacancies. The shortage arose even though the department offered every new recruit a $15,000 signing bonus and offered $10,000 to out-of-towners to relocate to Memphis. The department also lifted requirements that recruits have military or police experience, or college credits. And it reduced physical fitness standards at the police training academy. The department even sought state permission to hire people with criminal records to become officers.58
And now, five black Memphis police officers charged with second-degree murder59 in the January 2023 beating death of twenty-nine-year-old Tyre Nichols, a black FedEx worker, had only a few years on the force and were not accompanied by a more experienced supervisor because of a shortage of supervisors.
“They would allow just pretty much anybody to be a police officer,” Alvin Davis, a former Memphis police lieutenant in charge of recruiting, told the Associated Press. Davis said many new recruits told him they just joined the department for the paycheck and asked him how soon they could quit and still keep their bonuses. “They don’t know a felony from a misdemeanor,” he added.60
A year after Nichols’s death, the New York Times reported an update revealing, “Five police officers, all of whom are also Black, were fired and later charged with various state felonies, including second-degree murder, and separately indicted by a grand jury on federal civil rights, conspiracy and obstruction offenses. One officer has since taken a plea agreement, which included pleading guilty to two felony charges in federal court.” Four of the officers, however, “have pleaded not guilty to multiple state felonies. Those charges include second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression.”61 At this writing, a trial in the federal case has been scheduled for September 2024.
The vast majority of police officers, however, are doing the job because they love their community, want to protect their fellow citizens, and don’t engage in misconduct. Understandably, they find it hard to deal with hatred directed against them by groups like BLM. “Nobody wants to be the world’s villain,” Colonel Paul Humphrey, deputy police chief in Louisville, Kentucky, and a black man, told the New York Times in February 2023. “When you signed up to do good and people are telling you what you’re actually doing is harmful, it does cause you to do some soul searching, and probably you should do some soul searching.”62
Humphrey and other officers told the newspaper that the long hours, relatively low pay, danger, lack of respect in the community, and the chance of being accused of breaking the law have prompted many officers to leave the force or not join in the first place. The Louisville Police Department had three hundred vacancies it was unable to fill with new officers in early 2023. In past years, hundreds of people applied for the forty-eight spots in each police academy class for new recruits, but a recent class was made up of just fifteen recruits.63
Louisville isn’t alone in its scramble to maintain its police department. ABC News reported in April 2023, “Police departments across the country are facing a ‘vicious cycle’ of retirements, resignations, and fewer hires, according to policing experts, leaving the communities they protect with understaffed departments and potentially underqualified officers.”64 The New York Post tells us that the NYPD is losing officers at “an alarming rate” with recruitment so low the city “plans to cancel the next five Police Academy classes.”65 Moreover, “the number of cops quitting before they reach the 20 years required to receive their full pensions also skyrocketed from 509 in 2020 to 1,040 so far this year—an alarming 104% increase, the data show,” reported the Post.
In deep blue Washington, DC, a standard-bearer for defunding the police and supporting BLM, crime has skyrocketed. Reporting on data in November 2023 from the DC Metropolitan Police Department on year-over-year crime statistics, we now know just how bad things have become in our nation’s capital. Starting in 2020, the district cut its police budget by millions, and now have four hundred fewer police officers. The result? “Homicides have increased by 34% as of Nov. 28 over the same time in 2022, while robberies are up 68%, motor vehicle theft is up 93% and arson is up 125%. Overall, violent crime is up 40% this year, while all crime is up 27%, the data shows,” reported Fox News.66
Despite this data confirming that our capital has become a snakepit of crime, woke mayor Muriel Bowser decided to spend over a quarter million dollars on refurbishing the infamous Black Lives Matter street mural the city commissioned in June 2020, during the height of the BLM riots. Fox reports the cost of the touch-up appears to be $271,231, all at taxpayer expense.67 The painted street slogan is so gigantic, in fact, that it was clearly visible in photos taken by satellites in space. One wonders: if only the murders, robberies, rapes, and assaults inflicted on black lives in DC could also be seen from space, maybe the progressive DC establishment would care about them.
In November 2023, Gallup released poll results announcing, “Personal fear at three-decade high in U.S.”68 This doesn’t come as a surprise to all of us living in the real world, but it’s important to see the degree to which increasing crime affects basic life decisions. “Forty percent of Americans, the most in three decades, say they would be afraid to walk alone at night within a mile of their home,” and limits us from engaging in routine activities, including taking a walk, jogging, or going to the neighborhood park, Gallup tells us. The numbers also indicate that crime is higher in cities and among adults living in homes earning less than $40,000 a year. In other words, the very people whom the Democrats claim to represent and champion.
Not surprisingly, Gallup slips in a suggestion about why crime and fear about it have increased, by noting: “Whether because of sharp increases in violent crime during the pandemic or media coverage of other crimes [emphasis mine], Americans’ sense of security from crime has been rattled in recent years. That carries over into their attitudes today, reflected in a rise in Americans’ fear of walking alone at night in their own area to a three-decade high, and their fear of being the victim of several violent crimes being the highest in trends since 2000.”69
So it’s either the pandemic’s fault, or media coverage of crime. Got it. It’s so easy, but didn’t something else start at the same time as the pandemic? Let us think. . . . Oh yeah, the BLM riots were also happening in the summer of 2020, along with attacking, demonizing, and defunding of police departments across the country. Let’s also not mention the “no bail” policies implemented in blue cities across the country creating a revolving door rewarding criminals,70 and progressive rogue district attorneys going soft on prosecutions.71
You know things are bad when San Francisco, one of America’s deepest blue cities, even recalled their district attorney over rising crime. Voters overwhelmingly fired Chesa Boudin, blaming his progressive policies for the chaos, with CBS noting, “Momentum to recall Boudin picked up steam throughout 2021 as hate crimes against Asian Americans in San Francisco increased dramatically and victims blamed Boudin, saying he was siding with criminals. Recall supporters also pointed to car break-ins and viral smash-and-grab robberies at major retail stores, claiming they were becoming common occurrences as consequences of Boudin’s policies.”72
Gallup decided, however, to surmise about why crime and fear of being victimized are skyrocketing, and conveniently ignored a major public and political agenda kneecapping local police while coddling the criminal class across the country. This is not a gaffe or an accident; instead, like other actions of the establishment, it’s an attempt to blur and protect the pernicious result of the leftist agenda.
If BLM’s mantra of “Defund the Police” didn’t have the effect of gutting police departments, the bitterness and hate they promoted certainly did. It’s another example of more fear helping to facilitate the crippling agenda of those who do not mean any of us, or this nation, well.
But as we know, many big businesses, entertainers, and politicians fell over each other in the rush to embrace the phrase “Black Lives Matter” as part of their branding to showcase their opposition to racism. The companies included Nike, Twitter, Citigroup, Facebook, Nordstrom, TikTok, YouTube, Starbucks, Ben & Jerry’s, Netflix, Nickelodeon, WarnerMedia, and many more.73 Companies and individuals then flooded the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the fundraising arm of the movement, with more money than the movement had ever seen—just over $90 million in donations in 2020. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors happily described this as “White guilt money.”74
She also landed a production deal with Warner Bros. and a book deal.75, 76 Yet, just a few months after the news broke that Cullors was triangulating her “activism” with personally lucrative Hollywood projects, Politico published an investigative piece77 revealing discord among the BLM grassroots, which was beginning to realize something was not quite right. “The operations of Black Lives Matter have always been opaque, with thousands of members and dozens of affiliates. Two of its three co-founders are no longer affiliated with the movement—even as they continue to represent Black Lives Matter on TV. Local Black Lives Matter activists say national leaders cut them off from funding and decision-making, leaving them broke and taking the movement in a direction with which they fundamentally disagree,” Politico reported. Through all of this, Cullors has repeatedly denied any financial impropriety.
Then, in two impressive investigative pieces, New York Magazine, the iconic liberal magazine, examined what appeared to be financial shenanigans besetting Cullors and the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. In January 2022, Sean Campbell’s piece “BLM Mystery: Where Did the Money Go?”78 did a deep dive into the organization’s “confusing” financial arrangements and the inevitable organizational collapse when authentic activists began to realize something was not right.
Then just three months later the magazine and Campbell followed up with an explosive report exposing the Cullors/BLM purchase of a $6 million mansion in Southern California.79 Campbell begins by describing a YouTube video from 2021 featuring the three leaders of BLM enjoying a champagne brunch in the garden of what appears to be an expensive home. The women were complaining specifically about the New York Post’s mendacity for reporting on Cullors’s spending of millions of dollars on real estate.
New York Magazine was doing the unthinkable for legacy liberal media—actually noticing, investigating, and reporting on the disturbing details of a high-profile leftist group claiming to be one thing but being quite another. This is the story of the left for generations—co-opting issues of importance to a community (blacks, gays, women), and then exploiting the people and issues for money and power. Campbell’s willingness to shine a light on the betrayal so common by leftist “leadership” is laudable.
In the end, after questionable handling of tens of millions of dollars, and bitter infighting between grassroots activists and national leadership, Cullors stepped down. Ultimately, a new board was appointed, and Marc Elias, a Hillary Clinton and Democratic Party operative best known for funding “Christopher Steele’s discredited anti-Trump dossier while he served as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign general counsel,”80 was brought on to, as the New York Post put it, “sort out the non-profit’s questionable finances.”81 Soon after, Elias left that “top spot,” along with another “longtime Bill and Hillary Clinton ally” who served on their board.82
A director of a policy and watchdog group told the Washington Examiner at the time, “‘It is important to note the Elias Law Group is a firm with a laser focus on electing Democrats and pushing the progressive agenda. . . . This makes their disappearance from the latest BLM Global Network Foundation filings a pivotal moment, probably foreshadowing the total collapse of what is left of the organization.’”83
Over time, the invisible line between the Democratic Party and BLM became a bit more apparent. Having escaped the left as an organizer myself, I have said repeatedly none of this was organic, but organized leftist agitprop. But make no mistake, while the BLM iteration of leftist protest organizing, urban riots, and the ensuing redistribution of wealth is not what it was in 2020, this is just one construct of the type of organized protests and disruption meant to destabilize our nation through fear and violence. It will return. The names and faces may change, but the tactic remains the same: hijack important issues, maintain the pain, and work to destabilize.
Conclusion Breaking the Spell
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
—ANAÏS NIN1
The Communist Manifesto opens with the sentence: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.”2 Today we can say that a different specter (as we spell the word in America) is haunting the minds of people around the world—the specter of fear. This book is a user’s guide designed to help you banish the specter of fear that torments so many of us.
Earlier, I described the life-changing moment of conquering fear that gripped me as I ran through Times Square in New York City. Like many of us, I had long coped with fear by evading what frightened me—in this case, a woman who had manipulated me to fear her so she could exercise emotional control over me. My moment in Times Square was like the flip of a switch, moderating my fear, giving me clarity as I came to my senses. It was as though a spell had been broken, and the specter of mind-killing fear vanished. That’s when I realized I was in charge and always had been, and I resolved to write this book to help others break the fear spell.
I’ve been an organizer most of my adult life. My books, columns, and appearances on TV, radio, and podcasts are designed to further my mission of providing information that helps people overcome what the powerful leftists in government and society are doing to manipulate us. My goal is to spread the word as widely as possible that resisting this manipulation is essential to safeguard our personal freedom.
It’s safe to say you already know the Marxists and other leftists we fight aren’t really interested in policy, programs, or ideas that improve all of our lives. Instead, our self-appointed progressive overlords are driven by blind rage to control and punish those they envy, and to achieve power to mete out that punishment. It’s personal, as is the action we need to take to defend ourselves.
Working long hours or at two jobs to keep up with inflation, raising kids, and dealing with unexpected challenges is stressful and understandable priorities for many of us. So is worrying about crime plaguing our communities, terrorist attacks, wars, government dysfunction, incompetent leaders, and propaganda turning our schools into leftist indoctrination centers. As a result, we often don’t have the mental or emotional bandwidth to notice just how intensely we’re being manipulated. What the liberal establishment also does not want us to know is how easily we can slip those bonds and regain control of our relationship with the reality of daily events, and our own personal value and strength.
Finding that first moment of freedom, the breaking of the spell, can be life-changing.
For many of us, the spell was broken due to the shockingly malevolent actions of our government, and so many other Western nations, during COVID. For others, it was the distressing wakeup call we experienced as we watched our own government attempt to undermine Trump’s campaign and then his work as a duly-elected president. It is best, however, if we don’t have to wait for an existential issue to jar us out of the trance and decide for ourselves it’s time to lock out the mind-killers. If we remain in the thrall of gaslighting and lies, it can take generations before we learn the truth about issues,3 if at all.
Awareness is key to breaking the fear spell. The fact that you chose to read this book is a first, and singularly important, step. You knew “something isn’t right” but perhaps couldn’t put your finger on it considering the volume of information we’re all deluged with every day. Now you’ve taken action and know why and how certain inexplicable things happen. The government’s behavior and agenda during COVID was one of the first times when various agencies and politicians didn’t even bother to hide their agenda. They tripped on their contempt for the average person and got far too excited about all the power the “emergency” afforded them over our personal lives.
But that backfired, leading to an awareness through experience for the average person that was frightening but invaluable. They wanted us to be afraid, it dawned on us, making us more pliable, more inclined to take orders without question.