I recommend that you all watch this long monologue by Tucker Carlson. Note especially around the 20-minute mark, where he calls out the cowardice of Republican officials. I remind you that after Obergefell, the Republican Congressional leaders did not a single thing to protect religious liberty. They were too afraid of being called bigots by the press.

One point Tucker emphasizes is that Black Lives Matter, a slogan that’s on everybody’s lips, is calling for defunding the police. This is not an accusation against them — it’s what they demand. This, from Black Lives Matter’s DC chapter, rebukes Mayor Muriel Bowser for ordering the words BLACK LIVES MATTER painted on the street leading to the White House:

This is a performative distraction from real policy changes. Bowser has consistently been on the wrong side of BLMDC history. This is to appease white liberals while ignoring our demands. Black Lives Matter means defund the police. @emilymbadger say it with us https://t.co/w0ekwSG1ip

— BlackLivesMatter DC (@DMVBlackLives) June 5, 2020

Here is the head of the Minneapolis City Council, a veto-proof majority of whom have endorsed defunding the city’s police department, what she would say to people in her city who are worried what would happen if their house was broken into:

CAMEROTA: “What if in the middle of the night my home is broken into. Who do I call?”

BENDER: “Yes, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors. And I know — and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege.” pic.twitter.com/WhubQ9yJIf

— Eddie Zipperer (@EddieZipperer) June 8, 2020

Chicago last week gave us a glimpse of why the woke flower children are wrong about police. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

While Chicago was roiled by another day of protests and looting in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, 18 people were killed Sunday, May 31, making it the single most violent day in Chicago in six decades, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab. The lab’s data doesn’t go back further than 1961.

From 7 p.m. Friday, May 29, through 11 p.m. Sunday, May 31, 25 people were killed in the city, with another 85 wounded by gunfire, according to data maintained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

In a city with an international reputation for crime — where 900 murders per year were common in the early 1990s — it was the most violent weekend in Chicago’s modern history, stretching police resources that were already thin because of protests and looting.

“We’ve never seen anything like it, at all,” said Max Kapustin, the senior research director at the crime lab. “ … I don’t even know how to put it into context. It’s beyond anything that we’ve ever seen before.”

The next highest murder total for a single day was on Aug. 4, 1991, when 13 people were killed in Chicago, according to the crime lab.

The Rev. Michael Pfleger, a longtime crusader against gun violence who leads St. Sabina Church in Auburn Gresham, said it was “open season” last weekend in his neighborhood and others on the South and West sides.

“On Saturday and particularly Sunday, I heard people saying all over, ‘Hey, there’s no police anywhere, police ain’t doing nothing,’” Pfleger said.

“I sat and watched a store looted for over an hour,” he added. “No police came. I got in my car and drove around to some other places getting looted [and] didn’t see police anywhere.”

I don’t know what the races were of the murder victims, but every photo of a man or woman killed on that day depicts a black person.

“Defund The Police.” As if the real cause of violence in America is the police. How out of your mind do you have to be to believe that? As Tucker points out in his monologue, according to polling, the wealthier you are, the more sympathetic you are to anti-police sentiments. Naturally — rich people live in neighborhoods that rarely need policing.

To their credit, Black Lives Matter leaders are not backing away one bit from their radical demand — and they don’t seem willing to allow Democratic politicians to pay lip service to it either. Joe Biden said today that he is against defunding the police. Of course he did, because whatever his faults, he is not a crazy person. We’ll see how long that lasts, though.

UPDATE: The son of Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby manages a pharmacy on the West coast. Jacoby writes about what happened to his son and the store:

One of my children, only a few years out of high school, is the manager of a pharmacy on the West Coast, responsible for 50 employees and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise, drugs, and equipment. My heart was in my throat last weekend as I read about the riots, looting, and arson in his city. I texted him, anxious to know if he was all right. Yes, he texted back; other pharmacies had been attacked during the night, one had been entirely burned out, but his store hadn’t suffered much damage.

But the looters came in force that evening, using a pickup truck to smash their way through the loading dock entrance. Every part of the store was ransacked. Windows and plexiglass cases were shattered. Merchandise was taken from the sales floor and the stockroom. The worst of the damage was to the pharmacy department itself. Equipment was overturned, and scores of filled prescriptions were swiped. Closed-circuit video recorded some of the thieves methodically searching along the shelves for specific compounds and drugs. They attacked the high-tech safe in which the most strictly controlled narcotics, such as fentanyl and oxycodone, are locked up.

My son’s store was invaded five nights in a row. One night, thieves broke in through the roof. The next night, looters arrived in a van, the better to haul away the merchandise they were stealing.

The mayhem went way beyond theft. Cash registers were demolished, even though they’d been left with their drawers open to show that they were empty. Shelving units were ripped from the wall and toppled. A water main was broken, turning the pharmacy into a swamp of dissolved medicines, trampled containers, and overturned files.

“Defund the police.” Yeah, let’s do that, and leave society to the mercy of those animals.

Lo, a Minneapolis manufacturer whose business burned to the ground during the riots is relocating outside of the city, because the city didn’t protect it. There go fifty jobs. I’m sure this is all about white privilege.