The Latest Political Boogeyman

The American left knows this about politics. You have to have a scary identifiable target to put in front of your uninformed base to keep them energized, foaming at the mouth and with a reason to hate. These are the motivators they use to get their base voters to the polls. It doesn’t have to be true, fact-based or real. You just have to be able to appeal to their emotion by repeating some falsehood over and over until they suspend their sense of logic. Then you have their attention, and they are more susceptible to propaganda. Whenever the opportunity presents itself, especially around voting time with a general election being the ideal, they drag the boogeyman out and whip people into a frenzy to drive them to the polls.

The Democrat Party uses it as part of their get-out-the-vote strategy. This was described by a leftist university professor named Saul Alinsky in his book “Rules For Radicals.” You identify a target, isolate it, personalized it and smear the hell out of it. You incessantly talk about how terrible the target is and before long if there is not counter narrative, it sticks.

One of their favorite whipping posts has always been the demonization of police, painting them and their agencies with a broad brush. This goes back to the 1950s. They used some police incident, usually a use of force involving a white police officer and a black male suspect, and before any details even emerged, they exploit it for its race component. Police commanders were slow to respond with a counter narrative to put the fire out. The lie and misinformation about the facts become news headlines and become baked into the pie. By the time all the facts come out it is too late to change public opinion. Every person who wears the uniform of their community to this day carries the stain of being racist and bloodthirsty. All it takes is one incident to negatively brand an entire profession. There are of course some high-profile incidents where police performed badly. Those are anomalies. Doctors botch surgeries, more than you hear about, yet no one brands the entire medical community as horrible.

For most of this new century, politically agenda-driven people and groups continued the drumbeat that cops were racist. The problem for them is that the card was played so often that it is losing its charge. When everything and everybody is racist, well then nothing and nobody are. The left needed a new word or phrase with which to demonize people and groups. The left has found it. Notice that over the last six months racism and racist charges aren’t used as much anymore. The new phrase is white supremacy. This phrase has no doubt been focus grouped and has been determined to elicit more emotion and anger than simply being racist.

A new narrative has started recently about concern that police agencies are being infiltrated by, you guessed it, white supremacists. This is without foundation, data or evidence. It’s a smear that works on police and their agencies. Current research and data have debunked the lie that police are racist so cop haters needed new red meat to feed their masses.

Much of this started with the release of a report by a former FBI agent Michael German who authored a report on white supremacy in law enforcement. He said that, “It’s a pretty significant clue that white supremacy is so prevalent in law enforcement that the FBI is changing the way it does things.” He says that with no evidence. That’s a pretty remarkable claim for a former law officer to make such a slanderous claim with no proof. Then again this is the same agency that tried to smear a president of the United States claiming he falsely colluded with the Russians to win an election with no proof as they lied to obtain a wiretap to spy on his campaign. That smear by Michael German was followed by an FBI report released last year that warned that white supremacists had penetrated the ranks of law enforcement. The report acknowledged that there was no credible evidence to prove infiltration and that it was based on sporadic reporting. Gee, thanks FBI. This is the same agency that doesn’t spend much time working on cop-hating groups like Antifa or Black Lives Matter, MS 13, the Crips, Suerno or Blood street gangs but has no problem chasing the ghost of white supremacy in law enforcement.

Of course, this caused a feeding frenzy among the usual suspects in academia. They, too, acknowledge that nothing exists to suggest that it is true. But what the hell. Let’s look for it anyway. Federal grants will pay for research. Let’s let police live under the cloud of suspicion that they are white supremacists and continue to have to deny that something doesn’t exist. Let’s let cop haters collect traffic stop and arrest data of a white officer working in a high-crime area populated by blacks and misuse the data to claim the officer is a white supremacist. It’s the old let them try to prove a negative. You can’t. This will open the door for politically active lawyers from the United States Department of Justice to start its pattern and practice lawsuits against local police agencies that were prevalent under the Obama administration. Cities will be bullied into signing forced consent decrees as mayors and city councils fold like a cheap suit.

This is straight-up race politics. Shame on the FBI for being a participant in playing along by throwing local law enforcement under the bus. As the saying goes, with friends like this who needs enemies.

Sheriff David Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of AmericasSheriff LLC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com