Juno News - Calls to defund the police have become mainstream

00:00:00.000 There's a very interesting aspect to our current moment right now, and that is the

00:00:10.360 acceleration of the issues that are under discussion. How quickly things are changing.

00:00:15.600 What do I mean by that? Well, there are only two issues that are really in the news right

00:00:19.700 now that we've been discussing for months on end. One is the pandemic, and then more

00:00:22.980 recently it has been the protests and the sometimes riots that we've seen in our streets.

00:00:29.620 The pandemic first began as a discussion in January, February when we saw there was something

00:00:34.200 happening in China. It had gone to Iran and Italy. Is it going to come here? And the narrative

00:00:38.640 at that point was, no, it won't come here. We learned our lessons from SARS. No, you don't

00:00:43.320 need to do anything. Face masks don't work. Travel restrictions don't work. Oh, and by

00:00:47.240 the way, it's even racist to discuss this, to be alarmed about this. Huh. Okay. Kind of

00:00:52.420 troubling. And then suddenly things did a 180 and the story became something different.

00:00:57.080 How dare you suggest you can even go out and about in society a little bit. You must stay

00:01:01.340 home. COVIDiots. We created terms to name and shame anybody who took a slightly different

00:01:06.840 perspective on all of that. Very quickly we changed on those subjects, those sort of tight

00:01:13.140 lines of conversation. And boy, the sort of social punishments for people who stepped out

00:01:17.600 of the lines was severe, was harsh. We're seeing a similar thing happen right now with these protest

00:01:23.260 movements. Of course, originally there was anger, seeing that video of George Floyd being killed.

00:01:27.480 I think that was very righteous and justified anger. Then it moved on to the violence and

00:01:31.800 the looting and so forth that rather tragically flared up in a number of cities. And a lot of

00:01:37.060 officials, corporate PR speak and so forth, they're very cagey. They wanted to sort of endorse people

00:01:42.560 being in the streets, even though it went against the public health measures that we were shaming

00:01:46.440 people for breaking even just a sliver of an iota just a couple weeks ago. But they didn't want to

00:01:51.940 say no to the looting and the violence. They were very cautious about not warning against that. Now,

00:01:57.340 very quickly, things have changed in just a matter of 48 hours, 72 hours. The big talking point right

00:02:02.340 now, hashtag defund the police. Where on earth did this come from? It's a very novel idea for most.

00:02:09.140 It's a sort of niche academic neo-Marxist idea that some people have been writing papers on for years,

00:02:14.120 but it's a very new idea. It's suddenly hit us, but people are also expected to be 100% on board

00:02:20.420 with it immediately, and it has become mainstream. Wow. Because really, we don't even know what we

00:02:25.640 mean by defund the police. Different people mean different things by it. Some think it means just

00:02:30.500 reallocating funding. Others think it means dismantling police forces entirely. Man, talk about

00:02:36.840 two very disparate sides and interpretations. And yet right now, the pressure for this is at a fever pitch,

00:02:43.080 and it's all happening so very, very fast. I think we need to slow down as we discuss a whole lot of

00:02:50.100 these issues, rather than just suddenly flipping from one 180 to another, as we've been rather

00:02:54.960 bizarrely doing the past few months.

Juno News - June 08, 2020