“A key member of Missouri Rep. Cori Bush’s (D.) inner circle, far-left activist David Ragland, seeks to abolish the police, prisons, immigration enforcement, and the Supreme Court,” reports the Washington Free Beacon:
Ragland and Bush have been close allies since before she ran for office, launching a pro-reparations group together in 2014. Ragland’s biography at George Mason University—where he co-taught a class with Bush in 2022—describes him as her “special advisor.”….
Ragland in 2022 described the Supreme Court as one of multiple “undemocratic settler colonizer institutions” while calling to “abolish” it.
“#scotus tryna [sic] get their racist wishlist done before new justices come & or the people rise us [sic] and #abolish the #highcourt and these other undemocratic settler colonizer institutions,” Ragland wrote on social media. Bush, meanwhile, has cosponsored legislation to expand the Supreme Court, giving Democrats a partisan advantage.
“I don’t even celebrate Christmas and all I want is to defund and abolish all the police and their prisons—can Santa help with that?” Ragland wrote in 2021. Earlier that year, he called to abolish “all the prisons” and “all the police.”…Bush similarly has called to abolish ICE, defund the police, and “dismantle our carceral system.”… In May 2023, when Bush held a press conference announcing her reparations legislation, Ragland was there….
While Bush, like Ragland, has called for defunding the police, that hasn’t stopped her from shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars on private security for herself. Bush’s campaign since 2019 has paid at least $750,000 for her own private security, primarily by her husband Cortney Merritts. She is still an advocate for defunding the police. Bush told her detractors in 2021 to “suck it up” and “defunding the police has to happen….We need to defund the police and put that money into social safety nets.”
Other left-wing members of Congress have also called for defunding the police while spending thousands of U.S. taxpayer dollars on private security for themselves, such as Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.).
After police funding was cut in Seattle, crime spiked, and Seattle ended up solving less than one percent of sexual assaults, allowing most rapists to roam free. From 2019 to 2021, there was “a notable decline in the number of police on the beat,” notes Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute:
In a September 2019 report, the Police Executive Research Forum outlined what it declared a “workforce crisis.” A robust body of research has thoroughly illustrated that more police means less crime — a finding at odds with ever-more-popular calls to “defund the police.” It stands to reason that a significant decline in the sizes of the nation’s police forces could have helped set the stage for the violent crime uptick. There is also reason to believe that — in part because of the anti-police sentiments that characterized [2020’s] protests — the cops we have left became less proactive.
Road deaths spiked in the U.S. after the death of George Floyd, as police pulled back from police stops of motorists (especially black motorists), leading to big increases in reckless driving and crashes, especially among black motorists. But in the rest of the world, it was a different story, with a steady fall in road deaths in every year since 2010.
Reps. Bush and Pressley are mistaken to support reparations. Reparations are a bad idea that would cost taxpayers trillions of dollars. No country has successfully pursued a policy of race-based reparations. The African nation of Zimbabwe pursued a policy of reparations. It wrecked its economy by doing so, resulting in hyperinflation and leaving even its black population worse off. America’s racial wealth gap is not, for the most part, due to slavery or discrimination against black people. Reparations don’t even “fix” the racial “wealth gap” anyway. When Uganda seized the businesses of Indian immigrants without compensation and gave them to blacks as reparations for colonialism, the businesses did not last for long afterwards, and Uganda’s economy collapsed. When Uganda let Indians come back to Uganda and set up businesses again 14 years later, Indians once again ended up dominating Uganda’s economy, even though they had to start from scratch. Racial wealth gaps exist because some cultures are more economically productive or innovative than others.
