Whose Side Will Our Cops Be On?
When the mass arrests begin, we'll be unable to organize a resistance and our cops will be working for the Bolsheviks rounding us up. We have ourselves to thank for that and our insane War on Drugs.
In the early days of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the Bolsheviks eliminated the leading segment of society in one Russian city (and confiscated all their wealth “for the proletariat”) with a single blow. It was known that everybody who was anybody in the city would be attending a particular performance at a certain theater. Just before the show ended, a contingent of heavily-armed Bolsheviks arrived and positioned themselves around the exit doors. As the audience members left the theater, they were arrested as “enemies of the people” and loaded onto waiting trucks. As they were being prodded onto the trucks, some of the local worthies demanded indignantly the police be summoned so they could straighten this out. But the Bolsheviks only laughed. “The police? Half are with us,” they said, “and the other half are themselves under arrest.” Those people, dressed as they were, would be taken directly to the death camps of the north. Their homes, which they would never see again, were already being looted.
I think it says something positive about the Russian character that fifty percent of the local cops sided with the “enemies of the people” rather than going over to the Bolsheviks. In similar circumstances, I fear a much lower share of American cops will side with the locals.
A white guy I know in the small Midwestern town where I live was a father in his twenties when he was caught with a glass pipe with meth residue in it. Upon his conviction for illegal possession of a controlled substance, the State of Kansas locked him in a cage for nine years. He says the experience turned him into a racist. He’s anti-social and mistrustful and prefers to stay to himself and work on cars, which is how he earns enough money to get by. He thinks things are going to get really bad here in the US, which makes him sometimes wish he hadn’t had kids, he says. He has seven.
Another white guy I know here has been locked in a cage three times by the State of Kansas—also for illegal possession of a controlled substance. Marijuana, in his case. All three times. Like the first guy, he picks up piecework to get by, but is severely hobbled by his lack of a driver’s license. When I ask him why he doesn’t have a license, he says “it’s too dangerous.” He’s talking about the cops.
And there are a lot of cops. The older residents will say, yes, there are a lot of cops—more cops than we need—certainly more cops than when I was a kid. “But,” they all agree, “they are doing a Good Job with the Drug Problem.”
I don’t know how they can tell what kind of job they are doing with the Drug Problem. To me, the Drug Problem looks about the same as it always has. Maybe worse.
Recently, I was helping an old guy who volunteers delivering meals to “shut-ins.” As we drove past where they are adding a new addition onto the jail, I made some remark about now seeing why they need so many cops—to keep up with the available jail space.
“Yeah, there are a lot of cops,” he said, “but they are doing a Good Job with the Drug Problem.”
You know, I said, everyone takes drugs for the same reason. They want to feel better. It doesn’t matter whether the drugs are legal or illegal, prescription or over-the-counter, they just want to feel better. So I’m not sure we should use the word “good” to describe a job that involves locking people in cages for choosing the wrong way to feel better.
And just like that the old man told me about his grandson, who lost his job when a cop somewhere did a Good Job with the Drug Problem and locked him in a cage for choosing the wrong way to feel better. The loss of his job led to the loss of his house, which led to the loss of his marriage, which led to a downward spiral that… The old guy choked up. He just wished there was something he could do to help him.
The reasoning behind our War on Drugs goes like this:
We think, if you take these drugs, it will ruin your life.
Therefore, if we catch you taking these drugs, we will ruin your life.
Around a million Americans are arrested every year for drug offenses—nearly a quarter of a million sent to prison. For the drug offender, the engagement with the criminal justice system only amplifies the damage done by the drug abuse itself; imprisonment is a famously ineffective deterrent.
But the damage of an arrest isn’t limited to the drug user. The war on drugs damages the larger community, as well, in two important, but generally unrecognized, ways. The first is the way in which our drug laws degrade, corrupt, militarize, and alienate the law enforcement community.
Last week, I was helping a guy I’ll call “Reuben” install a floor. When we knocked off for the day, I gave Reuben a ride to his house and helped him carry his tools inside. When I got out of my truck, I dropped my phone on the ground without realizing it. I was home when I noticed my phone was missing. I couldn’t find it in my house or my truck, so I retraced my steps. I stopped at Reuben’s house and asked him to call my phone. Apparently, I was parked directly on my phone, because we could hear nothing.
So, I headed toward the place where we were installing the floor. On the way there, a cop flipped on his lights behind me. I pulled over. He told me he had stopped me for doing 24 in a 20. “You can’t start to accelerate until you’re past the 30 mph sign,” he said. I gave him my licenseregistrationandproofofinsurance and he went back to his car to “run” the information. No sooner had he and his partner walked away from my truck than a third cop walked up along the passenger side of my truck, around the front, and back along the driver’s side. He had a dog on a leash. I could see in my side view mirror the dog was paying no attention to my vehicle.
There were now two cruisers behind me with their lights flashing and another unmarked vehicle.1 For doing 24 in a 20!
A fourth cop walked up to my driver’s side window. “Is there any reason the dog ‘alerted’ on your vehicle?”
“I don’t think it did,” I said.
There was a moment’s hesitation. “Well, it did,” he said.
“What exactly did it do?”
“I’m not the dog handler,” he replied. “You wanna step out of your vehicle?”
“Then tell the dog handler to come over here,” I said. “I want to know precisely what the dog did that says it alerted on my vehicle.”
“I don’t have to do that,” he said. “I’m giving you a lawful order to exit your vehicle.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“I don’t want to have to put you under arrest, but I will if I have to. Step out of your vehicle.”
“I don’t consent to a search of my vehicle.”
I don’t need your consent,” he said, “I have probable cause.”
“And I have the right to know what’s the probable cause.”
“OK,” he said, “you’re under arrest.”
They searched me, but they didn’t cuff me. I said to the cop who was watching me to make sure I didn’t make a break for freedom while my vehicle was being searched, “You guys should be ashamed of yourselves.”
“Why?” he responded. “For Doing a Good Job with the Drug Problem?” Okay, I’m joking, that isn’t what he said. His actual response was, “Why? For Fighting the War on Drugs?”
In the end, there were no illegal drugs. They let me go with the admonition that, in the future, if I know I don’t have anything to worry about, I should be more cooperative. When I went to the police station a few days later to get an incident report, I was told that, since no ticket was issued and no charges filed, there was “no public record” of the incident. The 45 minutes I spent standing on East Main St while four armed men I’d never seen before searched every inch of my vehicle, including in the engine compartment and under the chassis, was a secret. The story about the dog “alerting” on my vehicle was bullshit, of course; the K-9 Unit was called before I was even stopped. Their secret search was predatory.
I suspect I was stopped because my brief visit to Reuben’s house at that time of night appeared to someone somewhere like an illegal drug sale. Or perhaps Reuben’s house is under surveillance. Who knows? In the secret world of the secret police, no one knows anything and anything is possible.
Is Reuben a criminal? When Reuben took his dog out later that night, he spotted my phone pressed into the mud. He returned it to me. (It still worked.) He’s honest enough not to steal my phone, but he did do a 20-year bid in a federal prison for robbing a bank. Three banks, actually. Right in a row—one of them while the cops were investigating the crime scene at the bank he’d just robbed across the street. I’ll say this: Reuben is colorful. He’s also Jewish. For Christmas, he put up a Hanukkah display that consisted of a string of blinking purple stars placed haphazardly and off-center in the dirt in front of his porch. It was the cheapest, tackiest, ugliest, worst Hanukkah display in the whole history of Hanukkah displays. His wife thought so, too, but it stayed up until “after the holidays.” Reuben compensates for his horrible taste in Hanukkah displays by making very good tasting, exceedingly smooth corn whiskey with a wicked left hook that comes out of nowhere. He also reads this blog and has defended it to others here in town on the ground that I write the truth. If I were hiding from Bolshevik Holocaust Survivors and had to entrust my location to either Reuben or to one of the church-going, law-abiding old people around here who nod their approval of the Good Job with the Drug Problem the cops are doing every time some local kid’s life is destroyed when he’s locked in a cage for choosing the wrong way to feel better, you can bet I’d entrust it to Reuben in a heartbeat. Not even close.
According to the US Census Bureau, there are 2,140 of us here in Council Grove, Kansas. Among the 94 percent of us who report being a single race, 96.8 percent report being White. The next largest racial category reported is “Some Other Race”2 at 2.3 percent. Blacks, Asians, Native Americans, and Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders combined account for fewer than one percent. Among those of us reporting ancestry, the largest group reported is German, then American German, then English. And a lot of us are old. There are nearly as many of us over the age of 60 (27.5%) as there are under the age of 18 (28.6%). Basically, we are a small community of harmless old Lutherans. For the most part, we are civic-minded, punctual, and unflappable, and, while we may produce an excess of quotation marks in our public signage,3 even at our most demonstrative, we rarely produce crime. By 11:00 pm on the Thursday night I was pulled over for doing 24 in a 20, there’s a good chance everyone in town was already in bed asleep. Having even one cop on duty at that time of the night in this small town is extravagant. But five? In three vehicles? Plus dispatch at the sheriff’s office? In this town?
The police presence here isn’t like it is in larger cities, nor like it is in places less white. It’s oppressive, and I think that’s a problem.
When a Federal Bolshevism Implementation team from the capital shows up with the first list of local white supremacists and antisemites who are to be arrested and have their property “confiscated for reparations,” will these cops cooperate? Bet on it—especially after the Feds tell the local cops wait until you see our asset forfeiture program. It’s modeled on the one our (literal) great-grandfathers set up in Russia in 1917. They simply declared all private property in Russia the property of the state, i.e., themselves, and executed any enemy of the people who disagreed. As the seizing agency, the Feds will say, you guys will get to keep a third (or whatever) of everything.
I’ll be surprised if even three percent of law enforcement decline to cooperate. What those cops won’t realize until it’s too late is that, eventually, we’re all white supremacists. Our War on Drugs has embedded the foot soldiers of that tyranny amongst us, taught them to view us as prey, and armed them to the teeth.
The second way in which our War on Drugs harms the larger community is the way our misguided drug laws undermine social trust—community cohesion.
Like gambling and prostitution, drug crimes are victimless, consensual crimes. And since there is no victim among the parties to a drug crime, there is no complainant and, therefore, no law enforcement trigger as there is when the victim of, say, a robbery files a police report. In order to enforce the drug laws, then, it is necessary to create surrogate victims. Law enforcement creates these artificial complainants, called “snitches,” using the prosecutorial tool of the plea bargain. Cops use the terror occasioned by a drug arrest to spawn more arrests by promising not to enforce the drug laws as vigorously against a terrified detainee in return for the details of the criminal activity of others.
The details the snitch provides, of course, can and do destroy lives—typically the lives of friends, relatives, and others with whom the snitch has a personal relationship.
President Richard Nixon officially declared the War on Drugs in June, 1971. The war expanded under Reagan when Nancy Reagan launched the “Just Say No” campaign in 1984. Also, in 1984, Congress passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which created the “asset forfeiture” law enforcement tool. Two years later, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which introduced mandatory minimum sentencing for some drug crimes, increased penalties across the board, and put the nation’s response to drug abuse into the hands of men with guns and a financial incentive, thanks to asset forfeiture, to make arrests. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, there have been something like 50 million drug arrests made in the United States since Nancy Reagan encouraged us not to choose the wrong way to feel better. 50 million! Many of those arrested Americans were confronted by a sophisticated institutional apparatus designed to induce them to betray one or more personal relationships—to bring destruction into the lives of friends and family in return for reducing the destruction in their own. Every time the system succeeded in creating a snitch it was, in effect, society rewarding betrayal. It was an insidious injection of distrust into the community, putting another rip in our already tattered and threadbare social fabric. That alone, in my view, is enough to discredit the War on Drugs and expose it for the fundamentally flawed and destructive blunder that it is.
One year after Nixon’s declaration of war, the University of Chicago launched its massive General Social Survey—a detailed, roughly biannual survey of thousands of Americans. To date, it has asked more than 40,000 Americans, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you can’t be too careful when dealing with people?
As can be seen in the chart above, while whites remain more trusting than other races, that “advantage” is disappearing as the nation becomes more diverse. Indeed as the nation becomes more diverse the high social trust that is an advantage in a homogeneous society becomes a disadvantage. Diversity transforms one of the great strengths of the Anglo-Saxon into a fatal weakness.
In 2015, two Danish researchers published a study4 demonstrating a negative correlation between ethnic diversity and social trust. Their paper received a lot of attention and in a follow-up 2020 paper,5 they further demonstrated that “ethnic diversity experienced locally—in neighborhoods—matters more for social trust” than it does at something like a city, state, or national level. Moreover, “the negative relationship applies for all types of trust.” It is “strongest for trust in neighbors,” less strong for “in-group trust and generalized social trust,” and “weakest for out-group trust… Ethnic diversity thus matters more for trust in people in one's immediate residential setting, but the effect also extends beyond this setting to trust in other people in general.”
In other words, with the breakneck growth of the non-white population in the United States, and its seemingly calculated diffusion throughout the country, social trust in general is negatively impacted, but the negative impact on in-group social cohesion for the white majority is far stronger. Moreover, I think it can be argued from the Danish study that diversity increase from the white point of view is actually diversity decrease from the non-white point of view and, therefore, while increasing diversity weakens white in-group cohesion, it strengthens non-white in-group cohesion.
By its very nature, mass non-white immigration poses an existential threat to the white majority. There’s no guarantee that it doesn’t. Perversely, that threat to the white majority makes white in-group cohesion more critical than ever while simultaneously diminishing our capacity for it. The very last thing we need is a government policy that rewards the betrayal of friends and family.
The War on Drugs makes us weak and mistrustful, atomized and vulnerable while at the same time teaches many of our own men with guns that we are enemies. The War on Drugs is stupid, cruel, and monstrously destructive. End it now.
Nothing says “we’re out to get you, not to serve and protect you” like an unmarked police vehicle.
Who the “Some Other Race” are is a mystery. Certainly, they are not a visible minority. I suspect they are refugees from the “flight from white” Steve Sailer writes about. On the other hand, my interactions with one or two of the locals suggest “Some Other Race” could be the Census Bureau’s catchall term for space aliens.
E.g., We will be “closing” tonight one hour early.
Dinesen, P. T., & Sønderskov, K. M. (2015). Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust: Evidence from the Micro-Context. American Sociological Review, 80(3), 550-573. https://doi.org/10.1177/00
Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust: A Narrative and Meta-Analytical Review Peter Thisted Dinesen, Merlin Schaeffer, Kim Mannemar Sønderskov Annual Review of Political Science202023:1, 441-465
Great expose of how the War on Drugs is playing out in small town America.
Living in British Columbia (Canada), I can report that the “hands off” approach to policing drug offences has created another set of problems. Even though I live in the middle of nowhere, I personally know 3 people who are in “rehab” for drug and/or alcohol addiction.
They are all in their 40s. One guy is a relatively harmless person, really hurting no one other than himself (although breaking his family’s hearts). The second guy has had brushes with the law – mostly traffic offences like driving impaired or driving without a license. Dangerous, but to date he has mostly hurt himself with his drug problems.
The third person – a woman I’ll call “Nicky,” is a walking disaster. She is in rehab for the 17th time. Yes, seventeenth, 1-7. She considers going to rehab a kind of holiday. I am not making this up. She usually gets by through whoring, stealing, and fraud.
Nicky is half-native (I refuse to use that PC term “First Nations”) and she plays that card to the hilt. She was living at a friend’s place for a while after she gave birth to her 5th kid (the previous four have all been taken away by the state), and after an altercation with my friend (also a woman), she stabbed my friend not once, but twice, with a kitchen knife. Nicky was holding her baby when she picked up the kitchen knife and stabbed my friend.
The wounds didn’t go too deep, and my friend decided not to report it to police. A couple of months later, Nicky moved out to a woman’s shelter; when my friend dropped by the shelter to drop off Nicky’s things, she was confronted by shelter staff in the parking lot and told that she couldn’t stay on the premises because Nicky was “scared” of her.
Obviously, Nicky is somewhat of an exceptional case – but I tell the story to illustrate that neither heavy-handed policing, nor soft and mushy “counselling,” is going to solve our problems. I guess the common thread between the two approaches is that it is government workers (law enforcement and social services) doing the behest of our overlords who are “benefitting” (in the short term) from how we are approaching the drug problem.
Why fix the problem when the problem pays your salary?
The recovered addicts I've known have all told me the same thing: you get over an addiction because of your own work, not someone else's. And of course we have to have a society worth living in for people to want to get over their addictions in the first place.
Good on you, Craig, for keeping your cool during that "traffic stop." Really speaks to the need for us to each be grounded in who we are at our core to deal with that kind of BS.