QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: “Is Joe Biden Calling ‘Defund’ Democrats Crazy?,” Noah Rothman asked in 2021:
This week, President Joe Biden attended a town hall-style forum hosted by CNN where anchor Don Lemon gently guided the president toward reframing the defund debate in a way that could benefit Democrats. “You said police are up against—well, they’re up against the narrative that, you know, the country is anti-police, Democrats are anti-police, Joe Biden is anti-police,” Lemon probed the president. “They’re not saying it,” Biden interjected. “Republicans are saying it on the far–,” the president caught himself. “I’m not going to—anyway.” “No,” Lemon pressed. “I want you to talk about this, because, I mean, it’s an important narrative.”
That word—“narrative”—conveys to the audience that they’ve been privy to little more than a story. It’s a more nuanced variation of the idea that Democrats have never really sought to defund local police forces, and you only believe that because you’ve been gulled by the GOP’s mesmeric powers of suggestion. But Biden expounded on this theme in a rather bizarre exchange with reporters on the subject.
“Are there people in the Democratic Party who want to defund the police?” a reporter asked the president. Biden snapped back: “Are there people in the Republican Party who think we’re sucking the blood out of kids?” he said to the sound of bewildered silence. Check and mate.
To translate, Biden’s veiled answer to the question posed by his interlocutor is, yes, of course, some Democrats support defunding the police. But they are as fringe, paranoid, and, indeed, vicious as the Republicans who subscribe to the most unhinged QAnon conspiracies. If that were true, we would be in big trouble. By any objective assessment, the number of Republicans who subscribe to some version of Q’s incomprehensible theories is dwarfed by the amount of elected Democrats who weren’t just amendable to defunding police but tried to translate that slogan into policy.
Flash-forward to today, where the Washington Examiner reports: Kamala Harris donated last year to defund police group backing DC ‘sanctuary city’ law.
Reuters reports that “Vice President Kamala Harris is toughening her position on illegal immigration, taking on hardliner Donald Trump on his signature issue in a series of campaign events and digital ads in coming weeks, according to campaign staff.”
Why wasn’t she doing that prior to running for the White House?
(Although perhaps the buried lede in the Reuters story is that they’re actually referring to “illegal immigration,” a phrase Kamala herself once tried to memory hole: Kamala the Language Cop: Harris Urges End to Terms ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism,’ ‘Illegal Alien.’)