Best of The Program | Guest: Christopher Rufo | 9/24/20

For a limited time at McDonald's, get a Big Mac extra-value meal for $8.

That means two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun, and medium fries, and a drink.

We may need to change that jingle.

Prices and participation may vary.

All right, it's Thursday's podcast.

We're gonna get right to it.

Great show today.

We went over the revolution.

We also said her name.

Yes, we did.

But more importantly, we gave the facts.

All of that, and so much more on today's podcast

you're listening to

the best of the blend back program

say her name still

say it breanna taylor say her name oh my gosh the racism just continues now is that an argument because i that's what i see substituted for an argument yeah yeah a bunch of names of people who had issues with police, you know, whether some of them justified, some of them not.

Like the entirety of the argument is like Brian Taylor, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Eric Garner.

And it's like there's a whole range of stories you're talking about.

We need solutions.

Some of them

justified, some of them not justified, some of them involving police.

For no-knock raids in the middle of the night.

No.

Can we clear some of these things up?

You're just for shooting innocent women in the back or however in the middle of the night, going in, no knock raid, just shooting her.

That's what I'm hearing.

This is one of those situations where if you know what happened in the story, it is impossible to adopt the things and viewpoints that Black Lives Matter and every NBA player apparently have.

From a guy who won't say her name.

Freelanced Taylor.

Go ahead.

Tell us the story, Stu.

First of all, there's a rumor that they went to the wrong house.

Yeah.

No, they didn't go to the wrong house.

They went to the correct apartment, the one they were supposed to.

It's on the warrant.

Yeah, but

how do we know that?

Well, it's on the warrant.

So, I mean, they went to the right address.

So, a police doctored warrant.

No, no.

And we also know there's this big thing about, well, there's a no-knock warrant.

Exactly right.

Now, there was a no-knock warrant issued in the case.

However, they didn't utilize it.

Okay.

So that's a big problem.

We know for a fact with 100% certainty that they did knock.

Really?

And we know that because police said they knocked?

Yes.

Yes.

And also Kenneth Walker, the guy, Breonna Taylor's boyfriend.

Boyfriend.

He also said he heard the banging.

And a separate neighbor who came out to say, what the heck's going on?

There's a lot of loud banging going on in this door out there.

And then the police said, get back out of your apartment.

So we know with 100% certainty.

So we only know from the guy who fired on police

and the neighbor.

Those are the only witnesses that we have.

Police and three police officers.

Okay.

Well, you got to throw out the police officers.

They're all corrupt.

Okay.

Okay.

But they all agree on this.

So that's a big, that's a good thing.

Well, they're probably lying.

But the guy who shot was inside.

He wasn't lying.

And the neighbor I trust, but I don't trust the police.

If you've just seen this on sports broadcasts or from dumb politicians.

I like to get all my news from both of those sources.

Oh, no kidding.

And MSNBC, which I think is the combination of the two.

Yes, that is actually pretty much the combination.

You might not know that Breonna Taylor,

in the past, before this incident, had dated a guy, Jamarcus,

Jamarcus

Glover, who was a known drug dealer.

And so he, the reason they got the warrant was for Jamarcus Glover, who was at a different place, and Breonna Taylor's apartment they wanted to search.

They did not accuse Breonna Taylor of a crime.

They were just the accusation or the belief was that they used to date.

They had seemingly broken up, but they were still kind of in contact.

He had come over to her house a couple times, maybe to pick up a package.

They believed that maybe he was getting drugs or money sent to her house and using it sort of as a safe house because she didn't have a criminal history.

There was no reason to do anything wrong.

There's nothing that she did wrong.

And

they didn't accuse her of doing anything wrong.

In fact,

the belief could have been that she

was maybe abused.

Right.

And she's just hiding stuff at her house because the drug dealer boyfriend, she ex-boyfriend, is beating her up and is abusive.

She doesn't want to piss off her ex-drug dealer, or her ex-boyfriend who's a drug dealer.

which would be a sensible motivation.

But the police's motivation, what are you going to do?

The police's motivation there is to go in and see what is in the house.

Is he hiding drugs?

Is he hiding money?

What's going on?

So that's why they have the warrant.

They go to the house in the middle of the night, and we can talk about why

this part of this is a problem, but separate from what happened yesterday.

Because

if you missed the news yesterday, there was an indictment in this case.

They announced the results of a grand jury

yesterday, and that's what led to the violence last night.

Two police officers were shot, among other things.

So they go to the house.

Police start knocking on the door.

We know they knocked on the door.

They identify themselves as police.

Now,

the neighbor

confirms this, that they identified themselves as police trying to come into the door.

Jamar, excuse me,

Kenneth Walker, the boyfriend, the current boyfriend of Breonna Taylor.

A good guy, no charge against nothing.

Nothing wrong with him.

Nothing.

Yeah.

Clean.

They're in bed.

It's three in the morning or whatever.

They're in bed.

They hear the banging.

They both wake up.

Right.

They stumble out of their bedroom

down the hall.

They're looking at the front door.

He realizes that she's got a boyfriend who would be pissed off that he was there and also is a drug dealer and with a known criminal history.

And if indeed she was in an abusive relationship or just afraid of him,

he was there.

He would have a gun.

He's going to shoot because he has a right to to defend himself in his own home.

And he's a legal gun owner.

Right.

And this is an important part of this: a legal gun owner.

So he obviously, as I would, by the way, went to go get his gun because

if he doesn't know it's police,

even if he does know it's police,

you would still be afraid that maybe that's the drug dealer just saying.

He's yelling police, right?

I don't know.

So he believes it's Jamarcus Glover breaking in to abuse Breonna Taylor.

So he tries to defend himself.

And her.

So after whatever distance of time, they decide, okay, no one's coming to this door.

We're breaking the door down.

The police knock the door in.

As they knock the door in, he believes a drug dealer is coming in to

kill them or abuse them in some way.

He does what I think is a completely defensible thing in the circumstances, which is shoot at the person breaking into his house at three in the morning.

Right.

Right.

I have to tell you, if somebody broke into my house at three o'clock in the morning and it was police, I'm not sure I would believe it because if I were innocent, if I neither of these people had anything, they have no criminal record, they have nothing.

Right.

So that would be me.

That would be you.

If somebody breaks in at three o'clock in the morning and they tear down my door and I'm afraid of somebody else, I know somebody else is coming for me.

I absolutely take a gun and I shoot.

Now,

you shouldn't shoot without knowing, but that's what happens.

And that is why we have a castle doctrine.

You have a right to defend yourself in your own home, especially at three o'clock in the morning.

Right.

So it was totally, now it doesn't mean it worked out perfectly.

Right.

It was a totally understandable response from Kenneth Walker's position in that moment.

Right.

He thinks he's being attacked.

Someone breaks his door down.

He fires one shot.

And this is something that is like, I would say, 99% of people who talk about Breonna Taylor don't know.

But this is agreed upon not only by the police, but also Kenneth Walker, the boyfriend of Breonna Taylor.

He fired first

and actually hit the officer.

Right.

So think about what just happened now from the officer's perspective.

They are trying to break down a door, which they assume, they believe potentially has drugs and stuff inside, which, you know, you'd think people were going to hide it or whatever.

When they break the door down, they get shot by someone.

The one officer, officer Mattingly, looks down the hall.

He sees two people at the end of the hall.

He can't really make them out.

The only thing he can make out is a gun, and he sees a flash of the gun and then feels the heat on his thigh.

He gets shot in the thigh.

He backs up.

What the hell do you think a cop is going to do in that situation?

He's just been shot.

Stop, stop, stop.

What do you think anyone

who is carrying a gun legally is going to do?

If someone shoots you and you have a gun,

you shoot back.

Right.

That's any human being.

Any human being.

Any human being.

So, and

think about this for a second, how this is shown as supposedly some big example of racism by police.

It is not even clear they could make out the race of who was shooting at them.

But again,

whoever it was, no matter what race it was, actually shot a cop.

I think it's defensible defensible from his position why it happened, as we just laid out.

But when you shoot a cop, what the hell do you think is going to happen?

So stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.

Because that, I think, is going to be misheard.

Here's what, here's what we...

No, no, no.

No, no, no.

Go ahead.

So here's what I think we should

need to be said.

Let's look at this from two points of view.

One, he was justified.

He was charged with a crime, the shooter, was charged with a crime, and then it was dropped.

That's normal.

Yep, very normal.

People think that that's a big sign of racism, too.

No, that's very normal.

If I shoot somebody in my house, if you shoot somebody in your house, plan on spending a year in court in hell, okay?

Because they're going to investigate all of it.

Okay.

Now, they have witnesses because there were cops that were there.

So they could witness and say, yep, that's exactly what happened.

This was a justified shooting on his part.

On the boyfriend's part.

On the boyfriend's part.

Absolutely justified.

These cops are not the cops that are doing the investigation.

These are there just serving the warrant and searching the house.

They don't know, they don't know all the details.

They don't have an axe to grind.

They were just the guys assigned this job.

Now,

period,

separate issue.

Cops come in, they knock, look at it only from their point of view.

The cops, they knock, they identify themselves.

They are going into a place that they have been told could be hostile because it could have a drug dealer inside.

And whether he's violent or not, I don't know, but they suspect that maybe if he's there, they knock, they identify, they knock, they identify.

Then they took the door down.

The minute that door is open,

somebody in the dark shoots at them.

Looking at it from their side, their shooting back is 100%

as justified as the person on the other side of the door.

This is, at this point, what happened in there was not anything that you can change.

There's no reform that will change that because you have two people seeing something from the

both innocent, both acting rationally and legally on both sides.

You have both of them reacting appropriately.

And if you add just

one little flavor here to add, is they thought Breonna Taylor was alone.

So they go into a place where they believe it's only Breonna Taylor.

Now there's two people in there and the other person is shooting at them.

Now, if you take this in the context of the investigation,

they're trying to break up a drug ring here.

They've already arrested Jamarcus Glover, the drug dealer.

What's their assumption probably in that moment that, and I don't know if there's enough time to really noodle this all out, but that he is probably working with Jamarcus Glover there to, now that they know he's already arrested, they're there trying to get rid of whatever is in the apartment.

Now,

that's not what happened.

But the bottom line is he shot a cop.

And cops, when they get shot, are going to shoot back at the person who shot them.

This is not brain surgery here.

This is very obvious.

And I don't even think you need to say he shot a cop because shooting a cop is one thing.

But when you're in fending for your life and you don't know it's a cop, shooting anyone with a gun who is legally holding a gun who's illegally holding a gun is going to shoot back.

Yes, he's justified.

A separate point.

From the police perspective, they just went into a house with a warrant and got shot.

So now they all fire.

They fire back.

There's another cop who gets charged with a lesser crime.

We could talk about that later.

But the bottom line is she gets hit.

He doesn't.

And

she passes away.

This is not a case of racism.

It's a good case if you want to talk about the libertarian critique of police over, you know, using not even a no-knock.

Yeah, it wasn't even a no-knock.

It's just

three o'clock in the morning.

Three o'clock in the morning.

There's no, to me, there's absolutely no reason to execute this warrant in this way, which is another part of the investigation that's not complete.

So we have no idea whether we'll find things that led to the warrant wrongly being served.

So everything that we know, the warrant has nothing to do with the cops.

And the warrant,

if that was fudged at all, that means the district attorney should be in trouble.

But the warrant is exactly the same thing we've been saying about Donald Trump's impeachment.

The warrant system in this country is bad.

It's bad.

That is reform all of us can get on the bandwagon with.

Anyone who really knows cooking understands that the tools you use are almost as important as the knowledge of what you're doing.

Over the past few months, it has become more and more apparent to me that this this is absolutely the case when it comes to grilling because I am not an outdoor chef.

Although I recently feel like one, every time I take a bite out of something that I prepared on my RECTAC, there is something to the marriage of the sturdiness of the great design, to the perfection of the smart grill technology, that when you're standing over a RECTEC, looking at what you've cooked, you're presiding over a work of culinary art.

And the best thing about it for people like me anyway is that you yourself don't have to be good at cooking to be great with RekTech.

It's high-end equipment without the high-end price.

It's the last grill you're ever going to want to own.

Follow RekTech on all of their social media and sign up for their newsletter.

Visit rechtech.com.

That's R-E-C-T-E-Q.com.

You're listening to the best of the Glendeck program.

Ten years ago, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets in what was known as the Snow Revolution.

You feel the election was stolen?

Yes, sure, I.

Look it up.

Wikipedia will tell you the cause of the unrest was claims by Russian foreign journalists, political activists, and members of the public that the election process was flawed.

The California law is that you will count ballots that arrive as late as 17 days or so after Election Day.

Exactly.

But it's not just in Russia.

These color revolutions occurred all over Eastern Europe.

No, no, not just Europe.

They occurred all over the world.

The Arab Spring in Egypt that swept the Middle East was just a spontaneous protest spurred on by social media, right?

We came, we saw, he died.

Wrong.

The protest in Benghazi, Libya erupted after anger grew on the streets due to a YouTube video, right?

Wrong.

And it's taken time, but the colors of these revolutions are clearing and we can see everything now.

We see the people people involved in each one and the strategies implemented to manipulate the people.

But most importantly, we recognize the steps and we can see that these revolutions have moved far from independent square in Kiev

to here now.

Joe Biden, the challenger, continuing to lead tonight, Civil War, the left's revolution playbook exposed.

That was from last night's Wednesday night special.

They are using the exact same playbook

to

bring this election into a color revolution.

And we showed you the first three steps.

And it's really important.

The color revolution specialists include Michael McFole.

He was the U.S.

ambassador to Russia under President Obama.

And he wrote an academic paper in 2005 about the seven pillars a country needs to have in place for successful color revolution.

I showed these last night on the chalkboard.

Color revolution.

Now, this is important.

This is not a banana republic style coup.

A coup is when the military takes over.

This is a revolution.

This is when the people rise up.

And it's a strategy that the U.S.

has used for regime change in foreign nations with just a few components.

You have to question the legitimacy of an election.

That is the key.

That's why we showed in Russia the snow revolution.

The guy who wrote the seven steps of the seven pillars of color revolution, he was the ambassador of Russia when this went down.

Putin said to him when they first met, I know why you're here.

Meaning, I know you are fomenting a revolution against me.

Putin

stopped that revolution.

Now, we can judge that as good or bad.

It doesn't matter.

The color revolution pillars just are.

So, if you want to say the guy who wrote the book, he might be very patriotic.

He may be like, hey, this is fantastic.

We can overturn nations

and we have an easy way to do it.

And they've done it over and over and over again.

They've used these steps.

This is what happened in the Middle East.

Do you remember when we talked about the Arab Spring?

And I said, this is coordinated.

This is not a spontaneous uprising.

You watch for those words.

Spontaneous uprising.

This is just a spontaneous uprising.

This guy in Tunisia, it was just a spontaneous uprising.

The Benghazi, Libya, that overthrow and Qaddafi being dragged in the streets.

That was just a spontaneous uprising.

ISIS, the rise of the radicals in Syria, that was just a spontaneous uprising.

In Ukraine, where they got rid of

the

Russian oligarch and put in an American-style oligarch, that was just a spontaneous uprising.

All of them are spontaneous uprisings.

But as we have shown on our Wednesday night specials during the impeachment trial, we showed you what was really going on in Ukraine.

And yes, it had a lot to do with Joe Biden and his family getting rich off of it, but

that's not what they were concerned about.

They throw Joe Biden under the bus in a heartbeat.

It wasn't about that.

Even the Joe Biden stuff is almost a red herring.

Yes, when you know what happened in Ukraine, he is possibly, I don't,

well, I'll leave it as possibly because you can make an argument against it.

He is the most corrupt vice president in our history.

And that's saying something.

We've had really bad corrupt vice presidents.

But that's not the story in Ukraine.

That's not what they were trying to cover up with impeachment.

It's the color revolution and how this has now become part of civil society 2.0.

What is civil society 2.0?

That's a George Soros

system,

if you will.

We want an open society.

We want civil society.

Civil society.

That is civil society.

It's like civil society, Inc.

Okay?

It's a way to control people and control.

Once you have a civil society, you don't control it anymore.

And part of that civil society is to go in and undermine the justice system.

You go in and you take over the attorney general's office.

You take over the district attorney's office.

This is what they've done in country after country after country.

And George Soros has been funneling money in all of the races to get his hand-picked people in at the Attorney General's office or at your district attorneys.

He's got district attorneys everywhere.

Now, I'm not saying that he's calling,

this is what you do.

He just looked for people that he could support, that support opening up prisons,

letting people go, not going after Marxist revolutionaries.

The people that are causing the real problems as district attorneys in states,

most likely, check it out, their campaigns were funded by George Soros because it's part of Civil Society 2.0.

Soros does not like, he is a corrupt capitalist.

He just wants to make money and power.

There are people that believe in something.

George Soros isn't one of them.

George Soros is a guy who believes in himself, his own intellect, his own power, and his wealth.

That's what he believes in.

He's not going to be on the losing.

He's not doing this in like our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, and if I lose all my money, I don't care.

He does care.

And this is set up as a system, as we saw in Ukraine, for him to be able to have the cover with all of his organizations,

to do what he wants, and to be able to control enough levers in the justice system to say, prosecute this guy, don't prosecute this guy.

That's what was happening in Ukraine.

This, by the way, is why George Soros is kicked out of country after country after country.

He's not welcome in the former Soviet Union in Russia.

Why?

Snow revolution, color revolution.

That's why.

Now, there are seven pillars that a country needs to to have in play and we have all of them in play right now and they explain absolutely everything that you're seeing in the news.

Last night I did a new chalkboard on it and it's to understand what's going on,

I've made it really, really simple.

This is bottom-up, top-down, inside-out.

You are now seeing the orchestrated

bottom-up movement.

You are seeing and feeling the orchestrated Antifa, Black Lives Matter.

Those things were started by Soros and his cronies.

They were the real funding.

He doesn't need to control them.

He just needs to fund them.

And he's not alone.

There are a lot of people that are just greedy, want power, want to be, as one of George Soros' people said to us in a threat

at a private lunch,

you tell your boss,

the ship has already sailed, and you're either on the ship or you're not.

The person who was at that table responding for me said, I don't need to ask Glenn if he wants to be on the ship.

The answer will be, he's not on the ship.

He doesn't ever want to be on the ship.

That's what's happening.

People and companies are seeing that a great reset is coming.

There's a new world order coming.

And you're either on the ship or you're not on the ship.

Well, I'm not for a new world order.

I'm not for a great reset that resets capitalism in the way that the progressives, the Marxists, the radicals would be closer to their heart's desire.

I shouldn't say Marxist because those people who actually believe in Marxism are going to be very surprised at what the world looks like because it's not going to be Marxist.

Oh, it'll be totalitarian, but it's not going to be Marxist.

It's not going to,

it might smell like Chinese communism.

But if you think that's the fair way of running a country, well, then you, you, you, I don't know what you're fighting for.

But that's what the people at the top are fighting for: a more fair and equitable system that provides the people at the top with even more control because they know better.

And look at how successful the Chinese are with their system.

If we only had a system more like that,

what you're seeing right now is, I believe, a desperate Hail Mary pass that started the minute Trump won the election.

They did not expect him to win the election.

They expected Hillary Clinton to be in office.

And Hillary Clinton was one of the originators of the Civil Society 2.0.

It was her State Department that was in Ukraine, her and John Kerry.

She was all for this, and they had all of the pieces.

They just needed somebody who would go along with it in the Oval Office

and let me remind you what George Bush told me in the Oval Office Glenn don't worry about things

I'm telling you it doesn't matter who's elected whoever is elected will be advised by the same people and they will realize the president's hands are tied I told you that I think the day after I met with the president and it scared the hell out of me then why do we have elections?

That is a recognition of the deep state.

It doesn't matter what the president wants to do.

We're on course and there's no turning this ship.

Well, Donald Trump doesn't believe that.

He is arrogant enough, in a good way, to say, I'm the president.

And what I say to my administration goes,

these people hired me to do this, and I'm going to do it in my administration and constitutionally.

This is why everybody lies to you.

Oh, I'm going to do this.

Then they get in and they realize it's not that they're corrupted.

They realize

there's,

I'm not going to change anything.

The system, the ship has already sailed.

The system is what it is.

It's too deep.

And when you have that, you have the choice.

Do you become part of it and enrich yourself and protect your family and your future?

Or do you go out in a ball of flame?

This is the best of the Glenbeck program.

He's a contributing editor of the City Journal.

He is also the director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty.

He is a guy who is

really

getting to the bottom of what is happening internally in places like Seattle, but also in Washington.

He was the guy who exposed the CDC for going ahead and

disobeying a direct order from the president to cancel their critical race theory classes.

He also uncovered three other

sections of the government that are also still doing it.

If I'm not mistaken, Christopher, have you heard an update?

Are they still holding those or have those been canceled?

They've been canceled.

And, you know,

Russ Vought, who's the director of OMB, has been really on a seek and destroy mission for these critical race theory programs.

And within 24 hours of me reporting on these three agencies, which were EPA, State Department, and Veterans Administration, his team shut them down.

And they, even with some resistance, I'm told, but they were able to get these things canceled.

So here's the thing, because I've talked to Russ, and he is great.

He's doing

yeoman's work here.

But

if the president doesn't fire people, if we don't fire these people, they're not going to learn anything.

It's going to teach that you can get away with anything until somebody like you comes along and exposes it.

Yeah, that's right.

I think it's very difficult.

As you know, the civil service laws are heavily favored towards kind of status quo, inertia, and bureaucracy.

It's difficult to fire folks, but the executive order that came out yesterday, or the day before yesterday rather, was quite striking because they built in some new enforcement mechanisms.

All diversity and inclusion training programs throughout the federal government have to pass through the OMB and the OPM for centralized approval.

And then they're also instructing agency heads for managers who refuse to comply and continue to do critical race theory training programs.

They're instructed to begin begin adverse action proceedings, which is the first step into actually getting people fired or demoted or punished.

And I think that they know this, and they're working kind of every lever that they can in order to build in some enforcement and build in some accountability.

You know, it's really amazing that you can have a president say,

this is a poison that is killing our country,

and no one is to do this.

And you actually have civil servants who will take it upon themselves to not only continue it,

but they will act in direct defiance because they believe that it's good, I guess, and

they will help poison the nation, and we can't fire them.

I mean, it's that would never happen in the regular world.

You go against the CEO says, hey, I don't want anyone, anyone making this product because it's poison.

and we're, you know, Tylenol.

Don't, we don't make that.

And then somebody just going ahead and making it anyway, that person would be fired and never work again.

Yeah, and that's that's exactly the problem because what we have now, and this is something that scholars at the Claremont Institute and elsewhere have long warned about, we have essentially a fourth branch of government, this permanent bureaucracy, and they're operating with the attitude that unfortunately is true, where they're saying, well, the administration changes every four or eight years, but whatever happens, we're going to be here.

And we're going to operate on our own ideology, our own rules.

And frankly, they're kind of operating outside of the Constitution and saying very clearly, even when they got called out through my reporting, even when they got called out directly by Russ Vaughan in the Office of Management and Budget, my sources tell me that they were still defiant.

And the administration had to kind of use

some threats on the funding funding level in order to get compliance.

So we have an out-of-control bureaucracy that has been radicalized politically, and they're operating with no sense of consequences and even a sense of disdain for the politically elected leader of the executive branch.

There's something my gut tells me, and we're investigating so many other things that I haven't had time.

Maybe if you're just one of those people that are just like worms and you just really like to just dig in and find stuff, Somebody should do an investigation on CDC because there's something wrong there.

I don't know what it is, but the way they are so defiant, there's something happening there that I just don't, I

needs to be cleaned out.

I don't know what it is, but maybe I'm wrong.

Chris,

go ahead.

I'll tell you exactly what.

I had, you know, my source within the CDC who had sent me the whistleblower documents,

you know, this person told me that the culture in CDC has been ideologically radicalized.

They're pushing some of the most toxic elements of critical race theory.

And when these programs were canceled after Rustfought shut them down,

this source described the atmosphere in the CDC as like a funeral because they were so disappointed that they couldn't be doing this critical race theory programming.

That's frightening.

All right, Christopher, I want to talk to you a little bit about Seattle.

The Seattle City Council overrode the mayor's veto to defund the police.

So the mayor even, the mayor's crazy.

The mayor has even said, no, no, no, we're not going to, we're not going to cut that deeply.

And the Seattle City Council overrode the veto.

What does this mean for police and for Seattle?

A couple things.

You know, I think it's actually a bit of a misconception nationally about the mayor of Seattle.

Jenny Durkin, she is actually a quite moderate Democrat.

She is obviously on the left, but she's on the sensible left.

She's a former U.S.

attorney.

She understands how the system works.

She's really the only person that's defending the police department.

But she's really being kind of ripped apart by the city council, which is kind of socialist and

democratic socialist in nature.

And they're moving forward with these plans.

We're going to have

100 fewer officers on the street.

And officers within SPD tell me that the officers who are still remaining are bailing left and right because they see the writing on the wall.

The activists are not going to stop at cutting 100 officers.

They're really going to try in the next budget season, which is coming up shortly, to defund the police by 50%.

You have a majority of city council members that have pledged for a full 50% cut.

So the youngest officers, the best officers, the officers that still have some career left in them, are seeking lateral transfers to other departments because they know that being a police officer in the city of Seattle is now a kind of risk to your career.

It's a risk to your life, safety.

And

frankly, what's going to happen is they're saying you're going to have a police office, a police force that is only responding to the most serious calls, and your response times might double, triple, quadruple.

How do you where you may have a violent crime and it could take half an hour for police to arrive?

How do they logically think that this is going to keep people safe and keep the street safe, the police safe.

How are they expecting this to work?

Are they that, really that stupid or do they not care?

You know, I think they're really possessed by this story that the police is a, you know, the city council,

some of the legislation that they were considering explicitly says the Seattle Police Department is a white supremacist institution.

They go around kind of hunting people of color.

I mean, the most kind of

horrific narratives have possessed a kind of activist class within the city and they are moving forward on really no logical basis.

They're moving forward on a kind of kind of millenarian basis where they're saying if we destroy the institutions of the police, which is kind of the last vestige of conservatism within the city institutions, it's the only thing that's standing between us and utopia.

Their idea is through this great destruction of the police department, some kind of natural beauty and natural utopia will emerge.

It's deeply naive, and unfortunately, it's going to cause the most chaos and destruction in Seattle's poorest neighborhoods.

Please,

Stu and I read this like three times, and we're like, okay,

maybe, maybe, maybe this is good.

Maybe this is good.

Seattle has just hired an ex-pimp

to

help them figure out how to police the streets.

Now,

how long has he not been a pimp?

And he's a community organizer,

I take it.

And that's, I think I might rather have the pimp.

Can you tell me that story?

Yeah, you know, I've actually, his name's Andre Taylor.

I've actually met with Andre Taylor.

I've interviewed him.

He is a very charismatic person, and he is kind of the mayor and some other members of the council are looking for any allies they have that can kind of play the role of activist, community leader.

You know, he's

from the kind of heart of the African-American community in Seattle.

And they're essentially desperate to buy off elements of the community.

And they're cutting checks furiously.

And the mayor

has said what they want to do, and the council backs her up, is spend up to $100 million supporting community organizations for communities of color, quote unquote.

So they're kind of playing this game where they feel like they can essentially buy support and if they inject enough cash into the activist networks that they'll stop with the kind of agitation and disruption.

But I think it's a strategic blunder because all that will do is it will kind of create a stronger and more permanent kind of activist class that has full-time employees, full-time agitators.

And

when someone someone tries to extort money from you and you cut them a check, they're just going to try to extort more.

Well,

you also create the new Al Sharpton that is just a business.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think that's exactly right.

And when I met this gentleman, Andre Taylor,

for an interview, he rolled up in a brand new Porsche with yellow rims.

He had

a security guard wearing a suit that was kind of

being his kind of advanced man and it felt very much like out of a Tom Wolf novel.

It felt very much like this is almost a kind of cartoon character who is now being funded with a six-figure paycheck by the city,

but really has kind of no training,

no kind of a kind of official capacity.

And it's not really clear that he has the ability to do anything positive for the city moving forward.

Because Christopher, there are cases like this, and some of the most effective people that would talk out about

a bad thing happening in the community are people who lived it and are reformed.

Those can be inspiring voices at times.

Right.

Do you see this particular ex-pimp as one of those people?

You know, and that's a great question.

And in fairness, in some ways, yes.

I mean, one thing that Andre Taylor has done to his credit is that he's actually spoke out against the Chaz Chop.

And he actually went to the Chaz Chop and he said, look, if you care about the black community, doing this experiment in kind of white anarchism is not going to help us.

So you guys should get out of here before someone gets killed.

And he was actually thrown out of the chaz chop because he was essentially giving that speech.

So

it's a kind of mystery, honestly.

Even I spent an hour with him.

It really is a mystery.

I think he has some actually good ideas.

He has some ability to kind of rein in the worst of the kind of activists.

But at the end of of the day, it's kind of like your left hand fighting your right hand.

I don't know if anyone wins.

As always, thank you very much for watching this stuff so closely and being brave enough to report on it.

Christopher Ruffo, contributing editor of the City Journal.

We'll talk again, Chris.

Thanks.