Do you have a source for “millions of people”?

This article gives it a funny framing by just brushing it off as “few”, but claims 15% of Americans support abolishing the police https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/22/abolish-pol...

15% of the roughly 200M adults in the US is 30 million people.

The article also stated that there may have been problems with the poll, like not differentiating between total elimination and partially dismantling police departments.

If presented as total elimination of police departments, the survey might have missed support for more nuanced calls to dismantle police, said Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. “One notion of abolition is the need for discontinuity from the violent and racist past of law enforcement,” he said.

The way I read it that quote is saying the 15% would be higher if you included both the people who want to abolish and those who want more moderate reform.

It’s not saying that it already includes both groups.

My speculation is that the actual phasing means very different things to very different people, and thus the actual nuance of what people believe in aggregate to be useless to discern by their agreement or disagreement with singular phrases. For example, "abolishing the police, with context that they would be replaced with equally strong mutual support systems, social workers, mental and physical health workers" could be a vast majority of that 15%, or it could be the vast minority of that 15%. We just don't know.

Social workers aren't going to stop people from breaching the Capitol.

No, but it's pretty normal to think that the people attending domestic incidents to identify whether a crime has committed and the people guarding the legislature should have different rules of engagement, training and quite possibly uniforms.

I'm the first person to argue that 'defund the police' was a terrible slogan to adopt, but that's precisely because everyone jumps to saying "but we don't actually mean have no publicly subsidised law enforcement". Even if the rafts of related reform proposals are still far too idealistic for the real world, it's not a position comparable to the Q faithful having the numbers to win primaries.

Well neither did the cops, so I don't see your point.

That’s not what your article says lol. Do you have another source for your outlandish claim?

Please stop using HN for political battle and flamewar. We've already had to ask you this once: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173294, and we ban accounts that abuse the site like this, regardless of their politics.

Other people being wrong or behaving badly doesn't make it ok to break the rules.

Many people are saying it was a Twitter user named "MillionsOfPeople"

The clarion call was "defund the police" not "abolish the police". Some people believe these are are synonymous but IMO most agree "defund" means things like de-militarize and add social workers to deal with things like mental health and quality of life issues instead of sending undertrained people with guns... I'd add "prevent them profiting from things like property seizures".

Compare the two phrases in google trends for example. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=defund%20the%20po...

At the peak in mid-June it was a 100:7 ratio.

You know what the difference is? Those are fringe elements of left wing politics who get little to no endorsement from anyone with any actual power, and who remain mostly irrelevant in Democratic party politics. Whereas on Wednesday, you had the most powerful Republican tell a violent mob to go to the Capitol and "convince" the "weak" Republicans to change their minds. His lawyer, who is one of the prominent faces in the Trump media ecosystem, told them this will be "trial by combat." A Republican Senator showed an affirmative gesture to that very crowd on his way into the Capitol.

Stop trying to "both sides" this, because this is not a "both sides are just as bad" situation. We just saw the top level leadership of a major national party endorse and praise a terrorist mob that tried to overthrow the US government. The president literally said he "loved" those people when he told them to go home. That is problematic on a completely different level from anything that has happened on the left.

Did I say anywhere that both sides are just as bad? Did I say the things the left does are as bad as starting an insurrection? I did not, and in fact I think the far right is much worse. That doesn’t mean there aren’t parts of the left that are also in the wrong about certain things. And no it’s not just a tiny part of the left.

But why are you so quick to get so defensive? Why can nobody openly acknowledge their own side’s faults?

Going back to the topic at hand about abolishing the police, I don’t understand why I never hear anybody say “yeah you’re right, abolish the police is a bad way to say it. Here are the things we actually want. Wr should tweak the messaging to make it more clear”. Everyone is so insistent on doubling down on the abolish/defund language. And if someone doesn’t understand that this is now just a code for a more nuanced agenda, then we’ll extend our outrage to them too!

If we make the right own their extremists in terms of rhetoric, action, and ideology then I think the same standard is appropriate for the left. The only people that complain about "both sides" points are people who can't introspect their own ideologies.

All you've done here is ask that people on the right ignore your fringe groups, but would you do the same? Or would you do what they're doing and engage in hyperbole to make you deal with them?

Both your parties are junk to me, so I'm happy to keep saying "both sides" until you all get your bad behavior under control.

Get back to me when the most powerful Democratic politicians in the country throw their support behind violent extremists. The fringes of left wing politics have been kept at the fringe. For the past five years, if not longer, the extremist fringe of right wing politics has been allowed to enter the mainstream of the Republican party. The Republican President has endorsed them, encouraged them, praised them, and defended them, and the RNC just declared him to be their party's leader after what happened on Wednesday.

Nobody needs to "make" the right own their extremists because they have done so already.

The CHAZ is a good example that was well supported and well tolerated, even championed. [0]

> On June 18, a volunteer medic intervened during a sexual assault in a tent in the occupied park area; the alleged perpetrator was arrested.[133] NPR reported that day, "Nobody inside the protest zone thinks a police return would end peacefully. Small teams of armed anti-fascists are also present, self-proclaimed community defense forces who say they're ready to fight if needed but that de-escalation is preferred."

Spenser Rapone, who attempted to infiltrate the US Military, received notable support and has gone on to be a speaker at events [1][2]

This gives a better spectrum picture of what's going on [3] and this statement sums it up fairly well:

> According to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the California State University, if Reinoehl is implicated in the case, "it would mark the first time in recent years that an antifa supporter has been charged with homicide" as "hard-left violence has generally been less fatal and more directed towards property, racists and to a lesser extent police and journalists" which is unlike "the white supremacist and the far right, which glorifies mass violence by loners and small cells against minorities and enemies". Gary LaFree, chairman of the University of Maryland's criminology department, stated that "the case could potentially be included in the university's Global Terrorism Database as the first act of terror linked to antifa".

Left-wing radicalist groups tend to be self-organizing cells which makes them hard to track, much like the group Anonymous from back in the early days of the internet. This has precedent through history as well. [4]

The way your message and my message differ is that I'm not going to provide rhetorical cover fire for either of your groups. They're both disgusting and you both need to own them, because you all provided the foundation or lack of accountability that gave them material presence and impact.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Autonomous_Zone#D...

[1] https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2018/06/19/commie-c...

[2] https://www.ncnewsonline.com/news/local-man-west-point-grad-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...

[4] https://time.com/4501670/bombings-of-america-burrough/

>Get back to me when the most powerful Democratic politicians in the country throw their support behind violent extremists.

They already do. Barack was training and arming "moderate" rebels in the takeover and destruction of Egypt, Libya, and Syria. Hillary Clinton was laughing when she heard Gaddafi was killed.