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MADISON - ST. CLAIR RECORD

Friday, May 3, 2024

How did we get this kind of political leadership?

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Illinois Rep. Katie Stuart and her middle school principal husband might want to question the value of their son's education at the University of Vermont. Annual tuition costs $41,000. It appears from his anti-police ranting on Twitter that he’s being indoctrinated, not educated.

Dean Stuart, whose mother passes laws for the rest of us and presumably expects police to enforce some of them (including the governor's lockdown mandate), is as “woke” as a well-off white boy from Edwardsville can get.

“No justice, no peace” is the motto he’s chosen for his Twitter page, which is festooned with fatuous comments on the George Floyd killing and rabid denunciations of police officers in general.

Why has the Floyd killing become a cause célèbre for Black Lives Matter and its virtue-signaling supporters? It was an appalling example of police brutality and unjustified homicide - but no one disagrees that it was an obvious tragedy. Yet in the explosive unrest that has followed, the woke crowd took an intellectually dishonest position that police everywhere are like Floyd's killer, and many have proposed defunding departments. Aside from the absurdity, an honest person would conclude that such a proposal would be most devastating to the communities that need protection the most.

Universities used to be places of robust exchanges of ideas. But now, they bestow degrees to those who line up to the one world view of wokeness.

Pretentious college kids (and triggered adults) don’t let facts get in the way of their expressions of assumed moral superiority. If you dare engage them in debate expect to be labeled racist or some other "ist."  

“There is no such thing as a good cop that willingly works in a system like this,” Stuart opines. Some of his tweet-readers might object to that gross and utterly unsubstantiated overgeneralization, but they’re delusional. “Just because you’ve had a good interaction with a ‘good cop’ doesn’t mean they’re not the problem,” Stuart insists. “It’s still f--- the police.”

Why is Stuart boiling over with rage against the men and women in blue? Has he had bad personal experiences with law enforcement? No, his deep thoughts are informed by an obvious piece of propaganda, no doubt recommended by a socialist professor, a book called The End of Policing.

Here’s a choice bit from the anarchic screed: “The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people.”

For her part, Rep. Stuart says the fact that her son plays make believe anarchist from a leafy East Coast college campus, that he is effectively cheering on lawlessness and looting isn’t newsworthy. 

Dean isn’t a spokesman for her office, she says. His behavior shouldn’t reflect on her.

Yet it does. As does Stuart’s attempts to offload responsibility for her own son’s calls for violence.

Such is political leadership in 2020. And we wonder how we got here.

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