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Cake day: August 1st, 2023

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  • By 1970, it was fully criminalized nationally esp. because of the whole drug culture of the late 60’s and the Vietnam anti-war protest movement.

    “You want to know what this was really all about?

    The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

    -John Ehrlichman, President Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief


  • We tried that. We had a whole national protest movement, it lasted a year, millions of people were in the streets with the explicit goal of lowering police budgets.

    Despite all of that effort, no police budget was defunded. Most police budgets have continued to increase. ICE funding has drastically increased.

    So what’s your plan to do something different? From where I’m sitting, the “let’s kill cops” camp is more realistic than the “let’s try the George Floyd protests again, maybe politicians will listen to us this time” camp.