Many of Vermont's streets and parks are now largely controlled by advocates of the BLM ideology.  Note that these are not black people — these are white Vermont zealots who import out-of-state suffering by inner-city blacks to advance their Marxist platform against rural white Vermonters who are innocent of any wrongdoing.  These are white BLM thugs, who demand that all laws bow before them.

Happily, this errant effort is failing miserably in Vermont.  The problem with witch-hunting arises when one lacks witches.  In Vermont, there are essentially zero white supremacist groups, zero swastikas, and only a few confederate flags.  The switcheroo occurs by replacing "white supremacist" with "white."  What used to be called "historical socio-economic disadvantages arising from slavery" is now dubbed "systemic racism."

In Vermont, this definition-altering manipulation is particularly offensive — attacking police as racists for arresting inner-city fentanyl-dealers.  This not only falsely condemns loyal officers, but greatly enables the narcotics traffic to flourish, even acting as an advertisement to gangs to peddle drugs in naïve Vermont.

Vermont's police already know this.  Commissioned to interdict the fentanyl and heroin flowing North from Mexico, they arrest dealers of those substances — regardless of race.  The "Second Wave" of opioids began around 2010, after a government clamp-down on pharmaceutical narcotics led to an explosion in heroin-trafficking.  The "Third Wave" was the subsequent flood of deadly fentanyl and related analogues that continues to kill Vermonters (regardless of color — fentanyl is "colorblind").

The resultant uptick in incarceration of "people of color" led to liberal outrage as liberals twisted these statistics to label Vermont's entire judicial system, and its police officers, as racist.  Vermont has so few black people that even a tiny increase in incarceration rates causes a statistical shift.  But the leftist screaming of systemic racism ignores a simple analytical question: are they guilty?

Black Americans commit crimes at higher rates than whites.  This is an issue not of race, but of urbanism — crime rates are much higher in cities.  Yes, this situation is itself a consequence of historic racism, but Mexican cartels and black American gangs don't admit white people (perhaps they are racists!).

Vermont's progressive leaders have an agenda built on imputed (not actual) racism, and they certainly will not be derailed by commonsense truths about the illicit drug trade.  They don't want to know that drug-trafficking causes incarceration rates of blacks to rise, because that would subvert their pathetic mantra that all white people (except them) are privileged and owe a past debt. 

These same liberal race warriors call the police in Vermont for the slightest of offenses and also demand defunding.  But when their children are raped or murdered, or their homes are burglarized, is it not hypocrisy to call 911?  Or what of EMTs?  Do they expect EMTs to render aid for $12/hour in a residence where mental illness or drugs expose them to injury, without police protection?

Vermont is arguably the least racist state in America.  Yet "BLM protesters" hiss venom if any citizens attempt to express support for our police and first responders.  There is no evidence that either George Floyd or Breonna Taylor was targeted for the color of their skin — it is being imputed in a desperate ideological gambit to enslave all Americans.  If there are no witches, they must be conjured; if there is no scapegoat, there is nothing to hate and target. 

Vermont's Legislature released an extensive study in 2018 that analyzed criminal sentencing based on race.  It concluded that "there was no significant difference in the frequency of drug charges issued to White and Black inmates" (p. 11); "there was no significant difference in sentence length between Black and White inmates" (p. 12); "[n]o significant difference in sentence length was found between the six racial categories" (p.13); "there was no significant difference in the frequency of DRs [Disciplinary Reports] issued to White and Black inmates" (p.13).  Such evidence contradicts the left's false narrative, so it is ignored.

America's police are the scapegoat witches of a deluded ideology.  This is especially evident in rural Vermont, where low crime rates and comprehensive (if imperfect) social services provide a stark contrast to the turmoil and chaos in many urban centers.  Americans are fleeing cities for the relative security of the countryside, even as rural Vermont liberals invoke the cities' anarchy as their casus belli against their own police and communities.

In these surreal times, most Vermonters know who stands on the front lines against sex- and drug-traffickers, burglars, and rapists.  The liberals aren't going to police the streets they are tearing up: loyal and underpaid police officers are.

All patriots, and those who endorse the rule of law, will stand with them.

Image: Johnny Silvercloud via Flickr (cropped), CC BY-SA 2.0.