Joe Rogan: 'Defund the police' is a silly, utopian mantra

This clip is nearly two weeks old but I hadn’t seen it until today. That doesn’t matter though because what Rogan says here is just as relevant now. In fact it will probably be relevant for several months to come. He’s interviewing a Cal State Fullerton professor of psychology named Nancy Panza who has a “side gig” as a forensic and police psychologist, meaning she works with police to help them with their mental health.

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“All this defunding the police talk scares the s**t out of me,” Rogan said. He continued, “I see what’s going on right now in New York City and it’s a god***n shooting gallery. It’s crazy. And the reason why is because the police officers have no trust in the mayor. They want to quit. They don’t feel like they get any respect. They feel like they have all been lumped in with this one murderous cop from Minneapolis.

“Now they’re all bad cops and there’s a license to call them bad cops, scream terrible things at them when they’ve done nothing wrong. They’re just there to protect and serve. A lot of them are good people. The vast majority.”

Rogan went on to criticize the social justice advocates who he says are living in a utopian fantasy world. “There’s so many people out there that have this very narrow-minded perspective. They just have blinders on and there idea—it’s like racial justice, social justice, defund the police—like this mantra that they have to say with no depth to it. They don’t understand the consequences of saying such a thing or implementing such a thing.”

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“You obviously need police. This idea that you don’t need police—are criminals just going to go away? Is crime going to go away?” Rogan said. He added, “And all those people who are out there protesting that think they’re immune from it because they’re the ones saying defund the police. Hey man, they’ll f**kin rob you too.”

“This utopian world that they’re trying to push—defund the police, we’re going to put that money into the community and everything’s going to be fine…It’s not going to be fine. You need to fund the police more,” Rogan said. “You can’t blame all cops and you can’t say defund the police because that’s nonsense. That is a silly…like a version of life that…it’s not real.”

At this point Rogan returned to an idea that he and Panza discussed from the beginning of the inerview, i.e. increasing the amount of training for officers so that it makes up 20 percent of their time. This would cost a lot more obviously but he argued that if it solved the problem of people not trusting the police and decreased crime because more people were arrested and caught, that would be worth it.

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But they key here is that what we should be talking about is better policing not slashing budgets. The direction BLM is taking us is exactly the wrong direction. As Panza mentions in this clip, there are already people out trying to self-police in some areas and that’s definitely not going to be an improvement. It will fail everywhere it’s tried, just as it did in CHAZ/CHOP.

Here’s the excerpt which is about 9 minutes long. If you want to hear more, the full interview this was pulled from is here.

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 22, 2024
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