The insane totalitarian absurdity of the Left, from one of its home bases, in two stories.

The national Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality has been localized to UC Berkeley’s campus, as several reforms are being made to UCPD, limiting its scope and creating public safety alternatives.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ sent a campuswide email Thursday outlining her proposed reforms for the campus UCPD force. 

“Elements of our country’s law enforcement culture dehumanize some of the very people whose safety and wellness police officers are sworn to protect, especially the Black community,” Christ said in the email. “The onus is on us.”

Christ also said a team of mental health professionals will now respond to noncriminal calls for wellness checks and mental health emergency interventions, in place of armed police.

In addition to the personnel changes, UCPD’s level of militarization will be assessed in an audit to look for “excessive” equipment that is unnecessary for protecting the community.

Unless you need the cops deployed in dorms to keep students from mingling or exercising. 

Police officers monitoring dormitory halls, frequent inspections of ID cards — these are among the measures being implemented in a dorm lockdown as UC Berkeley continues to grapple with a spike of COVID-19 cases on campus.

First reported by the Daily Californian, the self-sequester mandate for UC Berkeley students living in the dormitories, originally intended to end Monday, has been extended for another week, with stricter security measures in place to enforce quarantining.

Another new measure also in place: a ban on solitary outdoor exercise…

The policies that remain in effect for students include not leaving their rooms unless it is to obtain a COVID-19 test or medical care (including mental health care), use the bathroom or grab food from the dining halls.

Students who violate these measures, the university says, may face the threat of suspension or removal from dorms.

Police defunding? Don’t make me laugh. The Left loves cops. As long as they’re not enforcing normative laws, like the right to property, personal safety, or freedom from harassment, but love the idea of a police state built to enforce whatever version of the permanent state of emergency allows them to have abusive powers.

Name a leftist state that didn’t have a police force that would make the LAPD look like peaceniks with the power to arrest and detain people for thoughtcrimes? 

There have been a lot of these articles about how the Left has become what it claimed to hate. I wrote one back in 2013 titled, President Obie. Anyone who knows Alice’s Restaurant will get the reference.

On one side of the moral equation in Alice’s Restaurant you had Office Obie and the nameless army officers who were rule-bound fascists and on the other side you had the easygoing hippies who believed in community, hanging out and letting things slide. Culture would drag you into court for littering with twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs as evidence while counterculture would shrug and invite you to dinner.

A mere two decades after Arlo Guthrie began singing about being arrested on Thanksgiving for littering by Officer Obie; John Pozsgai was sentenced to three years in jail for “discharging pollutants into waters of the United States” for the crime of adding topsoil to his land.

And you can be sure that the evidence for the legal case which went on in varying forms for twenty years consisted of a lot more than a mere twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with a paragraph of text on the back.

There’s a folk song in there, but it’s not one that Arlo Guthrie would sing or that any liberal would listen to because every progressive who grins when hearing Arlo joke about a federal case being made out of throwing some garbage off a cliff would want to hang him in real life.

And does. The Left is a totalitarian movement. It’s not out to abolish prisons, but to fill them with political enemies.