But even as defunding turns to refunding, and even as woke politicos start to recognise that cops can be useful in crime-ridden communities, the question remains – how was this ‘bullshit’ allowed to ‘destroy cities’? Why did so many accept and promote the preposterous idea that cutting police resources and having fewer officers on the streets would help to make communities – especially black communities – safer? Many people warned against the slashing of police budgets, and yet still it happened. In NYC, for example, in August 2020 – right around the time of the BLM and Defund uprisings – influential people of colour were sounding the alarm about defunding the police. City councilwoman Vanessa L Gibson, a representative for the Bronx, said her constituents ‘want to see cops in the community’. Numerous black New York officials counselled against Defund. One described this woke belief in trimming cop numbers as a form of political ‘colonisation’ pushed by white progressives. Another said it had the whiff of ‘political gentrification’…

It’s because the new elites, these noisy purveyors of ‘woke’ thinking who have come to dominate the political and media classes, are now phenomenally removed from ordinary people and from the needs and interests of working communities. To such an extent that they couldn’t even see that there might be a problem with withdrawing police from poor, isolated, atomised communities in which crime and anti-social behaviour are significant problems. The story of Defund, the spectacular collapse of this toxic woke slogan, the hardship this eccentric ideology has caused in many communities, is really a story of the unbridgeable chasm that now separates the decadent new establishment from the reasoned public that wants to enjoy a safe, good, fruitful life.