Hillary Clinton’s ex-press secretary Brian Fallon tweeted, “Defund the police.” The progressive outfit the Working Families Party did the same. A Brooklyn College sociology professor, Alex Vitale, called for abolishing the police.

Celebrities rich enough to afford private security — Natalie Portman, Brie Larson, the Weeknd, John Legend, Jane Fonda, Lizzo, etc. — all signed an open letter drenched with lies calling for public funds to be turned away from policing and toward more nebulous goals such as “public health.” The letter claimed, absurdly, that funding for cops and the military has gone up every year since 1973 while spending on “public health” has gone down every year since 1973. Here’s the reality: Medicaid spending in 1975 stood at $13.1 billion. It has gone up virtually every year since, and now stands at $639 billion. Overall, public health spending has risen from less than $200 billion in 1988 to $1.6 trillion last year, according to HealthSystemTracker.org.

The lie that social spending has taken a hit interlocks with the media-created myth that it’s open season on unarmed black men in the US. Fifteen unarmed black people were killed by police last year, as opposed to 25 white people, according to the Washington Post’s database, but black people are much more likely to have police encounters than white people. In an average year, about 49 people are killed by lightning in the US, according to the National Weather Service.