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Curiously, The Thin Blue Line is one of many institutions that Roberts seems to dislike. Unsurprisingly, the FBI is repeatedly lambasted, but local law enforcement isn’t even mentioned positively in the book, nor is there any suggestion that it is necessary to make America great again. Like all of us, Roberts was appalled by the police response to the Uvalde school shooting, and rightly so. He is entirely right to hold the department accountable for its criminal failures. He is also right to point out that the Uvalde police’s attitude of “prioritizing obedience over competence, legalese over liberty” is common in police departments across the country, as most progressives have long understood. Yet Roberts’s open disdain for law enforcement remains one of the most startling departures from Republican orthodoxy here. Perhaps Trump’s repeated promises to pardon the thugs who attacked the police on January 6th have rubbed off on Roberts, because Dawn of the Day But for whatever reason, Roberts has somehow come to agree with the anti-fascist view that the police are not here to save us.
His solution, however, was not reform; although he never used the word “divestment,” Dawn of the Day Roberts seems to have given up on the police altogether. Instead, he argues, we should arm nearly everyone and turn every school into the OK Corral. “We will start by empowering the good people of Koreatown and other small business owners across the country to defend themselves, rather than boarding up their windows the next time BLM decides to burn down their city,” he writes, then continues. “In addition, we will no longer simply defend our individual rights to own guns, we will begin to reform police departments and form rifle clubs that will help all of us fulfill our collective responsibility to keep our communities free and safe, rather than waiting helplessly outside schools where children are in grave danger.” Public safety will no longer be the responsibility of law enforcement; Roberts will hand it over to armed militias that are accountable to no one.
Roberts’s vision of America is one of a violent frontier mentality. “The frontier is dangerous,” he tells us. “It is majestic and austere. It is imposing and liberating. In short, it is the most American thing there is.” Rejecting most American institutions as irreformable, he advocates the destruction of our contemporary American society, hoping that the nuclear family, the church, and Smith & Wesson will take their place. “Americans are inherently dangerous,” he gloats, “relative to our sister civilizations, they are violent to tyrants… Europeans, even Australians, may be civilized people, but Americans are dangerous creatures.” He longs for the rosy, bloody landscapes of John Wayne’s Westerns, the dirty, savage, violent America.
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