I 2nd this. If you stop me or my wife the first thing I need to see if a badge, id, and warrant. Not one or the other. 2out of three at least.
This is exactly where the 2nd amendment and the Blue Lives Matter movements collide. If both civilians and police have the legal right to arm and defend themselves with lethal force, and neither has a responsibility to show restraint or demonstrate cause, then you have created a situation where an innocent civilian and a good cop could kill each other in self defense and neither would have done anything wrong.
It always blows my mind when I see Back the Blue flags next to Gadsden flags. Who do they think is doing the treading?!
It makes sense if you remember that conservativism doesn’t actually exist, and all people claiming to be conservatives are just narcissists who pick and choose what they care about in any given situation.
Conservatism does sort of exist, but it’s all about conserving the social, economic, and power structures of the present. Honestly most so-called conservatives are actually reactionaries - they want to bring back the social, economic, and power structures of the recent past, i.e. reverse the past couple of decades of development. Mostly, of course, because they believe they were better off back then.
Bull crap. There is not now, nor has there ever been an inherently conservative value. Conservatives define their values based on their identity, and decide to conserve the social, economic, and power structures that benefit themselves. Any social, economic, and power structures that are not beneficial are evil and must be destroyed. Any position a conservative needs to take, any idea the conservative needs to spread, any argument a conservative needs to make, any action a conservative needs to take, all are justified because it is in the conservative’s best interests. It’s how they can say one thing today, and then attack the same idea tomorrow. To a rational person, this looks like hypocrisy, but a conservative is no more capable of hypocrisy than a scorpion. “How can they support this, but believe that?” “How can they say they believe X and vote for Y?” Conservatives are not tethered to any ideological foundations, so they can say or do whatever they think will help them most in the moment.