The Great Defund-to-Abolish Bait-and-Switch: How the Left Tried to Launder Their Cop-Hating Fever Dream and Got Smacked Down

You remember 2018, right? The year the Squad and every blue-check scream queen decided ICE was literally Hitler reincarnated. Family separations! Cages! Babies crying! “Abolish ICE” became the battle cry, chanted at protests, slapped on bumper stickers, tweeted by trust-fund radicals who’d never seen a border patrol agent in their lives. It was pure, unfiltered moral panic porn. And then the polls came in. Turns out most Americans, even the ones who hate Trump, don’t actually want to dissolve the agency that rounds up gang members and child traffickers. Shocker. The slogan flatlined faster than a Biden gaffe on live TV.

So what did they do? They didn’t apologize. They didn’t rethink. They just swapped the packaging. Fast-forward to summer 2020: George Floyd, cities on fire, and suddenly the exact same people are yelling “Defund the Police.” Same energy, same funders, same endgame—gut law enforcement, redirect the cash to their pet social experiments, and let chaos reign while they virtue-signal from behind gated walls. It was the most transparent rebrand since New Coke tried to pretend it wasn’t a disaster.

Both slogans are cut from the same cloth. Abolitionists have been at this for years: police and ICE are just two heads of the same racist, carceral hydra. Tear it down, build back better with “community safety” workers who’ll de-escalate a home invasion with a feelings circle. Cute in theory. Lethal in practice. When “Abolish ICE” started smelling like political suicide, they pivoted to cops because everybody hates at least one bad cop story. Easier sell. Same poison.

And oh boy, did it backfire. “Defund the Police” became the single best gift Republicans ever got. Trump ran on it like a freight train. Crime exploded in every blue hellhole that tried it. Minneapolis cut budgets, watched murders spike, then quietly begged for the money back. Seattle’s CHAZ/CHOP experiment turned into a warlord meme. Even Biden had to tiptoe away, mumbling about “reform” while his base howled. The slogan didn’t just lose elections—it lost cities.

Now here we are in 2026. Trump’s back, deportations are cranking, ICE just got a fat budget increase, and the left is dusting off the old “Abolish ICE” mixtape like we all have amnesia. Some congressional wannabe in New York is running on it again, paired with the usual Medicare-for-All-and-stop-genocide playlist. As if the last six years never happened.

Newsflash: we remember. We saw the switch. We lived through the crime wave. We watched the rebrand flop because the ideology never changed—it just got a new haircut. Call it “Department of Community Safety,” call it “transformative justice,” it’s still the same plan: starve the people who keep the streets from turning into Mad Max, then act shocked when they do.

The real victims? Not the champagne socialists tweeting from Brooklyn rooftops. It’s the bodega owners getting robbed nightly, the working moms dodging carjackers, the legal immigrants who played by the rules while the border became a turnstile. It’s the cops who got defunded, demonized, and then blamed when nobody wants the job anymore.

The left thought they could fool us with word games. They were wrong. Americans aren’t as stupid as the think tanks assume. We clocked the pivot. We rejected it. And in 2024 we voted it out of power.

So next time you hear “defund” or “abolish,” don’t buy the rebrand. It’s the same grift, different season.

What do you think—did they really believe we wouldn’t notice? Drop your hottest take below.