Leon Wolf is a Contributing Editor for RedState.com and after reading the entire 107 Page DOJ Report on the patterns of Racism within the Ferguson PD, actually did something unique for a Conservative activist.
He paid attention.
He then wrote a post titled "Many Conservatives are Blowing it on the Ferguson DOJ Report" which was read and noticed by Chris Hayes at MSNBC who then had him come into the studio to talk about it.
Via TalkingPointsMemo
In that post, Wolf decried the "ideological tribalism" that led conservatives to defend the Ferguson Police Department. He wrote that he had read the 102-page report on the department and came away convinced that "no conservative on earth should feel comfortable with the way the Ferguson PD has been operating.
"Conservatives, as much as liberals or even more so in many cases, are attuned to civil rights issues," Wolf told Hayes. "I think where the disconnect comes in a lot of times is that conservatives are less likely to believe that they occurs or that they're as widespread as they might be."
"And so what I think is important for people to focus on is that what this report shows in Ferguson, and I don't think that Ferguson is especially unique in this regard, is that these Civil Rights violations are relatively common place. They come from essentially a top down pressure in many municipalities, it comes from City Hall, it comes from City Managers, that basically puts more pressure on Police to write more tickets to bolster the cities revenues."
To which Chris responded, "This is why I expected more outrage at the Ferguson Report, it's the worst example of Big, Bad Government!
You are essentially turning armed agents of the state into revenue collectors. This whole thing is about extracting money from people for the public till."
This is the kind of thing that Ron Sen. Rand Paul lamented about in the Eric Garner cases because it was an issue of use local police to enforce tax laws. The point is when we push police not into actually preventing crime, but instead turn them into Revenuers we push them into direct conflict with a populace - who in this case is already fairly cash strapped. Eventually those repeated confrontations erode the trust between the police and the public and it's devolves into nearly open street warfare.
Yes, Conservatives are Blowing It on this - but that's not all that new or surprising. The fact that even one Conservative - besides Paul whose been clumsily attempting to pander to the Black community for years now - finally gets it, it's frankly astounding.
Kudos to Mr. Wolf for actually paying attention, for once.