Oddly, the Thin Blue Line is among the many institutions that Roberts apparently has no use for. The FBI is, unsurprisingly, repeatedly trashed, but there is no positive mention of even local law enforcement here and no indication that it is necessary for making American great again. Like all of us, Roberts is rightly horrified at the police response to the Uvalde school shooting. He is absolutely correct in calling the department to account for the criminal dereliction of its duties. He’s also correct that, as most progressives have long understood, the attitudes of the Uvalde police “prioritizing compliance over competence, legalese over liberty,” are widespread in police departments across the country. Roberts’s open disdain for law enforcement, however, remains one of the most startling departures here from standard Republican orthodoxy. Perhaps Trump’s repeated promise to pardon even the January 6 rioters who attacked cops has rubbed off on Roberts, for Dawn’s Early Light puts vigilantism well above law enforcement. But whatever the reason, somehow Roberts has come around to agreeing with antifa that the cops aren’t here to save us.
His solution, however, is not reform; while he never uses the word “defund,” in Dawn’s Early Light Roberts seems to have given up on cops altogether. Instead, he believes, we should arm pretty much everyone and turn every school into the O.K. Corral. “We’re going to start by empowering the good folks in Koreatown and other small-business owners across the country to defend themselves rather than board up their windows the next time BLM decides to burn down their city,” he writes, before going much further. “Moreover, we’re going to stop merely defending our individual right to own a gun, and we’re going to start reforming police stations and founding rifle clubs that will help all of us fulfill our collective duty to keep our communities free and safe rather than having to wait helplessly outside a school where children are in grave danger.” No longer will public safety be left in the hands of law enforcement; Roberts would see it turned over to armed bands of militias who are answerable to no one.
Roberts’s vision of America is a violent, frontier mentality. “The frontier is dangerous,” he tells us. “It is majestic yet simple. It is imposing yet liberating. It is, in short, the most American thing there is.” Having given up on most American institutions, believing them incapable of reform, he advocates the breakdown of our contemporary American society in the hopes that the nuclear family, the church, and Smith & Wesson will rise up in its place. “Americans are inherently dangerous,” he crows, “and violent to tyrants relative to our sister civilizations.… A European, even an Australian, may be civilized, but an American is a dangerous creature.” He yearns for a landscape out of some John Wayne Western, rose-tinted and blood-washed, an America that is nasty, brutish, and short-tempered.
