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Theres no doubt that left-wing culture warriors have done great harm to the Democratic cause. Some of it is mere foolishness. Ive never forgotten being chided at a college talk several years ago for using the word murderess to describe a character in my book Widows Web who shot her husband in his sleep and later orchestrated a plot to kill her defense lawyers wife.

Murderess, one professor said, was unacceptably gendered language. To quibble about it would have been pointlessly distracting. Even so, Ive wondered about it ever since. After all, is murderer an honorific?

But its when cant touches upon real-world concerns that the trouble starts. Consider the phrase Defund the Police. Has there ever been a dumber, more politically maladroit slogan in American political history? Worse even than Hillary Clintons basket of deplorables.

Far worse, actually. Clintons remark merely convinced people that she was a snob. Rhetoric about doing away with cops made voters think that liberal Democrats inhabit a different planet. In an interview with VOX, veteran political operative James Carville put it this way: Maybe tweeting that we should abolish the police isnt the smartest thing to do because almost no one wants to do that.

Words matter, Carville insists. You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like Latinx. ... Or they use a phrase like communities of color. I dont know anyone who speaks like that. I dont know anyone who lives in a community of color. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that youre talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language.

In the real world, for example, people wake up to headlines like these, which arrived in my inbox as I composed the preceding paragraph: UAMS officer kills gun-wielding man; Police ID man fatally shot at apartment complex; and 15-year-old arrested in killing of Jacksonville man.

One medium-sized southern city; one ordinary weekday in July.

Abolish the police? In which solar system, pray tell?

So no, what with homicide rates rising sharply nationwide, I was not surprised to see Eric Adams, a Black former NYPD captain who campaigned on making New Yorkers feel safe and restoring confidence in the citys police, winning a Democratic primary that makes him the citys de facto mayor-elect.

The debate around policing has been reduced to a false choice, Adams declared. You are either with police, or you are against them. That is simply wrong because we are all for safety. We need the NYPD we just need them to be better.

Whether or not Adams can deliver, thats exactly how Democrats should be talking. Also, contrary to a lot of loose rhetoric, its all about the guns. Property crimes burglary and theft are actually decreasing in many places. Gun battles between rival gangs and drive-by shootings of innocent bystanders are way up.

Although youve not heard about it in the national news, something else that happened in my backyard has convinced me that ordinary people are hungry for change. In the farming community of Lonoke, Arkansas, roughly 35 miles northeast of Little Rock, a sheriffs deputy shot a 17-year-old white kid named Hunter Brittain to death during a 3 a.m. traffic stop. The boy was unarmed and had no criminal history. Hed been working late to fix his uncles truck transmission.

Details are scant, because the state police have kept their investigation close, although a special prosecutor has been appointed. And the deputy never turned on his body camera, for which hes been fired. Nightly protests began outside the sheriffs department, growing steadily more intense. His family likened young Brittain to Minneapolis murder victim George Floyd. Even Little Rock media, however, showed limited interest.

Until the Rev. Al Sharpton showed up in town to preach Hunter Brittains funeral, along with Ben Crump, George Floyds attorney virtually the only Black faces among hundreds of mourners.

Sharpton referenced a can of antifreeze the victim held as he died. Weve been frozen in our race; weve been frozen in our own class, he said to thunderous applause. I believe today Hunter is calling to us. Its time for some antifreeze.

Ive got my reservations about Sharpton, but the symbolism of his appearing was impossible to ignore: Americans are ready to talk.

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Dems need to do better job of speaking to voters - Chicago Sun-Times