Thirty years ago, the incendiary columnist Sam Francis coined the term “anarcho-tyranny” to describe a state of affairs in which the government cannot or will not enforce laws against serious criminals and instead exerts excessive and often arbitrary force on ordinary citizens.
Francis’s coinage, conceived against the backdrop of the crack epidemic and attendant crime wave of the late ’80s and early ’90s, was provoked by a series of feckless gun laws ostensibly designed to curb armed crime. But in practice, they were used to harass ordinary gun owners. The original column appeared in December 1992, a few months after an off-the-grid Vietnam vet was entrapped by an undercover ATF agent for the illegal sale of a shotgun, leading to a raid on his cabin in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the murder of his dog, son, and wife by federal agents.
Anarcho-tyranny is not an intentional conspiracy to subvert the rule of law. There are no smoke-filled rooms where the anarcho-tyranny white paper is passed around among policymakers. It is simply the natural devolution of a government undergoing a crisis of authority: As power slackens in one direction, it must tighten in another.
After a two-decade respite, the days of anarcho-tyranny have returned, perhaps more explicitly than ever. Since at least 2016, leftist DAs around the country have made it their explicit aim to decriminalize every offense short of murder (and sometimes that, too) and empty the prisons of even the most dangerous felons. Violent crime is once again a
