Progressive ‘Wire’ Creator David Simon Battles Left-Leaning Followers Over Defund The Police

David Simon gave audiences a powerful look at Charm City for five seasons on HBO.

The veteran scribe created “The Wire,” the critically hailed drama set in Baltimore.

Simon, a former police reporter for The Baltimore Sun, brought an unseen grit to the saga. He didn’t flinch at showing the city’s woes or the near-intractable issues it faced. Each season showcased a different element of its infrastructure, from education to local media companies.

Simon, who previously helped bring “Homicide: Life on the Street” to small screens, routinely weighs in on the latest headlines via social media. And he does so from a uniformly progressive point of view.

Like nearly every Hollywood denizen does.

Simon doesn’t see eye-to-eye with some of his fellow liberals, though, when it comes to the Defund the Police narrative. 

David Simon Does Not Embrace 'Defund The Police'

Many stars, including Natalie Portman, John Legend, Lizzo and Jane Fonda, rallied around that talking point during the riots and protests tied to George Floyd’s death in 2020.

They demanded the reduction or elimination of police departments from cities nationwide, but they collectively grew quiet as their pleas were actually followed in select urban areas. Crime subsequently spiked, forcing mayors to furiously backpedal and throw more money at law enforcement.

Some Defund supporters still cling to the mantra, though, and it's almost exclusively among progressives.

Not David Simon.

Why? He’s spent enough time on Baltimore’s streets to know the locals don’t want less police officers in their neighborhoods. They grasp what could happen next, and it’s decidedly worse than the status quo.

He directly addressed the Defund the Police movement on Twitter this week, suggesting the argument hails from the elites, not the men and women of Baltimore and other cities.


The point, f***nuts, is that none of the people trying to live or raise families in West or East Baltimore, Pimlico or Cherry Hill talk this s*** about abolishing prisons or defunding police. You hear it from ideologues, academics and people who live somewhere the f*** else.
When someone shoots someone dead in the 1200 block of North Durham Street, who do you want to find the guy and put together the case against him. Someone with subpeona power? Someone with arrest authority? Do you have a name for this newfangled entity?

Simon Battles Followers Over Defund Stance

The progressive scribe, who likely built a large following of hard-Left followers amidst his 336K flock, spent days fighting his own fans.

And he wasn’t happy about it.


Half the gibbering mooks on my thread for the last three days. Nary a one acknowledging that we will still need functional policing and a prison capacity, or worse, not giving a f*** about the costs of eliminating such.

He blasted the movement’s rallying cry, too, suggesting it’s an epic fail on all fronts.


Then abolition, which has an explicit and definitive meaning in English, is a distastrous word choice and a Homeric failure of political sloganeering. Got it.

Simon also whipped out his progressive bona fides to win over his critics, but it likely didn’t work.


If you can't entice someone who has been arguing against mass incarceration, police militarization and drug warring for a quarter century, and you think this is some sort of victory to have done so, you are not only ineffectual, you're a f***ing moron.
In calmer lettering, man understands the word "abolish" in all its actual facets and understands that while mass incarceration must be attacked and defeated, prisons are an inevitability and a necessity and their abolition is not a legitimate goal.

Simon is getting a hard lesson in just how far Left today’s progressives have drifted.

NOTE: Simon blocked this reporter on Twitter.

Written by
Christian Toto is an award-winning film critic, journalist and founder of HollywoodInToto.com, the Right Take on Entertainment. He’s the author of “Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul” and a lifelong Yankees fan. Toto lives in Denver, Colorado with his wife, two sons and too many chickens. Follow Christian on Twitter at https://twitter.com/HollywoodInToto