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Saturday, April 30, 2022
New video by Unicorn Riot on YouTube - go check it out ;-)
Watch on YouTube here: 160,000 Pray at Al-Aqsa Mosque Despite Strict Measures by Israeli Occupation
Via Christian Gasper
Oh God It’s Going To Get SO Much Worse
Listen to a reading of this article:
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Rightists have spent the last couple of days freaking out and invoking Orwell’s 1984 in response to something their political enemies are doing in America, and for once it’s for a pretty good reason. The Department of Homeland Security has secretly set up a “Disinformation Governance Board“, only informing the public about its plans for the institution after it had already been established.
The disinformation board, which critics have understandably been calling a “Ministry of Truth“, purportedly exists to fight disinformation coming out of Russia as well as misleading messages about the US-Mexico border. We may be certain that the emphasis in the board’s establishment has been on the Russia angle, however.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, in her patented “You’re such a crazy idiot for questioning me about the White House” manner, dismissed alarmed questions about what specific functions this strange new DHS entity was going to be performing and what its authority will look like.
PSAKI: "It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities. I'm not sure who opposes that effort." pic.twitter.com/Z4xOv46RLT
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 28, 2022
“It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities,” Psaki said. “I’m not sure who opposes that effort.”
The answer to the question of “who opposes that effort” is of course “anyone with functioning gray matter between their ears.” No government entity has any business appointing itself the authority to sort information from disinformation on behalf of the public, because government entities are not impartial and omniscient deities who can be entrusted to serve the public as objective arbiters of absolute reality. They would with absolute certainty wind up drawing distinctions between information, misinformation and disinformation in whatever way serves their interests, regardless of what’s true, exactly as any authoritarian regime would do.
This important point has gotten a bit lost in the shuffle due to the utterly hypnotic ridiculousness of the person who has been appointed to run the Disinformation Governance Board. Nina Jankowicz, a carefully groomed swamp creature who has worked in Kyiv as a communications advisor to the Ukrainian government as part of a Fulbright fellowship, is being widely criticized by pundits and social media users for her virulent Russiagating and whatever the hell this is:
You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation
♀️ https://t.co/eGV9lpctYn pic.twitter.com/WVQFA2bPmq
— Nina Jankowicz
(@wiczipedia) February 17, 2021
Because of this person’s embarrassing cartoonishness, a lot more commentary lately has been going into discussing the fact that the Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth is run by a kooky liberal than the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has a fucking Ministry of Truth.
Which is really to miss the forest for the trees, in my opinion. Would it really be any better if the “Disinformation Governance Board” was run by a chill dude you wouldn’t mind having a beer with? Especially when we know the ideological leanings of this department are going to bounce back and forth between elections and will always act in service of US empire narrative control regardless of who is in office? I don’t think so.
The real issue at hand is the fact that this new institution will almost certainly play a role in bridging the ever-narrowing gap between government censorship and Silicon Valley censorship. The creation of the DHS disinformation board is a far more shocking and frightening development than last year’s scandalous revelation that the White House was advising social media platforms about accounts it determined were circulating censorship-worthy Covid misinformation, which was itself a drastic leap in the direction toward direct government censorship from what had previously been considered normal.
We should probably talk more about how as soon as people accepted that it was fine for government, media and Silicon Valley institutions to work together to censor misinformation and rally public support around an Official Narrative about a virus, the ruling power establishment immediately took that as license to do that with a war and a foreign government as well.
Like, immediately immediately. We went from a massive narrative control campaign about a virus, which people accepted because they wanted to contain a deadly pandemic, straight into a massive narrative control campaign about Russia and Ukraine. Without skipping a beat. Like openly manipulating everyone’s understanding of world events is just what we do now. Now we’re seeing increasingly brazen censorship of political dissent about a fucking war that could easily end up getting us all killed in a nuclear holocaust, and a portion of the Biden administration’s whopping $33 billion Ukraine package is going toward funding “independent media” (read: war propaganda).
White House fact-sheet says part of the mammoth $33 billion spending package it's requesting for Ukraine will be to "support independent media." Because nothing screams "independent" like being directly funded by the US Government as part of its "information warfare" initiative pic.twitter.com/O3JshV1Mg9
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 28, 2022
We should probably talk more about this. We should probably talk more about how insane it is that all mainstream western institutions immediately accepted it as a given that World War II levels of censorship and propaganda must be implemented over a faraway war that our governments are not even officially a part of.
It started as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine, without any public discussion whatsoever. Like the groundwork had already been laid and everyone had already agreed that that’s what would happen. The public had no say in whether we want to be propagandized and censored to help the US win some kind of weird infowar to ensure its continued unipolar domination of the planet. It just happened.
No reason was given to the public as to why this must occur, and there was no public debate as to whether it should. This was by design, because propaganda only works when you don’t know it’s happening to you.
The choice was made for us that information is too important to be left in the hands of the people. It became set in stone that we are to be a propaganda-based society rather than a truth-based society. No discussion was offered, and no debate was allowed.
In the middle of an election campaign, Defence Minister Peter Dutton tells Australians to "prepare for war". He compared China with Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Australia has no enemies, none, zero. But it speaks for its master in Washington. Read on:https://t.co/dSRhu5b23i
— John Pilger (@johnpilger) April 25, 2022
And as bad as it is, it’s on track to get much, much worse. They’re already setting up “disinformation” regulation in the government which presides over Silicon Valley, the proxy war between the US and Ukraine is escalating by the day, and aggressions are ramping up against China over both the Solomon Islands and Taiwan. If you think imperial narrative management is intense now, wait until the US empire’s struggle to secure global hegemony really gets going.
Do you consent to this? Do you? It’s something you kind of have to take a position on, because its implications have a direct effect on our lives as individuals and on our trajectory as a society. How much are we willing to sacrifice to help the US win an infowar against Russia?
The question of whether we should abandon all hope of ever becoming a truth-based society and committing instead to winning propaganda wars for a globe-spanning empire is perhaps the most consequential decision we’ve ever had to make as a species. Which is why we weren’t given a choice. It’s just been foisted upon us.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. By taking our control of information out of our hands without asking our permission and determining for us that we are to be a propaganda-based civilization for the foreseeable future, they have stolen something sacred from us. Something they had no right to take.
Nothing about the state of the world tells us that the people who run things are doing a good job. Nothing about our current situation suggests they should be given more control, rather than having control taken away from them and given to the people. We are going in exactly the wrong direction.
____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
source https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/04/30/oh-god-its-going-to-get-so-much-worse/
This Is America #165: Report from Grand Rapids; Direct Action Reports; Eviction Wave in NYC
Welcome, to This Is America, April 30th, 2022.
On this episode, first we present an interview with someone on the ground in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who speaks about the recent round of street protests that kicked off following the brutal police execution of Patrick Lyoya.
We then are joined with Marcela from Feel the News as we discuss Eric Adams, the eviction crisis in New York, and attacks on the houseless.
All this and more, but first, let’s get to the news!
Living and Fighting
More from rally @GRPress pic.twitter.com/FbO6jO3vMv
— John Tunison (@johntunison) April 16, 2022
Over the past week, thousands continued to take to the streets in Grand Rapids, Michigan following the police murder of Patrick Lyoya, a “refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—who was killed by a Grand Rapids, Michigan police officer on April 4th. Lyoya was fatally shot in the head while laying face down on the ground” following a police traffic stop. Following Lyoya’s murder, protesters held the streets for hours each night essentially laying siege to the embattled police station.
— James Croxton (He/Him) (@jwcroxton) April 17, 2022
There was also a rowdy night-time solidarity demonstration in Portland, Oregon. As Double Sided Media wrote:
On the evening of April 16, nearly 50 people in black bloc gathered under the pavilion at Portland’s Peninsula Park for a vigil and march in honor of Patrick Lyoya…A local Starbucks Coffee Shop was the scene of both window smashing and firework-launching. The nearby bus stop—one of several throughout the night—was also smashed. Banks, too, had their windows smashed and received spray-paint.
The crowd arrived at its apparent destination—the Portland Police Bureau’s North Precinct—after about 45-minutes and confronted a rooftop police officer with a firework launch. Three PPB cruisers full of officers in riot gear appeared shortly after a dumpster inside the precinct’s parking garage was lit on fire…The crowd dispersed in various directions as soon as the police arrived. According to a PPB press release, no arrests were made…
As Canadian Tire Fire has been reporting, actions in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en and against Coastal Gaslink remain ongoing. In so-called Olympia, according to a communique posted to Puget Sound Anarchists:
On April 20th some anarchists…armed with a bottle of brake fluid and a can of expanding spray foam to carry out an act of solidarity with the ongoing resistance of Wet’su’weten land defenders and their supporters. The fight against CGL and its funders has been long and inspiring, and one that we feel needs to be more supported, especially through direct anarchist tactics. The colonial project is ever expanding, and its allies and funders are in every neighborhood and on every street. These are our enemies, and the makers of artificial deserts. They must be attacked– by any means and at any given opportunity, no matter how big or small the enemy or the action may seem. We do not expect this small action to stop the Leviathan and bring about healing to this near destroyed planet, but we hope to channel the spirits of this land, the lifeblood of all water, and the goblins of anarchy. We want to inspire destruction to all manifestations of colonial powers and institutions. We need it. The struggle on Wet’suwet’en territory is one that has explicitly called for and employed anarchist tactics, and we encourage you all to heed that call and support their actions through your own.
Meanwhile in a communique posted to Montreal Counter-Info, another group wrote:
Over the past 2 months, the RCMP has ramped up their continued harassment and intimidation of the people living at and defending the Yintah from CGL, at km 44 camp, on Gidimt’en territory. A few days ago, cops decided to arrest someone, using the pathetic excuse of “mis-identification”.
We believe that active solidarity is always important, even more so when our comrades are facing repression. This solidarity can be expressed through easy attacks, which break the isolation and fear that the state tries to trap us within. Those involved in funding the pipeline have names and addresses. They might not always be esay to find, but usually, they are the ones trying to protect their peace and tranquility tucked safely away in big houses, far from the social war they are a part of.
With this in mind, and rage in our hearts, this past wednesday we decided to spend the evening in the streets of Westmount. Using a fire extinguisher filled with paint, we had a good time vandalizing the facade of the house where the…RBC Quebec president lives.
by It's Going Down via It's Going Down
Friday, April 29, 2022
IWW Union Fight on At San Francisco Start-Up
Report on Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union drive in San Francisco, California at a start-up.
The fight for unionization continues at Nitricity, a San Francisco-based start-up company that produces fertilizer. A union election held on April 6 split 5-5 between supporters and opponents, with a single, currently uncounted vote remaining.
A variety of unsafe working conditions and lack of health insurance initially led the workers of Nitricity to begin organizing their union with the Industrial Workers of the World. Early attempts to negotiate with management prior to the unionization effort were met with limited success. Workers’ input on suitable healthcare plans, for example, was ultimately ignored.
Soon after launching their union drive with the IWW, workers also discovered unfair pay disparities. Their efforts continue to be supported by the San Francisco Bay Area IWW, which helped prepare them for anti-union attacks and to organize their own pro-union actions, such as marching on management.
Nitricity workers have endured an array of anti-union tactics. Talk of how workers and management are a team, warnings that the union is a “third party” that won’t actually represent workers and threats that the business may be unsuccessful if a union is formed were all deployed to dissuade workers from organizing. Management even hired anti-union consultants to help quash the workers’ efforts.
“They claimed that if we unionize — and if we unionize specifically with the IWW, with its very anti-capitalist stance — then venture capitalists will be more hesitant or outright deny providing funding,” says Jackson Wong, a research and development technician and union member at Nitricity.
Workers, however, don’t believe these threats to be credible, due to the continued interest from investors that they have observed firsthand.
Nitricity workers attribute the split union vote to management misclassifying one of their coworkers as a supervisor. The worker was allowed to vote, but it does not count toward certification of the union at this time.
“This person does not have hiring-firing power,” says Wong. “They don’t have the power to control salary, take disciplinary measures — anything that’s listed in that part of the National Labor Relations Act.”
The decision on whether the worker in question is indeed a worker or a supervisor will ultimately come down to the National Labor Relations Board. If the federal agency recognizes the worker as a worker, rather than a supervisor, their vote will be unsealed and become the deciding factor in union certification.
“The National Labor Relations Board is basically investigating this classification or misclassification,” says Wong. “At that time, we will open the envelope of this coworker and see how they voted .… but it’s definitely not a coincidence that this coworker is definitely pro-union.”
While the pro-union workers at Nitricity have been dedicated and steadfast in their resolve and efforts, they admit that they could have done a better job of inoculating others against management’s anti-union attacks.
“I think if we had been better prepared or if we’d responded better — both to our employers and to our fellow coworkers who were swayed by their arguments — that would have been helpful,” says Wong.
Wong also acknowledges the difficulties of labor organizing at start-ups, which are dependent on venture capital, but hopes that the efforts of Nitricity workers will prove successful and inspire colleagues elsewhere.
“You want to help inspire other tech workers, workers in the Bay Area, start-up workers to see that this is something that’s possible,” he says.
Contact the IWW to start building a union at your job.
by Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) via It's Going Down
From Embers: Student Organizing with Divest McGill
Anarchist podcast and radio show from so-called Canada From Embers, speaks with members of Divest McGill.
In this episode I chat with two members of Divest McGill, a student-led organization at McGill University in so-called Montreal. They are fighting to force McGill to divest from the fossil fuel industry and transform the university into something liberatory and accountable to the people whose lives it affects. This spring, they led a more than two-week-long open, social occupation of a university building.
All music in this episode is from the 2012 anti-folk opera “What The F*ck Am I Doing Here?” about anarchist participation in the 2012 Quebec student strike. Check it out on Soundcloud here.
Learn more about Divest McGill here.
photo: Divest McGill on Twitter
by From Embers via It's Going Down
Thursday, April 28, 2022
PayPal Blocks Multiple Alternative Media Figures Critical Of US Empire Narratives
Listen to a reading of this article:
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In what appears to be yet another escalation in Silicon Valley’s redoubled efforts to quash dissident voices since the beginning of the Ukraine war, PayPal has just blocked the accounts of multiple alternative media voices who’ve been speaking critically against official US empire narratives. These include journalist and speaker Caleb Maupin, and Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod of MintPress News.
Just the other day MintPress published an excellent article by MacLeod titled “An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm” documenting the many ways skepticism of the US government’s version of events in this war is being suppressed by Silicon Valley megacorporations, including financial censorship via the demonetization of YouTube videos that don’t regurgitate the imperial line on Ukraine.
Today, both MintPress and MacLeod have been banned from using the payment service that many online content creators have come to rely on to help crowdfund their work.
BREAKING: MintPress News & @AlanRMacLeod has been banned from PayPal for unspecified reasons.
Help us fight back against this onslaught of censorship: https://t.co/dzLbAlo48o https://t.co/7CkUbXPFQy
— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) April 28, 2022
MintPress News happens to have published critical journalism about PayPal itself in the past, like the articles it published in 2018 by Whitney Webb documenting the way shady PayPal-linked billionaires Peter Thiel and Pierre Omidyar have advanced the interests of the US empire and facilitated imperial narrative control, or this one from 2016 on how the company blocks Palestinians from opening accounts while showing no such bias against illegal Israeli settlers.
I asked MintPress News Executive Director Mnar Adley for comment on PayPal’s move. Here is her response in full:
“Paypal banning myself and MintPress is blatant censorship of dissenting journalists & outlets. For the past decade MintPress has been unapologetically working as a watchdog journalism outlet to expose the profiteers of the permanent war state from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Sudan to Apartheid Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen to regime change operations in Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela where US weapons have flooded these nations to plunge them into devastating civil wars.
“In the era of a declining US empire, censorship has become the last resort of an unpopular regime and its forever wars to make the truth disappear and critical thinking all but dead. With the war in Ukraine raging on, we’ve entered war time and Big Tech giants, including Paypal, are working hand in hand with the New Cold War architects themselves to sanction dissenting journalists. If you read the board of any of these tech giants from Google, Twitter, Facebook and Paypal, they read like a rogues’ gallery of war mongers and their agenda is clear: To control the free flow of information and target the bank accounts of anyone who dares question the official narrative of the Pentagon or State Department.
“It is outrageous to be told that tech giants, which are run by those who directly profit from the New Cold war including the crisis in Ukraine, could limit any journalist’s ability to fund their work. Can you imagine if this was the norm in Russia, China or Iran? Our media would be screaming about free speech and first amendment rights. Yet, when we do it’s ok because it’s under the guise of fighting ‘Russian propaganda’.
“We’re living in an intellectual No-Fly Zone where online censorship of dissenting journalism has become the new norm. The US sanctions regime that is trying to starve Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Cuba and Iran and over 25% of the world’s population is now targeting its own citizens with its maximum pressure campaign so we are forced to toe the official government line in order to survive as a journalist in alternative media today.
“No matter the war waged against us, we refuse to be backed into a corner and bullied by tech giants who have a deep relationship with weapons manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and who work hand in hand with NATO that profit off the blood of millions of people around the world. The only way forward is for people to unite on a broader front of non-partisanship and fund our own media because there are more of us than there are of them.”
I am banned from PayPal. pic.twitter.com/GB6IrT80wq
— Caleb T. Maupin (@calebmaupin) April 28, 2022
PayPal has also banned Caleb Maupin, an American speaker and journalist whose work has already seen his personal Twitter account branded “Russia state-affiliated media” by the US state-affiliated platform.
“Why should something as basic as cash transactions be subject to political censorship?” said Maupin when asked for comment. “The economic war on independent countries is turning into a war on free speech. Writers and journalists must be able to eat.”
Indeed, a very effective way to silence unauthorized media voices is to make it difficult for them to earn a living making their voices heard. Speaking from experience I know for a fact I couldn’t put out a fraction of the content I put out if I was forced to work a 9-5 job in some office rather than having the freedom to put all my time and mental energy into this work thanks to the generous support of my readers. Cutting me off from that funding would be the same as censoring me directly, because there’s no way I could continue the kind of work I do.
We are at a profoundly dangerous and frightening point in human history. The US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is escalating by the day and the drums of war are beating ever louder against China over the Solomon Islands and Taiwan. If you think censorship is bad now, wait until this global power grab really gets going.
____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
source https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/04/29/paypal-blocks-multiple-alternative-media-figures-critical-of-us-empire-narratives/
We Outside: The Washington Square Parties of 2021
A look at how resistance to park curfews in Washington Square Park in the summer of 2021 continued the spirit of the George Flroyd rebellion.
photo: @AshAgony
A year after the riots and mass marches of 2020, the spring and summer of 2021 belonged to kickback flash mobs, generator punk shows, raves, and other guerrilla gatherings. The focal point of the trend in New York was the bluetooth-PA dance parties in Washington Square Park. Lured by meetup maps posted to Instagram, restless youth logged off Zoom class and traveled to Manhattan to enjoy the weather, drink, get high, dance, and look for trouble.
An anarchist mutual-aid table distributed water, fruit, pizza, and a really really free minibar. Dirt bike gangs circled. M80s blasted. Something like an American version of the autonomous squares of Christiania in Copenhagen or Exarchia in Greece, the shared rowdiness of these happenings instilled a sense of solidarity and togetherness which at times felt like being in a riot. As energy peaked around midnight, improvised boxing matches or mysterious fist-fight melees broke out. Dangerous and ugly as these moments could be, most staying this late preferred them to the dull luxury of clubs and bars.
Listen up:
The editor of BHN spoke with @IGD_News on their #ThisIsAmerica podcast about Washington Square Park curfew protest and DC’s focus on mutual aid in the midst of fighting far-right violence and police brutality. https://t.co/Lul9SciWVA
— Black House News (@blackhousenew) June 24, 2021
Amid the crowd were partisans of the George Floyd uprising, including members of SM28, MACC, mutual aid groups, and other anarchists hoping to find embers of a new rebellion glittering in these anti-social free-for-alls. We had been disappointed earlier that Spring when the Daunte Wright rebellion in Brooklyn Center was crushed within a few days, and Derek Chauvin’s conviction seemed to have convinced some that justice prevailed. Perhaps the chaotic communalism of these parties was the reincarnated spirit of the riots, regathering heat in preparation to rage again. But the parties peaked in late June and disappeared in July with little trace, aside from a semi-permanent police-tolerated flea market ringing the park’s fountain, mostly selling pre-rolled joints and streetwear, some pieces emblazoned with images of NYPD vans burning from the previous summer.
I. From CHAZ to WSPAZ
There were two ways that the uprising led directly to the Washington Square Park parties. The first was that the dozens of abolitionist protest groups formed during the uprising often ended their snake-marches with dance parties at the park, particularly during Pride Month. Often people would show up to these marches looking fine and fabulous, chanting Fuck 12 and glorifying the most fiery scenes of the previous summer – but this was not attire for fighting the police. Sadly, 2020 somehow taught many the false lesson that peaceful protest could be in itself revolutionary, leading to de-escalatory bullhorn wielders becoming the last remaining people calling for actions.
A second pretext was a “labor” action taken by the embattled NYPD after the uprising. Hated by seemingly everyone, the NYPD traded their posture of the heroic tough-guy for the pouting bully, like a prolonged version of the slow-down that followed the assassination of two cops in Bed Stuy at the height of protests against the murder of Eric Garner in December, 2014.
After a full year of the New York Post sensationalizing petty crime and scapegoating the homeless as the ones “destroying the city” (as rents jumped above pre-pandemic levels!) wealthier New Yorkers started begging for the NYPD’s return in full-force. Manhattan’s previously-sympathetic wealthy liberals, many of them with proud memories of when Washington Square Park’s “Sunday Sings” were a haven of beatniks, radicals, and proto-rappers, faced with party-brought public urination, graffiti, homelessness, violence, and hip hop, were finally sold on the idea that the police had been humiliated long enough, and picked up the phone.
Heavy-handed midnight evictions of the park began in June. Complaints remaining steady, they began closing the park two hours early – a tactic rarely employed, even during Occupy. WSP quickly appeared to be the battleground for the future of public space in New York as it fully reopened from pandemic lockdown. On one side was the Giuliani-era stance of public order and safety, in which unpermitted public gatherings were treated like broken-window omens of social decay. The other was the memory of lower Manhattan in June 2020, run by proletarian kids no longer fearful of the city’s army of police.
Washington Square Park is quickly becoming a place of contested public space between the NYPD and NYers. Selective curfew enforcement with riot police, once used to repress protests there, has been increasingly used against partying park-goers in the past week or so.
— no pasarรกn (@notmynypd) May 23, 2021
As videos of police aggression spread across social media, a group of party organizers calling themselves the We Outside Crew called for reinforcements to strengthen and defend the parties. A decentralized activist left answered, with a mutual aid group taking a central role, journalists on-hand to document violent arrests, an anarchist film collective screening revolutionary films, followed by an open-mic speak-out on the politics of the park gathering. But radicals mostly came in little groups, without plan or much to offer, perhaps expecting to leap into action if necessary. Usually they discovered that the lawless festival had little ambition other than its own perpetuation, let alone street-fighting with police.
In turn, the police eventually tolerated just about anything until after midnight, at which point they would announce the closing of the park and move in. After some taunts back and forth, the party would peacefully retreat out of the park to the streets towards Union Square, Astor Place, or Tompkins Square Park. By the arrival of summer’s dog days, the radical edge of the parties died down, order seemed to reign between the partiers and police, and the atmosphere of the park became like any other passe downtown nightclub.
II. The Influencer Vanguard
The politics of these parties were best articulated by its most vocal defender, a We Outside Crew organizer calling himself Shaman. “That’s not your park, that’s our park!” he told a local community board convened to discuss complaints about the party. “And we’re not leaving! You’re not stopping us. If you don’t like it, go back to Long Island! Get out of our park! This is our park, not yours. Get the hell out! … Get out of the city! We do not want you here! Understand? We don’t want any of you here! You’re disturbing our peace! … We will never leave!”
To radical elements these words were a direct expression of the passive-aggressive class war between proletarian neighborhood parties and the park’s rich neighbors. It could have been a continuation of the “Fire Fire Gentrifier” chant targeting bourgeois eateries in gentrifying neighborhoods, or at least a defiant middle finger towards non-profits like the Washington Square Park Conservancy who use their members’ vast wealth to dictate how the public park, and life in the city in general, should be managed.
But Shaman was far less hostile to the police actually doing the board’s dirty work. Although he decried their advances against the parties, he only urged resistance in the form of returning night after night in larger numbers. A year prior, in the same park, he kneeled with NYPD Chief Terence Monohan in a confusing gesture of solidarity between the police and protesters. The same week, Shaman defended a Target from who he claimed to be “undercover detectives hired by the NYPD” posing as looters. As the most direct connection between the uprising and the parties, Shaman represented a politics of chastising individual bad actors, the “Karens and Kevins” of the West Village, rioters, and maybe some bad-apple cops.
Now it’s a party. From talking to a few folks on the ground, we think NYPD will stand down once again tonight. We are less than 30 minutes away from curfew. pic.twitter.com/i5CCADu0nH
— Black House News (@blackhousenew) June 12, 2021
These politics of individual resentment and faux-collectivity neatly translated to Shaman’s turn into a full-time right-wing activist against pandemic measures once the parties died down, his IG now regularly featuring screeds at President Biden and crypto-scams. Some activists at the time believed this meant Shaman had changed. But Shaman explained they were mistaken. He never had a problem with the police. His politics were always about freedom to live as he pleased, without restrictions or accountability. He thought he had made that all perfectly clear.
It was common during the uprising to label people like Shaman as undercover agents. Such things are possible, more likely he’s simply an individual who had the confidence to step to the front. Too often this type, regardless of their politics, has lead the crowd to a retreat towards cultural aesthetics, perhaps because building an autonomous movement towards real confrontation risks precisely that which motivates them above all else – personal clout.
Gone were the experimental mobilizations and encampments, the graffiti covering every surface, the blockade of infrastructure and coordination between peaceful protesters and mischievous night marches. Shaman’s innovation was to reel the nihilistic youthful rampage back within the controlled parameters of aesthetics. In this sense we see from the parties that it was not violence, illegality, and joy alone that made the uprising so powerful. For the most part, the George Floyd Rebels did not come from political milieus, nor were they motivated primarily by any set of political demands. They manifested their own politics spontaneously through a collective desire to punish carceral society. Even as they burnt cop cars and looted without control, they confined themselves to that short-term goal, ambivalent to leftist mic-checks. It’s no wonder, then, that the screening of Crimethinc’s documentary about the Wendy’s Autonomous Zone in Atlanta, We Are Now, primarily attracted committed radicals as most passed in search of the next party spot. The youth were desperate for immediate intensity, however fleeting, not retreading the past, and certainly not spending a night in jail.
III. We saw parties from the perspective of the riots. We had it backwards.
Before the ruptures of BLM in 2015 and the George Floyd Uprising in 2020, the NYPD, hand-in-hand with real estate, had an iron grip on public life in New York. Both events showed how a little push-back can make both monolithic forces suddenly cower in fear and embarrassment. But without a return of these hostilities, they have regathered their strength and returned with a vengeance. Eric Adams’ first days in office displayed strident sweeps of homeless camps while slashing of budgets for parks, food pantries, and housing. In a rebuke to de Blasio’s conciliations, Adams makes no apologies for police gunplay and cover-ups as the situation in jails continues to deteriorate while the Democrats rollback bail-reform. The return of broken windows and stop-and-frisk policing are next on the agenda. If few are willing to fight against this carceral revanchism, who will fight the repression of the newfound vitality of WSP? With the future of New York in the balance, progressive politicians, eviction blockades, and snake-marches will not put the ruling class on the back foot like the uprising of 2020 did. Certainly neither will partying.
Washington Square Park Mutual Aid SOURCE: Instagram
Despite this somewhat bleak outlook, the parties also offered flickers of the community and care that spontaneously emerged within the riots. As during the uprising, mutual aid groups provided free food, booze, water, clothes, and books. They may not have been the stars of the show, but they added a political content of care and solidarity that countered the party’s more cannibalistic impulses. On multiple occasions, people acting abusive towards other partiers were jumped and kicked out of the park. Lookout crews spread the word when police were on the move so those who needed to evade them could make a safe exit. It was not for lack of effort that the gap between the revolutionaries and revelers proved too wide. As the uprising moved from an explosion of rage into a cultural space of free expression, the door closed on the autonomous militant struggles capable of transforming life in New York. Influencers like Shaman thrived in this atmosphere, where IG clout was oxygen. Many of them are simply chasing after fame – brand deals, modeling and acting gigs, and political careers. Revolutionaries like Martin and Malcolm and Sylvia and Marsha were evoked as cartoon characters on shirts and tote bags, not tireless strategists determined to change the world.
Another hard truth with which we must reckon is that many of the George Floyd rebels don’t necessarily want revolution or even to abolish the police. They want the police to stop killing and brutalizing folks in their community. This is totally valid, but making that happen will take more than words and spectacle. We need a new narrative that cements violent forms of protest, such as rioting, not just as sexy and fun, or always the primary objective, but actions taken strategically in certain moments in order to build larger ruptures capable of sustaining themselves until the racist capitalist order is toppled entirely.
by Spirit of May 28 via It's Going Down
In the Face of Community Mobilization, Construction Contractor Backs out of ‘Cop City’ Project in Atlanta
In the face of continuing direct action and community opposition, a major Atlanta construction contractor, Reeves Young, has backed out of the “Cop City” project, which threatens to destroy the Atlanta forest. Originally posted to Stop Reeves Young.
On April 25th, activists with Stop Reeves Young (SRY) confirmed the news that Reeves Young, a major Atlanta construction contractor, is no longer working with the Atlanta Police Foundation on the Cop City development. This is a great victory for popular resistance to police militarization and environmental devastation. In only a few months, independent efforts and direct action have motivated a large company to leave the project. If we want to defend against racist backlash to the 2020 George Floyd protests, guard against militarization of our city, and assure the inhabitability of the region in the coming years, we have to remain focused and see this struggle to the end. Cop City must not be built.
According to reporting, the first phase of construction — surveying the land, soil sample boring, building paths, and cutting down trees — had a projected cost of $90 million, with the Atlanta City government paying $30 million, and corporate backers of the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) paying the rest. That cost is going up, as dedicated groups continue to obstruct the forward momentum of the project. According to a statement made by APF on April 28th, Reeves Young has “finished” their role in the project. This is a creative way to describe what has happened, but we understand that the police and their corporate allies do not want to admit the truth: that a focused group of activists have delivered a devastating blow to the Cop City construction.
defend the ATL forest! May 8-15 pic.twitter.com/pELLt0tMJk
— Defend the Atlanta Forest (@defendATLforest) March 12, 2022
The APF would have us believe that Reeves Young was contracted to do nothing more than hire a bulldozer and and walk alongside Long Engineering work crews as they planted a few surveying stakes and did some soil testing. However, our research indicates that Reeves Young typically does not do minor preliminary subcontracting: they take lead contracting roles, working on projects from start to finish. In fact, Reeves Young specializes in massive municipal projects, including so-called “public safety” centers in the Atlanta area, just like Cop City. While the Atlanta Police Foundation tries to save face, we are celebrating a major victory: pressuring a main contractor out of the project.
We are pleased that the movement has built so much momentum, and that the Cop City development continues to face setbacks because of the intelligent actions of regular people. However, the struggle continues. Brasfield & Gorrie, another large general contractor, remains with the project. Brasfield & Gorrie do not do any work themselves: they are entirely dependent on subcontractors to complete their projects. Now they must hire an entire set of subcontractors in order to build Cop City. We believe it is in the best interest for Brasfield & Gorrie to follow the lead of Reeves Young and drop the APF as a client, rather than remaining complicit in the destruction of the forest. It is up to all of us to make that clear to them.
Support the Defend Atlanta Forest week of action May 8-15. @defendATLforest #dtfatl #nocopcity pic.twitter.com/bABw2DSZbV
— submedia (@submedia) April 27, 2022
As we move forward, developing new strategies will be easier if we can look closely at the events leading to the withdrawal of Reeves Young from the contract.
October 2021: activists on-the-ground discover that Reeves-Young has been contracted to clear the forest and “prepare” the grounds for construction, i.e. to destroy the forest.
October 18, 2021: An employee contracted by Reeves Young is clearing grounds and preparing a work site in the Old Atlanta Prison farm. He is met by activists, who ask him to leave, which he does.
November 12, 2021: A few dozen protesters visit the Reeves Young headquarters in Sugar Hill, GA. The protestors disrupt a board meeting by demanding that the company abandon its contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation.
December 20, 2021: A group of activists enter the gated community in which Dean Reeves, chairman of Reeves Young, lives. This group affixed banners outside of the Reeves’ home, urging them to cancel their contract.
January 18, 2022: Reeves Young enters the forest with a representative from the APF and begin knocking down trees with a bulldozer. A small group of activists confront them, escorting them out of the forest.
January 25-28, 2022: Long Engineering, a subcontractor owned by Atlas Technical Consultants and sometimes accompanied by Reeves Young workers, is continuously confronted by protesters as Long Engineering attempt to do surveying. Their surveying stakes are repeatedly removed at night.
March 1, 2022: Five vehicles belonging to Long Engineering, the Reeves Young subcontractor, are disabled by anonymous activists because of their participation in the destruction of the forest.
March 19, 2022: Six machines belonging to Reeves Young are disabled in Flowery Branch, GA by anonymous activists who also leave a message asking them to drop their contract with the APF.
April 2, 2022: A Georgia open records request reveals that the Atlanta Police Foundation has begun working on the Cop City project with Brasfield & Gorrie, another major general contractor in the southeast region.
April 9, 2022: StopReevesYoung.com launches, including the names and home addresses of executives within Reeves Young and some of their affiliates. The site includes a call to action to oppose their attempts to build the Cop City.
April 18, 2022: The Atlanta Police Foundation quietly announces that phase one of their project has been completed and that Reeves Young is no longer working on the project.
April 25, 2022: Reeves Young employees confirm that they will not build Cop City.
This has been an incredible period of momentum and research, but nothing is over yet. Now that we have made a decisive victory, it is important to remain more focused than ever. In the coming weeks and months, we will need to continue pressuring all the contractors associated with the project, to create economic incentives for them to simply move their time and resources to other endeavors. This platform, SRY, will continue to serve as an educational hub for this ongoing campaign.
Here is the May Day call to action:
This May Day, we are calling for solidarity actions in defense of the Atlanta Forest and against Cop City. Find your friends, make a plan, and fight for the forest. Across the world the police want to take what’s ours. We will stop them and we will win. Another word for world is forest.
Brasfield and Gorrie, the general contractor behind the Cop City project, works with smaller companies such as Long Engineering, a subsidiary of Atlas Technical Consultants. Their smaller entities specialize in various aspects in construction for projects in over 40 states such as the Apple Campus 2 in Cupertino, California.
The contract between Atlas and Brasfield and Gorrie are one of the pillars of the Cop City project that is threatening the forest. Through autonomous efforts of small groups and individuals we can convince Atlas to do the right thing and divest from their involvement with Brasfield and Gorrie.
Go here for a list of Atlas offices across the US. There is also a call to come and defend the forest in the face of bulldozers in early May and May 8th – 15th is a week of action in defense of the forest. Already, marches on May 11th and 14th have been called.
#StopCopCity Remember disconnect from AT&T. Tell them to stop funding Cop City. Join us May 11 at 4pm if you in Atlanta. Meet at the North Ave Marta Station. March on the AT&T Headquarters, it's still No to Cop City pic.twitter.com/BM0xzAuEib
— Community Movement Builders (@CommunityMvt) April 25, 2022
Stop Cop City! March for the future of Atlanta
Saturday May 14 6pm pic.twitter.com/aovLVdo3am
— Defend the Atlanta Forest (@defendATLforest) April 28, 2022
by Anonymous Contributor via It's Going Down
On Justice and Abolition: A Conversation with Nevada on ‘The Abolition of Law’
An interview between Living and Fighting with the author of The Abolition of Law, which discusses the George Floyd uprising.
A comrade and a friend wrote a wonderful book recently on the George Floyd Uprising. We decided to interview them about what’s in the book and on their process and experience of writing it. The Friends Print Collective is a print and design collective out of Minneapolis and St. Paul. They published and printed Nevada’s “The Abolition of Law.” We encourage you to check it out. Copies of the book are available here.
L&F: I suppose I should start by showing my hand and saying how much I truly appreciated the revolutionary thinking that went on within these pages. It felt refreshing, challenging, and simultaneously encouraging towards what Moten and Harney might call a revolutionary ensemble. Now that I have frontloaded my opinion, I’d like to ask you a few questions about your book, The Abolition of Law.
This book came out a letter you wrote titled “Warning” which was published by the Liaisons collective at The New Inquiry. I guess I am curious as to how thinkers work with an idea or a concept. How it moves and shifts throughout the different iterations of their study and how events – both internally and externally – can impact this process. Would you take a little time to help explain and orient us to what your process was like working with these thoughts over the last year plus? And in addition, how this thinking was particularly impacted by living in Minneapolis during the uprising?
Nevada: First of all, thank you dearly for the kind words and I am glad to hear you got so much out of the book. Thank you as well for this opportunity to talk about it, I’m excited to get into it.
Yes, the first text I wrote for what would eventually become the analytical section of the book was “Warning.” But if you go back and read it—and this was even more true in the earlier drafts—it’s rather plainly responding to a practical issue that arose in the uprising. The issue was that the state had said the George Floyd uprising was ‘a bunch of white supremacists that were going to burn everyone’s house down,’ and overnight the uprising essentially ended. We can get more into the details later, and of course it’s all in the book. But I was pretty shocked by this sudden turn of events and was trying to figure out how it happened, but mostly I just wanted to tell people that it happened at all. At the time it felt like it was written months too late.
I continued to work on the text, to flesh it out conceptually, and draw connections to other thinking that had emerged from the uprising on a national level, like the work of Idris Robinson. It was at this point that I realized there was something deeper going on than a disinformation campaign or a simple counter-insurgency victory. The problem spoke to a struggle at the heart of the uprising between radically different visions of abolition. To put it simply, one vision offers us the same world, only a little less brutal, as the tasks of law enforcement have been distributed to a myriad of different departments with better reputations than the police. The other vision entails the abolition of not just a certain kind of law enforcement but of any law to be enforced—which would involve the complete transformation of life itself. And I continued to try and articulate the struggle between these visions, from a few different angles in a few different texts, which eventually became the book we’re talking about today.
So, it really couldn’t have happened without being a part of this uprising and experiencing it firsthand, from beginning to end, and attempting to pick up the pieces it left behind. I really like how Hannah Black describes this feeling: “Uprisings are the only time you ever learn anything new. Then you have months, or years, or decades of aftermath during which you have to keep drawing on the moment of rupture.”
Lastly, and this is crucial to say, is that I didn’t write this book alone. Of course, there are co-authors of certain parts noted in the book, anonymous or not, but it also was written from a place of collaborative study. Every word stems from conversations around dinner tables or bonfires, on walks or on porches. And some of them—like this one—took place over great distances. My name might be on the cover, but revolutionary thinking can never be reduced to any individual.
L&F: In the introduction, you write about how the aftermath of revolt can run a risk of potentially becoming “frozen in time, unable to see past our nostalgia for such events as the world moves forward without us.” I wonder how we become passive voyeurs to the image of the past and in what ways nostalgia plays a hand in this process? Particularly, when those images of the past were forged by a strong insurrectionary event. It’s almost as though past events lose their resonance with their revolutionary potential. Walter Benjamin’s concept Now-time seems to deal, at least in some form, with this problem of nostalgia.
But I am curious in what ways you think nostalgia hinders or deactivates potential for a sustained insurrectionary event? Or maybe said another way, how does nostalgia – in relation to the uprising – impact our capacities at recreating this historic rupture? How can thinking and being with each other move towards an eternal returning to the world and away from a frozen gawking at past insurrectionary moments?
Nevada: At one point I made a joke to a friend that I almost included in the book. In discussing how the 2020 uprising will likely inform our thinking for the rest of our lives, I said “now I know what it feels like to be a ‘68er.” But this is a bit sardonic, because at this point we think of ‘68ers as being unable to look forward, to move beyond that single moment. If that’s what we become, then we’ll be just as irrelevant to the future generations.
But this doesn’t mean that past moments can’t inform our thinking. It was a strong insurrectionary event, as you say. To be honest, it’s hardly worth trying to describe the magnitude of it in words, nothing I can say could come close to capturing it. Of course, it will stick with us and we will return to it time and again. The line I quoted above from Hannah Black above illustrates this perfectly.
Last night, government buildings were stormed, crowds pelted police departments with rocks, freeways were blocked + in #Minneapolis, a police precinct was burned following the County Attorney's refusal to charge cops who killed #GeorgeFloyd with a crime. https://t.co/fTJa4d0eMA
— It's Going Down (@IGD_News) May 29, 2020
What I want to do is recognize the inherent danger lurking here, when we become too focused on what happened in the past that we miss out on what’s happening today. If we are too busy attempting to recreate our past experiences—an endeavor which will always fail—we will lose our chance to experience the present. I think this could be said of every generation of social movements. There will always be those who want to recreate the World Trade Organization protests in 1999, or to recreate Occupy Wall Street. These events will never be repeated, and we all chuckle whenever Adbusters announces their next big move. Trying to hold on to past events this way leaves us ill-equipped to perceive the present. Think of all the French commentators on the radical left who denounced the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) in 2018, and were left in the dust by the country’s most ferocious movement in decades. It didn’t look like the movements of the past and so not only were they unable to recognize its potential, they spoke out against it—at least at first.
With the cost of gas and food going up on Biden’s watch, I can only imagine that unrest will be at our doorstep any day now. And those of us looking for something just like what happened in 2020 will be sorely disappointed. Whatever happens will be monstrous, and it will defy every single notion of politics we still cling to. Yet we will have to jump into the fray regardless.
I don’t think I have a good answer for how we can “move towards an eternal return to the world,” or in Benjamin’s words, bring about “a real state of emergency.” I have written elsewhere on what could be called the “molecular continuation” of the uprising, such as how it manifests in sideshows, which I think is a really important in thinking about these ruptures in duration. And yes, our thinking and being together is also a form of that molecular continuation, even if it doesn’t always bear such a flagrantly criminal character.
L&F: The first part of the book is composed of an interview with lundimatin and a firsthand account of the events of the uprising in Minneapolis. The second part focuses on the abolition of law. In the interview with lundimatin, there is a quote towards the end that struck me: “At the same time, it is decisive that we find ways to ensure that the movement is not transformed into a symmetrical armed conflict with the state, but I think many people know that. People have been fighting these fascist pigs for 500 years; there is a deep knowledge of resistance in America, and I think moments like this we really see just how smart and resourceful Americans really are.”
I really like this segment. By prioritizing difference, this fragment frames a communalized capacity towards revolt in a deeply affirmative and positive way. Those of us who were in the streets experienced a contingent ingenuity to think and act in a myriad of ways. It is crazy inspiring to see how dynamic and creative people were throughout the uprising as an autonomous response to their place and situation.
When the outcome isn’t exactly how we want it however, sometimes it seems like we fall into – and by ‘we’ I mean those who choose to move into the streets – a sort of pessimistic nihilism. This quote shatters that nihilism and reorients us to difference and to joy by way of becoming a loose ensemble within revolt. I guess this isn’t a question as it is a statement. But please feel free to expound if any of it resonates with you or your ideas for choosing that piece as the opening interview to the book.
Nevada: In his most well-known book, Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson writes extensively on what he calls the “Black Radical Tradition.” He defines it as “an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle,” from slave revolts that took place centuries ago up to present day. I think this emphasis on the affirmation of resistance—black resistance, specifically—is incredibly important, especially as it undermines the tendency to look back on uprisings or movements and judge them based on their “achievements.” I think that this happens because of the prevailing logic of politics, how everything is meant to fit into means and ends. But there is no telos, no demands to achieve or policies to enact. The George Floyd uprising was a means-without-end, to use Giorgio Agamben’s idea. This is what I mean when I wrote the line later in the book: “It is one thing to hold a sign that says, ‘redistribute the wealth;’ it is another to decide that all that shit on the store shelves is ours for the taking—and take it.
At the very end of section two in Black Marxism, Robinson wrote a short chapter on “The Nature of the Black Radical Tradition.” Here he reflects on the fact that the rebellions and uprisings that constitute this tradition have occurred with the notable absence of mass violence. Violence is of course an amorphous concept, but Robinson is attempting to make a point that there is a significant discrepancy between the tactics and forms of brutality enacted by the ruling class and those employed by the oppressed in their revolt. This isn’t an attempt to paint the history of black uprising as peaceful by any means—but simply that when given the opportunity, the enemy was not outright slaughtered.
There’s been a lot of chatter about armed struggle lately, which is often connected to—but not the same as—talk of civil war. However, armed struggle is a particular kind of resistance, defined not simply by the use of arms but by its fundamental symmetry. This notion of symmetry is usually used to note the dynamics that manifest as what is essentially a frontal clash between armies, but I want to dig a little further. There is also another level of symmetry—you have the subject of the guerrilla versus the state, also imagined as a subject. So even when this guerrilla war is “asymmetrical” on a tactical level, you are still stuck in this ontological symmetry that envisions victory as the military defeat of the state as a singular entity.
This is flawed in two ways: Firstly, it reintroduces means and ends, the political logic the revolt undermined as I described above. Second, the state isn’t simply the enemy. We are fighting the entire organization of the world, which is more than police and politicians. It also involves the infrastructures of the world, the arrangements of resources, and to bring us back to the book, our understandings of everything we take for granted, like the law. In Tiqqun’s words, “Empire is not the enemy. Empire is no more than the hostile environment opposing us at every turn. We are engaged in a struggle over the recomposition of an ethical fabric.” We are fighting over the definition of life, essentially, and that involves so much more than military victories.
Cedric Robinson is essentially arguing that this aversion to a certain form of struggle is a defining feature of the Black Radical Tradition, and I hope it’s not too imprudent to follow this hypothesis into the present. It may be worth noting that this slim chapter is Robinson’s first and only mention of the “ontological totality,” which would go on to be a key reference point for Fred Moten’s thinking.
L&F: You talk about the early morning press conference that the governor of Minnesota held on May 30th, which subsequently followed the burning of the Third Precinct. During this ‘briefing’ the governor put forth a series of false claims that outside white supremacist agitators were coming into the Twin Cities to instigate violent riots. The lies were then parroted by the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The lies of course implying that the collective rage against the ongoing murder of black life is somehow unfounded, unwarranted, and not coming from Minneapolis.
In part II, titled Abolition, you identify this spreading of fear and false information as an almost defeating blow to the uprising in Minneapolis. I guess my question is, where do you feel this event leaves us in relation to the circulation and processing of information? This is obviously a very large question particularly when we consider the ways Russia and China seem to be cybernetically manufacturing public opinion. I am wondering if this is a larger strategic question concerning how rebels build networks of information sharing? And furthermore, at what point can we be able to identify and understand the endless limits that the state will go to in hopes of remaining in and preserving their power.
Nevada: In the moment and its relatively immediate aftermath, the need for fact-checking seemed incredibly urgent. As with many of the tactical innovations seen in Hong Kong, there were a number of radical activists and militants around the country attempting to promote the emphasis rebels there placed on verifying info. Likewise, the infamous “The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis” includes an entire section describing fact-checking as a “critical necessity for the movement.”
In my writing, I don’t spend too much time on all the different rumors and conspiracy theories that were circulating at the time, but perhaps it’s a good idea to summarize a few. There were two main things happening, both that only really gathered steam after the press conference you mentioned. First of all, there were countless updates circulating social media about different things being on fire, like houses, libraries, etc. that were all untrue. People would see a tweet in all-caps about how this or that is burning down, and then check it out to find it totally untouched, or maybe the residents gathered around their backyard fire pit. The other thing was that there were tons of rumors of neo-Nazi gatherings and demonstrations. In one instance, a flurry of posts (many labeled “CONFIRMED”) described a KKK rally in a St. Paul park. But if you read the replies, people were posting timestamped photos of the same park, quiet and empty. In some of these rumors gone wild, it’s hard to even imagine what “kernel of truth” they sprung from in the first place, besides being an intentional disinformation campaign. But I haven’t done the research and don’t have proof of that, and I’m not sure it matters what percentage was intentional or relatively organic.
Having some distance from these events now, I’m not sure I still think of fact-checking as such a crucial thing. While yes, verifying information is quite important and we should do our best to avoid fear-mongering and inciting panic, I think we fall into the trap of trying to center some sort of universal rationality called the truth. I think it’s become pretty commonplace to accept that this is no longer compelling in our world—even “The X-Files” reboot covered this issue. And while this isn’t always the case, fact-checking can sometimes serve the function of the police.
On August 26th, 2020, Minneapolis police officers were pursuing a black man with a gun in downtown. When he was cornered, this man Eddie Sole Jr. took his own life. Yet all that the people observing the situation could see was the police advancing on a black man and that man with a fatal bullet wound. Nearly the same instant, fighting erupted and many windows in the downtown shopping district were being smashed to bits. The rest of the night felt like a brief repeat of the uprising a few months earlier, although with a much clearer emphasis on the de-centralized looting by car, as the street-fighting downtown did not provide as much of a center of gravity as the 3rd Precinct did in May. The next day, people again began to gather downtown, but before anything like the previous night could break out, prominent Leftist organizers arrived to tell people that the police did not kill Sole, and that they had no reason to be angry, and that they should go home. Overall, they were successful in defusing the tension that was building.
Of course, I want to be clear that the police did kill Sole, even if they didn’t literally pull the trigger. Yet here we are again, returning to these two visions of abolition: one where we shouldn’t be angry because the police were just doing their jobs, and one where the choice between prison and death is unconscionable.
#MinneapolisPolice car vandalized and wrecked outside of precinct at center of #GeorgeFloyd protests. Photo via @UR_Ninja livestream. Check their feed for on the ground coverage. pic.twitter.com/1OdfDpYVpm
— It's Going Down (@IGD_News) May 27, 2020
There is something else we can see in the events of August 26th, though, and this goes back to your last question too. There were thousands of people who reflexively returned to the tactical and strategic basis of the George Floyd uprising. We’ve seen this again and again in the years since, as well, like in Brooklyn Center for example. So even if the counter-insurgency was able to halt the uprising in one moment, this legacy carries on to the next moment, and the next.
So, if I had a hypothesis to answer this strategic question with, I would say that we should openly and shamelessly affirm the actions of the uprising, to the participants of the uprising, rather than becoming an anarchist or communist Snopes. But yes, we end up at the same place, which is building networks and platforms to share information with others. Instagram story shares aren’t going to cut it. Do everything you can to break out of the algorithmic bubbles we are put in online, and above all get offline too. Print out zines, flyers, posters, put them everywhere you can, but also talk to people, talk to strangers, organize events that appeal to people other than your affinity group or political milieu.
I want to bring up one more point, in response to this question. It’s not only that the state manufactured this disinformation about these white supremacist outside agitators and everything stopped. How I see it is that they gave people this “out,” this way of excusing themselves from the situation that was otherwise terrifying for them. Urban liberals and leftists weren’t likely going to take up a mass project of auxiliary policing in the explicit defense of the white power structure. Yet by redefining the rioters as themselves the white supremacists, these people could then preserve both their culturally or ideologically woke positions while actively defending (often at gun point) the structures of white supremacy and capitalism. But I don’t think people rushed to defend this structure for ideological reasons like fighting fascists. I think they did it because the revolt was immense, and pushed them to their breaking point—and they chose to defend the existent rather than to leap into the unknown. As Saidiya Hartman once said, no one “wants to be as free as Blackness will make them.
L&F: Towards the end of the book, you talk about the way policing and law show up in different often more insidious ways. As was the case with the ‘progressive’ ballots appearing to abolish the MPD and to eventually substitute it with a “Department of Public Safety.” You go on to say “The figure of the white supremacist agitator does not simply tarnish the memory and legacy of the revolt. It also illuminates the very stakes of the movement itself and its call for abolition does not simply mean the defunding of any specific department, as many activists advocate today. Nor does revolutionary abolition simply mean doing away with the brutality that police use to enforce the law, as offered by restorative justice. Instead, revolutionary abolition must mean the abolition of law, itself, along with the property relations that the law upholds.” Marcello Tari, in his book There is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution, talks about the difference between law and justice. How the former is nothing other than a continuation of the logic of domination and often friends fall into the siren song of institutionalizing potential into a form of governing power.
But I wonder what you imagine when you say the abolition of law. Many have a hard time envisioning what life could look like without law. Yet through Tari, Moten and Harney, and others one can begin to see a communal plane of ethical and justice-oriented living. Does this framing speak to what you imagine as a sort of escape from juridical thinking and being? That is, if we are to take Walter Benjamin seriously when he says justice is a state of the world.
Nevada: You (and Tarรฌ) are right to differentiate between law and justice, even if the latter has been so twisted as to be nearly as distasteful as the former. I think the same thing of “community,” which is an issue addressed in the second half of the book as well. Yet in the final pages I arrive at both “justice” and “community” in my attempt at thinking life differently, a life without law. Of course, it’s still barely a gesture at such a life, because such a life would be impossible to define in advance, and even if it were, I don’t think of myself to be in a position to describe it.
I mentioned earlier about paying attention to the molecular continuations of the uprising, which is another way to describe the power or potential that has escaped capture so far or that has not yet been subsumed into the political sphere. I prefer to use the word ante-politics rather than molecular, taking the term from Fred Moten and those inspired by him. I see sideshows as a really poignant expression of this; one of the most inspiring elements isn’t just their incredible tactical innovations but the ways in which they have developed ways of being together that don’t rely on police or the law because their existence depends on keeping the police at a distance. While it would be entirely possible for a new law to emerge from within this space (and this is exactly the problem much of my book tackles), what I’ve seen is precisely the opposite. My friend Jackson and I termed this “self-regulation” to illustrate how it differs from self-policing or the creation of a new transcendent law.
A non-profit funded by the City of #Minneapolis was part of an attempt to dismantle #GeorgeFloydSquare. Community members mobilized in response + barricades were re-enforced. "It is inspiring how quickly and how militantly that space was reclaimed." https://t.co/cCC7O0G2vu
— It's Going Down (@IGD_News) June 5, 2021
This isn’t to say that sideshows are prefiguring the world we wish to see, but that they offer, among many things, the ability to imagine ways of being together that don’t replicate the law. What happened during the uprising is that citizens, in taking up the call to fight the outside agitators, reintroduced policing in the same moment as they proclaimed to abolish the police. At sideshows, no one decides what is or isn’t allowed to happen. Sure, some people might provide feedback towards something they do or don’t like happening, and that feedback may indeed be forceful, but it never solidifies into a law. And certainly, no one will try to hand you over to the police because they don’t like what you did.
Lastly, on justice, I want to really emphasize how crucial the ideas of transformative justice are to this vision of abolition I’m advocating here. Transformative justice, of course, gets thrown around, distorted, and emptied of much of its content like many ideas in the activist lexicon. But I see it as a fundamentally abolitionist attempt to navigate justice outside of and without law. I cite the book Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement in the passage you quoted, which is a great anthology for thinking about transformative justice and abolition. To go further, I think we have to learn to translate these ideas beyond activist subcultures—which, despite its constant gestures to the accessibility, creates a highly insular frame of reference and vocabulary. Yet, as with my experience at sideshows and being a part of that subculture, the fundamental premises are not foreign to others and should not be treated as such.
L&F: The Abolition of Law has a beautiful and reoccurring theme of movement to it. You ruminate on the interplay of the idea of an “inside” and “outside.” A gorgeously ferocious line emanates from page 73 where you write, “To go further, we must investigate the material foundations of these measures – revealing that the myth of outside agitators is fueled by an inherent desire for a closed, stable social space. Yet the only thing preserving the notion of an ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is a thin blue line.”
Saidiya Hartman, in a conversation she had with Fred Moten titled To Refuse That Which Has Been Refused to You, speaks on this sort metaphysical and material exchange. She posits, “Rather, I think the tradition is to produce a thought of the outside while in the inside. […] the thought of most folks is really devoted to this labor of trying to create an opening, which is often only discernible belatedly and it’s discernible as it becomes marked as crime or as it’s subject to a new form of enclosure that is the response to a certain kind of making/happening.” I guess what I am thinking about is the way colonialist methods within political economy set out to manufacture divisions between life on both internal and external levels, and how these divisions operate as a subjectivizing process towards civil thought. To which one eventually believes these divisions to be true and are what shape our relation to the world. As opposed to a sort of communistic thinking which orients an ethical relation to difference not as closure but as an extension of an ensemble.
Do you think it is helpful for us to frame thinking in this “inside” and “outside” dichotomy? I find myself balancing between the importance of it and also understanding that this framing – as you point out in reference to the rhetoric of the “outside white agitators” during the uprising in Minneapolis – seems to function as an abstraction from relation. As well, the larger material circumstances to how racism and bigotry occurs on an everyday level within this system and as the everyday function of this systemized thought.
Nevada: Right—I think the dichotomy of “inside” and “outside” inherently limits our vision of what could be. I take it up only because this dichotomy has become the dominant framework we are offered to think about the world, but I take it up only to demonstrate its porousness to ultimately break it down. I’d like to think that I’m joining Saidiya Hartman in this project, if I understand her correctly.
That section was inspired by, again, what seemed to me as quite practical concerns but is ultimately based in this subjectivizing process and abstraction you’re talking about. For someone to “outside agitate,” there has to be an outside to come from, and for that to exist there has to be an inside that has an essential quality and is therefore inherently legitimate. This is problematic on a metaphysical level––Fred Moten’s thinking on enclosure and surround helps articulate this, but it’s also a problem on a simple geographic or material level.
First of all, it’s basically impossible to claim some geographic “inside” to the uprising. The Star Tribune map shows damage stretching well past Minneapolis and Saint Paul city limits, with many incidents in first-, second-, and even a few third-ring suburbs. Even if damage was constrained to the city itself, this thinking would imply that by virtue of being a Minneapolis resident—or more specifically, having an ID that listed Minneapolis as your current residence—you were a legitimate actor in the uprising, and a Brooklyn Park resident was not.
I deal with this problem explicitly around George Floyd Square, which is the name given to the area where George Floyd was killed and the surrounding blocks, which for over a year remained barricaded to traffic and where a memorial and gathering space were created. This space and those who organized in it really exemplified this thinking, where residing on the blocks the Square occupied lent a legitimacy to your voice or project. But in reality, there was no consensus amongst the very diverse residents of the area, and plenty of people lived elsewhere or came from elsewhere to participate in activities or daily life there. But the discourse consistently employed did not match the reality—and it’s worth saying, I think this left many participants at the Square disadvantaged to handle conflicts between the many people who could claim this supposed legitimacy of living there.
This essay can now be found as part of a new book, published by "the Friends Print Collective, a design and print collective out of Minneapolis and St. Paul." Check it out here: https://t.co/Ty1rYNAcqP https://t.co/Sv2Jfk8ulr pic.twitter.com/kyeXzVh4xK
— It's Going Down (@IGD_News) March 5, 2022
Beyond geography, this also has to do with race. When we are not given a geographic interior as the source of legitimacy, we are told there is a racial interior. And this racial interior can only exist if being black, or being white, has unique, essential qualities, shared amongst everyone of that race. Despite how absurd this might sound, we hear it quite often in activist circles and beyond: center the most marginalized, amplify black voices, etc. While there are (usually) good intentions here, it offers us no possibility to understand the difference between the actions of a black rioter that throws a rock, and a black police officer that shoots them with a rubber bullet.
I want to be clear that in rejecting this racial “inside”, I am in no way denying that this uprising was unquestionably about black liberation. What I am trying to illustrate is that living in a certain city or neighborhood, or being racialized a certain way, does not guarantee any sort of solidarity with this vision of black liberation. (I follow this conclusion further in the next chapter in the book, on “race treason.”) This thinking instead becomes a serious obstacle because of how such false legitimacy is leveraged to defeat an uprising.
There is no inside or outside in an uprising. The only inside is “the fort,” to take up the image Fred Moten and Stefano Harney offer us in their opening essay to The Undercommons. The uprising only exists as the surround, “the common beyond and beneath—before and before—enclosure.” And what we surrounded was not only the 3rd Precinct but also white civil society as a whole.
photo: Jake Schumacher via Unsplash
by Living and Fighting via It's Going Down
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Back in Portland, a claim of responsibility took credit for a sabotage action in solidarity with the expanding struggle to defend the Atlanta forest. A communique posted to Rose City Counter-Info wrote:
Not to be left out, another communique posted to Indybay.org stated:
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