C4SS produced some hard-hitting material in March. But then again, that’s nothing new. We always aim to bring you the most radical commentary on world headlines.

Here are just a few of last month’s publications:

Nathan Goodman remarked on the cold-blooded manner in which Washington’s Killing Machine carries out its mayhem. James Wilson and Sheldon Richman both weighed in on the destructive Trump-Sanders bipartisan brand of protectionism.

H.C. opted not to mourn the passing of Nancy Reagan and got some push-back for his “incivility.”

Ryan Calhoun reported from the International Students for Liberty conference, where Ross & Lyn Ulbricht were snubbed by a whole lot of ungrateful “libertarians.”

I celebrated Open Borders Day by echoing a common C4SS theme — calling for the dissolution of all state borders. Kevin Carson opined on the Supreme Court appointment of Merrick Garland, ultimately coming down in favor of permanent Washington gridlock. Nick Ford’s onslaught against America’s heinous prison system continued, with Ford penning several op-eds on the subject in March.

…and speaking of Nick Ford, expect some exciting news about a forthcoming book project that you will read about here in the coming days. Stay tuned.

Thanks again to all of our readers and generous financial supporters. We rely on you to keep us going. If you’re new to C4SS and enjoy our work, please consider making a donation to C4SS via Paypal, Patreon, or any of our other countless giving platforms.

Chad

Every so often, the call for African-American reparations re-emerges in full force. The Atlantic author Ta-Nehisi Coates is perhaps the most prominent pundit to issue the call in recent years, pointing to America’s shameful history of slavery and segregation as grounds for restitution. Because American depravities placed black people at an economic disadvantage, he reasons, and because no formal reparation has yet been paid, the United States should now right its wrongs.

Many other activists, such as Hillary Clinton, emphasize formal reparations less than race-based affirmative action as a way of elevating racial minorities. These thinkers generally argue that traditionally white institutions can help mitigate the enduring effects of past oppression by simply seeking out and offering special consideration to black applicants.

To evaluate either of these remedies to historical racism, we must determine what sort of society we favor and what mechanisms will allow that society to flourish. In ideal circumstances, I posit, people of all colors interact in a nonviolent and voluntary manner. They establish dominion over unowned land by mixing their labor with it. They purchase goods and render services at their discretion. They cultivate friendships, proffer gifts, invest in social action organizations, and collaborate in the spirit of non-coercive mutualism. By allowing peaceful people to use their bodies and property freely, this arrangement respects the individual character and autonomy of everyone it affects.

When people contravene these norms by aggressing against the bodies and property of their peers, we should (1) punish the aggressors and (2) force them to “repair” what they destroyed—in a sense, to make their victims “whole” again. In the event that a criminal dies before trial, his heir should not endure punishment but should be forced to return his ill-gotten property to its legitimate owner.

These principles have several implications. Suppose that a thief steals an innocent woman’s red purse, quickly hands it off to his unwitting wife, and then commits suicide. Must the wife, who aggressed against nobody, now return the red purse to her late husband’s victim? Indeed she must. Although she is not a thief herself, she possesses stolen property and has no right to withhold it from its rightful owner.

Now suppose that the thief, instead of giving the purse to his wife, bequeaths it to his daughter on his deathbed. Suppose that the thief’s victim’s daughter, 50 years later and after her mother has died, sees the thief’s daughter walking around with the stolen purse. Does the victim’s daughter here have a legitimate claim to the purse adorning the arm of a peaceful pedestrian? Again, the answer is yes. If the victim’s daughter can demonstrate that she would have inherited the purse had her mother never gotten robbed, then she can justifiably take the purse from the thief’s daughter.

Next, let us suppose that 5 men rob 15 women and then retreat to a neighborhood of 20 other men. Suppose that the 15 indignant women then enter that neighborhood and demand reparations from all 25 men. Are the victims in the right? Here, the answer is no. The only men who owe reparations are those who possess stolen goods. The other neighbors are undoubtedly justified in helping these women voluntarily, but they should not be compelled to do so.

With these principles in mind, let us now turn our attention to race-based affirmative action. Should a private institution, composed of individuals whose consciences impel them to assist certain groups, have the right to use affirmative action? Yes. Any private institution that relies on voluntary market transactions merely exercises its right to free association by adopting an affirmative action policy.

The answer is different for public institutions. In a state system, public institutions almost invariably rely on taxation, a process whereby the government dragoons innocent people into subsidizing whatever projects the majority (in a democracy) or powerful minority (in an oligarchy) fancies. Public affirmative action programs are therefore objectionable, not because affirmative action is inherently wrong, but because public affirmative action operates at the expense of non-criminal taxpayers.

Beyond that, the imprecision of race-based affirmative action weakens the program’s efficacy as a tool of corrective justice. That is because beneficiary B of race-based affirmative action does not need to demonstrate that his ancestor, A, was robbed of funds that B would have received had A not gotten robbed. Nor must the people disfavored by affirmative action possess property that rightfully belongs to affirmative action’s beneficiaries.

We must therefore reject the notion, propagated by such theorists as David Horowitz, that race-based affirmative action and similarly sweeping welfare programs “count” as reparations for slavery. Contra Horowitz’s claims, reparations “count” only when they go to the victims of crime exclusively. If all black people, poor people, single parents, or Americans qualify for “slavery reparations,” then these are not actually slavery reparations, because not all black people, poor people, single parents, or Americans today descend from slaves. Moreover, reparations for slavery, like reparations for any other crime, “count” only when tendered unconditionally. If slaves’ descendants must apply to certain colleges, achieve certain test scores, work certain jobs, maintain certain incomes, or keep a certain marital status in order to qualify for “slavery reparations,” then these are not slavery reparations either.

Authentic reparations, in both intent and effect, are straightforward: they restore stolen property to its rightful owners. Ethnicity, occupational status, educational status, and everything else do not enter the equation. A Palestinian whose parents were expelled from their land is entitled to reclaim his family’s property. A Jewish person whose parents were robbed by Egyptians is entitled to retrieve his family’s goods also. The same premise holds true everywhere else for everyone else. Should we demand a statute of limitation for these sorts of property claims? Not at all, for as Walter Block reminds us, “Justice is justice is justice.” With that being said, the onus is on the plaintiff to prove beyond a reasonable doubt (1) that his ancestors legitimately owned the property in question and (2) that the contemporary defendant possesses the property illicitly.

Therefore, reparations must not rely on taxation or other slipshod methods of wealth redistribution. Taking property from every American in order to subsidize reparative checks or public programs would amount to rough-and-tumble collective punishment. If we oppose state-administered collective punishment in other situations—if we believe, as we should, that it is abominable for the American government to assassinate civilians on enemy territory in Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen—then we should oppose it here as well. Just as it is barbarous for state officials to kill innocents who live near terrorists, so too is it barbarous, albeit to a lesser degree, for state officials to seize property from civilians who live near people with stolen property.

A different type of reparations might have us reduce taxes by exempting African Americans from income taxation for a certain period of time. How about it? The gesture would be admirable, but it would go not nearly far enough as a form of “reparation.” In the first place, nobody— African-American or otherwise— should have to pay income taxes. Even if they occasionally use income tax revenue for benevolent causes, statesmen do not deserve innocent people’s income any more than occasionally benevolent thieves do. To rescind African Americans’ income tax obligation, then, would be to respect the property rights of African Americans going forward without compensating them for past injuries.

A justifiable reparations program would be appropriately backward looking, allowing nothing more and nothing less than for affected individuals to retrieve their property from its illegitimate possessors. Though this model is clearly more restrictive than the state-facilitated taxation model, it nonetheless presents clear opportunities for restitution. Descendants of the 1,250 slaves owned by J.P. Morgan Chase’s predecessor banks, for instance, could bring claims against the company now. So too could the descendants of slaves exploited by the Bank of Charleston and the Georgia Railroad and Bank Company, both of which Wachovia acquired before the extant Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia.

Other modern companies did not own slaves but still profited from slavery. Brooks Brothers, for example, sold slave clothes to masters. Might such a company have to pay reparations also?

Yes. Suppose that I steal 10 dollars from you and surreptitiously use it to buy myself a movie ticket from a local cinema. Although the cinema did not steal the 10 dollars from you, it now possesses 10 of your dollars that you did not relinquish voluntarily. That property is rightfully yours, and you should be allowed to take it back, no matter the identity of the person who now holds it. Of course, if you were to take it back, the cinema’s operator would be down ten dollars and would therefore be well within his right to sue me for buying a movie ticket with stolen money. Even if he could not find me though, he would owe you your ten dollars.

Brooks Brothers’s debt to slaves’ descendants is even more clear-cut than the cinema operator’s debt to you. Slavery is worse than mere theft, but beyond that, the cinema operator did not know that I was purchasing a ticket with stolen money, whereas Brooks Brothers knew that its slaveholding customers were purchasing attire with stolen wages. It should therefore be abundantly clear that people have legitimate claims against Brooks Brothers if they can prove that their ancestors’ masters purchased Brooks Brothers attire.

“But wait!” some might plead. “What if Brooks Brothers has donated to African-American charities in the past century? What if it has offered jobs to African Americans?  Surely that counts as reparation.” Actually, it does not. A criminal who bankrolls charities and employs people still has an obligation to his victims.

We should not let other such irrelevancies distract us from the moral case for reparations. It does not matter, for instance, that some slaves’ black descendants are today wealthier than the white people who owe them reparations. A poor man who illegally possesses a rich man’s property, after all, still owes a debt to the rich man. Nor does it matter that some slave owners were black. Because a just system of restitution does not function on the basis of skin color, the heirs of black slave owners would be just as liable as the heirs of white slave owners.

It is also irrelevant that slavers, by bringing Africans to America, inadvertently gave slaves’ descendants access to lucrative American markets. Imagine, as a parallel, that a rapist illegally enters a woman’s home, strangles his victim with a necklace that he purchased, and then departs without removing it from her neck. When the victim takes her assailant to court, the rapist insists that they should “call it even” since he “gave her a necklace” in the process of raping her. Of course, this frightening logic ignores the fact that the victim never agreed to exchange her body (or anything else) for that necklace. Because the rapist unilaterally “gave” his victim a necklace outside the confines of a two-way contract, he cannot reasonably expect anything in return. The same goes for Americans who got wealthy off of slavery. Because slave traders unilaterally transported slaves to America outside the confines of a two-way contract, slaves’ descendants have no obligation to pay for their presence in America by now surrendering their right to reparations.

Although it is not quite an “irrelevancy,” the fact that American slave owners operated with the sanction of law does not undermine the case for reparations either. Law, lest we forget, is often just a tool that powerful people use to facilitate human rights abuses. It possesses no intrinsic value and deserves no knee-jerk appreciation. The law of slave owners, like the law of fascists, should here matter no more to us than barbarians’ arbitrary decrees do.

There remain intricacies to work out, but the African-American reparations idea is neither quixotic nor academic. It hews to a strict conception of property rights and meets the demands of corrective justice. Unlike collective punishment programs that run roughshod over individual rights, it takes property from select individuals and distributes it to the people whose ancestors lost it. To the extent possible, then, it gives people what they would have had if mass expropriation had not occurred.

In a speech March 28 at an award ceremony for the Toner Prize For Excellence in Investigative Reporting, the biggest enemy of investigative journalism since Nixon complained of the lack of… investigative journalism. That’s right. President Obama criticized the dominant journalistic culture for its stenographic approach of simply quoting the official statements of public figures and spokespersons without asking tough questions or digging deeper, and treating “both sides” of controversies as “false equivalencies” rather than attempting to independently ascertain on which side the facts lie.

I’m surprised none of the attendees asked, “Who are you and what have you done with President Obama?” The Obama administration, as Mike Masnick of Techdirt notes (“After Leading The Attack On Investigative Journalism, President Obama Whines About A Lack Of Investigative Journalism,” March 30), has used the Espionage Act against leakers and journalists more than twice as many times as all other administrations combined. And the cumulative prison sentences for leakers under his watch are fifty times as long as under all previous administrations. He’s also set a record for stonewalling on FOIA requests.

The Obama administration has been consistently adversarial and punitive towards the actual practice of investigative journalism, when anyone has presumed “to probe and to question, and to dig deeper, and to demand more” concerning the abuses of power by his own government. Let’s take a look at how Obama has dealt with the leading examples of investigative journalism in recent years.

In the greatest act of journalistic heroism since Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, Chelsea Manning released an enormous cache of government documents that disclosed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and State Department collusion with oppressive regimes around the world, at the very time the U.S. government passed off its foreign policies to the American people as “promoting democracy.” She is now serving a 30-year sentence in federal prison for her service to the American people and the people of the world.

The Obama administration declared all-out war on Wikileaks, the leaked document hosting site that published Manning’s documents. It pressured the World Wide Web’s governance institutions to shut down Wikileaks‘ domain name, and leaned on a number of online payment systems to seize its donations.

When Edward Snowden leaked a large collection of NSA documents exposing their illegal spying on the American people, he was forced to flee abroad to escape prosecution for his act of investigative journalism. The United States and its allies have since harassed Glenn Greenwald (who has released some of the leaked documents) and his partner, as well as staff at The Guardian (which published them). At one point they went so far as to forcibly ground and search the airplane of the Bolivian head of state, Evo Morales, in hopes that Snowden was aboard.

Barack Obama is the highest-ranking official in the American state. The unaccountable use of military and police power against his own citizenry, as well as people around the world, is what he does. He may well like the idea of investigative journalism so long as it serves his policy agenda by poking into the misdeeds of his own enemies. But the pretense that he, or anyone else in power, actually wants real investigative journalists examining his own abuse of power, is simply ludicrous.

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi (2014).

One does not often find it a pleasant surprise to receive unpleasant information, but this is a reaction many readers will get from Matt Taibbi’s 2014 book The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. While the book has largely been billed as a piece on the evils of growing economic inequality in the US, a more accurate description would be that it documents the discrepancy in how the American legal system treats wealthy offenders as opposed to poor ones. Taibbi’s thesis is that America’s legal system lets the wealthy get away with massive injustices, while the poor, racial minorities and immigrants are faced with draconian punishments (not to mention nightmarish bureaucracy) for minor violations and even unsubstantiated allegations. The picture he paints is not a pleasant one, but the author’s storytelling ability and grasp of the subject matter make for a surprisingly enjoyable read.

Matt Taibbi is best known as a generally left-of-center columnist for Rolling Stone, for which he is arguably the star political writer. He has also written for The Nation, Playboy and New York Press as well as several books of his own. While Taibbi is clearly in the liberal or social democratic camp, The Divide offers much that is of interest to libertarians, especially where it criticizes the excesses of bureaucracy and the prosecution of victim-less crimes. Left libertarians especially will appreciate that the book strongly echoes their concerns that the state actively takes actions that make the poor even worse off. While Taibbi uses statistics to make his case, the real driving force of the book is his depictions of specific examples of injustices. In these anecdotes the human consequences of plutocracy are vividly illustrated.

Taibbi alternates between stories of white collar criminal activity going unpunished and mean-spirited state aggression leveled at poor people. This does well to illustrate Taibbi’s point that the rich and poor in America live in two different worlds when it comes to treatment by law enforcement. However it may be the book’s biggest weakness for some readers who will find the back and fourth changes in setting distracting. To his credit, Taibbi ultimately ties his narratives together, asserting that lax treatment for the rich and overly harsh punishment of the poor combine to form a dystopian reality.

Taibbi begins with Eric Holder, the Clinton administration official who would become Attorney General under Barack Obama. In the late nineties Holder authored a memo which made explicit the concept of “Collateral Consequences.” Holder argued that courts could consider the indirect negative economic consequences of subjecting large companies to legal penalties if a court ruled against them. This idea would later become known as “too big to fail” and by extension “too big to jail.”  Between his time with the Clinton and Obama administrations, Holder worked with Covington and Burling, a law firm that pioneered the use of “Collateral Consequences” to keep major companies from facing legal penalties. Taibbi largely credits the Clinton administration for passing laws which  exacerbated the disparity in legal punishment between the rich and the poor. Specifically he notes that Clinton’s presidency marked a time of agreement between democrats and republicans on “getting tough on crime,” specifically crime committed by poor people. leading to the escalated war on drugs and increased prison population (specifically the black prison population) during Clinton’s presidency. This was coupled with an increased leniency towards crimes committed in the financial sector. Taibbi claims it is no coincidence that Goldman Sachs was among the biggest contributors to both Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns (not to mention Hillary Clinton’s current campaign).

All of this occurred during a sharp decrease in overall crime, which continued through the 2000’s. Taibbi notes that as crime decreased police officers whose performance and promotion potential was evaluated on numbers of arrests were forced to chase increasingly pettier offenses. Police adopted a wide net strategy, comparable to fishing with dynamite, in which large numbers of ostensibly “suspicious” poor or working class people would be searched, arrested, ticketed, or issued summons for minor violations which they may or may not have committed. These offenders almost certainly did not have the time or money to fight the allegations in court. Arrests for marijuana and violations like “blocking pedestrian traffic” sky-rocketed. Taibbi discusses one instance where the accused chose to fight this particular allegation due to the fact that the supposed offense took place on a morning when there was no pedestrian traffic. His own defender and the judge had little knowledge of how to handle this as the entire system is set up to encourage guilty pleas for such offenses. In another instance cops accuse a young man of drawing graffiti in black ink with a pink highlighter. Unsurprisingly police cruelty, dishonesty and downright stupidity are often on full display in this book.

Taibbi gives a great deal of attention to Howard Safir, the Giuliani-appointed New York Police Commissioner, who expanded the “Broken Windows” and “Zero Tolerance” policies of his more well known predecessor Bill Bratton, with an even greater focus on arresting and fining people for petty offenses. Under Safir, arrests for marijuana sky rocketed. Taibbi notes that the accused faced hours on end at court hearings, in which large numbers of cases are reviewed by judges who themselves would rather be anywhere else. The court appearances and other bureaucratic red tape often forced the accused to take time off from work or seek child care that they otherwise would not have to. Taibbi discusses many of the violations reviewed as “administrative crimes” which while technically illegal do not cause demonstrable harm to anyone. While crime with actual victims had gone down, police focused on violations of arbitrary statutes. Illegal immigration is one example. Taibbi relates this to occurrences of police setting up “drunk driving” checkpoints at the roads going in and out of immigrant neighborhoods during times when people would come and go to work. He notes that the increased deportations that occurred under the Obama administration enabled a massive kidnapping industry in Latin America, in which kidnappers would locate deportees while seeking ransoms from their remaining relatives in the US.

Elsewhere Taibbi discusses the collapse of Lehman Brothers and its secret backroom deal with the English firm Barclays that ripped off millions from smaller creditors around the world. This section is an excellent primer on the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis. As is the chapter on JPMorgan Chase, which committed massive fraud involving fake credit card judgement. He notes that the business of collecting delinquent credit card debt itself relies on fraud, as it would be uneconomical for collection agencies to review the actual records of the alleged debtors. Often they instead employ “robo-signing” (the practice of having entry level staffers sign as many documents as possible, without actually reading them) and “gutter service” where a server may or may not deliver a summons to an accused who may or may not show up to contest the allegation. In all cases discussed, real people are genuinely harmed and the perpetrators are never given more than negligible fines. He also contrasts the treatment of crimes committed by HSBC (a firm that has worked with murderous drug cartels and Islamist terrorists) to the disproportionately worse treatment of small time drug users.

In one of the more interesting stories of the book, a gang of well-funded hedge fund managers attempt to bully the owner of a smaller insurance firm, Fairfax Financial Holdings, into going out of business through an elaborate campaign of harassment, threats, late-night phone calls, and phony accusations of a criminal activity. This may be of interest to libertarians looking for a starting point to a discussion of what forms of malicious activity do and do not violate the non-aggression principle. Similarly, Taibbi’s discussion of welfare recipients who largely forgo their right to freedom from government search and seizure without probable cause is a potential starting point for conversation. Such people are often subject to inspectors rooting through their underwear drawers and bathrooms looking for evidence of unreported income. While Taibbi’s sympathy for people on welfare may rub some mainstream libertarians the wrong way, he argues that regardless whether one opposes the welfare state or not, one should find this excessive, especially when such zeal for fraud prevention is not matched when it comes to white-collar criminals committing the same crimes on a larger scale.

Overall Taibbi finds that the poor are subject to bureaucracy while the rich are able to become bureaucracies in and of themselves by hiring lawyers capable of generating decades of red tape for anyone who makes any accusation against them. He feels that America has such love for and fear of people with power and money and disdain for those who lack it, that its people allow two divergent class-based legal systems to govern. The book is an engaging and often entertaining read that will likely find a sympathetic ear from anyone who values justice.

The first nationally recognized Earth Day was celebrated in the United States on April 22, 1970. Now, 46 years old, the annual event is a world-wide phenomenon celebrated in more than 192 countries. It is a day numerous cultures come together to voice their support for environmental protection.

I like a lot about Earth Day. As a natural scientist I enjoy walking around campus and visiting with students as they partake in environmentally-themed festivities. There are special opportunities for community service on and around Earth Day. These opportunities usually include neighborhood clean-ups, river rescues, a “Bio-Blitz” or two, work in a community garden, etc. Folks are inclined to think about the global environment and learn how they can act locally to protect it. This decentralized, neighborhood approach allows us all to engage, support, respect and empower our communities — benefiting the individual and thus the common good.

But I am bothered by an overarching theme that continually looms over April 22: Praise of authoritarian institutions. Earth Day was born of the 1960’s environmental movement. This 60’s-era environmentalism differed from the preservation-oriented ethics that preceded it.

Preservationist ethics sought the protection of the natural environment. The idea held that natural landscapes and seascapes, along with all the fragile flora and fauna that call these systems home represent a grandeur that is in and of itself worthy of protection. Preservationists and (to a lesser extent) conservationists believed human-civilization needed to protect wilderness because the pure freedom of the wild, nature for nature’s sake, deserved radical liberty.

Sixties environmentalism shifted the focus of public thought from natural systems to state institutions. The original Earth Day spawned a series of high-profile legislative measures in the United States under the Nixon Administration, including the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act, formation of the Environmental Protection Agency and much more.

I may differ from some of my libertarian comrades on what to do with these laws and institutions. That is to say, for the time being, I find them necessary for public and environmental health. The world is not as it could, or rather, should be. Still, these institutions are faulty. Mainly, they are ineffective.

For instance, the nation’s “most powerful environmental law,” the Endangered Species Act, is full of shortcomings. The number of listed species has well outpaced delisted species (plus, some species are delisted as they go extinct, noting failure as opposed to success). Even with global regulations, air pollution, according to the World Health Organization, is responsible for seven-million deaths annually — that’s one in eight global deaths. Global water quality is also of increasing concern, as freshwater reserves are tapped for industrialized agriculture and acid dilution. The list goes on.

Yet, on Earth Day such laws are hailed as victories. This is disheartening because the key message of Earth Day is good ole neighborhood environmentalism. The empowered populace is the revolutionary power needed to protect our communities, surrounding biota and maintain and restore healthy ecosystems.

The message of Earth Day is every bit as much about human liberty as it is environmental protection. The old ethos, that nature is good and that the living biosphere deserves liberty should be re-established.

Thankfully, it is. The environmental paradigm is once again changing. Rewilding the planet is openly discussed in academic and movement debates as a means to mitigate the current extinction crisis. The field of Restoration Ecology is a leading employer of conservation scientists today. Perhaps most excitingly, the urban corridor is changing. Community gardens, urban food corridors, public spaces and even wilderness areas are being designed into cities.

The concept of sustainability is evolving. I believe it will continue to do so. As each bit of progress is made, the cultural revolution will chip away at systems of power and domination. The democratic, permissive society is indeed the only sustainable society.  After all, what is more revolutionary, more natural, than human liberty? And what is human liberty without healthy neighborhoods and wild spaces?

The consensus view of both pro-gun and anti-gun people in America is that our gun culture protects gun rights.

I believe this needs to be questioned.

Individuals who face the highest risk of being violated are the most likely to not have full gun rights. American gun culture is joined at the hip with attitudes that limit the rights of traditionally disadvantaged groups, attitudes which run counter to philosophy underlying gun rights.

It’s true that if you have access to guns, you have access to a wider array of types of guns and have more freedom to have them on your person than you would in virtually any other developed nation. But you’re not as likely to have that right if you’re from a disadvantaged group or on the wrong side of the law.

Another bipartisan belief is “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a good guy with a gun.”

This is the catch phrase of NRA types, and it’s bought into implicitly. You might see good guys as cops and private citizens who pass a background check or you might narrow that list down to just certain cops. Unless you are of the minority opinion that no one should have guns, you can’t truly say you disagree with the statement.

The question is who we consider bad guys. That often means criminals. Who commits crime? A better way to phrase the question is “whose livelihoods are criminalized?” The answer of course is disadvantaged groups, people driven to taboo and illegal activities by discrimination, which means the same people most likely to experience violence.

Gun people are quick to point out the alleged hypocrisy of pro-gun control politicians protecting themselves with armed bodyguards. And their detractors are quick to point out the silliness of the belief that everyone is under equal threat of violence.

It’s true that public figures are at a greater risk of assassination attempts than the general public is of murder attempts. But that’s not the only dividing line. Lower income individuals face more violence than middle-class individuals and Black individuals face more violence than White individuals. LGBT+ individuals, especially trans women, especially trans women of color face extraordinarily high rates of violence. Unlike public figures, most of these people can’t afford bodyguards.

In addition to facing higher risk of violence, for which gun proponents offer guns as a solution, disadvantaged groups also face more reductions in their civil rights and hence their access to guns. Despite breaking laws against drug use in equal numbers, Blacks make up a larger proportion of drug arrests than Whites.

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, points this out in a blog post:

In 2005, for example, 4 out 5 drug arrests were for possession and only 1 out of 5 were for sales. Most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or significant selling activity. Nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests in the 1990s — the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war — was for marijuana possession, a drug less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. In some states, though, African Americans have comprised 80 to 90 percent of all drug convictions.

It’s very telling that a lot of the difference in rates of control by the criminal justice system come down to victimless crimes. LGBT individuals are also more likely to be on the wrong side of the law, either due to being driven to illegal activity by discrimination, such as LGBT youth who have been kicked out of their home or due to being targeted by cops because of stereotypical beliefs about LGBT individuals, especially trans women.

And once again victimless crimes, sex work in this case, are part of the problem:

Many queer youth are forced onto the streets and become targets of the criminal justice system as a result. Social stigma and rejection, feeling they have no choice but to leave, or being kicked out have all caused queer youth to leave home. Now, about 40% of homeless youth are believed to be queer. Interviews with queer youth suggest that many are often driven to commit crimes such as robbery or prostitution in order to survive. These are the crimes for which queer youth are most often arrested, and estimates indicate that queer youth compose anywhere from 4% to 10% of the juvenile justice population.

LGBT individuals also face more violence due to a legal system that allows their attackers to absurdly get their sentencing reduced by appealing to “temporary insanity” also known as the “gay panic defense”:

There are no laws or rulings barring the so-called “Gay Panic Defense.” This is a defense in which a person claims to have committed a violent crime against a person of the same sex because they allege that the person made unwanted romantic or sexual advances towards them. The defense is usually unsuccesful (sic.) in winning acquittals, but it is often able to reduce the defendant’s culpability and mitigate the punishment he receives. […] The defense has also been used in recent years by those accused of murdering queer people, such as in the much-publicized Matthew Shepard case in Wyoming.

(Note that contrary to what this says, the “gay panic defense” is illegal in the State of California)

If, despite all the potential obstacles, someone has the de jure right to guns or having guns on their person in public places, that doesn’t automatically translate to the de facto right. Laws, after all, threaten violence against those who break them, so if cops see any armed black man as dangerous, the right to carry isn’t real for them even in states where the letter of the law assures it.

In a country where a cop can gun down a black child with a toy gun and get away with it, it’s difficult to conclude that any African American truly has the right to carry. Since open carry laws don’t actually stop police from using force, open carry is only truly a right for individuals who don’t appear threatening to cops, armed as they are with both guns and society’s white supremacist beliefs.

Behind our strong cultural belief in gun rights is the idea that the world is dangerous, it’s full of dangerous people, and you need to use force to protect yourself sometimes. This bodes well for the right of a rich white property owner to have a gun in their house in preparation for exotic threats like hot break-ins.

But not if you’re in the out-group, if you’re thought of as dangerous, if you ever got in trouble or got diagnosed. It’s not to the benefit of a trans women of color who’s been pushed by discrimination into prostitution and faces a much more realistic threat of violence.

Not only do pro-gun people blame gun deaths on neurodivergent people, but so do some who support more gun control, a misguided belief. Many gun people see neurodivergent people and drug dealers as a threat to their own gun collection and care nothing about them as people, much less their right to own weapons and protect themselves. A more realistic, and less sanist view of risk would have us realize that neurodivergent people aren’t any more dangerous than neurotypicals.

Gun ownership carries with it an increased risk of suicide and homicide by anyone else who may be in the household.

The estimates of the likelihood of defensive uses vary wildly but it’s likely that for the average person, gun ownership doesn’t pass cost/benefit analysis in terms of personal safety. This may differ if the likelihood of victimization, and hence potential for defensive use, is sufficiently high. Since anyone for whom that may be the case is likely to not have their full civil rights, we only really have a right to engage in an expensive hobby.

Since oppressive laws begin with disadvantaged groups first before spreading, we may all lose our rights to firearms in the end. The current associations notwithstanding, the gun control movement has a racist and conservative history with even the NRA partnering with Reagan as governor of California to restrict the gun rights of blacks in a wave of anti-Black Panthers hysteria:

The first major ban on the open carrying of firearms — a Republican-led bill that was drafted after Black Panthers began hanging around the State Legislature in Sacramento with their guns on display — was signed in 1967 by none other than Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. The federal Gun Control Act of 1968 was primarily a reaction to the scourge of “Saturday night specials” — cheap handguns owned by the poor and the black. The National Rifle Association opposed neither law.

Given what I’ve said here so far about our gun culture, nothing should be surprising about this history. Gun rights have a long history of being for white men only, and with explicitly racist ends, like slave patrol militias. Recognizing that both the 2nd amendment and the movement for gun control have racist histories should further drive home the idea that embedded in the logic of our gun rights are tendencies that run counter to same.

The logic wasn’t about equal rights in the first place and it will be an uphill fight to actually win equal gun rights for all.

Most people identify with their own government to some degree. Even if they largely disagree with its actions, they see government guns as vital to their own safety as they see their own. The people who oppose reductions in military or police presence the most are the ones who oppose restrictions on gun rights the most, generally speaking.

This could be looked at as simply a matter of how the platforms happened to evolve here but I contend it’s also because the reasoning is similar in both cases. It’s not about viewing gun rights as a human right, it’s about “I’m going to be scary and dangerous to protect myself from danger”. This association means that guns can never be a way to protect against government tyranny. The idea of standing up to our military with our guns is so laughable, especially given the people who tend to have this fantasy, that it was the subject of one of Clickhole’s finer gags.

If you believe that protection from government tyranny is a valid reason to support gun rights, then you must be for massive reduction of government guns. Police are more likely than the general public to be domestic abusers, and domestic abusers can be trusted with guns the least. Police use their guns to enforce unjust laws; even the death of Eric Garner was regarding laws against selling loose cigarettes. Our military fights unjust wars. And yet “people who believe in gun rights” and “people who see the military and police as threats” scarcely overlap.

Where it does overlap is mostly libertarians, a group that unfortunately tends to have a lot of conservative baggage and hence many of the same problems as the mainstream pro-gun crowd. If disadvantaged groups aren’t central to your campaign to protect gun rights, then you simply aren’t protecting gun rights.

Whether you see gun rights as worthy of protection or not, the American gun movement and our gun culture aren’t your friends. If there are good arguments to be put forth, it’s by taking a firm grasp of reality and not escaping the problems inherent in our culture. We must not only dismantle the various laws that increase violence like the war on drugs (more properly thought of as the war on drug users) and the war on sex workers, but also strike at the root causes of murder and assault like toxic masculinity and white supremacy.

In an interview with Cenk Uygur March 23, Bernie Sanders noted, “The media is an arm of the ruling class of this country,” going on to point out its concentrated corporate ownership (for example, Disney’s ownership of ABC, Comcast’s of NBC, etc). This corporate media have a vested interest in not covering real news in a way that examines the root causes of problems. Such coverage might lead to radical threats to the power structure. Of course he’s quite right. And it’s not a situation that came about by accident; the state played a central role in bringing it about.

The mainstream media — network news shows, cable news networks, major newspapers and wire services — are part of an interlocking set of governing institutions that also includes government agencies, large corporations, and universities, think tanks and charitable foundations. These institutions share a common organizational style — top-down hierarchies and enormous managerial bureaucracies, Weberian rules, million-dollar executives — and tend to shuffle their personnel back and forth from one such institution to the other.

This whole interlocking complex of institutions goes back to the rise of such institutions in the late 19th century as the dominant organizational form — a top-down transformation of the American economy and society that the state and the plutocratic interests controlling it imposed on the country.

From the beginning of radio, the state’s regulatory approach fostered a cartelized system of nationwide media networks. The FCC licensing system permitted a limited number of radio stations compared to what the spectrum permitted. Had the full spectrum been opened up on a first-come first-served basis, with something like the common law of riparian rights preventing new stations from broadcasting on frequencies that might disrupt broadcasts of existing stations, there would have been many more stations. And had the spectrum been open to all homesteaders, there would have been a variety of participants including amateurs and hobbyists, and community and labor groups. For that matter the FCC itself might have awarded its licenses to such a variety of groups; but instead it awarded them almost entirely to commercial interests. And given a limited number of salable licenses, they inevitably appreciated in value just like taxicab medallions, so that only plutocratic interests could afford them.

But before the mass broadcast media ever came into existence, there was already a nationwide advertising market in place fostered by the corporate centralization of the economy, and a complex of corporate and government institutions to influence the content of media.

The existence of a nationwide advertising market, coupled with “intellectual property” in content and rebroadcast rights, further reinforced the concentration of broadcast media into nationwide networks.

And the pre-existence of an interlocking system of corporate, state and civil society institutions into which the media could be assimilated, created the systemic pressures and filters behind what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman called the media’s “Propaganda Model.” This doesn’t just mean the cruder forms of influence like direct advertiser vetoes of stories, or even editorial fear of offending advertisers — although that obviously plays a real part in filtering content. More important is the common class background and affinity, and common social ties of those in charge of the media and governing institutions, and the symbiotic organizational structures of the institutions themselves.

Network executives, talk show hosts, and newspaper publishers and editors travel in the same social circle as the powerful state and corporate figures whom they’re theoretically supposed to serve as watchdogs over. So you have “responsible” and “patriotic” news organizations refusing to report on government war crimes, and people like publisher Katherine Graham of the Washington Post telling an appreciative audience of CIA spooks that “there are some things the public doesn’t need to know.”

You have a “professional” journalistic culture, since Walter Lippmann’s time, dominated by the same managerial ethos as other governing institutions, seeing their job as simply reporting “objectively” what “both sides” say without regard to facts. And given the limited (and dwindling) resources for actual reporting, you have the majority of TV news anchor scripts and newspaper column inches taken up either by quotes from public figures or the output of public spokespersons and corporate and state PR departments. You have wire service correspondents in countries where the U.S. is backing local death squads or military coups, sitting in hotel rooms writing their copy directly from U.S. embassy handouts.

The cumulative effect of all these filters, without much central direction, is a sort of “invisible hand” mechanism with exactly the result Chomsky and Herman described:  a corporate media that reports news from the perspective of the state and the corporations in control of it almost the same as if they were officially censoring it.

So Sanders is right: the media is an arm of the ruling class — and the state is at the heart of it.

Holman Prison in Alabama is home to death row and many there have little to lose should something go wrong. Given the degrading conditions of prisons and their lack of security for prisoners, it should come as no surprise that riots took place on March 11th and 14th.

The first riot happened when a prison guard was stabbed during a fight between two inmates. A prison fire was subsequently started by inmates so they could get access to another part of the prison. The riot included 100 inmates and went from Friday night into Saturday morning before control was re-established and the prison put on lockdown.

An inmate who was interviewed by WHNT 19 News over the phone explained, “What [the officer] did was not professional. They teach them not to do what he did. He went in swinging his stick and throwing inmates around. You know, if you try being in prison for 20 years, people get tired of seeing their fellow convicts get treated that way.”

On Monday while Holman was still on lockdown, an estimated 70 inmates barricaded themselves in a dormitory room after the stabbing of another inmate. WKRG News was able to get a phone call with an inmate there who “said inmates are fed up with deteriorating conditions and overcrowding within the prison system, something even Governor Robert Bentley has acknowledged is a serious issue in Alabama.”

Unfortunately the answer by both Bentley and media like Alabama.com has been to build more prisons.

Bentley and others agree that the riots are symptomatic of a system that isn’t working. But instead of trying to reduce sentences, challenge discriminatory practices or expand alternatives we’re given the choice to expand prisons.

Then again it shouldn’t be surprising that the response from the people in power to necessary and radical action on the part of inmates is milquetoast at best. Yes, the riots were necessary, despite perhaps being inadvisable. Prison riots are acts of desperation that will more naturally occur under such brutal and repressive systems. There’s no need for moral condemnation of the inmates; desperate people act desperately in an attempt to become empowered.

The proposed expansion of prisons from Bentley includes, “merg[ing] the state’s maximum security prisons — about 14 in all — into six prisons, four of them new.” But suspiciously Bentley has also pushed for a one-time exemption for letting a single company build these new prisons. The inevitability of sweetheart deals is much too great to be surmounted by well-meaning liberals.

Governor Bentley thinks focusing on older prisons and merging some will help save money. As true as this may be it still won’t bring back all of the casualties that the Alabama system has caused.

One casualty was death row inmate Timothy Jason Jones. Jones committed suicide in 2006 before he could be sentenced to death for a murder conviction. Jones was a drug user, aggressive, and shied away from his responsibilities by fleeing the scene.

But instead of trying to understand him, prosecutors called him a “monster” and confined him in a locked cell where he eventually killed himself. My point isn’t that Jones was a good person but that instead of giving him the chance to prove he could’ve been the state decided he’d be better off rotting in a cell.

There are are other ways to deal with justice.

Organizations like Common Justice and Community Works West both specialize in alternative forms of justice and specifically transformative and restorative justice. These organizations help inmates feel they can still successfully contribute meaningful things for themselves and their communities. They involve prisoners in their local communities and try to encourage meditation as ways to address underlying issues of crime. As organizations they may not deal with death row inmates specifically but their promise is great.

The success of these models helps release pressure from the overcrowded and bloated prison systems that the inmates expressly used as one of their underlying motivators. If we can help build alternatives to prisons that use positive collaboration instead of fear and dread, perhaps we can begin to more meaningfully address overcrowding.

Instead of expanding prisons, let’s work to expand alternatives.

The rally against Trump in Fountain Hills, Arizona, on the 19th of March, 2016, was met with great resistance and critique from both the Left and the Right largely using arguments about “freedom” and “violence.” As these are important and seemingly misunderstood themes, I’ve chosen to weave analyses of them through this report-back.

Freedom is here understood as, “the ability to do something” and violence as “harm done.” Basically, violence and the repression of freedom are both really shitty and should be avoided at all costs, however community-defense in response to violence, and disruption of freedoms that are contingent on repressions of freedom, should be considered viable, if delicate, tactics in undermining fascism and its ilk. This is because community defense that is non-aggressive is less violence and more survival and any “freedom” that depends on the exploitation of an “other” should not be considered a freedom at all. These forms of resistance should only be considered the first step in any grounded antifa strategy. After resistance, must come long-term transformative organizing and praxis of alternatives.

There’s an old adage that basically goes, “We want total freedom for everyone as long as each person’s freedom does not restrict someone else’s.” At this point, there is inevitably someone who sort of tautologically states, “But what if, what you want to believe or do with your freedom is against what someone else wants to believe or do with their freedom?” The conversation generally stops there with a stoner-ish, “whoa that’s deep” kind of pause, but it shouldn’t. The solution is simple; there are different levels (scale and depth of impact) at which freedom can occur. If we look at the issue through a consequentialist, utilitarian, or just macro lens, we realize that a belief that is acted upon, that seeks to repress the freedom of a group, necessitates restriction because it oppresses more freedoms than it fulfills. “No platform for fascists!” is just a recognition that authoritarianism- and privilege-sponsored ethno-nationalism is a recipe for structural violence and genocide. So shutting down systematically conditioned hate and privilege, even if it pisses off many of those that benefit from it, is still the action that creates the most freedom. This is especially true in a capitalist and statist society where smaller groups of elites are given structural privilege of access and mobility through the direct expense and exploitation of those, often a few classes below them. This same logic applies, though, when speaking of, say, the privilege of poor whites over poor blacks. As long as a freedom comes at the expense of others, it’s not a net-impact of freedom. That which defends the freedom of marginalized persons through minimum thresholds of “violence” is self-defense.

Actions

We woke up at about 4:45am to pick up the comrades and drive to the rally in North Eastern Phoenix, Arizona. I went as an independent activist and anarchist not directly affiliated with any organizing bodies. Trump campaign organizers, we presume, put the rally way out from downtown Phoenix in a wealthy white neighborhood and early in the morning with an 8am doors opening time, to discourage the protests that they keep finding in city after city… and because the pro-Trump, and just generally slimy, Maricopa Sheriff, Joe Arpaio, lives there in Fountain Hills. We drove out with 4 people, 75 bottles of water, snacks, bandanas, signs (blank and drawn on), and first aid preparation.

A bit of context about Phoenix and Arizona will explain the extra need for street medics at this rally. Arizona is on the border of Mexico and is at the forefront of racist, xenophobic, and draconian laws. The situation is such that No Mas Muertes, an organization that seeks to give direct aid such as water and medical care to immigrants in la frontera/the borderland deserts, is constantly being raided, harassed, and surveilled by Border Control: slashing open their water tanks, cutting them off, threatening them, etc. This conservative, racist, xenophobia goes a step further in Arizona when racism is combined with not only, open-carry laws, also conceal carry, and even further that it’s a “Stand your ground” state, which basically means you can legally shoot someone first if you feel aggressed upon.We have not only the issues with individualized far-Right vigilante “justice” warriors (VJW’s?) but also those who, with the state’s legal blessing or at least blind-eye, form highly armed and racist militias. Phoenix itself has a particularly active far Right and white-supremacist contingent. Many of these group members make their presence well-known at the Trump rallies especially in Phoenix. So…. we brought first aid materials.

The protests began with prep followed by your standard liberal shouting and such on the sides of the roads with signs, a few miles from the rally. Chants such as “Whose state is this?” which was supposed to be responded to with “Our state!” is met with our half-enthusiastic, “No state!” I was kind of bored and feeling confused like, “Is this all we’re doing?” It became clear that there were, as usual, a split between the more liberal group of organizers/protestors and the more radical organizers/activists.

The core organizers for the whole larger event was a migrant justice organization called Puente. Many of their supporters were more on the liberal side but many were also amazing folks taking big risks. Further up the road, they organized a brilliant shutdown of the highway that involved three rows of parked cars with people chained to the cars without keys. This shutdown tactic massively slowed police evacuation of protest blockages and led to a total shutdown of the highway with hundreds of cars backed up. There were many intense moments in this action, including a Jeep ramming through protesters at one point. One brave protester U-locked herself to her car and after detainment was sent to ICE (Immigration Control Enforcement) just because her last name sounded Latin@, even though she was a U.S. citizen.

The area I was protesting was at the only other road into the Trump rally and was originally meant by the Puente organizers to be sort of a distraction from the action to shut down the highway. It was another hot desert road off of a major highway called Shea blvd. We were about 150 to 200 people, about a third of which with faces covered. There were folks of various faiths present as well as a few children. There were a few helicopters and your normal excess of police armament. Many people had pre-fabricated signs from the kind of infamous moveon.org saying things “united against racism” or “united against Islamaphobia” but many others made their own signs as well. There was much chanting even a somewhat discomforting U.S. American flag. We, shut down this street(Shea Blvd.) as well with a thick line of a hundred or so people. Those blocking the road were, at first, mainly black bloc-style anarchists, Latinxs, Native folks. Then slowly, once the more liberal or vulnerably situated protesters started realizing it was actually working, they timidly joined us. I went over and explained to the more liberal or vulnerably situated protestors that only the front-lines will get arrested and that we would get three warnings, so it was safe for them to add in numbers and still have time to escape arrest. We backed up the road all the way back to the highway (maybe 50 cars and trucks) effectively cutting off all routes to the rally for both Trump himself and the rally goers.

At one point, a women was nearing having a panic attack in her car because she had to go to a wedding and we were blocking her way, so I organized a path for her to break through the protest line with us still holding the cars behind her in. As she left, the awkwardly-just-standing-there police jumped into action thinking that she was an easy target for harrasment and, by virtue of our having let her through, demonstrating her alliance with us. They ran to her car screaming at her and banging on the window. I ran over between them and explained why we let her through and they backed off, but the damage was already done. The driver had gone into a full-blown panic attack from the initial tension of being blocked coupled with the fear of the cops yelling at her. Someone else had to get out of the car and drive for her. This was a pretty shitty scene. There was also a truck with dogs who I just made sure that had plenty of water for the dogs. Also there was a truck with horses and a fear of the horses getting overheated so we attempted at one point to get them through as well. We utilized the chant, “What do we want?” “Horses!” “When do we want them?” “Now!” As a cute means of getting the message through the crowd.

The actions were pretty exciting because we basically succeeded at disruption even though there are some critiques to be made. We received obstinate and vocal resistance to the blockage from every direction: liberals, conservatives, drivers, local landowners, a panicked bride (even though we let her party through), etc. but Trump was 50 minutes late to his own rally. Joe Arapio bemoaned the activists in his love ode to Trump and ensured that we would receive justice. I was happy to see the anti-fascist people and anarchists critiquing the liberal and nationalist chants and showing up with more direct signs such as, “Goodnight White Pride!” (an anti-white supremacy antifa slogan) and “No platform for fascism.” Even though Trump himself is more capitalist than classic third position Fascist, many of his views are strongly Fascist sympathetic which draws many openly Fascist identified people and groups to his support and events. We eventually turned around the entire row of cars through our blockage and just began marching in a throng to the rally on the overtaken streets. This is when about twenty cop and SWAT cars came up behind us, trying to get us off the road. We held for awhile but eventually broke formation. I almost got nabbed, and would have if it wasn’t for the quick thinking and acting solidarity of a comrade who grabbed me just before a cop, who had gotten out of his car was sprinting and reaching for me with handcuffs (True compañero identified!). At least three arrests were made.

Water and Freedom

I brought out the water bottles we had in our car, and after offering them to the protesters, I went down the lines of stand-still cars handing them out to people in the spirit of mutual aid and a recognition of the inconvenience we were putting them through. It was a PR move in part too because I wanted people to shed their fear of anarchists, and acknowledging and trying to ease the nuisance we were causing had the potential to win us a few more friends, or at least prevent me from getting shot. Mostly the people in their cars wouldn’t talk to me or accept them, though. Some even thought that I was selling them (which would have been such a shitty move). To be fair, I was wearing a bandana over my mouth even though I took it off to greet people. There was face recognition technology being used by the surrounding police including a large SWAT looking vehicle with a rotating periscope style device, tracking faces. I would say about 20% of people accepted water and about 60% wouldn’t open their windows or look at me. But of those who did speak with me, I was able to engage with several of them and talk. Even one person, wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, had a conversation with me. I asked him, like many, why he was voting for Trump. He denied he was and didn’t offer any real political positions. He preferred instead to discuss his disagreement with the protest. We laughed and shared jokes while discussing politics. We even shook hands (which I know some of my comrades will condemn, but building such relationships helps to build a robust counter-recruitment strategy.. and again, it’s hard to tell who’s carrying a gun in Arizona).

I write about passing the water out as a return to the original theme of multiple layered freedoms. Many people on the Right and (U.S) Left critique road shutdowns as a tactic. At this protest we received extensive hostility from liberals and conservatives enthusiastically and dramatically condemning our choices. The critique from most (although there are more nuanced disability or poverty related critiques about some folks who have immediate health or unstable employment related needs etc.) is basically that in stopping someone from using a road, you’re shutting down someone’s freedom, which is hypocritical. This is more complicated than I think the Left or Right would like to admit. A first important note of course is that as protesters, we are not the government or the state, so arguments related to the First Amendment etc. are irrelevant. This logic of protecting some people’s freedoms at the expense of others is, however, the same sort of thought train that is used to justify the “War on Terrorism” or internment camps. These examples, however, are different in that they are state-based and collectivized xenophobic punishments. But the logic itself does have slippery slopes. It is true in blocking a road we are disrupting freedom of mobility. We are literally inconveniencing people. But the analysis never usually gets past that level. There is a block of freedom happening to disrupt a block of freedom that is many orders of magnitude larger and more dangerous, in this instance (or say in the BLM protests on the Bay Bridge in California), systemic white supremacy and a platform for instigations to collective violence against a variety of minority groups. I handed out water bottles because I regret having to inconvenience unaffiliated motorists even while acknowledging the importance of disrupting platforms for white supremacy. It’s a hot day in the desert. I don’t actually want anyone to get hurt, Trump supporters or otherwise. It is historically evidenced however that road blockages are often successful methods of getting fascist events shutdown, getting international media attention on issues of injustice, or as a bargaining tool.

There are non-negligible numbers of outright fascists, cryptofascists, and fascist sympathizers (even on the Left) organizing and arming in the United States alone. It’s no secret that white supremacy flourishes primarily when exposed to the light and when given platforms and declines in power when denied that ability. This is because the Right gains strength from visible dominance with its promise of turning the powerless into rulers, while the Left often gains strength from martyrdom and sense of moral superiority, gaining power and numbers from loss. When white supremacy or Nazism fails to deliver on its promises of power, it hurts the capacity to recruit. So therefore it is no coincidence that you see a non-negligible proportion of active white supremacists and neo-nazis coming out in support of Trump with his crypto-fascist ethno-nationalisms and conversely why the shut-down in Chicago reflects poorly on his image. Asking, “Who constitutes my fans?” is a compelling approach to understanding what vein of collective interests one is tapping into. Trump, for whatever reason, cannot understand why white supremacists support him. He swears that he’s, “the least racist person you’ll ever meet.”

There is a video that came out shortly after the protests that shows someone who looks suspiciously like me walking away from a stopped car in this action. The video then goes on to explain how spray .22 bullets are the best for dealing with protesters. He speciously argued, using this video snapshot as evidence, how protesters in situations such as this are intentionally threatening your and your families lives. He explains with disturbing cool how sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between a snake and a protester, so you should use the same shells either way. Which is quite disturbingly funny considering what I was actually doing in his referenced video, handing out water bottles. I’m pro-self defense if that is what he was actually describing, but of course it’s not. What he’s doing is barely camouflaged calls to violence against left-leaning activists. If our platform was to commit violence, I might be more sympathetic to him, but of course it wasn’t. Our platform was for condemning violence. The car that I was walking away from in his video was, I think, the guy I shook hands with. The top comments on his video though speak volumes. The top commentor is some nazi guy in a speedo named “MoneyBags603” declaring, “We need a Hitler! You can’t have a nice yard without killing the bugs.” With the video creator “Dave Acton Checking In (whose picture is a Trump cartoon)” responding, “nicely stated.” Aside from the blatant genocidal nazi propaganda, his analogy doesn’t even make sense. Who kills all the bugs in their yard? That is impossible and pointless. I mean what do worms do to anyone? The second top commenter is a Cleveland cop recounting his excitement at throwing flash bangs at protesters adding, “Bring it in losers.” With his top response being, “You guys get all the cool stuff, huh.” The whole thread is practically an orgy of Trump sympathetic, anti-protester, chest-pounding, glorification of violence but I really hope it doesn’t get reported or deleted. It’s idiotic propaganda gold and a strong justification for actively standing against hateful Trump rhetoric and organizing Left community-defense.

As you can imagine, things got more intense at the actual rally. The protestors marched several miles towards the rally. The four of us got a ride for the last couple miles to the rally with a black woman and her son who was media but sympathetic to the protestors in part due to her friend getting shot by police. She was not let into the media corral despite having a press pass, she assumes because of her race. Going alone to the rally was a questionable tactical decision by us because we then found the four of us alone in a crowd of nearly 5,000 Trump-sympathetic white people and a shitload of visible police, mounted police, secret service, undercovers, snipers, etc. We were still wearing our bandanas and just generally sticking out due to our visible and invisible: queerness, transness, non-whiteness, poverty, literal dirtiness, etc. We took off our bandanas and walked around, trying to take it all in. It was a big outdoor space with a giant man-made fountain in the middle juxtapozed against a flurry of bourgeoisie attempts to hide the fact that this is a desert such as implanted grass and trees. Despite the vast space, it was pretty packed facing the landing where Trump’s helicopter was supposed to, but didn’t, land. We looked at the Trump buttons and paraphernalia with such gems as, “Bomb the hell out of ISIS!” and “Hot chicks for Trump!” We wandered around until we caught up with the mass of protesters around the other side of a big open outdoor space with a giant man-made fountain in the middle, where the rally was being held.

We felt scared, honestly…. It was way more daunting than I think any of us anticipated. Everyone was staring at us, especially at the non-white member of our group, even shielding and trying to protect their kids from them. The protesters made another tactical error by pushing themselves into the very middle of the rally thus completely cutting us all off from escapes and surrounding us by jeering and vocalizing threats of violence. Constant yells of “Go home!” were directed at all of the Latin@ members of our group. Even a sparse few Latino’s stood in the Trump crowd screaming toxically, “Legal Mexican’s for Trump!” There were lots of confederate flags including one guy with the whole back of his shaved head covered in a confederate flag tattoos and his girlfriend’s full, matching upper back confederate flag tattoo. On the middle of his sweaty, sun-burned head was also a tattoo of that poor spiraled far-right snake that apparently keeps getting tread on. This is the point to remember again that this is a conceal carry state with a very active far/alt-Right militia and white supremacist movement and we are in their territory, not ours, and massively outnumbered. I felt as if any altercation could quickly escalate into one of us getting shot. There had also been a call to arms by various far/alt-Right militia groups and umbrellas organizations. One group called the Lion’s Guard (Which although referring directly and intentionally to a Mussolini quote is also the name of a Lion King cartoon show) to subvert protestors at Trump rallies and specific calls to action regarding suppressing and intimidating the organizers this event. Trump doesn’t just condone violence, he encourages it by offering to pay legal fees of people who beat up protesters claiming that one black-lives matter protester needed to be, “roughed up a little.” He said, “if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ‘em, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell- I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise.” This is the same tactics that Mussolini and Hitler used during their rises to power. They encouraged violence against any naysayers which is why many are comparing this aspect of Trump’s presidency to the “brownshirts and blackshirts” they utilized.

I have never felt more so what a Klan rally might feel like. This feeling was only exacerbated when two well known, skinny, white-boy, local nazi skinheads began making the rounds and circling us like prey and trying to start fights with people with loaded and triggering rhetoric. They both had full arm tattoos with skinhead symbology including the runes and a giant iron cross with a swastika on it. They were at the mosque protests and also put out a video claiming that they helped organize them. Trump’s history of violence instigation and ethnic nationalism makes him an easy lead to embolden white supremacists.

I mostly hung out around the back of our group, keeping an eye out to quell fights, as we were so drastically out gunned and out manned. Despite the constant screaming between protesters and Trumpers, and a few small scuffles, the rally went pretty well with no serious injuries or fights. The dicier situations were after the rally and in the parking lots. It was after Trump’s speech, of which I heard very little over the screams, and the crowds started to disperse was when the individual and more scattered fights started breaking out. We were very aware of the need to not leave alone, for fear of being recognized by either the police or a drunk and armed Trumper. Third mistake of organizing was that we did not have a good exit plan, so it was really messy. The skinheads were prowling and the cops were ignoring them. At one moment I even considered pointing them out to the undercovers but then realized I’d rather not cooperate with them at all and besides, they know skinhead symbology, if they wanted to monitor them they already would’ve been.

As we started trying to organize to leave, my core group met up with this Latino guy that we had met earlier at the action. He was clearly shaken up. We gathered up around him and ask what was wrong and he explained that he was trying to leave in the parking lot with his family and someone jutted their car in front of his and got out and pulled a gun on them. We consoled and surrounded him for protection as best as we could and tried to help him look for the other people in his crew that he came to find. Once he found them he split off from us and our four-person crew started to leave. As we walked away, I tried to avoid eye contact with the Nazi dudes as they are still swooping and hunting. These three big white guys walked past us staring at us heavily. The older among them says to the others, “Hey boys, you think we should take a few of ‘em out?” My girlfriend blew him a kiss and we walk away.

We meet up with the African-American woman and her son who was doing media work that we had met earlier and she offers us a ride to our car. She got side-tracked though when a white boy, about 16 years old, hocked a loogie at us. She went over to confront him and his mother, but also just tried to explain to them the hatred that she and her son had felt that day. They traded words for awhile while I hung out with her son. I asked him what he thought of the rally. He just responded, “Baaaaad.” Although I felt fear on behalf of the boy, his mom was looking out for him and she wanted him to experience this historical moment first hand. He’d literally just gotten back from Disneyland.

We got a ride back to our car. I gave the boy a Gatorade from our trunk and gave his mom a squeeze. We all took a deep breath and tried to start to comprehend the 12 hours of day we just had.

On Violence, Liberals, and Freedom

In the aftermath of this protest people, from all sides have come out critiquing us for protesting or for protesting in the ways we did. During the rally, I had countless trumpers come up to me with their opinions about our actions. Their was this one older woman in particular who insisted that we were disrupting her freedom to watch the rally. I pointed out to her “But those are literal neo-nazis right there!”, to which she responded, “They’re just exercising their freedom.” This exchange resonated as the complete failure of the freedom discourse at its normative level. Aside from the fact that she was literally defending neo-nazis, it struck me how biased her misunderstanding of freedom was. She wanted freedom for the skinhead but not freedom for the protester. She wanted convenient freedom. When I describe doing what I consider to be anti-racist/anti-fascist work many people have claimed that I as well want freedom for myself but not for those with whom I disagree. It’s a misunderstanding though. I’m super pro-free speech but as a non-statist actor it’s also my freedom to stand against violence and violent rhetoric. I also recognize a hierarchy of violence, am aware of multiple forms of violence, and believe in taking practical steps to undermine violence.

In terms of the hierarchy or degrees of violence, certain types of violence, such as white supremacy, have a degree of structural backing that gives them tread and greater impact. Violence does not exist in a political vacuum. That is why someone killing a cop goes to jail but a cop killing someone gets a vacation. That is why calling someone a “cracker” goes up the hierarchy of power and is not the same as using a slur for an oppressed group down the ladder.

This brings me to multiple forms of violence. Direct physical violence is not the only form of violence. Structural violence such as white privilege or statist militarization is still violence. Symbolic violence such as wearing a swastika is still violence. There is verbal, emotional, cultural, etc., the list goes on. These forms of violence can still exist in various hierarchies of violence, but still count as violence, and, again, does not exist in a political vacuum. So while shouting anti-white power slogans could be considered violence to white-supremacists, it would take an extreme perversion of logic to miss the implications of how much more severe shouting anti-black or brown slogans are. We were surrounded by very explicit anti-black and brownness. A swastika tattoo is not punching someone in the face; it’s punching them in the historical trauma which is in some ways worse. Not only is it meant to trigger, it’s also meant to incite and encourage further violence. This is why certain degrees of violence should be considered as viable tactics in undermining a larger and structurally-supported threat. Aside from just words or chants, this goes even farther when we realize that Nazis marching in the street etc. is so strongly correlated not only with violence, but also with literally building an army, that it needs to be shut down swiftly. So goes for leaders who create safe spaces for Nazis and white supremacy in general. When Trump encourages violence against protestors, when his fans assault protestors, when white supremacists are defended in his rally, it is time to consider that he is a viable threat to the safety of marginalized people and must be resisted as part of a larger process of transformation.

I agree with anarchists such as William Gillis when he wrote, “The only way we’re going to achieve a better world is with strategy, not magical moral energy that somehow makes everything better cuz gandhi particles. That strategy has to be *coherent* with our desired ends — we can’t just choose any willy nilly means like gulaging people into freedom — ends and means ARE interconnected, but they’re not 1:1. And part of ethics and morality is being intellectually vigilant. Not blinding ourselves to realities.” We should be exceptionally wary of violence and ratcheting effects and try to create prefigurative means evocative of the non-violent/non-repressive ends we desire, but this is not a 1:1 equation: we have to think about tactics and context. We already exist in a context of violence, just some forms of violence are accepted and others are frowned upon. There is, for instance, a war on black bodies. That should not be in question at this point. So the minimum level of violence needed to protect black bodies should be considered ethical, justified, and tactical.

In terms of these specific anti-Trump protests, we again see the visible flourishing of white pride, homophobia, racism, and the like. It’s a breeding ground for toxic ideologies so interrupting hegemonic narratives with diverse counter-narratives is essential. This played out in, at times hilarious ways, like when one Trump supporter yelled, “Fuck Hillary!” Out of an oddly common sentiment that we were somehow paid for by Hillary. A protestor in the crowd responded, “Yeah I agree. Fuck Hilary!” The Trump supporter was so confused that he stopped chanting. We as protesters didn’t have one set narrative. We constituted a vast array of political ideas and identities making it harder to sustain a hegemonic narrative in our presence.

Alternatively, we have a largely white, privileged, liberal contingent who condemns all forms of violence and through this condemnation, ignores context, history, and the current violence faced by others outside of their socio-economic statuses. Obviously we have non-white and marginalized anti-violence activists as well, and I support the importance of those activists and means. Personally though, I advocate for a sense of contextual perspective and community-protection and posit that not suppressing someone who is actively committing a larger violence is actually co-signing their violence. A friend of a friend, recently mentioned that he would never punch a Klansmen because he doesn’t want to ‘stoop to their level’ and be violent. To say that you wouldn’t stand against the Klan because you don’t want to be violent is to misunderstand violence. White supremacy is systemic and sure, your average skinhead is a poor manipulated foot soldier (plug for counter-recruitment here) but white pride is itself already violent and worse, it’s structurally-backed violence. In this protest the undercover sheriff’s literally ignored the neo-nazis and tried to arrest protesters. It’s similar to the woman who was defending the freedom of the skinheads to express their white pride. It’s never a freedom if it’s violating the freedom of innocents or coming at the expense of those marginalized.

With this understanding we can see inaction, when you have the power to do something, as what it is, a form of violence. That being said, violence is a failed ends. Antifas who just fetishize violence are pains in the ass with problematic ideologies. Wherever possible transformative structural and cultural solutions should be sought. The entrenched worldviews, coupled with structural conditioning, of racism and the like are mental viruses which makes the agent extra-susceptible to confirmation bias and more shut-off from alternative paradigms. To be able to hold the deeply nuanced contradictions and worldviews of those we oppose, we can learn to transform both our thoughts and theirs. This is not a happy liberal ending. The work is still rough, painful, and at times even violent but, we can pursue intellectual and emotional vigilance and uproot our own mental viruses of dogmatic certainty that make us susceptible to propaganda. We can then simultaneously take active stands against marginalization and hatred, in solidarity with those who need it most. We can never do this alone.