Archive for category: TRUTHOUT

We all love a good bargain, and are sometimes willing to go to great lengths to secure one. But for a few hours at Woodbine*, an experimental hub in Ridgewood, Queens, New York, thrifting was entirely free and there wasn’t a catch. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a flood of people showed up to the space 30 minutes before its “Free Store” event was supposed to begin.

At a free store, people are encouraged to bring things they no longer need, but are too nice to throw away, and take things they want or need without any questions asked. It’s meant to be an experimental space for building an economy based in solidarity, not sales or barter, and to harness the immense amounts of waste and excess generated in capitalist economies. Pop-up models encourage people to congregate in one space on a particular day, and the momentary disruption of norms generates a buzzy atmosphere that can be conducive for building community.

Putting the free store together was fairly simple. Most of us involved in organizing it met through Woodbine’s soccer teams. We transitioned from running around, scoring goals and high-fiving each other on the field to running around with heaps of donated clothes, toys, home goods and electronics that our neighbors donated. We plastered flyers in English, Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin around the neighborhood and on Woodbine’s social media accounts to spread the word. We borrowed tables and clothing racks from Mil Mundos, a bookstore curated to celebrate Black, Latinx and Indigenous heritage in neighboring Bushwick that frequently hosts clothing swaps and distributions with free items, and brought leftover items to other community-based groups after the free store ended. During the free store, the atmosphere was fairly chaotic and crowded, and it was difficult to stay on top of organizing donations. But, overall, the event didn’t require that much time or labor.

I overheard someone saying, “They are subverting the store,” which is exactly what we were trying to do. Under the logic of capitalism, you only deserve to “make a living” if you sell yourself and your labor power to a capitalist. At a free store, the criteria for participating is simply being alive.

People who benefit from the current system — landlords, police, politicians and bosses — rely on mass media and our schooling systems to deceive and dull the population into believing capitalism is the most efficient way, or the only viable way of producing and distributing resources. As British philosopher Mark Fisher famously wrote, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” But what currently exists is one way of organizing a society of many, and it isn’t serving most of us. An ability to imagine and create non-hierarchical alternatives threatens the authority of people benefiting from the current system. At a free store, we can begin to glimpse a world where everything is free and built on voluntary exchange of labor, resources and knowledge.

The free store concept is far from new. Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, “a street gang with analysis,” organized free stores in New York City during the late 1960s. The Diggers, a radical theater group, popularized them in San Francisco and New York City with dramatic flair and humor. For them, everything was theater and people were actors who could create the reality they wished to see together. “When materials are free,” they wrote in 1968, “imagination becomes currency for spirit.” Young Black revolutionaries involved with the Diggers opened a Black People’s Free Store in the Fillmore ghetto of San Francisco in 1967. One of the organizers, Roy Ballard, explained how the free store was opening the minds of people in his community in an interview with the publication Venture:

Our thing in the store is not the black and white issue — we’re far from that. Here in the store we welcome everybody. The only way we’re going to bring about change is people communicating. Once a person closes his mind, that’s it. Things become one-sided. Brother, I’m going to keep my mind open! This store is bringing about a hellava lot of wisdom. It’s helping a lot of young ones on the street who are coming in here. And it’s opening their minds to where it’s really at. That’s our whole thing here in this store. Opening minds — to share, to make understanding, to feel for each other. What I’m thinking is what would happen if black people could disaffiliate from money altogether.

More recently, anarchists started organizing “Really Really Free Markets” (RRFMs) throughout the 2000s, which tend to be pop-up events, across the United States. These markets never completely dwindled but, if media coverage is to be an accurate benchmark of organizing efforts, there seems to have been an uptick in RRFMs over the past couple years. Collectives are organizing them in cities large and small, from Louisville, Kentucky; Corvallis, Oregon; Avon, North Carolina; Ypsilanti, Michigan; Tempe, Arizona; New Paltz, New York; Athens, Georgia; Jersey City, New Jersey; and in many other locations.

From 2015 to 2019, some of the only media coverage of “free stores” was Amazon’s so-called free stores, which are just dystopian stores that rely on automation and surveillance to bill customers without a physical checkout line.

In 2022, anti-capitalist free store spaces seem to be gaining a resurgence alongside the mutual aid networks that have blossomed out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A network of free community fridges in Atlanta that arose during the pandemic supported the opening of The Grocery Spot, a pay-what-you-can grocery store, in March 2022. Groceries are free for anyone who can’t pay, and community members with means for paying or donating are encouraged to do so. It’s also a community space that hosts bonfires, film screenings and holiday events in their lawn. They’ve seen an influx of shoppers during the summer months in the midst of rising inflation. Meanwhile, up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a nonprofit relied on increased food donations during the pandemic to kickstart the opening of two free grocery stores.

Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Richmond (MAD RVA) is renting a space to open a free store this fall in Northside, a lower-income neighborhood and a food desert in Richmond, Virginia. Originally, throughout much of the pandemic, the collective ran a free supply drive out of a warehouse where volunteers ran a hotline and delivered requested items to people’s homes. But Tamanna Sohal, an organizer with MAD RVA, told me that they received feedback from supply drive participants that they wanted more agency over the items they received. The supply drive model was less able to cater to individualized needs because the group had a limited inventory and people weren’t able to select the brands they wanted. MAD RVA organizers anticipate having a much larger inventory at the free store, and people will be able to select what they want or need at the space.

“A big part of what we want to do with the free store is prioritize people’s choices in what they’re getting and their autonomy,” she said. “We’re also prioritizing accessibility in terms of location, how our shelves are set up and what we’re offering.”

Sohal also emphasized the collective’s desire to facilitate connections and relationships in the neighborhood. “People can come in with their kids and sit down or sit outside and rest and chat. We’ve been talking about having a really big, comfy seating area, and sitting options outside,” she said. “We know the power of talking to your neighbors, and we’re hoping that having a physical free store will allow conversations between neighbors so that people are letting people around them know that this resource exists. Maybe neighbors will pick up groceries for each other.”

In Chicago, several collectives opened a volunteer-run free store at a church in Rogers Park during the pandemic, and they recently moved into their own space. Neighbors came together to build a do-it-yourself free store outdoors in Clinton Hill, Gowanus and in Ujamaa in New York City. In January 2022, mutual aid organizers opened a free store in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And a married couple used their retirement savings to open a free store and a community fridge in Dublin, Virginia, a town with just over 2,500 people in 2021.

“There’s a really high rate of poverty in Pulaski County, and in a lot of Southwest Virginia and its really common for a lot of places that do offer help to do a lot of means testing and put other barriers in-between people and help,” Hazel Wines, an organizer involved in the free store told VPM News. “And we wanted to remove as those barriers and just be a place where people could help each other. It’s not just food, it’s not just clothes…. Everyone deserves to live a life of dignity and we want to help provide that.”

All of these efforts ultimately follow in the footsteps of some Indigenous societies, like the Navajos, that reproduced communal living for centuries. Colonizers attempted to destroy Indigenous communalism on Turtle Island through warfare and by enacting laws like the Dawes Act, which enforced private property and dissolved 90 million acres of Indigenous communal landholdings.

Indigenous communalism underpinned the culture and economy at Standing Rock in 2016 by offering massive tents full of free items, like sleeping bags and blankets. Meals were cooked and served collectively for free. (One attendee who spent several weeks at Standing Rock expressed shock after being asked to pay for food again at a store once he left the camp.)

Despite centuries of colonialist violence, cooperation is still a glue that holds societies together. When we are invited to a dinner party, we may bring a dish over. If it’s raining outside, we give our friends an umbrella. We cooperate with colleagues at our workplaces every day. As the late anthropologist David Graeber and political theorist Andrej Grubacic wrote, “[C]ommunism is not an abstract, distant ideal, impossible to maintain, but a lived practical reality we all engage in daily, to different degrees, and that even factories could not operate without it — even if much of it operates on the sly, between the cracks, or shifts, or informally, or in what’s not said, or entirely subversively.” Free stores embody these nascent communistic impulses, pulling them out of the informal cracks and into the public sphere.

As isolated, sparse units, free stores lack the resiliency and resources needed to build power on a scale needed to challenge the capitalist economy. But what if free stores spread in a given city to include 10, 20, or 30 hubs, and what if they mutually supported each other, while coordinating with other grassroots organizers, farmers, builders, and designers who were willing to contribute to their talents and resources to the projects? A well-coordinated network of free store hubs could begin to act as building blocks for moving beyond the capitalist economy and toward one that we co-produce together.

*The author has been involved with Woodbine since June 2021.

I have this book coming out. It’s about the disabled future, about how most of the world will be disabled soon, and how disabled people kept each other and other people alive during COVID. I have tour dates. They’re all online. Because COVID. Because COVID is still here. Because every week, 90 percent of the country is in high or substantial uncontrolled community transmission — the whole country is blood red on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) map. Because 400-500 people a day are still dying of COVID in the U.S., and long COVID is the third-most common neurological disorder. For all of these reasons, having in-person events would feel like inviting my disabled fan base to a slaughterhouse. I have every booster that exists, and I’m still immunocompromised and not hopping on 19 planes in a row.

Yet every time I post, people — radical people, “movement” people — say, “Oh see you in L.A./Atlanta/Chicago!” And I have to say, “All events are virtual. Remember that? Virtual events? The accessible kind, with CART (real time captioning, making events accessible to people with a variety of disabilities and neurodivergence) and American Sign Language (ASL)? How did you forget so quickly?”

I’ve started calling the time we live in “The Great Forgetting.” Some call it “The Great Gaslighting.” Both are true.

By these terms, I mean the immense, on-purpose effort by the state to throw down the memory hole the fact that the last two years of the pandemic happened. The CDC switching its easiest-to-find map from the accurate community transmission map to one that shows the whole country in (fake) happy low-risk green. Biden saying offhandedly that “the pandemic is over” even as thousands of people die every week and groups like Long COVID Justice and #MEAction organize — from bed and in die ins in front of the White House — demanding that the U.S. declare long COVID a public health emergency. The state is acting like a bad boyfriend, a gaslighting partner telling you that nothing you remember is real. That’s not new, but the intensity level has reached a new high.

It shouldn’t surprise me. Of course, the state hates disabled people, even now that there are so many more of us. Of course, federal, state and local governments for the most part don’t want to pay for guaranteed income or disability payments or paid care work or accommodations. They want us to die slowly so they can save money.

The powers that be also badly want us to forget that there was a moment — a long, two-year moment — when people felt that everything could be different, that revolutionary change was possible. Many disabled people noted that the pandemic made for a “cripping of the world” — where for perhaps the first time in a while, the world, gripped by a global pandemic, dwelled in disabled reality. Remember how, for a minute, so many forms of access disabled people had long fought for were here because abled people needed them? Remember virtual work, pandemic pay for frontline workers, online school, online events with captioning and ASL, teaching people how to freaking wash their hands and stay home when they were sick, the ability to reschedule an appointment or a plane ticket when you got sick and not get yelled at or charged a fee, and immunocompromised shopping hours? These waves of access, mixed with mass resistance in the streets and at home against anti-Black, white supremacist violence, made for a powerful-ass two years. If that kind of mass access, resistance and mutual aid could happen, revolutionary change could happen too. The state wants us to forget that.

The thing is, though, it’s not just the state. It’s been wild watching people who are ostensibly leftist say, We’re following the CDC guidelines, and drop masking, rapid testing and other safety requirements. Two years or more of rioting in the streets and suddenly, we’re doing what the government says we should do? One minute, we were masking; the next minute, you do you. One minute some abled people are experimenting with “WE keep US safe,” the next minute, every club in 2022 was like, “Masks encouraged but not required. You do you!”

By wild, I mean painful. By painful, I mean heartbreaking. By heartbreaking, I mean every disabled person I know is in a state of grief and shock since April, when many mask mandates in airlines, public transport and public life were abruptly dropped by federal and state governments in the U.S., as everyone else abandons solidarity to “move on.” One minute, a lot of people were masking during Omicron; the next minute, everyone was back to breathing on each other on the bus — and we weren’t safe anymore. We increasingly feel pushed out of public life, as events and spaces from urgent cares to ERs to conferences say, “Oh, we’re not doing virtual anymore.” We’re talking about it, but it feels like no one else is. And many of us feel incredibly alone in our grief, and in the disorientation of feeling like we’re the only ones stubbornly remembering.

Maybe I was naive. I thought many people, while hating the pandemic, liked some of the access features it brought it. I still think that. I also think that most people at heart must care about others and want us all to stay alive. But internalized ableism is real. A lot of people have had a brush with what it’s like to live a disabled life these last two years, and a lot of them want to forget it as quickly as possible. They’d rather expose themselves to all kinds of harm than continue to be disabled like us — mask, discuss risk, stay home, pass public policies for the safety of all. Unfortunately, this puts us all, but especially us, at risk. So many abled people — including abled members of the left; including abled queer, trans, Black, Indigenous and/or People of Color on the left — want to forget disability.

Sometimes forgetting is the only way people can find to survive. In the face of few to no mass public rituals or acknowledgment for the millions of people who died from COVID, combined with almost zero collective survival public health strategies, I understand that denial is many people’s only accessible survival strategy. What we face is completely overwhelming and brain-bending.

I wish I could pretend everything was fine, too, sometimes. But I lost a lot of people and I can’t forget their deaths, or what we all went through — and continue to go through. And I also have somehow made it through 2.5 years of pandemic as an immunocompromised disabled person without getting COVID, and I want to keep that winning streak.

People like to say survivors of sexual violence make up false memories. But it’s far more common for people who perpetuate abuse to make up a false reality where they did nothing wrong. It’s easier that way. They don’t ever have to face it. There’s a similar logic with The Great Forgetting. If the powers that be tell us nothing happened and nothing is happening forcefully enough, they can make it true. We will always have been at war with Eastasia.

I believe many people’s denial does not just stem from ableism, but also from the huge un-composted mass of collective grief we find ourselves in. There has been no mass public mourning, no Vietnam Veterans Memorial for everyone we lost to COVID. Millions of people are dead, and we have mourned privately; some of us haven’t been able to mourn in ways we need to — funerals, ceremonies — at all. Most of us have had to go back to work and suck it up, holding all our dead in our hearts. The beat goes on. We’re supposed to go shopping.

However, in the words of June Jordan, “We always have choices. And capitulation is only one of them.” And in the words of South African freedom struggle activists, as quoted by bell hooks, “Our struggle is a struggle of memory against forgetting.”

We, as disabled revolutionaries, are disabled memory keepers. And our refusal to forget, both our dead and the work of our survival, is part of our revolutionary work. We live in a world that always wants us dead, and wants to erase that we existed after they kill us. As disabled revolutionaries — particularly disabled, sick, Deaf, neurodivergent BIPOC — our refusal to forget our dead, our losses and our survival is an act of resistance.

And I know we will keep remembering — through speaking out stories, shouting out our dead, archiving our work, making accessible gatherings and protests and homes and communities no matter what.

But I also call on the abled left to not abandon us. We need each other to stay alive. You may be us, or may become us quite quickly. We are you. We are all each other’s beloved community. Disabled Korean organizer and writer Mia Mingus recently wrote, “Why doesn’t ‘We keep us safe’ apply to COVID and monkeypox?” It does. The last two and a half years — and our lives before and after this moment — prove to us that we are all we have to keep each other alive, cared for, loved and home.

I call on the not-primarily disabled Left to make good, lifegiving, disabled wisdom choices, to continue to insist on access that the past two years proved possible. You have the power to insist on masking, community safety strategies for COVID and virtually accessible events, and to invest in community care. There must be support for disabled activists continuing to do lifesaving disabled activism, mutual aid and survival work who are exhausted and need and deserve support.

Some troll on my Twitter the other day said, “No one’s gaslighting you- you can mask all you want.”

Many people are gaslighting all of us. And I want so much more than to be told, “Oh, if you don’t feel safe/ it’s not accessible, just stay home!” I want to live in the full world, like every disabled person. I want to be able to leave my apartment without fearing death, go to a party, have casual sex. I want to live in the world, not my safe immuno-bubble, for the rest of my life.

More than that, I want to finish what we started. I want us not to abandon the revolutionary dream some of us touched and made in 2020-2021 — of a world where community care, mutual aid for collective survival and a refusal to obey are not just possible, they make up the bones of the new world.

Many, many disabled people feel what a coalition of Chicago disability justice organizers wrote in their “Letter to the Chicago Party Scene” in April 2022:

We don’t want to return to normal. We want to dream and imagine a less ableist future where we listen to each other and take care of each other. We want to build spaces that work for everyone, and we want this for ourselves and for our future generations of queers…. We want to move slower and with intention. More people are becoming disabled every day, and we need Disability Justice dreams to hold us and guide us.

Join us. We can still make that other world that is possible, but only if we all do the work. Let’s not abandon the dream. Let’s make it happen.

Planned Parenthood Arizona on Friday night vowed that its fight to protect reproductive healthcare in the state was “far from over” after a judge lifted a decades-old injunction which had blocked an anti-abortion rights law dating back to 1864 — before Arizona was even established as a state — and allowed the ban to be enforced.

Pima County Superior Court Judge Kellie Johnson said in her ruling that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which affirmed the constitutional right to abortion care, had been the basis for barring the 1864 law from being enforced. Since Roe was overturned in June, she said, the injunction should be annulled.

Johnson’s decision will “unleash [a] near-total abortion ban in Arizona,” said Planned Parenthood Arizona, with the law including no exceptions for people whose pregnancies result from rape or incest. Under the law, which was first passed by Arizona’s territorial legislature and then updated and codifed in 1901, anyone who helps a pregnant person obtain abortion care can be sentenced to up to five years in prison.

Today, The Pima County Supreme Court lifted the injunction that suppressed an archaic near- total abortion ban in Arizona.
Our lawyers are evaluating next steps in the case, and we will update our patients and community as soon as we have more information. pic.twitter.com/Hy1ncVzL9C

— Planned Parenthood Arizona, Inc. (@PPArizona) September 24, 2022

The law does include an exception for “a medical emergency,” according to The New York Times, but as Common Dreams has reported, such an exception in practice has already resulted in a Texas woman being forced to carry a nonviable pregnancy until her health was deemed sufficiently in danger before a doctor provided care.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs told the Times that “medical professionals will now be forced to think twice and call their lawyer before providing patients with oftentimes necessary, lifesaving care.”

In a statement on Twitter, Hobbs vowed to “do everything in my power to protect” abortion rights in Arizona, “starting by using my veto pen to block any legislation that compromises the right to choose” if she becomes governor.

“No archaic law should dictate our reproductive freedom,” Brittany Fonteno, the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood Arizona, said in a statement. “I cannot overstate how cruel this decision is.”

The ruling was handed down a day before the state’s 15-week abortion ban, which was signed by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey in March, was set to go into effect. Although abortion care had remained legal in Arizona after Roe was overturned on June 24, it has been largely unavailable as medical providers waited to see whether Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s motion to lift the injunction on the 1864 law would succeed.

Johnson’s ruling made Arizona the 14th state to ban nearly all abortions following the overturning of Roe. Earlier this month, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced his proposal to pass a nationwide forced-pregnancy bill that would ban abortion care at 15 weeks of pregnancy.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Saturday called the ruling “catastrophic, dangerous, and unacceptable.”

“Make no mistake: this backwards decision exemplifies the disturbing trend across the country of Republican officials at the local and national level dead-set on stripping women of their rights,” she said.

Planned Parenthood Arizona, which had argued in court that medical professionals in the state should be permitted to continue providing abortions under the 15-week ban, said its “lawyers are evaluating next steps in the case.”

More than 1,000 members of the Teamsters union and allies turned out Tuesday in downtown Seattle to stand in solidarity with Amazon workers and to denounce the tech titan’s “union-busting tactics and dangerous labor practices.”

In a rally coinciding with this week’s Teamsters Women’s Conference in Seattle, demonstrators gathered outside Amazon’s headquarters in the northwestern city holding signs with messages including “Amazon Hurts Workers,” “Organize Amazon,” and “Stop Union-Busting.”

A tweet by the union explained that its members “are taking action at Amazon HQ, fighting for more workplace protections in the warehouse and logistics industry, and defending workers from the unchecked exploitation of one of the world’s most dangerous employers.”

“It’s time to hold the white-collar crime syndicate known as Amazon accountable,” Teamsters added.

Sean M. O’Brien, general president of the 1.2 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said at the rally that “Amazon should be afraid — the Teamsters are here standing shoulder-to-shoulder with so many communities demanding change.”

Right Now: General President Sean M. O’Brien is rallying more than 1,200 #Teamsters outside of Amazon’s corporate headquarters in Seattle. Teamsters have a message for Bezos and his white-collar crime syndicate called Amazon: we are 1.2 million-strong, and we are coming for you! pic.twitter.com/wEqp3DimJV

— Teamsters (@Teamsters) September 20, 2022

“The Teamsters aren’t going away. Wherever Amazon abuses workers, we’ll be there,” he added. “Amazon will not bust unions and get away with it. Amazon will not churn and burn American workers and get away with it. This corrupt corporate giant must answer to the Teamsters now, and we’re ready for the fight.”

In a statement, Teamsters said that “Amazon workers across the country have been rising up and demanding better workplace standards, and communities are increasingly demanding Amazon be held accountable for its worker injury rate, contribution to pollution, and most recently, a string of worker deaths at warehouse facilities in New Jersey.”

Earlier this month, the Teamsters launched its Amazon Division to support workers at the e-commerce giant.

Faced with increased worker organizing — including the establishment of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) in New York in April and the first-ever work stoppage at the company’s air freight division in August — Amazon has fired organizers and unsuccessfully petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to overturn the ALU’s victory.

An open letter signed by over 200 humanitarian groups calls on world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly to urgently take action on world hunger, citing that one person dies of hunger every four seconds. We speak with Abby Maxman, president and CEO of Oxfam America, one of the letter’s signatories, who just returned from Somaliland, where a famine may be declared as early as next month. Climate change, COVID and conflicts such as the war in Ukraine are largely to blame for rising hunger, she says, and “those who are the least responsible are suffering its worst impacts.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: One person is dying of hunger every four seconds. That’s the warning from a coalition of humanitarian groups, who say global hunger is spiraling out of control. Oxfam, Save the Children and other groups say 345 million people are now experiencing acute hunger — double the number from 2019. Humanitarian groups from 75 countries sent an open letter to world leaders and high-level diplomats gathering this week for the United Nations General Assembly here in New York Ciy. This is the first U.N. General Assembly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and a key meeting Tuesday focused on how the war is contributing to skyrocketing levels of hunger. This is the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: At the outset of 2022, conflicts, COVID-19, the effects of the climate crisis had already driven more than 190 million people into acute food insecurity. According to the World Food Programme, President Putin’s brutal war of aggression in Ukraine may add 70 million people on top of that — an already staggering number becoming even more staggering.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as the United Nations is warning of a looming famine in Somalia, where a searing drought fueled by the climate crisis has withered crops, killed livestock and left nearly 8 million people, or half of Somalia’s population, in need of humanitarian assistance. The U.N. says millions more are at risk of hunger and famine across East Africa, including Kenya and Ethiopia.

For more on the world hunger emergency, we’re joined in New York by Abby Maxman, president and CEO of Oxfam America. She recently returned from a trip to Somaliland, where a famine may be declared as early as October. Oxfam is one of the signatories to an open letter submitted by over 200 NGOs to world leaders this week, calling on them to take immediate action.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Abby Maxman. Can you start off by laying out the scope of the problem and what you’re calling for?

ABBY MAXMAN: Thanks so much, Amy. Good to be with you.

Having just returned from Somaliland last week, I’m able to connect what we’re seeing in the lived, real lives of people and how they’re affected, and connect them with those global numbers you already outlined. Three hundred and forty-five million people are facing extreme hunger as a result of that confluence of climate, COVID and conflict — and that number, in and of itself, 345 million people, more than the entire population of the United States, and this in the 21st century.

Now, we know that we have been calling the alarm for several years. And we’ve had used our early-warning systems to trigger, to show — that have showed drought has continued to erode the lives and livelihoods of pastoralist and agropastoralist communities. Someone I saw in Somaliland, the stories were very similar. A woman named Safia, mother of eight, divorcée, who had stayed in her community as long as she could over the past several years, and ultimately went to a displaced persons camp near Burao called Durdur after she had lost 90% of her livestock. And hyenas were literally circling her family and her community as the livestock weakened. They had no choice but to move.

What is so egregious about this is the cause of this is climate change. The increasing frequency and ferocity of intense climatic shocks, droughts, floods and heat waves, that we’re observing from Pakistan to Puerto Rico and, of course, across East Africa, are evidenced in all of the news. But we know it’s people like Safia and the 74-year-old farmer who said this is the worst drought he has ever seen in his lifetime, they are down to one meal a day. And they need and deserve our help.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Abby Maxman, you mentioned conflict, as well. To what degree has the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected the food supply, especially to the Global South? And also, to what degree, from your sense, is it the corporations taking advantage of situations? We see the secretary-general mentioning oil companies or energy companies exploiting the current crises. Your sense of these two things — the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and general super profits sought by some international companies?

ABBY MAXMAN: Yeah, Juan, thanks for pointing those two things out. Yes, the war in Ukraine has exacerbated an already dire situation. The economic consequences of COVID and the climate crisis have been supercharged by the war in Ukraine. Prices have gone up exorbitantly. And people in Somaliland who I was talking to and seeing were spending more than 90% — 90% — of their income on food just to survive, and they were using coping strategies, down to one and two meals a day. That just is one anecdote of many about the impacts, direct and indirect, of the global crisis and conflict and its impact on those in East Africa and Somaliland.

Your point on fossil fuel profit and others, it can’t be understated. It is extraordinary that as humanity faces this existential crisis of climate, that there is still more incentive by fossil fuel companies to destroy our planet and people than to save lives and to save the planet. Now, we know that the oil and gas industry has enjoyed staggering profits as they have wrought havoc on the planet. They’ve been amassing $2.8 billion a day. That’s more than a trillion dollars a year over the last 50 years. And just let me contrast that against the fact that 18 days of fossil companies’ profit could cover the entire U.N. humanitarian appeal for 2022, which has been woefully underfunded.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you also mentioned that you were in Somaliland recently. Particularly, could you talk about the situation in Africa? Obviously, there are major conflicts still raging there, especially in Ethiopia. Your sense of the impact of those regional conflicts in terms of hunger and poverty in Africa?

ABBY MAXMAN: Yeah, Juan. Well, that confluence of those toxic three Cs — COVID, climate, conflict — are just supercharging the situation. And those who are least responsible are suffering its worst impacts. So, we need to make sure — we know that when humanitarian access is limited, that exacerbates people’s lives and livelihoods and the ability to get basics of their human rights — food, shelter, water, safety, protection. So, that is part of the cocktail, if you will, the toxic one, that people who — are experiencing, people like the countless pastoralists who are facing existential crisis to their lives, livelihoods, and that of their ancestors. They have rights and dignity that we need to protect and support in crisis. And the international community has a responsibility and a moral duty to act. And this week, in New York, around the U.N. General Assembly, we are calling on those in power, member states and policymakers, to take action now.

We need to do three big things. Save lives — and there’s a number of ways of doing that: make sure we resource the humanitarian appeals and get the resources to people who need them, support local organizations, women-led organizations. Second, we need to build resilience. We cannot repeat this pattern of pulling resources to respond to crises that we know are coming. And we need to invest in both now. It’s an investment in the future. It’s an investment in protection. It’s an investment in promoting lives and livelihoods and dignity. And third, we need to invest in that future, beyond the resilience. We need to double climate adaptation funds. We need to make sure that special drawing rights are modified so that countries are relieved from debt and debt burden. And we need to fund nutrition and other fundamental issues that need to be supported at this time.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about the growing inequality in the world and how this relates to the crisis of hunger around the world. According to a report just released by the investment bank Credit Suisse, the number of “ultra-high-net-worth” individuals, UHNW people, also increased exponentially last year to a record 218,200. Can you comment on this extraordinary rise in wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, while hundreds of millions are dying from hunger and hunger-related causes? And how must this be addressed?

ABBY MAXMAN: It must be addressed. And I appreciate there’s an acronym now, UHNW, though that’s sad, a sad fact that that needs to be called out. This is a failure in our economic system, a system that is broken and serving a privileged few. It’s not — it’s immoral, it’s wrong, and there’s an opportunity to fix it. It’s not happening by chance. It’s happening intentionally by those in power and political capture and those who are wreaking profits to benefit themselves.

There can be an opportunity to have a global wealth tax, to ensure that fossil fuel companies’ profits can be fairly taxed so that things like the U.N. humanitarian appeals, at a minimum, are funded. This is — nobody suffers. This is a race to the bottom versus a race to the top. And extreme inequality is harmful to all of society and all of humanity. It is very frustrating, it makes me very angry, to hear that, “Oh, there are no resources. That’s why we cannot save lives, build resilience and invest in the future.” That is not accurate. In the 21st century, there are enough resources to ensure the integrity and dignity of people’s lives and livelihoods and a more equal world. And there’s an opportunity to end extreme inequality by changing this failing economic system.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Abby Maxman, we thank you so much for being with us, president and CEO of Oxfam America, recently returned from a trip to Somaliland, where a famine may be declared as early as October.

Next up, Adnan Syed has been freed after spending 23 years behind bars. His case gained international attention when it was the subject of the podcast Serial. We’ll speak with the first attorney to represent him. Stay with us.

The Trump/MAGA 2022 blitzkrieg cited by President Joe Biden and so many others is for sure a multipronged attack with a clear goal — to obliterate democracy itself.

It’s now been two years since Steve Bannon vowed to “take over elections” and overthrow the “Deep State” — a government run by elected officials and civil servants dedicated to serving the public.

The oft-indicted Bannon instead has summoned a fascistic base that’s “hit the ground running,” demanding an iron fisted bureaucracy run by party loyalists bowing to Donald Trump’s every command. This reality is apparent in Bannon’s “precinct strategy,” in which he is pushing right-wing activists into positions of power at election boards and poll worker outposts throughout the U.S., where they can directly impact who can vote and how those votes are counted.

The dictatorial game plan embraces a wider range of attacks on our core institutions and democratic assumptions than even the president might imagine.

And there’s only one way to beat it: grassroots organizing from the progressive left.

Let’s count the ways the right wing is attacking democracy:

On January 6, 2021, the Trump/Bannon minions made clear that their “Stop the Steal” mob loves violence and sees outright murder as a legitimate way to trash an electoral outcome they can’t handle. “Just understand this: All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” Bannon said on his “War Room” podcast the night before. “It’s going to be moving. It’s going to be quick.” Also: “We’re converging on a point of attack,” he said in a different January 5 rant. “It’s coming to a head tomorrow.”
Gerrymandered MAGA state legislatures are now trashing the most directly democratic feature of American governance, the popular referendum, making it clear the public will means nothing to their “Christian” view of how we all must live.
The people of Florida twice voted to let people formerly convicted of felonies to vote. But following 20 arrests made in August by his new “Office of Election Crimes and Security,” Gov. Ron DeSantis has made it clear he will prevent eligible citizens (virtually all of them Black) from casting ballots, even after the state assured them they could vote, as per the mandate of the public referenda.
Ohio Republicans have shredded two state-wide referenda mandating un-gerrymandered districts while defying the state supreme court, which ordered the legislature to produce fair maps that conformed to the demands of the voters to be used in the upcoming 2020 midterms. With blatant contempt for the law and the will of the people, they’ve instead imposed maps on this fall’s election that are likely to unfairly sway a number of congressional seats while preserving a fascist supermajority in the state legislature. Similar things are happening in North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Texas, Arizona and elsewhere.
Multiple red states are also defying referenda on abortion, voting rights, and other core democracy issues, clearly signaling that the people’s mandates mean nothing to them.
GOP gerrymandering was enshrined in the 2010 elections, which were bought by the Koch Brothers and ignored by Obama Democrats, who failed to fight back. Thus far-right legislatures have metastasized throughout states that used to belong to the Confederacy, the “heartland,” Arizona, and elsewhere. These red legislatures are now spreading anti-democracy statutes aimed at enshrining dictatorial state-based regimes.
According to the Brennan Center, dozens of those legislatures have enacted scores of restrictions denying the right to vote and to have those votes counted, especially if cast by young citizens of color.
Those dictates include Georgia’s ban on giving food and water to people waiting in line to vote, as well as widespread attacks on the ability of people of youth and color to get ballots, to vote at all, to have access to drop boxes, to vote by mail, and many other simple mechanisms that make democracy work.
As Election Day approaches, legions of election-denying acolytes of Bannon and Trump are filling local election board posts that will let them intimidate eligible citizens and deny ballots to those they may not like. According to the Brennan Center, election workers have been facing death threats, “doxing” (publicization of their home addresses aimed to fuel harassment), outright violence and forced removals from their positions as part of an overall right-wing campaign to fulfill Bannon’s call to “take over elections.”
By severely restricting poll access, eliminating early voting, erasing voting stations and overall making it far harder for working people to vote, the MAGA autocrats impose de facto poll taxes on those who cannot afford to spend whole days waiting to cast a ballot… often only to face a Bannonite bully waiting to pitch it in a waste basket.
MAGA bullies have weaponized the death threat — in person, by phone, in writing — to terrorize election officials, school board members, teachers, FBI agents, district attorneys (and their families), destroying vital nodes of election protection.
By guaranteeing endless voting station foul-ups and needless delays, Bannonite poll workers now have the dangerous ability to impose impossibly long waits on citizens vulnerable to discrimination and disenfranchisement, especially as armed militias threaten them as they wait in long lines… where they will also be denied food and water.
In the now-pending Moore v. Harper case, the rightist U.S. Supreme Court could well seek to use the bogus “Independent Legislature Theory” to let gerrymandered MAGA/Trump democracy-hating state legislatures seize control of the Electoral College and usurp the public’s right to choose the next president.
Moore would enshrine for 2024 the Trump strategy of flooding Congress with fake state electors chosen by gerrymandered legislators to make Trump, DeSantis, or someone like them dictator for life, no matter who the voting public actually chooses.
The 2022 and 2024 elections will also be swarmed with fake “recounts” like those in Arizona in the 2020 election, challenging any pro-democracy outcomes MAGA forces dislike.

MAGA attempts to kill democracy are a backlash against demographic trends that could spell disaster for Republicans down the road if the mechanisms of U.S. democracy are left intact.

The big-picture reality is that all these desperate MAGA attempts to kill democracy are a backlash against demographic trends that could spell disaster for Republicans down the road if the mechanisms of U.S. democracy are left intact.

The Supreme Court overturn of Roe v. Wade — which gave a sudden rush of power to gerrymandered legislatures — has mobilized the nation’s voting majority in ways that have already overwhelmed right-wing constituencies in Kansas and numerous once-conservative congressional districts.

More than half the U.S. electorate is female. So is the voting public born after 1981. Our diverse multiracial LGBTQ-friendly Millennial/Zoomer constituency is so deeply attached to democracy that in 2020 it voted more than 3-2 to oust Trump. Based on Pew Research findings, among others, the numbers in 2022 and 2024 are projected to be even more progressive.

The rise of the Millennial/Zoomers is accompanied by a drastic drop in right-wing Evangelism and a “Christian” faith rooted in racial bigotry, sexual puritanism and Orwellian malaise.

Bannon and his MAGA minions are well aware that the rise of a diverse, tolerant and increasingly progressive voting constituency in this country means their hate-based movement is doomed.

Trump’s 2020 losing margin was in fact the third largest for any incumbent in U.S. history (behind only Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter). The January 6 hearings, the flood of crony indictments, even Ukraine’s stunning resistance, all portend a deeply human revulsion against the kinds of dictatorial regimes made all too real by the likes of Trump and Putin.

But the lead-up to 2022 also makes clear that corporate Democratic “business as usual” will not be sufficient to stop an armed, multilayered, anti-democratic coup.

So, what will?

On January 5, 2021 — the day before the Capital coup attempt — progressive democracy scored one of U.S. history’s most improbable electoral victories.

Guided by the Atlanta NAACP’s Ray McClendon and the computerized strategizing of Andrea Miller’s Center for Common Ground, grassroots campaigners in Georgia — mostly operating outside the Democratic Party — elected to the U.S. Senate the Black preacher Raphael Warnock and a young Jewish filmmaker named Jon Ossof.

The corporate Democrats’ ongoing attacks against young progressive candidates have underscored their aversion to necessary change, even in the face of overt fascism.

The earth-shattering dual runoff victories gave the Democrats their vital 50-50 Upper House tie.

But it would not have happened had the corporate party run its usual media-based campaign without the massive grassroots upheaval coordinated by Miller and McClendon. By all accounts, decisive turnouts in Democratic strongholds of youth and color made the difference.

Steve Bannon is well aware of all that. As evidenced by his “War Room” podcasts, he has been consistently demanding door-to-door “relational campaigning,” for establishing party storefronts in key right-wing strongholds, for a “boots-on-the-ground” takeover of the electoral apparatus, starting with poll workers, election board officials, secretaries of state.

The corporate Democrats’ ongoing attacks against young progressive candidates have underscored their aversion to necessary change, even in the face of overt fascism. Millions of donor dollars still sink into endless TV advertising that does less and less to shape electoral outcomes.

Despite a wave of angry activism among Millennial/Zoomers demanding the party move left, there’s little evidence its corporate gerontocracy is ready to embrace the generational wave that must happen if the Bannonites are to be defeated.

The Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade has aroused an army of angry American women and trans people.

But millions of pro-choice voters now marching toward the polls could be stopped in their tracks if the Bannonite take-over of the voting apparatus is not neutralized.

And the victories in those two Georgia Senate races aren’t likely to repeat unless the Democrats embrace the grassroots campaigning that opens the only sure route to saving our democracy.

A first-of-its-kind public database launched Monday estimates that burning all of the world’s known fossil fuel reserves would spew 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere — more than all of the emissions released since the Industrial Revolution.

The new database, known as the Global Registry of Fossil Fuels, also warns that emissions produced by combusting all of the planet’s oil, gas, and coal reserves would exceed the world’s dwindling “carbon budget” seven times over, underscoring the urgency of keeping fossil fuels in the ground to avert climate catastrophe.

“The science is crystal clear,” Inger Andersen, under-secretary-general of the United Nations and executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, said in a statement Monday. “The transition away from fossil fuel-powered economies is critical to the survival of people and the planet.”

“For this to happen we need to deploy every solution in our toolbox to decarbonize our economies,” Anderson added. “The Global Registry of Fossil Fuels is an important step in providing insights to policymakers and investors as we embark on a just transition away from fossil fuels.”

Led by Carbon Tracker and the Global Energy Monitor, the expansive new registry includes data for more than 500,000 oil, gas, and coal fields in 89 countries around the world, with the goal of providing transparency around fossil fuel reserves and production at a time when the climate crisis is fueling increasingly devastating extreme weather events across the globe, pushing up sea levels, and threatening to render large swaths of the planet uninhabitable.

“To date, climate change policy efforts have focused on reducing demand and consumption of oil, gas, and coal, but ignored the supply of those fuels,” notes Carbon Tracker, an independent think tank. “The Paris Agreement, for example, does not even mention fossil fuel production, despite the fact that such fuels account for over 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions.”

The organization goes on to observe that the newly released data shows “the U.S. and Russia each hold enough fossil fuel reserves to blow the entire global carbon budget, even if all other countries ceased production immediately.”

“Of the 50,000 fields covered by the registry,” Carbon Tracker points out, “the most potent source of emissions is the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia, which produces approximately 525 million tons of carbon emissions each year.”

Suneeta Kaimal, president and CEO of the Natural Resource Governance Institute, said in a statement that the new registry marks “a welcome step toward open access to vital information about fossil fuels.”

“A fair global energy transition requires greater transparency, better coordination between states, and stronger accountability for fossil fuel production,” said Kaimal. “Now citizens and investors everywhere have an essential tool to hold governments and companies responsible for their decisions.”

This story was published in partnership with Capital B News.

Nestled in Cleveland’s Industrial Valley, the intersection of Transport Road and Rockefeller Avenue holds the story of the city’s toxic past — and potentially poisonous future. Once the home of a massive oil refinery, the plot is now the potential new home of a $700 million jail in the heart of Cleveland’s industrial corridor.

County officials say the new jail is needed to provide a safer and better-resourced facility after more than one dozen detainees died in county custody in recent years. But the plan has ignited a movement to block construction of the jail on a site that the Ohio government once deemed too toxic for a state prison.

“It’s a slap in the face,” said Yvonka Hall, a member of the coalition to stop the Cuyahoga County Jail.

The potential Cleveland facility underscores a trend across the Midwest, which has seen a boom in jail construction in recent years. At least 23 jails — totaling $3.6 billion — have been either proposed or constructed on toxic and contaminated lands since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a Capital B analysis of local news reporting and federal data from the National Institute of Corrections. All but three of these facilities also were located in their state’s toxic air corridors, where the most harmful health risks from air pollution, including COVID-19 and cancer, are found.

The trend has unique implications for Black folks. In states where the 23 projects are located — Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin — Black people are nearly six times more likely than other racial groups to be incarcerated, making up more than 40 percent of those locked in jails and prisons.

The construction of detention facilities on contaminated lands reinforces an often forgotten form of environmental racism, said David Pellow, director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“It’s literally putting these folks in double jeopardy, putting them in an inherently unsafe place that causes health and mental health problems by design. Then you’re going to layer environmental, chemical toxicity on top of that,” Pellow said.

“This practice is an amplified case of environmental racism,” he added. “Because incarcerated folks are completely powerless, most people in society embrace this disenfranchisement and environmental violence.”

Jail Construction Booms

Those environmental health harms, ironically, have been partially funded by billions of dollars of federal COVID relief made available since 2020. At least nine of the counties found in Capital B’s analysis have either used or planned to use federal pandemic funds to build the detention facilities. Meanwhile, jails drove millions of COVID-19 infections during the first year of the pandemic, according to a 2021 study.

Across the country, counties in at least 18 states have used or want to use COVID funds to build new jails, a recent investigation by The Nation found.

In the U.S., jail spending is higher than ever, with the country spending more than $25 billion annually on county detention facilities, according to the latest nationally available data in 2017 — a 13 percent increase in spending over the previous decade.

Since 1970, America’s jail capacity has grown from 243,000 beds to roughly 1 million. An outsized amount of this growth has occurred in Midwestern states, according to a University of Nebraska study.

While municipalities have a documented history of building detention centers in heavily polluted areas from Los Angeles to New York, the Midwest has become a hub for the practice as industrial cities have moved through urban revitalization. With formerly industrial sites sitting empty for years and cash-strapped counties needing new sources of revenue, these locations have been rezoned for businesses, homes, and jails.

In Wayne County, Michigan, a new $600 million jail is sandwiched between a waste incinerator, a hazardous waste treatment plant, and the former site of an incinerator frequently cited for exceeding emissions standards. The practice is found in rural areas, as well. In Ohio’s Appalachian region, Coshocton County officials have proposed a $30 million, 120-bed jail on top of a former steel plant.

The construction of new jail facilities has grown in conjunction with poverty levels in formerly industrial communities. In Indiana, where poverty has increased by 30 percent since 2005 as more than 50,000 industrial jobs have disappeared, a recent investigation by the Vera Institute found that 40 percent of the state’s 92 counties are building jails or planning jail construction.

Building in these areas has come with significant environmental risks, particularly for Black Americans. In urban Dane County, Wisconsin, a new 1,000-bed, $175 million jail is being built in an area with the worst health risks from air pollution in the state. As of August 11, 53 percent of the county jail’s population was Black, despite the county being less than 6 percent Black.

Just 150 miles south of Cleveland, Franklin County, Ohio’s new 1,300-bed, $360 million jail — which the county wants to fund through COVID relief money partially — is built in an area where residents have a higher cancer risk from air pollution than 99 percent of the state and a lower life expectancy than 98 percent of the country.

With this trend, the connections between incarceration and environmental justice have been pushed to the forefront of a social movement. In Wayne County, Michigan, and Vigo County, Indiana, for instance, activists have attempted to use environmental laws to block the construction of new jails.

Cleveland’s Industrial Valley

Cleveland’s toxic past is hard to escape. With the Civil War raging on, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller purchased his first oil refinery in 1863, located at what is now known as 2700 Transport Road. Operating for four decades before the country had uniform pollution standards, this refinery, one of Rockefeller’s 21 oil refineries in Cleveland, was his company’s flagship.

Fast forward nearly a century to the early 2000s, the site, now an industrial waste recycling plant, was once again one of the city’s most environmentally toxic. For years, the industrial plant violated federal clean-air standards and racked up tens of thousands of dollars of fines before abandoning the operation altogether. After a high-octane gasoline tank explosion at the plant injured six workers, the plant’s operators, General Environmental Management, decided to close rather than pay $1.2 million to bring the site up to environmental, health, and safety standards.

Today, the site is home to a shipping container storage yard and elevated levels of diesel pollution. Given its current industrial use, it’s not surprising that, despite multiple rounds of environmental remediation, it is still home to levels of the cancerous chemical benzene and the climate change-causing methane gas at levels well above standards.

Hall, the activist involved in trying to stop the county jail, questions how placing the facility on a toxic site will solve the issue of inhumane conditions that county officials often highlight.

“You force people into areas with contaminated soil and high levels of particulate matter where they’re going to get sick, but won’t get the medical attention they need or the food they need,” said Hall, director of the Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition. “What does this do except set them up for a lifelong engagement in the justice system?”

Earlier this year, a county consultant claimed despite this site’s toxic past, it would not be viable to look for other sites and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per site on testing. It’s not a “scary property,” the consultant said, adding that placing a jail on the site would be an example of “normal urban redevelopment.”

The rhetoric, one that argues that most potential sites in urban areas will have some elements of environmental contamination, is dangerous, Pellow says. “If it is so hard to keep people safe and find land that is not toxic, then maybe we need to start looking beyond incarceration,” he said.

The state’s Environmental Protection Agency is expected to give its ruling on the potential site soon.

Cleveland’s environmental health impacts are wide-reaching. Although millions of dollars have been allocated to address lead exposure, children living in Cuyahoga County continue to have the country’s highest risk. In 2016, about 10 percent of kids in Cuyahoga County were exposed to lead at or above the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s standards. Within Cleveland city limits, children have lead poisoning rates nearly four times the national average.

This public health catastrophe, which is twice as widespread as the lead poisoning emergency caused by the Flint Water Crisis, is caused by soil contamination through the city’s industrial past and aging housing stock. In Cuyahoga County, 80 percent of the housing stock contains lead; in Cleveland, it is nearly 90 percent.

“We need to talk about the cyclical impact this has on our communities,” Hall said. “We’re poisoned starting as children, we find lead in our blood and bones. Then, it stops our ability to fully develop cognitively, causing poor decision-making.”

“Then, you add the fact that many of our communities are poor. They’ve created a jail and prison pipeline.”

The myth of U.S. democracy is on the verge of shattering.

In the region where cotton was king and prisons have succeeded the throne, this myth’s falseness is particularly evident in the U.S. South, the epicenter of the nation’s plantation and chattel slavery economy where the majority of Black/African-descended people still exist today. This region is also the land where Jim Crow law/segregation law once ruled and whose specter determines how resources are still allocated today. It’s also the region in which workers are least unionized and often hyper-exploited, with community members disproportionately subject to state violence such as incarceration or deportation.

Given these deathly conditions, the seats of power in our region are filled by those who benefit from these systems and uphold them, oppressing Southerners both historically and presently. In response, Southern freedom fighters have been fighting to build a grassroots democracy that is directly informed by the needs of our region, beginning at the local level. In so many ways, the efforts of Southern freedom fighters are an extension of freedom fighters in the Global South who share experiences of exploitation in the workplace, state violence and increased rates of incarceration, and have led organizing fights that inform strategies in the U.S. South. Formations like the Southern Movement Assembly are uniting U.S. Southern grassroots organizations with comrades across the Global South, particularly Central and South America, to develop a people’s democracy across colonial borders.

The Highlander Research and Education Center, where I work, is a Southern movement school, building democratic participation in the U.S. South and Appalachia through grassroots organizing, leadership development, and movement building. Highlander, which was established 90 years ago, has helped fuel the Southern fight for liberation against white supremacist capitalism.

Highlander supported the integration of labor unions in the 1930s and 40s, was a meeting place for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1950s and held trainings for civil rights activists during the sit-ins of the 1960s, and Highlander’s Education Director Septima Clark initiated the Citizenship Schools that expanded access to voting rights for Black people.

Although Highlander may be best known as the place where Rosa Parks trained before the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and where Martin Luther King, Jr. attended workshops that contributed to being red-baited as part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, we know that many of the same issues these freedom fighters battled continue to face our communities today.

My work as Highlander’s electoral justice researcher and educator seeks to build capacity for today’s Southern freedom fighters and their communities to govern themselves as we move toward building a truly democratic world beyond capitalism and white supremacy.

This work goes beyond maximizing participation in the U.S. electoral system. This work seeks to build Southern communities’ capacity to collectively define their problems, learn and understand current power structures as they exist, and develop collective solutions based on the experiences and abilities of each community member.

There is strategic value in engaging elections, but strategies for grassroots democracy must extend far beyond Election Day. While we understand that participating in this U.S. electoral system is presently inevitable, we also understand it is equally, if not more, vital to build parallel systems that are truly democratic and accountable to every community member.

Southern freedom fighters have been fighting to build a grassroots democracy that is directly informed by the needs of our region, beginning at the local level.

This work is reflected when we see People’s Movement Assemblies being utilized to build political power in cities such as Nashville, Tennessee; Jackson, Mississippi; Lexington, Kentucky; and so many more Southern cities.

People’s Movement Assemblies are grassroots, democratic gatherings inspired by the World Social Forum in 2003, where collective decision-making spaces facilitated action plans that sparked international protests, leading to the Global Day of Action that year with millions of people worldwide taking to the streets to speak out against the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. These assemblies are used by communities to collectively assess their problems, determine their strategies, assess who has the power to materially change their conditions, and create grassroots solutions to bring their vision for a life-affirming world into reality. The Southern Movement Assembly, a regional formation that has been seeking to build grassroots democratic power across the South for 10 years with Southern freedom fighters and their communities, is inviting Southern community organizations to utilize People’s Movement Assemblies in their work throughout Summer 2022 to build collective power, community governance and action plans for organizing throughout the Global South.

In the midst of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections for gubernatorial and legislative seats, Highlander has developed the People Practicing Power workshop intervention. During this workshop series, organizers and their community members are learning methods for self-protection during Election Day from racialized, fascist terrorism; the process for developing a policy demand into a law; and creating or joining efforts to build democratic institutions rooted in solidarity economy principles.

“Solidarity economy” is an umbrella term for institutions and practices that are grounded in mutualism, cooperation, democracy, pluralism and building a world beyond racial capitalism.

Examples of this include worker-owned cooperatives, time banks, participatory budgeting and community land trusts that place decision-making power and ownership directly in the hands of workers and communities that have been historically stripped of agency under white supremacist capitalism.

The U.S. South is often seen by those outside the region as a right-wing stronghold and a recipient of charity. Our practice of rooting our work in the creation of solidarity economies acknowledges Southerners’ long history of not only surviving under white supremacist capitalism, but leading the charge to develop people-centered democracies and economies within the U.S.

We invite anyone who is interested to plug into the workshops Highlander offers around solidarity economies, join us at our annual Homecoming event September 30-October 2, 2022, where we will celebrate 90 years of Southern movement building, and follow Highlander online for updates on upcoming workshops and learning spaces where Southern freedom fighters will build strong relationships and learn with each other to build a true democracy rooted in community governance throughout the U.S. South.

The U.S. empire is crumbling due to the destruction created by capitalism. As this empire takes its last breaths, it doubles down on its centuries-old fascist violence domestically and abroad. From the ashes of this empire’s burning, people are using tools of community governance and solidarity economies to build a world beyond colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism. There is a new world coming, we’re building it together, and the time is here to usher it in.

“Forces that have been awakened are not ones that can be tucked away. And it will be a struggle, perhaps, for the rest of our lives,” says Tal Lavin, author of Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Lavin and host Kelly Hayes talk about how right-wingers get radicalized, liberal and left-wing complicity, and the avoidance of despair.

Music by Son Monarcas and Pulsed

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. This week, we are talking about fascism, how right-wingers get radicalized, and what it means to actively oppose fascism in these times. The Biden administration has belatedly ramped up its rhetoric against the right, describing MAGA Republicans as “semi-fascist” and raising the alarm about attacks on the electoral system. Some people have applauded Biden for these rhetorical escalations, while many Republicans have predictably whined and wailed. But what does this development mean for activists who are already taking action against fascism? A lot of people are speculating about how Biden’s enlivened language could affect the midterms. But whether or not the Biden administration’s heightened rhetoric affects voter turnout, it will not protect us from the fascist mass movement the right has loosed upon the world. As anti-fascists — and I hope we all identify as anti-fascists — we have to understand the limitations, and potential dangers, of viewing establishment Democrats as a driving force against fascism.

But given that Biden is finally talking about fascism, I think it’s important that we pause to reflect on what that word means, how fascism is manifesting itself in our society, and what combating it demands of us — because we are not going to gain that understanding from any framing that is being offered by the White House. So today we will be hearing from Tal Lavin, who is a journalist and author of the book Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy.

Tal Lavin understands the threat that fascists pose in the United States better than most people, because he embedded himself in their online worlds, creating fake names, social media accounts and profiles in order to learn more about how our enemies operate, and how we might expose and stop them. While writing Culture Warlords, Tal posed as a woman-hating incel and an antisemetic, white supremacist waitress, among other assumed identities, in order to infiltrate online spaces where right-wing radicalization was occurring — places where radicalized right-wingers were discussing their terrifying hopes, plans and desires. In doing so, Tal learned a great deal about how our enemies think, what animates their work, and how so many people have become fascists.

Tal Lavin: One thing about online, right-wing echo chambers is they’re not as monolithic as you might think. There is a spectrum of how people self-identify. There’s a lot of sectarian stuff: “I identify as a white nationalist,” “I identify as a civic nationalist.” There’s generational gaps, all this stuff. But the one thing you can generalize about is the way these spaces essentially function. Having observed them at close quarters for a long time, which I continue to do and have since the book has been published as well, is they really function as these sort of, I call it perpetual motion radicalization machines.

I mean, they’re just these really specialized echo chambers where there’s this continual message of stochastic violence. There’s continual propaganda and it never stops, and it’s going 24 hours a day. And in essence, they serve as incubators for both political violence, which is now abundantly clear can exist in both the “mainstream right,” as well as the far right where it’s resided for a long time.

So you really are faced with this issue where people are continually radicalizing each other and seeking recruits to draw into that milieu.

KH: One thing people should understand about these automated radicalization machines is that these environments were supercharged by the pandemic.

TL: First of all, radicalization thrives with isolation, and I think many, many people felt deeply isolated, felt and were deeply isolated during the pandemic. Another factor that contributes to radicalization is a sense of threat or uncertainty. And that certainly abounded, particularly in the early months of the pandemic, because we were told, over and over again, that the stakes were existential, but the responses didn’t feel particularly existential. There was doubt very early on, there was not a consensus.

So, put all of that together and you have a very strong recipe for people to kind of…. There’s nothing inherently wrong with seeking your own answers about world events. I don’t want to make it seem like, I’m like, no, you have to accept official narratives uncritically because that’s not how I feel.

On the other hand, I think this was sort of a hyper-concentrated scenario where people were feeling very adrift. There were a lot of bad faith, slimeball actors who were perfectly poised to take advantage of it. There’s a lot of anger and confusion and fear.

And so, all of those things put together makes for a perfect stew for radicalization to ferment in.

KH: While I certainly do not feel any sympathy for people on the far right, I do think it’s important to understand these dynamics. A 2021 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core found that 15 percent of Americans believe in QAnon conspiracy theories. As PRRI founder Robby Jones told the New York Times, “Thinking about QAnon, if it were a religion, it would be as big as all white evangelical Protestants, or all white mainline Protestants … So it lines up there with a major religious group.” The poll also found that 55 percent of Republicans “mostly disagreed” with QAnon’s outlandish claims but did not reject them entirely. That means only 1 in 5 Republicans completely rejected the idea that the Democratic Party is run by a cabal of satan-worshiping elites who also eat babies.

Biden has stated that he respects conservative Republicans but does not respect MAGA Republicans, whom he views as extremists. I understand the strategy. Electoral politics is a numbers game, and Biden is attempting to go hard against his enemies while minimizing alienation. But if, for our own purposes, we are dealing in reality, the idea that MAGA Republicans are not representative of conservatism is something we cannot afford to buy into.

The right wing has a vanguard, and while that vanguard may be stumbling, confused, and wholly divorced from reality, it also has the full backing of a major party, and many of that party’s members are currently attempting to overthrow the electoral system. MAGA and QAnon myths and conspiracy theories are now part of the mainstream character of the Republican Party. Republican leaders who previously denounced the Capitol riots now minimize those events as mere expression. Attempting to isolate the problem of fascism to a select group of extremists also erases the issue of complicity, which we cannot afford to do right now. Fascist atrocities do not occur in a vacuum. Silence and cooperation also pave the way to atrocity, which means we cannot afford to bask in notions of innocence right now. Many people are no longer resisting fascistic policies and actions. We have to be cognizant of that and aware of the dangerous part our silence or inaction could play in whatever comes next. Fascism requires mass participation and mass cooperation, and I am seeing a lot of both.

The official framing we are getting around fascism — much like the official framing used for the climate crisis — does not come close to encapsulating the stunning severity of our situation. The extreme right-wing radicalization we have seen in recent years cannot be neatly extracted from our politics, because it has fundamentally altered the nature of our political environment.

So how did millions of people who might have previously been run-of-the-mill racists, or even Obama supporters, get pulled into a moment of mass right-wing radicalization?

TL: One of the things that I found, and I write about this in my book, Culture Warlords, at some length, but one of the things I found very consistently in my study of how people get radicalized is, one of the biggest desires that many, many people have, one of the strongest desires out there for a lot of people is certainty — for someone to tell them what to do, how to think about a certain thing. And all of us, of course, feel this to some extent. No one is immune from just being like, well, I want to find an expert or a solid authority or just… I feel uncertain and that’s an uncomfortable feeling.

And one of the things that radicalizers, right, excel at is offering that certainty, saying like, “OK, I am certain. I do know. And only I will tell you the truth.” The motif of truth that’s hidden from all others, but revealed to the elect is both the religious motif, and also, I would say probably the single most important commonality between different kinds of conspiracy movements, different kinds of movements that espoused political violence.

I think there are almost always psychological explanations, human explanations for why people behave the way they do and why people believe the things they believe, which is not to say exculpatory explanations. Just because something is sort of human and natural doesn’t mean that it’s forgivable, per se. But in many cases, [people are motivated by] the desire to belong, the desire to comprehend your place in the world, the desire to feel significant or part of something important.

And certainly, in the case of pandemic era radicalization, the desire to feel as if the world isn’t actually incomprehensibly turning upside down, [and that] there are all sorts of perfectly rational explanations for the chaos around us. You know, you can see how in an era of tremendous fear and uncertainty and isolation, both that sense of belonging and that sense of certainty were incredibly powerful and felt incredibly necessary to a very wide variety of people.

KH: In uncertain times, people search for answers, and the internet is full of bad answers and radical rabbit holes. It is also full of spaces that will offer people a sense of belonging on very sketchy terms. In such spaces, belonging is grounded in identity and notions of supremacy. All grievances and anxieties are affirmed, and people are assured that their worst impulses are correct. That kind of belonging can draw people in very quickly. It’s important to understand these dynamics, because we are talking about tens of millions of people being radicalized toward right-wing ends within a period of a few years. And, as I have said before on this show, it’s easy to mock and be dismissive of people who believe that Democratic leaders eat babies, but I also think people should stop and ask themselves, “What might you be capable of if you believed that?” If you were convinced that a pedaphilic cabal that eats babies had illegally seized control of your government, how dangerous might you become? Because those automated radicalization machines Tal mentioned are running 24/7, generating that mindset in people.

As a result of that constituency, as well as the influence of Fox News, I hear from a lot of people who have lost relatives to QAnon conspiracy beliefs. Like other cults, QAnon can isolate people from the ones they love. Many liberals and leftists desperately want to de-radicalize their loved ones, whose worldviews have been rewritten by Tucker Carlson and a host of random YouTube grifters. But for the most part, I hear leftists saying, “Fuck those people.” Which is fine, up to a point. If someone has gone dark side, I do not think you are obligated to care about them, or to want to save them, but if we do not assess how this is happening, and take steps to prevent or interrupt these processes, our enemies will continue to amass an army — and these folks already have a lot of people, and a lot of guns.

Rather than focusing on deradicalization, Tal is concerned with prevention.

TL: Because I study the far right, people talk to me about de-radicalization a lot. And that’s not particularly… That’s neither my area of expertise nor sort of the thing I’m most interested in. I think that as a moral issue, yes, people are not irredeemable, et cetera, et cetera, but for me, the understanding piece of things is more about prevention than it is about sort of rescue.

I think when people talk about wanting to de-radicalize neo-Nazis and QAnoners, I think that’s a laudable impulse. I don’t deny that that can come from a really good place. But I think one of the narratives that I think about when it comes to de-radicalization is the story of Megan Phelps-Roper who grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. She was born into that family. And she was eventually de-radicalized. Because she ran the church’s Twitter account, and someone, like this guy started DM-ing her, and they wound up talking and that eventually set her on a path towards leaving the Westboro Baptist Church.

And that’s very laudable, but they wound up married. That’s the level of passionate interpersonal commitment that it takes to de-radicalize someone,, that level of intimacy. For many people, or Eli Saslow’s book Rising Out of Hatred, which is a wonderful book, talks about the son of Don Black, the founder of Stormfront, who was set up as the heir to this white supremacist dynasty. And eventually, he left the movement after, literally, years of being invited to Shabbat meals by a Jewish student at the college he attended.

Now, are we going to ask that of every marginalized person under threat? First of all, it’s a huge ask, one that leaves the would-be de-radicalizer at risk for radicalization in their own right, ironically enough. And the other piece of it, the other reason I’m skeptical of de-radicalization as the end-all-be-all is that people really do have to be ready for that process as well. It’s not something that you can force on a person, especially because leaving movements like this is, sometimes, physically dangerous. Certainly, it involves, in pretty much every case, the total loss of a community that has meant a lot to someone.

And so, you have to pour in at least as much resources as you would into getting someone out of an abusive relationship situation. I think people imagine themselves sort of riding up on a white steed and saving someone from being a Nazi. I think that’s a laudable desire, but it’s not necessarily scalable.

So, when I talk about deciphering the human motivations for this sort of radicalization, my motivation is not necessarily any sort of laudably altruistic desire to rescue people, but more to prevent people from getting enmeshed in the first place. And also, in the interest of knowing my enemy, frankly. I think once you know what motivates someone to even the most monstrous act, you’re closer to deciphering it and thus closer to preventing it.

That’s why so much of my book focuses on the psychology of how these movements develop, and I think about it all the time. But again, just because something is a naturally human impulse does not mean that it is a forgivable impulse. We can acknowledge that people are people and not monsters without forgiving them for acts that are deeply destructive.

One of the things that has been the most heartening for me in the response to Culture Warlords is the parents who’ve reached out to me and said that they’ve used the book, they’ve had their kids read the book, and teenagers who’ve read the book, and said that it’s helped them understand things going on with their classmates.

I mean, one element that I really saw is, and you see this in the ages of the white supremacist mass shooters, they’re 18, 19, 20. The radicalization is very youth-focused, and a lot of it takes place in online spaces that are targeted towards young people.

And so, one strength of my book, I think, is that it is fairly approachably written with me as your guide character. I think that, for parents, it can be useful to talk to kids about, and then, I think for teens and young people, it can be also a tool for understanding why did my friend suddenly start radicalizing? Like what happened? He was just into Minecraft a few months ago. I don’t get it. So, this is a little bit of a map. And I hope it can be used in that way.

KH: I also want to name that I really appreciate people who are doing deradicalization work, to invite people who have embraced right-wing conspiracy theories back to reality. I agree with Tal that marginalized people should not feel obligated to rescue the people who want us dead, but I also want us to consider that, in this era of catastrophe, our own communities are not immune from the influence of cults or conspiracy theories. We saw the truth and consequences of that during the pandemic. Understanding these dynamics is going to be crucial, regardless of who we are trying to safeguard, influence, or bring back to reality. Because a lot of people are going to be frantically searching for answers in the months and years to come, and it’s raining lies. We are awash in grifters and charlatans who are ready to build religions around their bullshit, so we need to figure out how to anchor ourselves in reality together. And some of us will have to think deeply about how we can invite people back to reality after they have detached themselves from it.

In examining the scale of our current crisis, I want people to understand that for things to be as far gone as they are in this country, we could not possibly be dealing in the reality that Biden describes, where fascism is a marginal force. Biden is invoking rhetoric that invites everyone but the most extreme Republicans to view their politics as separate from the politics that are driving this nightmarish moment. This language does not reflect the reality of our political circumstances. Those of us who want to do the work of politics need to understand those circumstances.

If we look at the history of fascist movements, or mass atrocity in general, genocidal outcomes are not the result of everyone simultaneously becoming a true believer. Some people participate in atrocity for social reasons. Some people become more prone to violence after enacting it in the context of shared purpose, or bonding with their fellow assailants. Some people will not engage in any acts of atrocity but may be biased against the targets of fascist violence, and they may express that bias in ways that lend fuel to the fascist fire.

TL: I had a recent conversation for my Substack with Michael Hobbes of Maintenance Phase and You’re Wrong About fame, who’s just a lovely person as well. And we talked about how much we both loathe and despise this sort of tendency in the mainstream media, which he dubs reactionary centrism.

And that’s the sort… the columnist who… I think Pamela Paul of The New York Times is a really great example of someone like that who’s writing… well, like both the left and the right want to erase women. And in one case, talking about the destruction of Roe v. Wade. And the second case is talking about how some leftists are like, “Hey, you should use trans-inclusive language when you’re discussing reproductive health,” like, as if these are morally equivalent and equally threatening. I find it absolutely putrid and very upsetting, a lot of different ways. It’s just so frighteningly evident of a media class that’s mostly concerned sort of their own personal convenience that makes false conflations as easily as you make toast.

I mean, it’s a very difficult and frustrating time to be someone with any kind of a critical focus on the media. And one of the reasons why… Michael and I talked about it as manufacturing consent for the authoritarian drift, because that’s really what you wind up seeing, is people very eagerly conflating, oh, someone made me uncomfortable on Twitter with like women are dying of sepsis, or, “Well, my child has to wear a mask at school, and this is equivalent to an entire generation of the elderly dying to this disease, [and COVID] becoming the third highest cause of death for people over 80, since 2020.”

It didn’t exist before 2020. And now, it is the third leading cause of death for that age group. I mean, yeah, it’s just wild to me. There’s been this sort of soft peddling of eugenics, “soft peddling” of particularly transphobia under this false veneer of concern for the children, which is the way so many moral panics manifest. I think there’s just an awful lot of people working at the consent factory who may be witting or unwitting accomplices to the authoritarian drift.

But at the end of the day, when the consequences of your work are that, you make it easier for authoritarians to abuse their chosen out group victims, like I’m not sure that your intention particularly matters.

KH: To succeed as a mass movement, fascism requires mass participation, and when someone forwards ideas or assumptions that bolster the fascist position, or further fascist violence, they are participating. I know it’s going to be really hard for some people to think about themselves, or people they know, as participating in fascism. The idea of having to guard against that may sound baffling and foreign, because they may see their values as existing in opposition to fascism. But fascism is not fought with self-perception. To be anti-fascist, we must be vocal and active in our opposition, and we must never lend fuel or cover to the fascist advance.

We must also understand that there is no ethical silence in the face of fascism. Silence is complicity and cooperation, which helps facilitate atrocity. That might likewise be hard to hear. But how many liberals and leftists have fallen silent on trans issues as the Republicans make the elimination of trans people from public life the new centerpiece of their politics? I am watching, horrified, as a lot of people who claim to share my values remain silent, allowing their biases, their beefs, or their sense of political expediency to override their decency, or any solidarity they might have previously lent to the targets of fascist groups. Under Trump, liberals and leftists raised hell about laws attacking trans people, so where did this wave of passivity come from?

TL: To me, it’s less about increased passivity or whatever, as a very successful propaganda campaign bearing fruit. And specifically, in the case of the moral panic around trans people, that has resembled a lot of prior moral panics in that it’s this fixation on the seduction of the innocent. This idea that children are under sexual threat. These ideas are very specifically meant to appeal to and scare the crap out of a certain kind of bourgeois parent. It’s very easy to sell dread to people who already feel uneasy with something.

So, that as a parent who might feel like, “Oh my gosh, like Timmy said that they’re non-binary, and I don’t know what that means. And that makes me uncomfortable.” Right? That is the person who’s going to, perhaps, feel a lot more receptive and a lot more justified in their unease, when you have an article in The Atlantic or whatever, saying, well, these kids are being forced into being trans. They’re being sliced and diced and brainwashed at the same time.

And, of course, it’s all founded on lies, but it’s very easy to sell people on like, “I’m not a bigot.” This social trend that just coincidentally makes me feel scared and old is actually very sinister. And I think it does connect to that chapter in my book where I talk about George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi party, and then, him playing out this weird fantasy where Black socialists in tanks take over the U.S., which sounds awesome to me anyway, but he’s like, ah, my neighbor, the nice liberal immediately picked up a gun and started shooting at these Black people because there’s no such thing as a white liberal in a tight corner.

I don’t agree with George Lincoln Rockwell about a lot. I do think there are people for whom liberalism, or a vague alignment with the progressive left is more of a social veneer or mark of caché, or just a way to fit in any deeply held set of values, of course, that exists. I don’t think it’s inevitable. And I do think in the specific case of the concerted attacks on trans rights, it’s really the fruit of a very successful transcontinental propaganda war casting trans people as a unique threat to children specifically.

KH: The fantasy sequence Tal described comes from the eleventh chapter of George Lincoln Rockwell’s book White Power, and I have to admit, as I read Tal’s description of that chapter in Culture Warlords, I felt a chill. Even though the scenario itself is a fascist fever dream, I have to agree with Tal that there are liberals whose opposition to racism, transphobia and fascism is a matter of social identity. In a moment of crisis, we have seen liberal celebrities grab onto Pamela Paul’s ideas about calls for gender inclusive language being on par with forced birth, while liberals and leftists have remained largely silent about eliminationist attacks on trans people. We have also seen people in liberal areas vote to criminalize homelessness, and embrace the abandonment of COVID mitigations, ramping up cycles of human disposal.

To reject fascism, we must actively oppose it. In the upcoming anthology No Pasaran, Tal dicusses what it means to be anti-fascist. He writes, “The simplest explanation is also the truest: antifascism exists in relation to fascism as antimatter does to matter—its opposite, and, hopefully, its equal. As fascism rises and spreads, so does the need for antifascism, and the people inspired to fight back.”

There is no silent opposition to fascism. U.S. politics have led many people to believe that they are defined by their stated beliefs, or by their self-assumed political identities. Liberals and leftists are unlikely to believe they are bolstering or facilitating fascism, but our self perceptions do not define our impact. In this spiraling political moment, most people have failed to actively challenge transphobia or the abandonment of COVID mitigations. We are still losing hundreds of people per day in the U.S. to COVID-19. Disabled and chronically ill people are being deemed expandable, or as simply having no place in public life. Why? Because the wheels of capitalism need to keep turning. So life gets cheaper, and people are cooperating en masse, and with far too little protest.

If you are thinking, “Well, the Biden administration is setting that agenda, not the Republicans,” you’re right, which is another reason the Democrats are not an effective force against fascism. As Buenaventura Durruti once said, “No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.”

The Biden administration cannot be the “anti-matter” of fascism, because neoliberal Democrats are committed to the maintenance of capitalism, at any expense. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore stated at the Socialism Conference in Chicago over the weekend, “The Democratic establishment … is going to constantly yield to the authoritarians in order to maintain the most important thing that they are the political wing of, and that is capitalism.”

I would also like to share some words from Robin D.G. Kelley, from that same conversation, which was a live recording of “The DIG” podcast. Kelley said:

I don’t remember a generation of activists that were not fighting liberals. If you even look at the history of fascism in Europe, it’s the liberal regimes that cede to fascism…. The fascists did not overthrow the liberal regimes, they emerged out of them. And right after fascism was formally defeated, what did the regimes do…. They continued fascism in the colonies. That’s what they do. So … we have to be careful saying if we can uphold the liberal regime and silence ourselves, we could actually beat back fascism. That’s not how you beat back fascism.

The idea that disabled lives are more important than the maintenance of capitalism will never come from the powerful, because it is antithetical to their purpose. The idea that disabled people are not expendable is radical, especially in these times. To be the “anti-matter” of fascism, we must be anti-capitalist, and we must champion the idea that disabled people are not expendable. We must defend trans children and trans lives with unequivocal solidarity, regardless of difference, bias, or political disagreement. The Democratic establishment will yield to or align itself with the right, as needed, in order to maintain capitalism, and capitalism is not compatible with our freedom and survival.

Fascism’s antimatter is not liberalism; rather, it is the stuff collective survival is made of. Tal referred to anti-fascism as fascism’s “opposite” and “hopefully, its equal.” I think we need to think deeply about those words as we witness the continued rise of violence. I don’t think most people are even considering what it would mean to counter the rise of what is currently happening, and I think it’s dangerous to believe that casting a ballot, by itself, is sufficient opposition to people who are promising street violence and a civil war.

TL: The last time there was this prominent of a militia movement was back in the ’90s in the wake of Ruby Ridge and Waco. There was this movement of people arming themselves, and setting up these armed militia groups. And that militia movement has really risen again after a period of dormancy.

It’s always interesting to see when social movements resurrect after periods of dormancy, what does that look like? Why, and what’s changed? But as we see, the groups that were involved in January 6th and the groups that are facing legal culpability, many of them are these militia groups that are guys that… Men and women that form up and practice military drill on the weekends, and do all sorts of shenanigans in the name of Christ and the constitution. Certainly, they were heavily involved and heavily armed in the storming of the Capitol.

You also have the accelerationist fantasists on the very far fringe of the right who really fantasize about the destruction of the “tainted Jewish system” who follow this playbook laid out by prior generations of white supremacists, and whose goal is the goal of that kind of accelerationism. We see it on the right and the left. In fact, the term originated on the left. But essentially, [they believe that] like enough political violence will topple the “corrupt Jewish system.” That sort fantasizing happens as well, of course.

It’s interesting, we have these intersecting… again, besides Miller, the extreme right does have some ideological diversity and generation gap stuff. The militia guys have fairly little overlap with the sort of doomer like young neo-Nazis on 4Chan. But ultimately, these are two separate groups on the right who are talking about arming themselves, who are talking about what to do when the system inevitably falls.

And so, it is interesting to see the confluence, important to recognize the distinctions and goals and desires, but also, to be mindful of the fact that we are living in a time of an awful lot of ambient destructive energy towards the extant political system and towards marginalized people.

And that’s something that I’m continually aware of. Certainly, any teacher is aware of it right now, any doctor, any nurse, anyone who has to engage in any fashion with conservative parents. It’s very out in the open right now, and a lot of people who have fairly benign professions in any other time are facing considerable threat.

KH: One thing I hope people can get past, as quickly as possible, is the idea that we can defeat fascism in the realm of debate, or with fact checking, or by emphasizing their hypocrisy. I am not saying we should not highlight facts or acknowledge contradictions. I think those things are important, but they are not fighting words. I frequently see people on social media who think they are spiking the ball by pointing out how contradictory fascist positions are, and the fact is, none of that matters to a fascist, or to their target audience. What’s being sold to these people, and what’s being embraced, has nothing to do with facts, and it requires no consistency. In all cases, that which aligns with fascism is deemed right and true, and whoever and whatever does not is either irrelevant, false, or wicked.

TL: There is a tendency on the left and center left to focus consistently on hypocrisy and apparent contradictions in right wing speech. And the sort of “Blue Lives Matter, but also, defund the FBI when they raided Mar-a-Lago” is a perfect example, it’s like, don’t you guys “Back the Blue”? But that sort of thing, I really don’t find it a useful lens to look at the right through.

I find the useful lens is, like, you have to understand this movement as one that believes itself… Believes that it’s due is absolute power, that it’s seeking after power at all times. And the way they understand the police, and possibly, have always understood the police is as a very powerful armed group in society whose function is to get rid of the people they think are undesirable.

So, when cops were cracking down on the George Floyd protest, then, it was “Back the Blue.” When they’re raiding Mar-a-Lago, it’s like, “defund the FBI.” It’s very simple. It’s like when you’re going after the guys I dislike, you’re great, and when you’re going after the guys I like, fuck you. That’s part of it. And then, there’s also a fairly long history, I mean, we’re talking decades of certainly the fringe right, the sort of more violent, openly violent right going against federal authorities.

So, just as we’ve recently seen, bomb threats and shootings at FBI facilities, like the sort of renaissance of the white supremacist movement in the ’80s and ’90s really was coming after Waco, after Ruby Ridge, these sort of standoffs with federal authorities. You have these conspiracy theories about the New World Order, and nowadays, it’s the Great Reset and the deep state. And certainly, Donald Trump was quite hostile to the FBI because he’s a big giant crook, in part. Not that I’m super pro FBI, it’s just a funny situation.

The contradiction is only apparent, like, A, if you think of the police as a tool to subdue people who you dislike or want to destroy, then, you see any contradictory action or action you dislike as them stepping outside their remit. And B, if your goal is to violently tear down the system, then, the armed agents of the state are the first line of defense of that system. So, there are many reasons for the right to object to cops.

KH: Police are perhaps the best example of why we cannot rely on the state as a primary force against fascism. Police are a fascistic force, even though they will, on occasion, find themselves at odds with fascists who are not police. On January 6, some police were in league with the Capitol rioters, and in situations where state property and the lives of the ruling class are not at stake, collusion between police and fascist organizers is routine.

It is politically significant that Biden is using stronger language to describe the Republicans. But neoliberalism cannot be our salvation. It is the ideology that delivered us to fascism. And if the Democrats somehow thwart the current Republican advance, Democrats like Biden will continue to ramp up the violence of bordering, policing, and human disposal in their own ways.

In this era of catastrophe and collapse, neoliberalism may offer a longer, loopier, and less offensive path to authoritarianism, but that’s where it’s headed. As global disasters multiply, capitalism will become increasingly incompatible with the norms of liberal democracy. Biden’s calls to fund the hiring of 100,000 police officers, and to throw billions more at law enforcement agencies — in a country where COVID treatments and testing are being defunded — underline this reality. Biden recently stated that, “The answer is not to defund the police; it’s fund the police,” adding that, “We expect [police] to do everything…to protect us, to be psychologists, to be sociologists.” But rather than suggesting that we fund more psychologists or sociologists, Biden wants to throw more money at police. But police do not fill in for other professions. They dispose of people who are being denied other services. Police do not provide psychological care or sort out social problems. It’s the communities police victimize that have been defunded.

I once heard Angela Davis describe imprisoned people as being “catapulted beyond the bounds of democracy.” We are living through a moment when unhoused people are increasingly being catapulted beyond the bounds of any civic consideration. As the mere presence of unhoused people is increasingly criminalized, some have been driven into uninhabitable places, such as the Mojave desert, and died as a result. Disabled people have likewise been catapulted beyond the bounds of consideration in most matters. Because what matters under capitalism is that the wheels keep turning, no matter how many people get ground under. We are all acceptable sacrifices, if that’s what ongoing profits demand. The casualties may be chosen differently under Republicans, but we have to remember where all of this is going. Because while Democratic savior narratives might work turnout for the midterms, we know they are not real, and while I plan to vote in November, as an organizer, I also know that my political world cannot revolve around the ballot box.

To oppose fascism, we must be its anti-matter, and that is not what the Democrats are offering. Regardless of what has to be done at the ballot box, we cannot afford any confusion about who our friends are, or where this system is headed.

I know that awareness can be daunting. As activists and organizers, many of us are absorbing a lot of traumatizing information on a regular basis. In the afterword of Culture Warlords, Tal talked about the toll that immersing himself in fascist environments took on his psyche. He wrote:

Immersing myself in the worst of human nature while researching this book made me want to shrink inside the mollusk shell of my body, surrounded by air and hollow bone. I wanted to be sealed off. Every word felt painfully extracted from me: Rows of bad teeth grinned at me from the page. I hated myself, the world, and my words. Everything felt suffused with ugliness and I wanted to sleep all day.

In some cases, Tal encountered conversations about himself, among fascists who were unaware of his presence, discussing how “rapable” he was. In the book, Tal describes how absorbing all of that ugliness weighed on him.

TL: I mean, Culture Warlords, I am proud of it. It is also very much a freshman effort. It’s my first book, and I included more of myself than I might have if I were writing it now. But I did find the year plus that I spent, probably closer to 18 months that I spent, the vast majority of every day consuming white supremacist material to be very traumatic.

I mean, it took me a very long time to recover. And in some ways, because it coincided with an abusive relationship, it coincided with the beginning of the pandemic. It feels like a hole I’m still digging myself out of, and I’m still writing about the far right. Currently, most of my work has been about child abuse in the evangelical Christian community, which is not easy material to wade through either.

I think the biggest lesson I took away from the ferocious single-minded immersion I did for Culture Warlords is like: “Oh boy, I can’t do that again. That almost broke me.” You know, you wake up with this bad taste in your mouth, and you go to bed mad, and you wake up mad, and it’s almost overlaid on the world around you, this knowledge that people want to kill you and people want to kill your family and people want to kill people who are your friends. It’s a very dark weight to carry around with you all the time.

It just took me so long to dig myself out of the sort of frozen hole that I was in after finishing the book, that I realized like if I had allowed myself more balance in the first place, if I had allowed myself more time to write the book, so that every day didn’t have to be spent in perpetual darkness, I wouldn’t have had to spend so much time putting myself back together, like Humpty Dumpty, over here.

So, I think for activists, I would just say… I mean, it’s so hard to turn away, and there’s so much guilt any time you turn away. But if you do not take the time to deliberately find joy in your life, deliberately reconnect yourself with whatever it is that makes you feel alive and whole in the present, you will burn out. You will, perhaps, find yourself in places that are psychologically precarious and very difficult to recover from. And you will have to take the time to reconstruct yourself.

So, temper that guilt with the knowledge that you may be forestalling, like, ceasing being able to be involved in activism at all.

KH: One line I really appreciated, toward the end of Culture Warlords was, “Love is not optional. It is what we must marshal to break the back of the beast.” I have to admit, I teared up a bit upon reading those words, because nothing could be truer. I know why I believe that love is not optional, but I was eager to hear Tal say more about it.

TL: When I say love is not optional, it is what we must use to break the back of the beast, I mean that you can’t simply operate from a space of opposition. I mean, opposition, anger, rage, these are very useful emotions. Certainly, much of my work is motivated by anger. I do not discount the power of anger ever. Neither in my opponents, nor in myself.

However, I think there has to be an affirmative that you are also fighting for. There have to be ideals, there have to be relationships, be it family, be it chosen family, be it comrades, fellow activists. There have to be affirmatives in place for this struggle to be sustainable in the long term. Because anger is super high-octane fuel, right? It’s like race car fuel, it burns really hot. It can drive you really fast, really far, but it will burn you out.

And if you don’t have something to sustain you over the long term, if you don’t have things that tether you and nourish you, things that you find yourself fighting for and not simply against, it’s very difficult to sustain that battle over the long term, which is, unfortunately, this is an ethical struggle. It’s not one that’s going to dissolve in the next five years or even 10. Forces that have been awakened are not ones that can be tidily tucked away. And it will be a struggle, perhaps, for the rest of our lives.

And so, you can’t wade into that with just a whole lot of rage and a death wish. You have to have things you are working towards, people you are working with. These anchors of, yes, love, and affirmation as well.

KH: Fascism thrives on hatred and self obsession. The “anti-matter” of fascism must embody love and empathy. A true force against fascism must reject human disposability and challenge the status quo. I know a lot of people cannot imagine themselves consenting to fascism, on any level, but we have already been conditioned to leave people behind. Millions of people are experiencing torture, deprivation, and premature death due to the violence of the prison industrial complex. If we can be conditioned to ignore that, we can be conditioned to ignore much more, and it’s already happening. So I want us to think long and hard about what it means to be anti-fascist, and what this moment demands of us, beyond a trip to the ballot box in November. Because while it’s easy to zero in on big electoral moments, the shift we are experiencing is much larger than that, and we are going to need a larger vision to make a better world.

I also hope people will check out Tal’s substack, The Sword and the Sandwich, which is the only Substack I am personally subscribed to, because in addition to providing important insights about right-wingers, Tal also offers readers some welcome interruptions to that content. Every Friday, Tal writes about sandwiches. In keeping with his advice that we should not spend all of our time immersed in painful topics, Tal has written 34 essays about sandwiches, following Wikipedia’s list of notable sandwiches in alphabetical order. As someone who writes about right-wingers and collapse, but longs to write about my favorite TV shows, I am delighted by Tal’s approach, and I really recommend checking out Tal’s substack, which will be linked in the show notes of this episode on our website at truthout.org.

I want to thank Tal Lavin for joining me today to talk about fascism and right-wing radicalization. I highly recommend checking out his book, Culture Warlords, and sharing its lessons with the young people in your life.

I also want to give a shout out to Melody Ng, who has been one of the primary fact checkers for this podcast. Melody is on another exciting journey now, and we are all so happy for her, but we are also going to miss her. Thank you for all your work, Melody, and for making this show stronger.

I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

To lean more from Tal Lavin:

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Tal Lavin
The Sword and the Sandwich by Tal Lavin

Referenced:

QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests by Giovanni Russonello
The Dig LIVE: What Now? Perspectives on the Conjuncture
The Fascist War on Trans Rights by Tal Lavin
As police crack down on homelessness, unhoused end up in Mojave desert by Sam Levin

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