The Trap of Law and Order Under Fascism
“There’s no rule of law that’s going to get us out of where we are,” says Andrea Ritchie.
“There’s no rule of law that’s going to get us out of where we are,” says author and organizer Andrea Ritchie. In this episode of Movement Memos, Andrea and I discuss the role of criminalization in authoritarian and fascist regimes, and why “we need more outlaws” and less fetishization of “law and order.”
Music by Hatamitsunami & Pulsed.
This transcript was originally published in Truthout. It is republished here with permission.
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. Today, we’re discussing the role of criminalization in authoritarianism and fascism, and why clinging to the rule of law in this messy moment in history is a catastrophic mistake. We will be hearing from Andrea Ritchie, a co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization and the author and co-author of multiple books, including No More Police, with Mariame Kaba, and Practicing New Worlds. Criminalization is the default framework people turn to in the United States to restore their sense of order, amid a crisis or emergency, so, when I hear someone suggest something wild, like calling the police on ICE, I understand where they’re coming from. But as the Trump administration continues to consolidate power, we need to lose our illusions about the law as a moral instrument. We need more outlaws and less confusion about what the law protects and who it targets.
If you appreciate this episode and would like to support Truthout, please consider making a donation on our website, or signing up for our newsletter today. We are fighting an uphill battle against AI summaries and social media algorithms that are working to erase independent media. But we’re still here, telling stories the corporate media won’t touch, and creating the kind of journalism that fuels movements. The truth is a front of struggle, and we can only do this work with the support of readers and listeners like you. So thank you for believing in us, and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.
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KH: Andrea Ritchie, welcome back to “Movement Memos.”
Andrea Ritchie: Thanks so much, Kelly. It’s so good to be here with you.
Kelly: How are you doing today, friend?
Andrea Ritchie: I’m hanging in there. I’m of course sitting with where we are, with the military occupying the nation’s capital, bolstered by forces from states loyal to the regime and the very clear announcement of intent to deploy military force to opposing regions of the country, and particularly to cities led by Black mayors and with predominantly Black populations, and how people are responding or not responding to that reality. And I’m also feeling really fortified and inspired and emboldened and hopeful about all the ways people are moving, seen and unseen, in response in this moment, including this coming weekend, Labor Day weekend. The People’s Conference for Palestine will be happening in Detroit, and I’m very grateful to the organizers for making space for us to think about the connections between those two. For some people it might feel like disparate and competing realities, which are in fact very much connected. And I’m excited about being in space with folks to think through how resistance on both fronts can fortify and make more possible on all fronts.
KH: I am also really grateful for our Palestinian co-strugglers, for their steadfastness, and the lessons they teach. This is a time to understand authoritarianism, and to fight it, on all fronts, and our Palestinian siblings have been engaged in that struggle for a long time. I am also tremendously grateful for my co-strugglers across Chicago who are rallying and organizing in the face of Trump’s threats to create a military occupation of our city. I have a broken ankle, right now, but I’m still moving fast — figuratively speaking — and trying to do my part, because we have a lot of work to do. But I do want to stress that, as daunting as these threats may be, I am full of strength and hope right now, because I believe in my community and I believe in Chicago.
AR: I do too. I feel so grateful to be hearing from the people I, as you were saying, have been in community with in Chicago for many years, moving together in collectivity, in unison, in preparation, in defiance and in readiness to take care of each other. And it’s so heartening. So many of us have learned so much from Chicago over the years about what truly intersectional organizing looks like, what fierce and joyful resistance looks like, and what prefiguring possibility looks like. And so my heart is with every single person in Chicago right now because you’re staring down an occupation, and also my heart is with you all in resistance and coming together to create what is needed for this moment.
KH: Well, so much of what I, personally, am able to bring to this moment is the product of being in conversation and collaboration with friends like you, so I also want to express that I am so grateful for you, as well, Andrea.
AR: And I for you, Kelly, really. I say this every time I have an opportunity. You heard me say it recently, that this podcast, and these conversations that you’re having with people and organizers in your newsletter, and making possible in community in ways that people don’t see, I think are a critical light shining our way forward. As you wrote recently, “As we’re limping through the darkness” – and I know that’s a labor that is … It’s a lot of labor. And I recently witnessed you doing it in the middle of the night. And I want listeners to know that it’s a labor of love and it is a labor, and I’ll continue to be a “Movement Memos” evangelist, I guess, is one way I could describe myself.
KH: That is so kind, and it really does mean the world to me that people find this podcast useful. Because I really am over here with a busted ankle, a swollen spine, a banged up knee, and a bad shoulder, just trying to make things that are useful to people, amid everything that we are up against. So, thank you for affirming that, and with that, let’s dig into some of this analysis that we are hoping people will find useful today.
As someone who has been working for years to interrupt the violence of criminalization, how would you describe this moment?
AR: I would describe it as a culmination of criminalization, of a deep investment ideologically, politically, financially, emotionally, spiritually in criminalization over centuries, and certainly many recent decades of modern history. And that is true in the US and around the world.
And so many people have heard me, at this point, talk about how criminalization is a political process that extends beyond the enactment of criminal laws and policies and their enforcement by police and other law enforcement agencies to a political process that designates groups of people and places as inherently criminalized and criminalizable and feeds into those core practices of fascism, which is to create an “us” and a “them,” a core practice of authoritarian regimes, which is to contain, control, repress, expel, and exterminate, ultimately, in its most extreme form. And that’s the most extreme form of criminalization, whether it’s the death penalty or genocide. And that is where we are in this moment.
What’s really striking me is how visible that is in real time in D.C., that the occupation of D.C. is being justified, rationalized, given cover by this process of criminalization, whether it’s of unhoused communities, of unmet mental health needs, of disabled people, of under-resourced communities, Black communities, of youth, of all the groups that of course have consistently been criminalized since 1492, in the original occupation of these lands. And how that is literally the cover that the administration is, and the regime, is using to justify it.
And then when opposition mounts, they have the gall to say that they’re engaging in this occupation to protect Black people, while critiquing what they see as predominantly white people resisting it by saying, “Well, they haven’t experienced the kind of violence that we’re trying to stop through this extreme form of criminalization called occupation.” And it’s just so clear about right now in D.C. how criminalization is mobilized. Not just to repress the opposition, not just to suppress dissent, not just to target the regime’s opponents, which of course it is also being used for that, but to literally rationalize the whole process of authoritarianism and fascism, and frankly, to manufacture consent for it among people who would otherwise be alarmed by what’s happening.
But this sort of pacification of, “No, but we’re doing it in the interest of public safety. We’re doing it because crime is rife in D.C. or Chicago or New York. We’re doing it to protect underserved, under-resourced communities. We’re doing it to help people who can’t help themselves.” Those ideas have been so deeply ingrained and so deeply implanted in our souls and spirits that it turns down the temperature of people who would otherwise be like, “What is happening in our nation’s capital?” Because criminalization is such a powerful idea, we’re so deeply invested in it, and it serves the interest of this regime so well.
And so that’s what I’m seeing in this moment. Obviously, as I said, genocide is the ultimate form of criminalization. The notion that everyone, from newborns to nonagenarians, in Gaza deserves to be starved to death because that is the appropriate punishment for existing on land that someone else wants, claims, occupies, is the ultimate form of criminalization.
And I think it’s important for folks to understand that criminalization operates the same at any level.
So, in the same way that corporations that commit wage theft will never be criminalized, but the person who shoplifts a basic necessity of life will be, particularly if they’re Black, Indigenous, Queer, trans, disabled, poor, obviously. It’s also important for folks to recognize that that operates at the national and international level.
And so we’re in a moment where people are really pinning their hopes on the criminalization of the president around what’s in the Epstein files, around any number of other acts that he has engaged in that are ultimately violations of criminal laws, or holding out hope that some form of criminalization of Netanyahu or Israeli occupation force officials or soldiers will stop the conditions that we’re living under and describing.
And I really need people to understand that criminalization is a political process that serves the interests of those in power. And so there is no way that the people who are engaging in the greatest acts of violence right now are going to be criminalized and stopped by criminalization because that’s not the purpose of it. And so I think that’s a really important moment too, that that’s really being unmasked in ways that are undeniable. And yet, I see people continuing to hold on hope to the possibility that criminalization can stop what’s happening, instead of being the thing that’s fueling what’s happening.
So, that feels like an equally important thing for us to confront, which is that our best chance at stopping fascism and authoritarianism and striking at the heart of it is to interrupt criminalization, is to confront, challenge, refuse, and uproot criminalization as a central organizing force in our world and in our lives, including in our personal lives. But also to stop looking to criminalization as a process that is going to end violence, whether it’s in our communities or at the international scale, and start to think about what else is required, which obviously those of us who are abolitionists believe is moving from a place of transformative justice, which is transforming the conditions that make violence possible, that make it necessary, that are essential to the functioning of the systems that we’re in, rather than this process that furthers those systems of power.
KH: Absolutely. Criminalization produces disposable people. That’s what the process of criminalization does. People who are deemed undesirable, people who threaten the functionality of systems of oppression, and as Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches us, people who are deemed surplus as economic and social conditions shift — criminalization is the process by which these people are disposed of. Not just functionally, but in public consciousness as well.
It takes people whose actions are often symptoms of or responses to systemic conditions and labels them the problem. So, if they’re punished or disappeared from society, justice was supposedly done, and we can all go about our days, continuing to contend with those same conditions — and not giving any thought to the torturous or impossible conditions those people face, because we have social permission to stop thinking about what happens to them once they are labeled as criminals. How people can look at this system, which grinds people like you and me under every day, and see it as the fix for fascism, rather than the beast Donald Trump would feed us to — I mean this is obviously the product of a near-religiosity, in terms of how criminalization and punishment are deployed as a means of sense-making. When people’s lives feel out of control, they want there to be a number they can call, they want there to be people whose job it is to make things make sense again. But what those forces really offer us is a process of human disposal that reinforces untenable and increasingly cruel and inhumane conditions.
This has long been true, and it’s even truer now, under authoritarianism and fascism. What Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment,” where services that help maintain and sustain communities, and people’s lives, are stripped away, and policing and prisons are increasingly funded to manage the fallout — what we’re seeing right now is that phenomenon on steroids. This society already had scapegoats. Black people were already scapegoated for crime, immigrants were already scapegoated for job losses, women, trans, and queer people were scapegoated for the anger and alienation of cis straight men, and these ideas always came into play when people in these groups were criminalized or otherwise experienced violence. Fascism creates moral panics around scapegoated groups, and builds culture and policy around the total control, containment, or eradication of people it portrays as a threat to the dominance of its in-group members, to status quo values, or civilization itself. Fascism provides a fantasy landscape where if scapegoats are disposed of, the chosen people will be restored to a state of greatness they never actually knew, because systemic conditions have never actually allowed things to be great for them, and certainly won’t now, under Trump.
AR: I was going to say there’s absolutely no doubt about that, that criminalization under any political regime is a process that normalizes and legitimizes a certain level of violence and denial of care and necessities for survival to groups who are criminalized. And if we think about what we think is perfectly acceptable as soon as someone is criminalized, whether it’s being ripped from your family, being ripped from your community, family separation through incarceration, being put in a tiny cell and being kept there for 23 hours a day, often with the lights on the whole time or the lights off the whole time. It’s boiling hot, it’s freezing cold. You could be sentenced to solitary confinement for decades, you can be deprived of any kind of physical, emotional, communication or contact. I mean, the list of violences that are deemed acceptable as soon as someone is criminalized is kind of limitless. And so I think that makes me think of some things in this moment.
One, is how people are exceptionalizing ICE and sort of being very upset about family separation and violence against people who they don’t think should be criminalized, in a way that they don’t think similarly about other groups who they do think should be criminalized, right? And that also makes me think about this sort of … I’m someone who does Know Your Rights trainings, and I do think it’s important to know your rights and to exercise them in strategic ways in particular moments. But I do think that criminalization is a process that creates inherently criminalized groups of people, like you said, rights don’t exist in reality for these groups, right? They’re framed as existential threats who have to be violently controlled, punished, and in the worst and most extreme case, exterminated or expelled. And so, there’s this way in which a focus on Know Your Rights work in this moment without a recognition of that reality sort of stops short of what the process of criminalization is, which is it’s designed to make us act as if certain groups of people, once they’re criminalized, have no rights in reality.
KH: I also want us to think about how these moves get justified, narratively, based on our understanding of where crime supposedly is and is not happening. I think it’s important to note when Trump’s rhetoric completely contradicts available data — which he simply deems fake, if it doesn’t agree with him — and what people on the ground in our communities are telling us about crime and violence. But I’ve seen a lot of people turn the discussion around D.C. into a discussion about whether there’s really a crime problem there or not, and that is really the wrong question. Violent crime is down in Chicago right now, but even if it were up, would Donald Trump sending in the National Guard be the answer? Of course not. We are living under an authoritarian government which is in the process of consolidating power. That consolidation is not complete. The administration still bumps up against guardrails and officials who refuse his edicts, especially at the local level in Democratic states and cities. Any power grab by the authoritarian must be resisted, regardless of whether he is naming a real condition on the ground. Yes, tell the truth about people’s communities and experiences, but whether or not crime or violence is an issue cannot be the bottom line when we’re talking about a federal takeover.
We need to remember, the AI bubble is basically propping up the economy right now. Prices are up, and I am constantly hearing from more people who are out of work. As conditions get rougher, we may see surges in crime, and we cannot allow this administration to create chaos and impose itself as the solution. Which, again, is a case of a lot of us failing to see how long-term trends — like systems that perpetuate the conditions that generate crime being trusted to dispose of people as a solution — are being supercharged right now to kick our asses.
Trump does not care if crime is up or crime is down. Trump cares about money, power and resources, and about enforcing his agenda. Major cities are this country’s biggest hubs of money, power, and resources, and some of them are run by Black Democratic mayors who are refusing Trump’s edicts. They’re getting in the way of him being able to execute his agenda in major centers or social and economic power, so he’s trying to arm wrestle folks for that power. We need to have clarity about this. He does not care if crime is up or down, or for that matter, if an immigrant is here legally or illegally, so we need to be just as uncompromising about resisting his power grabs and the idea that this fascist administration should be deciding anyone’s fate.
AR: Well, I want to say that what you just said is true whether we’re talking about the NYPD occupying my former neighborhood in Brooklyn, or we’re talking about the National Guard occupying the city of District of Columbia. And I really want to make that continuum clear for folks because I think that when we see criminalization operating at a scale and in forms that we haven’t seen before at this scale, at this level of power and consolidation of authoritarian power, we don’t sometimes see the thread. And this ties into what abolitionist organizers are doing in this moment. What I want to say is that abolitionist organizers have been working very hard to make sure that we didn’t get to this moment by pointing out exactly what I just said, that the occupation of a city block in Brooklyn by the NYPD paves the way for the occupation of D.C. by military forces. By normalizing it, by manufacturing consent for it, by saying that there are certain conditions under which that is necessary or required or useful or productive or just of course essential.
And so abolitionist organizers have been working very hard to stop the infrastructure that’s making this current moment possible from being built. Abolitionist organizers have been pointing out the connections between criminalization and immigration enforcement, and the crimmigration pipeline have been fighting to shrink detention capacity for migrants and to shrink the capacity to cage people in other spaces, whether they’re prisons or spaces of civil commitment, which this administration is determined to put disabled people into. Abolitionist organizers have been fighting the technology that makes surveillance and information sharing possible at the scale that it is now, whether it’s ICE getting access to Medicaid records or the kinds of street-based surveillance that is making it possible for them to locate people and to abduct and kidnap and detain and deport them. We’ve been trying to make connections between criminalization of abortion care of trans people and of gender-affirming care and of care for disabled people generally.
And we’ve really been, again, sort of fighting to uproot, to really pull on criminalization at the root and to get us divested both in terms of resources, power, and legitimacy from the various systems that are operating at full effect right now. And so therefore, I would say abolitionist organizers are best positioned to lead response and resistance this moment because we’re most familiar with the terrain of criminalization and how to interrupt and uproot it. And so abolitionist organizers are at the center of organizing and resistance, whether we’re talking about D.C. or preparations that are being made in Chicago or New York or Baltimore. And I hope that people who are wanting to come together and engage in collective resistance recognize that abolitionist organizers are the experts that they need to be turning to and looking to, not only in terms of resisting criminalization in the ways that we traditionally think about that, but also in creating the systems of care that will enable us to survive and thrive and be resilient through the kinds of violent occupation that we are experiencing and facing.
[It is they] who know how to create networks of mutual aid and care and protection and moving resources and people and ideas and practices of resistance around in the ways that we have been doing for decades. And I would say even centuries before it was even named as abolitionist organizing, and it was Indigenous folk resisting colonization, or Black people resisting enslavement, or migrants resisting the violence of borders.
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KH: Let’s talk about the importance of mapping our support systems and defenses. You helped create a resource for interrupting criminalization called Mapping Community Ecosystems of Collective Care. Can you talk a bit about that resource and how that kind of assessment and strategizing can help us right now?
AR: I woke up this morning thinking about a beautiful book written by our friend, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, called Theory of Water – it just came out recently – Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead. And to a process she describes in the book called centering. And it’s something I didn’t know, I grew up in Canada in part where Leanne lives, and on her, not her traditional lands, those of the Kanyen’keha:ka people in Kanesatake, but I grew up around a lot of snow. And she talks about how when snow hits the ground, the first thing that happens is that the crystals of snow literally reach for each other and change their chemical and structural makeup in order to bond to each other, to make what then becomes a snowpack. Which is materially different from each individual snowflake as it falls in composition and structure. And it’s such a beautiful metaphor for what Mapping Collective Ecosystems of Community Care needs to be right now.
How do we reach for each other in this moment and create a stronger structure by changing who we are and how we connect to each other to make something completely different from what we could be doing individually. And so this toolkit came out of the 2020 Uprisings, it came out of people’s efforts to build community-based responses to violence and community-based systems of care, and particularly things like community crisis response teams, what people are calling alternative crisis response teams. And finding in some places, for instance, that they had managed to wrest crisis response away from police, but they had not been able to create an ecosystem of care to bring people into other than the carceral system. So what they would describe is, they would respond to someone in crisis, maybe with some unmet mental health or physical health or material needs, and they would have nowhere to take them.
They would get there, they had gotten the police out of that equation, so they had at least eliminated the likelihood that the person would be harmed by police and criminalized and caged for having unmet needs. But then they had nowhere else to take them, there were no other resources to offer the person, or very few over-subscribed long waiting lists, et cetera. And that sometimes the person would need to go to seek care at the hospital or somewhere else, but they would get to the hospital and the hospital would say, you’re not sick enough to be here. And then the person would be upset because they were being denied the care they needed, and there might be some kind of escalation. And then they would either be pushed out onto the street again, in the same crisis they first came into contact with the care team or the crisis team, and/or worse, they would be criminalized for being upset that they weren’t getting care and end up in police custody in a cage anyway, or a psychiatric cage.
And they were like, we need to build the whole system of care, not just take the police out of the equation, whether it’s budgetarily or operationally. We need to build the things that people need. And in places like Minneapolis where people were building those things, they were saying, well, but we don’t necessarily have agreement or even a strong web of these organizations, they’re sort of all operating independently in their different neighborhoods at different hours, performing different functions. And so people in community aren’t feeling that there is a web of support for them, they’re feeling like, I have to remember that this group only works between 12 and five on Saturdays, and I have to call this number, it’s not familiar to me. 911 is familiar to me, and I know it’s like calling, it’s like Russian roulette, but at least I know someone will answer the phone when I call, and I don’t have to figure out whether they work in my neighborhood or they don’t, if they serve people like me or they don’t, or if I have to know somebody there or don’t.
And so people were trying to think about how to make programs feel more, the things that we are building, feel more like a solid net people could count on and rely on. And that would also operate with shared values, that if a group in one part of town said, we don’t work with the police, that that would mean the same thing as it meant for the other group that was doing something different, and that people could know that there were shared values and also shared communication. If different groups are trying to respond to a similar or the same crisis, whether it’s the same individual or the same location or the same problem, that people could come together and talk about collectively how they were going to do that instead of each program trying to do it individually. So that was sort of the original impetus for this toolkit. And so it offers a number of tools for mapping what exists, what needs to exist, how to have shared conversations about safety and values and practices.
And also, the very real thing, that you get very quickly overwhelmed when you’re trying to map what your community has and needs. Because in some ways there’s so much, and in most ways there’s so little. And the scale of need is so vast that it can be kind of paralyzing, how much needs to be done in order to meet the scale of need. We’re trying as ramshackle abolitionists to meet the conditions of end-stage racial capitalism, it’s the fallout of end-stage racial capitalism, and climate collapse with very few resources, and having been de-skilled by the state in how to care for each other. And so that was kind of the original purpose of the toolkit. And it was something that was collectively created by a cohort of groups from half a dozen cities across the country who were engaged in this process themselves, in Phoenix and Dallas and Milwaukee and Minneapolis, in Seattle and Baltimore and Atlanta, et cetera, places that were sort of trying to build, Austin, were trying to build these ecosystems and figure out how to strengthen them and fill in gaps, et cetera.
So that toolkit came out in 2023, sort of as a product of that process. And now of course, we’re in a very different political condition and we need to do a different kind of, a similar and a different kind of centering together. And so we plan to update it to meet this moment, which means that we really do need to map what we have both relationally and contextually and spatially. I had a dream last night that really reminded me in very vivid form of what Ejeris Dixon and so many other people remind us all the time, that relationships are our greatest currency in this moment. And I’m seeing this on so many fronts, that I am able to do what I’m able to do because of deep relationships over time. And that makes so much more resistance and strategizing together possible. And also, that relationships really make resistance possible, About Face is really working, which is formerly Iraq Veterans Against the War, is working with veterans in relationship with each other and National Guards people in relationship with each other to try and blunt and block this occupation or these occupations.
And inviting people to use the relationships they have. Many people are in relationship with National Guards people in the states that are loyal to the regime and sending their guard to participate in the occupation of D.C., or who will be sent to deploy in opposition states and cities. And there’s a way in which those relationships can be mobilized, to talk to people who are being called up, to talk to people who are supporting what’s happening, to talk to anyone in our sphere to get information and to move them to action and resistance. And so we definitely want to map those relationships and where we have influence and power, where we have skills, and who we can move together in resistance with. And then also, who’s doing what in our community. So I think particularly now we’re thinking about mapping, who’s doing encampment defense? Who’s doing Stop the Sweeps? Because the first thing the National Guard and federalized law enforcement we’re doing in DC is sweeps of over 40 encampments of unhoused people and people with unmet material and health needs.
And so, who are the groups who are already doing those kinds of sweep defense and encampment defense work, who are already deeply in relationship with people who are in those communities. And how can we support them as they are facing a greater pressure, how can we support the folks who are already engaged in community crisis response and safety response to sort of try and get people away from state responses which are ever, ever more violent under occupation. Who’s already organizing day laborers and sex workers and other people who are in public space as a means of survival. It’s essential to their survival. But of course, in an occupied city, being a public space means you are immediately a target. Who are already working with migrant communities around ICE watch and ICE defense, and who’s already sort of engaged in the kinds of work that’s fighting criminalization of youth or criminalization of folks, people in schools, of young people in schools, et cetera. Because those are the spaces that, based on the D.C. occupation and what’s been said about upcoming occupations, are where we’re going to need to be defending most.
And also, to think about what are the spaces in our community and the programs in our communities that we’re going to need to defend. I think D.C. has been really clear that public transit is a space we need to defend, public parks, downtown areas, public spaces where people live, work, survive, enjoy the world, are spaces that need to be protected, and how do we do that. And I’m really inspired by the ways in which D.C. organizers have encouraged folks to adopt a block or adopt a park or adopt a transit station that they and their crew will protect and defend. And also, the way there was a giant go-go party in a public space in D.C. recently, so that we can, not just be defending but claiming public spaces of joy and resistance together in response and resistance to the occupation. And then I think it’s also about encouraging people to map threats, both in terms of where the physical locations of the threats are. Where’s the armory? Where’s your local National Guard office? Where’s your local special agent in charge of the ICE office? Where is ICE deploying from? Where are other law enforcement deploying from? Where are they taking people? And what other targets folks need to be focused on in order to, again, blunt or block the impacts of the operation?
And then of course, we need to be mapping what we need in order to survive. And I think there’s a lot of good work being done in LA and elsewhere of people being like, well, if people are afraid to come out of their house because of an occupation, then we need to bring food to them. We need to bring health care to them. We need to bring community and fellowship to them. We need to bring childcare to them. We need to bring the necessities of survival and community and resilience to them. And how do we set up spaces where that can happen? And how are we mapping our information and communication networks, particularly those that are offline? Because we all know it’s very easy to shut off cell service with StingRay towers. It’s easy to jam internet.
Certainly, I traveled last year a great deal, including in spaces where there was a lot of repression happening. And even in neighboring countries, if Nairobi’s cell signal or internet is being shut down to shut down a protest or resistance or rebellion, the surrounding countries also are having similar issues. So it was just really clear to me that we really need to figure out other mechanisms of communication.
And then the last thing I’ll say is we need to map our spaces of fortification, and spiritual resilience, and then we need to fortify those as well because… And our spaces of communion, our spaces of collective care. The spaces where we find joy, the spaces where we’re able to be creative. People are constantly talking about how the most important part of counterinsurgency is creativity. And certainly, the theory of water is that we need to move like water, and that means that we need to flow above and below ground in and around things.
Sometimes water operates with direct and sometimes destructive force or resistance, but often it operates in more creative ways. And we need to be making spaces where that kind of creativity can come forth. And mapping where that’s happening in our movement so that we can be generating, through a practice of love and joy and creativity, the things that we can’t think about when we’re stuck in the opposition’s imagination rather than in our own.
KH: Thank you for that. I am a huge fan of the Mapping Community Ecosystems of Collective Care Toolkit. And recently, I have been taking ideas and inspirations from the toolkit to help inform a worksheet for folks in Chicago who are organizing preparedness for a possible federal military occupation. I have pulled a lot of ideas directly from the toolkit, while also talking to people around the country, and listening to some of our friends in LA and D.C., in order to create a resource that helps people ask the right questions, while mapping out a response to this threat. By the time this episode airs, a number of groups in Chicago will have met to discuss that worksheet, and to map lines of protection and support in their communities. Because we really need to zero in on how we’re going to defend and care for our people if troops and massive teams of federal agents move through our cities.
And if people want to check out that resource, I will be linking it in the transcript and in the show notes.
One of the things that’s already come up in my local discussions around who’s working together, and who should be working together, and how we can fortify lines of support and protection, is that this is a time to put aside some of our one-sided beefs and conflicts. It’s a time to ask what conflicts we can put aside, at least temporarily, in order to act together, and maybe, what old fractures could be healed with a conversation. Because what isolates us empowers our enemies.
But I do get that some of our differences with people who we need to act alongside are meaningful, and in the right context, worthy of discussion. One of the things that’s been frustrating me lately, among people who talk about “defending democracy,” is how determined people are to separate that from any meaningful discussion of criminalization. I am really concerned about the fetishization of the rule of law, especially under an authoritarian regime. And I’m also worried about the use of reductive, flattening language some liberal and progressive groups are using, like vague language about “stopping political violence,” which, in my opinion, fuels false equivalencies and ultimately sanitizes white supremacy and fascism. Do you have thoughts about this?
AR: So many. So many, and so grateful for the spaces you make for these conversations. I mean, this kind of thinking is what got us here. So I think it’s really alarming to me that this is sort of the predominant and most resourced narrative of resistance. As I was saying earlier, the rule of law is the carceral state. It is the law of colonialism. It is the law of chattel slavery. It is the law of racial capitalism. There’s no rule of law that’s going to get us out of where we are. I mean, there are Supreme Court decisions, recent and old, that make it clear.
One of the first ones you learn in law school is a case about Indigenous land rights, in which the court says in no uncertain terms, that the conquered will never find justice in the courts of the conqueror. That was probably one of the first times I walked out of law school and swore I was never going back. Probably, the next one is when I read Dred Scott, which says that Black people have no rights, that anyone is bound to respect, as property. And so there’s just a way in which people really are hanging on to a system of law that has consistently been about criminalization. And even if you don’t buy that, you can read recent Supreme Court opinions, including one around deportation to third countries where Justice [Sonia] Sotomayor said in close to these words, the White House has the Supreme Court on speed dial. There’s nothing I can do. I dissent.
The capture of the courts is complete in some ways, in most important ways. I’m not saying we don’t keep fighting in the courts as a way of trying to blunt or delay or throw sand in the gears or protect people or get some wins, because people are still getting some wins there. But that is not where we are going to find a solution to this current situation and these current conditions. And again, whether we’re talking about at the local, federal, or international level. But there is this idea that there is some impartial order that can be maintained through the rule of law that is just really completely ahistorical about what the law is and does.
I mean, the law is how power is created and enforced, and so it’s going to uphold and enforce existing systems and relations of power. And the law is not the only, but certainly a primary, tool and weapon of criminalization, which, as we’ve discussed, is how this all happens, and what makes possible to create the infrastructure, to create the investment, to create the buy-in, the manufacturing of consent for what’s happening is through a process that happens primarily, but not exclusively, through the law.
So I need people to start thinking about what is the social contract that we want to create together, and how do we want to create it together. Whether it’s how we’re going to defend our block, how we’re going to provide for the things people need, and what kind of world we’re going to build together in ways that are creative rather than sort of hanging on to… Not to be hackneyed about the use of this phrase, because it’s actually a really powerful and revolutionary phrase, that we can’t keep hanging onto the master’s tools. And the rule of law is definitely the master’s tools.
And again, even if you don’t buy that as analysis or a politic, I certainly hope that people, at least in this moment, are strategically seeing that there are some levers that are no longer available to us. And the courts, certainly the Supreme Court is one of them. And that we are going to have to move past relying on a system that has been captured by the regime as our primary or exclusive way out of this. There’s no way we’re litigating our way out of this situation. It’s just never going to happen. And I want people to get clear on that, because it’ll open up many other far more effective ways that we could be moving right now in order to resist and build and practice a new social contract.
KH: Absolutely, and you know, I really feel like, as you say, even if you don’t buy into abolition as a political commitment or objective, and even if you don’t see criminalization in the same way that Andrea and I do, you have to recognize what’s happening in real time. You have to see who has a stranglehold on the law and what their objectives are. That means that a lot more of us need to be willing to be outlaws, and to embrace that as a moral good. In a country where getting essential forms of medical care has been criminalized, being a criminal for the sake of getting people that care is a fundamentally good thing. We need to care for each other and protect one another, with as much defiance as that work requires, and we need to celebrate that defiance, at a cultural level. Fetishizing the rule of law will not get us there.
And you know, I am not going to go too deep on this, because we’re short on time, and because this I’m going to talk more about this in upcoming episode, but as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and I discussed in an episode earlier this year, the research at the heart of some of this analysis that is fueling so many workshops and grants right now is really widely misinterpreted, in the first place, and also flawed, in terms of how it categorizes “violence.” Again, I will get into that more next time. I know you and I could go back and forth all day about this, Andrea. But at the end of the day, we cannot play into these good protester, bad protester logics that depict some people as expendable. It makes sense to have a strategic frame around what you do and don’t do. I have heard antifascists in Chicago this week, who I know believe in a diversity of tactics, saying they want to be mindful about the imagery they create, because Trump’s narrative is that Chicago is a violent city, and they want to show people that Chicago is a place where people support, protect and take care of each other. That’s a strategic consideration, and I applaud people being strategic.
But if some protester does get in trouble for breaking something or throwing something back at the police, that person is not now responsible for Trump’s escalations, and we need a lot more moral clarity around that. I even saw someone on social media whining about the guy who threw a sandwich at a federal agent, saying, “This does not help us,” and seriously, please, just shut the fuck up. Fascists are responsible for fascist violence, full stop. We know that, historically, if they want a so-called “justification” for their violence, they’re not above staging it or just lying and saying it happened. As Mariame and I talk about in Let This Radicalize You, the state will twist itself in knots to brand you “violent,” if you get in their way, and we’re seeing that with the severity of some of the charges people are facing now — but also the severity of charges people have been facing for years for taking actions to stop catastrophic harm from happening, without hurting anyone. People have been charged with “trafficking” for life-saving acts of mutual aid. “Violence” is an incredibly flexible term, and criminalization is a dehumanizing trap.
We cannot join the state in its blame game. We have to be consistent about who’s to blame, and it’s not the people in our communities who are under attack. And no, it has not been proven that reactive acts of community defense, or property getting damaged mean people are less likely to win. That’s just false. In a lot of the revolutions that are held up as examples of nonviolent success, property was destroyed, punches — and other things — were thrown, and people did defend themselves, in key instances. It’s just easy to bullshit people in the U.S. about global history and gloss over specifics because most people yell more than they read.
So, I just want to be very clear that my bottom line on this will always be: Leave the scapegoating to the fascists. Our narratives should center the people they harm and the threat that they pose. We’re not gonna win by agreeing with them about who’s responsible for their escalations. They are responsible for their escalations, always.
[musical interlude]
So as we’re coming to the end here, I really want to make some space to talk about the work that you all are doing at Interrupting Criminalization with the Beyond Do No Harm Network, because I think that’s a really hopeful project that really demonstrates the kind of refusal we need people to engage in right now. Can you talk a bit about that project and how those efforts are going?
AR: The Beyond Do No Harm Network is an invitation to health care providers of all types to really live into their commitment to do no harm, including with the understanding that criminalization is harm, that denial of criminalized care is harm, that denial of care to criminalized people is harm, that criminalization really is the antithesis of care.
And I feel like in this moment that is really kind of at the core of what all of us need to be thinking about. Hearkening back to what we’ve been talking about for most of this time is that the number one assignment of this time is to confront, challenge, interrupt and uproot criminalization, and that that represents our best chance of striking at the heart of fascism and pushing back. So this invitation to health care providers to do that is I think one of the sort of main survival strategies that we need to be engaged in.
We’ve organized a network of health care providers across the country around 13 principles that are about interrupting criminalization in the context of access to care. But they’re principles that we’re not just asking people to sign onto and carry on with their daily lives, but to really enact in their individual practices, in their institutions and in their professions and professional associations.
And all 13 of them really are particularly relevant in this moment. Certainly cops out of care, ICE out of care is one that people are really engaged in, whether it’s keeping ICE out of health care facilities, trying to stop them from kidnapping people from health care facilities, when ICE brings people into health care facilities because they’ve hurt them during the abduction process, engaging health care providers to support and care for the person in that moment, which includes making sure they’re connected to the people they need to be connected to, and that they’re not discharged into conditions that we are all clear are bad for anyone with any health care issue. Being in a space where you’re not being fed, you’re being dehydrated, you’re being overcrowded, there’s nowhere for you to lay down and rest, you’re being tortured, it’s freezing, it’s super hot, and you’re away from your care team, and you’re certainly not going to get follow-up care is not safe for anybody, right? No doctor or health care provider would be like, I’m going to release you from my care into those conditions, and think that you will get better. So we’re inviting health care providers to act on that reality.
But there’s many other principles. I really invite folks to check them out at our page. It’s a project we actually started during the first iteration of this administration based on our understanding that criminalization of sexual gender and reproductive autonomy and self-determination is a core aspect and principle of how fascism and right-wing agendas are advanced. And that health care provision is a primary site of criminalization for many of the populations who are being targeted eugenically, xenophobically and homophobically and transphobically by this administration. And so we’re grateful that we started building this before this moment, and certainly that it’s needed in this moment.
So some of what people are doing are what I described is trying to keep ICE out of facilities and keeping people out of ICE’s hands, but also providing care for people who are afraid to go to health care facilities or afraid to go to school or afraid to seek out the care they need because of the presence of ICE or the fear of coming into contact with ICE if they do so. And so they’re setting up community clinics, they’re setting up house calls, they’re setting up visits to spaces that people feel safe in to make sure they’re getting the care they need and that the process of seeking care isn’t what then puts them into a situation that’s a danger to their lives, to their wellbeing, and to their continued presence in this country.
We’re also thinking about the most recent, well, one of the more recent executive orders in which there was a declaration of intent to cut funding and resources and potentially criminalize harm reduction-based programs to incarcerate disabled people and people with unmet mental health needs in coerced medical interventions or medical carceral facilities.
And we’re going to be hosting a virtual gathering at the end of October to help organizers think about how we organize beyond stopping jails, prisons, and detention centers to also think about other carceral spaces that people are being pushed into, whether it’s RFK deciding that people with autism or other mental health diagnoses should be forced to work on organic farms ’cause that’ll be better for their health than whatever practices they’re using now, including medication to manage their own health care, or this commitment to reinstitutionalize or institutionalize large swaths of the population.
Those are just two projects in which certainly people are resisting the criminalization of trans health care and finding ways to make sure that people get the care they need. Same is true for resisting criminalization of abortion care, including the designation of abortion medication for now in the state of Louisiana as a controlled substance and sort of coming together with folks who have been fighting the drug war and fighting abortion criminalization to share strategies and join our fights together.
And we have monthly resistance labs in which people are constantly ideating, sharing strategies and tactics and creative approaches to, again, making sure that people are getting the care they need, that they’re not criminalized when doing that, and that they’re getting the growing amount of care that is being criminalized and that criminalized populations are getting the care they need.
KH: Interrupting Criminalization is such a gift to our movements, and Beyond Do No Harm is such a heartening project. I’m just so full of gratitude hearing you describe this work, and I hope everyone involved knows how much they’re appreciated.
As we wrap up today, is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of the audience?
AR: I just want to point people to our Block and Build, But Make it Abolitionist tool, which I think sort of along with the mapping process can be a helpful orientation to this moment to really invite people to think, “What is it that my group and I do or I’m really good at? Is it that I’m the blocker?”
The tool really invites people to think of criminalization at the core of fascism, and then think about what form or iteration or manifestation of criminalization we need to be targeting in our particular community or that in our particular area of concern, and whether we need to be targeting it by blocking something or blunting the impact of something to make it less bad if we can’t block it completely. Whether that’s criminalization of certain kinds of learning or certain kinds of activities, et cetera.
Is there something that we need to be focused on breaking, whether that’s the alliance of certain folks who are excited about organic food, for instance, do we need to break them off from the RFK brand of how we should be managing our health? People who might be concerned about certain things that he’s addressing, but we want to break them off from supporting his whole agenda.
Are there things that we also need to break within ourselves, including our investment and addiction to criminalization and punishment as the way that we address harm and conflict and need? And do we need to be building different ways and practicing different ways of addressing those things?
And then I think really, where do we need to broaden? I think that that’s an important moment. It’s what we were trying to do with the Beyond Do No Harm Network. The vast majority of health care providers are not abolitionists, right? They don’t think about criminalization on a day-to-day basis. They engage in what they think are helping practices. And we didn’t let that be a barrier to us when we were reaching out to them to sort of have a conversation about what care is and what care isn’t and what gets in the way of care.
And many folks in our network might still not describe themselves as abolitionists, but they are committed to care and to deepening their understanding and practice that criminalization is antithetical to care. And so what will they do based on that? And that was a process of bridging across multiple tendencies and beliefs about the world around a shared value.
And then what do we need to build in our communities in order to not only resist and be resilient, but to practice the world we want on the other side of this? We are suffering. There’s going to be too much suffering. There’s already been too much suffering. Hundreds of people in D.C.’s lives have been irrevocably changed by what’s happened in the last couple of weeks. And that will only continue to exponentially expand across time and space in the coming period.
And so what we come out on the other side can’t be just a return to what was. It has to be something completely different. This has to be a portal to, as I said, a new social contract, a new way of being and relating to each other that makes this kind of moment and what we’re experiencing in Gaza and around the world in terms of climate collapse, et cetera, impossible. And that means we have to be practicing new things as we’re building resistance and resilience.
So this invites us to think about where we have power and how we can exercise power and where we need to target power and invites us to think through the contradictions and tensions that we have about power, including things like the rule of law, and to have those kinds of conversations with ourselves and each other.
So I just wanted to lift that up as another resource to accompany your mapping process. It might not be what you need right now, but it might offer some helpful questions and focus in the face of overwhelm and kind of analysis paralysis, which I think many of us are stuck in. So I wanted to lift that up. And thank you so much for making the time to be in conversation today, Kelly.
KH: I’m so grateful to you, Andrea. And I just want to name that I love Block and Build But Make it Abolitionist as an example of how we can take something that has value, but maybe doesn’t completely jive with our politics or approach — in this case, the Working Families Party’s Block and Build strategy — and figure out how to apply what makes sense for us, while also bringing our own values and ideas to the table. We need more of that in these times. There’s so much out there that isn’t exactly what we would do, or doesn’t exactly fit our frame that we can still make use of. People we aren’t on the same page with about everything have a lot of good ideas, and we need more sharing, innovation, and opportunities to grow, build, and experiment. Anyone can critique — we all do it, we could do it all day — but taking action and inviting people into action is what’s going to create a path forward for all of us. I appreciate the role Interrupting Criminalization is playing in creating tools and resources, and inviting people into action and the shared thought-work that can help sustain it.
And Andrea, I am always so grateful to hear your insights and to have the opportunity to learn from you, and think alongside you. And I am just so grateful for your friendship and for our ongoing collaboration.
AR: Right back at you. Thank you so much, Kelly, for all you are and are doing and being and helping us think through in this moment and all the ways you’re shining light on the path forward.
KH: Well, let’s keep up the fight and stay in it together.
AR: We are definitely in this together.
KH: 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
