Must-Reads and The Work We Need to Do

Your weekly, curated list of must-reads is here. From the secret world of a right-wing militia to the Democratic Party’s slide to the right, here are some of the most important stories I’ve read this week.

• In 2024 Platform, Democrats Lurch Right on Policing and Immigration by Schuyler Mitchell. “Rather than seek to dispel bad-faith misinformation disseminated by the far right or embrace a truly justice-driven agenda, the Democrats have, with this platform, taken a reactionary approach, responding to attacks by reinscribing their position as a staunchly carceral, pro-police party. And they take a similarly disappointing approach to immigration.”
• "And Now They Want Our Votes" by Eman Abdelhadi. "Your tone will not pull bombs out of the sky. Your tone is not enough."
• Exclusive: Joe Biden Appoints Hawkish Official To Lead Israel Policy At State Department by Akbar Shahid Ahmed. “‘Assigning [Resnick] ... reflects a doubling down on the administration’s determination to continue to provide unconditional material support for Israel’s genocidal campaign against civilians in Gaza,’ argued Annelle Sheline, a former State Department official who quit the agency in protest over Biden’s approach earlier this year.”
• Understanding Netanyahu’s Endgame in the War on Gaza by Qassam Muaddi and Faris Giacaman. “In charting this maximalist path, Netanyahu is playing with fire, since a broader war with Hezbollah may get Israel mired in a quagmire that offers little more than the chance of a pyrrhic victory. But it also, in his view, presents an opportunity.”
• Israel Using Ceasefire Talks to Expand Colonization of Palestine, UN Expert Says by Sharon Zhang. “In the latest ceasefire talks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been insistent that Israel be able to maintain a permanent military occupation of Gaza’s border with Egypt and a corridor built by Israeli forces cutting across the middle of the Gaza Strip, which Israelis respectively call the Philadelphi Corridor and Netzarim Corridor.”
• The unpublished Genocide Diaries of Refaat Alareer by Refaat Alareer. “As people attempt to protect themselves from the constant onslaught of distressing news, they grow indifferent. Because we could die anyway, no matter where we go. Emotional numbness sets in, as individuals attempt to detach from their emotions to survive.”
• Chicago Police Made Nearly 200,000 Secret Traffic Stops Last Year by Pascal Sabino. “Chicago Police officers have secretly pulled over as many as 20,000 more drivers per month in the past year than they have reported publicly, in violation of a 2003 law requiring them to document every traffic stop, a Bolts and Injustice Watch investigation has found.”
• ‘Nobody Ever Saw Anything Like This Before’: How Methane Emissions are Pushing the Amazon Towards Environmental Catastrophe by Rob Jackson. “I never thought I would live to see the world’s weather unravel and people suffer so much for it.”
• The NYPD is Illegally Leaking Sealed Records About Children to Tabloids by Akela Lacy. “Legal advocates working on the suit said the practice of leaking sealed juvenile records was indicative of the NYPD’s broader disregard for civil liberties.”
• Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia by Joshua Kaplan. “Police officers weren’t the only ones quietly allying with AP3. Some lawmakers did, too. Among them was a North Carolina state legislator who was an off-the-books member.”

Final Thoughts

Greetings friends,

I am so glad the Democratic National Convention is over and that the elites of the Democratic Party have flown back to wherever the hell they came from. I didn’t make it to every protest this week, and yet I still feel completely drained. Maybe it’s the times we live in. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m getting older. My lower back certainly isn’t doing me any favors, that’s for sure. 

If you haven’t had a chance to check out my conversation with Palestinian feminists Eman Abdelhadi and Leena, which I published yesterday, I highly recommend giving it a read. Their perspectives were exactly what I needed to hear after a week of watching the Democrats slide to the right in a highly celebrated manner. 

The protests this week were powerful, but honestly, they were not as large as they should have been. That’s not an organizing critique but more of a statement about where we are politically. Activists and organizers are exhausted. Many people are mesmerized by the election. Some are afraid of Donald Trump and willing to hang their hopes on Kamala Harris, in spite of her hardline talk of border security and her refusal to support an arms embargo for Israel. I think some people have also grown cynical after 11 months of marching, protesting, and crying to the heavens that the genocide must stop. The Palestine Solidarity Movement has gathered in unprecedented numbers, created encampments, shut down weapons manufacturers, and forced Biden to drop out of the presidential race, and yet, it feels like we are no closer to stopping the genocide. It’s discouraging, I know. 

At one of this week’s rallies, one of the speakers on stage insisted, “We are winning.” 

Someone standing near me in the crowd muttered, “That’s not true.” The person beside them, who I assume was their friend, nudged them as if urging them to be quiet. The mutterer repeated, “Well, it’s not true.”

While acknowledging that my opinion is hardly the most important one, I tend to agree with the mutterer. The protests I attended this week were meaningful and necessary, but I don’t think we are winning. I don’t think this is what winning looks like, and I don’t think most of us have a clear vision of what it would take to win. 

I believe in big marches as a show of political force and as a means to welcome people into our movements, but as we saw this week, and as we have seen on many other occasions, our political leaders are content to let us march, applaud themselves for it, and then ignore us. I believe in disruptive actions, such as the blockades we have seen at weapons manufacturing facilities. I also know that many activists who have participated in those actions are now facing jail time and astronomical fines. Many people are unwilling to risk those outcomes and will, therefore, not engage with such bold tactics.

I’ve heard some arguments that we don’t have the right to expect safety in protest when so many people are being killed. I don’t think collective action is about what anyone has a right to expect. It’s about what people can be organized to do. We talk about meeting people where they are because that’s where you have to begin. We do not get to summon people to our political conclusions. We have to think alongside them. We have to demonstrate that what matters to them matters to us and that common ground exists between us. We have to engage in political education and move with people as they begin to inhabit their power. We have to be in relationships with people, and that involves an investment in their survival and well-being. I’m not sure that people who carry on about how we shouldn’t expect safety understand any of that. If they did, they might realize that the argument, It doesn’t matter what happens to you, is kind of a non-starter from an organizing perspective. 

Obviously, as a disabled person, I think about safety much differently than I did 20 years ago, but I’ll save that for another edition of this newsletter. What I will say here is that accessibility matters, just as our differing relationships to risk matter, and that failing to recognize that won’t help us build power.

Supporting people who have engaged with bold tactics also matters, and I haven’t seen nearly enough people doing that work over the years. As someone who has raised money for people facing serious charges, I can tell you that most people who demand bold action do not concern themselves with supporting people who are facing the long-term consequences of such actions. If we want bold movements, people need to see that bold activists are well-supported. They often aren’t.

I’m also thinking about how focused we are on the rightward lurch of Democrats like Harris when the populace itself is also sliding to the right. We can rip on liberals all day for their carcerality and their disregard for an ongoing genocide, but despising the larger political terrain will not change it. (Oh, how I wish it would, for I would have changed the world decades ago with the sheer strength of my spite.) It’s true that people were more concerned with police brutality under Trump. It’s also true that the Democrats were espousing much more progressive ideas in 2020. I have heard some people say that this means organizing conditions would be more favorable under Trump than Harris because liberals often become complacent under Democratic presidents. I think that argument is bananas. 

The terrain will be extremely challenging regardless of who wins this election. 

Under Trump, activists and organizers would be forced to operate in a reactive mode, constantly defending against incoming attacks. More liberals would be politically activated, but many of them would simply write posts on social media about how upset they are or take selfies at the occasional protest. (Treating self-expression as a political end in itself is a problem among both liberals and leftists, to be clear, but it is quite pronounced among liberals.) Under the first Trump administration, some liberals were upset to the point of hysterics by the daily news cycle, but what did that ultimately mean for the left? Are our political projects stronger for it? I would argue that they are not. There would be more donations to leftist causes, for sure, but are those donations worth a national abortion ban or the end of federal environmental protections? In any case, I think relying on right-wing entrenchment to stir up interest in our movements is a losing plan. The cost/benefit analysis simply does not add up.

Under Harris, we will be dealing with entrenched neoliberal policies and many of the same injustices we have experienced for years: the criminalization of homelessness, the violence of austerity, the brutalization and expulsion of migrants, support for Israel’s ongoing war crimes, and much more. While we would not see the all-out gutting of environmental protections, Harris will not deliver us from climate chaos. She will protect the interests of the ultra-wealthy and the fossil fuel industry, imperiling all life on earth. We wouldn’t have the boogeyman of Trumpism to push liberals into our arms, and we would be up against a party that knows how to make some fascistic policies feel like inevitable, mainstream conclusions. It will be ugly, and I will hate it. 

The part about it being ugly and me hating it is true regardless of who gets elected. There is no salvation at the ballot box. There is no salvation in persuading people not to vote. Most people don’t vote now, and the majority of nonvoters have not been transformed into a legion of well-organized changemakers. I am not saying you must vote. I respect your autonomy. (Though I do encourage people to engage with local elections, even if they ignore the federal races.) However, characterizing abstention as something that makes injustice less likely – one of the two outcomes described above is what will happen, either way – or somehow cleanses our hands of the atrocities of empire – that, I can’t rock with. 

I live in the imperial core. I’ve never seen clean money or clean hands.

I also don’t understand how fixating on the election or our judgments around how people engage with it serves leftists who do not view electoralism as our work. Posting endlessly about how much people suck for supporting Harris is just another way of being consumed by electoral politics. We should be talking about what people ought to do with themselves right now. What is the infrastructure we are going to need, to face a difficult future, regardless of who is elected? What can we organize? What can we build? How can we move people to engage with our efforts rather than relying on boogeymen to motivate them? 

The political terrain is lousy. I know how disappointing that feels. After all, it hasn’t been that long since the majority of people in the US supported protesters who torched a police station. In 2020, millions of people in the US got a whiff of collapse and a taste of organized abandonment. Then, they got some semblance of normalcy back. For many people, the restoration of normalcy ended their brief love affair with leftist ideas. They thought they wanted justice, but what they really wanted was the restoration of the American way of life. Their primary objective now is to avoid ever feeling that their experience of normalcy has been imperiled again. The further normalization of mass death has lent itself to the further normalization of mass murder. We are living in an era of normalcy at all costs, and in an era of collapse, the costs will be staggering. Some people characterized the pandemic as a portal. Four years on, I don’t like where that portal has taken us. But this is where we are, and it’s where we have to organize. 

Until we have built a hell of a lot more power, our work will be countercultural. If we want that countercultural work to grow into something transformative, we have to do more than reject the status quo. Most people don’t want to do the work that this moment requires of us. The thought work, the imaginative work, and the profoundly unsexy work of navigating difference and operationalizing our political visions – none of this stuff offers the kind of instant gratification we can get from telling people off on the internet. But asserting our righteousness will not change the world. This week, I urge you to think about what you can do to help make your political visions material. Who can you learn with, build with, and take action with? What ongoing work can you support? Does the structure or container you want to be a part of exist? If not, what would it take to make it real? 

If you are engaging in political discourse on social media in ways that do not feel productive, please stop drinking from that toxic well and read a book. (Let This Radicalize You is on sale right now!) Or even watch some trashy television. It will be better for your soul than what’s happening on the bird site.

I could say more, but I’ve already said far too much. In these final thoughts sections, I usually set out to write something the length of a Facebook post and then just keep on writing because I don’t know when to shut up. This is clearly another one of those times. In any case, I hope to see some of you next weekend at the Socialism Conference. Perhaps we can contemplate some of the work ahead and focus on something other than the electoral circus for a little while.

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