Notes on a Destructive Escalation: An Anarchist Perspective on Riot Control

The murder of George Floyd by now-terminated Minneapolis police officer Derrick Chauvin abetted by three of his fellow officers sparked a national wave of property destruction the likes the United States hasn’t seen since the roadside beating of Rodney King. Images of trashed police precincts and torched police cars have littered news broadcasts and social media feeds, but this time with a rather muted condemnation from mainstream media outlets.

It’s tempting to look at this sort of explosion of popular destructive rage as an aberration from normal civic engagement. Certainly, our history textbooks and popular media would have us believe that the history of progressive change is one of docile protestors against brutal gendarmes and their equally brutal, right-wing accomplices. However, a broader view that pans out from the Martin Luther Kings and Mahatma Gandhis and Jesus Christs of history shows a social context in which political destruction played a crucial tactical role in forcing the capitulation of the authorities.

Nazis Should Be Victims

Recently, the UK Home Office proscribed two neo-nazi organizations–Sonnenkrieg Division and System Resistance Network–as terrorist organizations, making membership in those groups itself illegal. Commenting on this for the CARR blog, Dr. Craig McCann, a "countering violent extremism" consultant with prior experience in law enforcement, largely praised the actions of the Home Office. He did however express one reservation, namely, that this might fuel narratives of the victimization of the far right.

The Right Doesn't Like It When You Correctly Identify Racism

I guess feelings don't care about facts either. Since writing a report about the very true presence of VDare and Red Ice TV on Facebook, Guardian tech reporter Julia Carrie Wong has received a bunch of attention from right wing outlets, angrily stating that she correctly identifies racists online.

Richard Spencer Made Me Look Up What an Octoroon Is

Hoo boy! Apparently, Milo leaked some audio of Richard Spencer's reaction to learning of Heather Heyer's death and the negative media attention it earned him. Let's say he's displeased. Slur-filled transcription under the cut.

Conversation with Gretchen Mullen

I have been having a stimulating conversation with Gretchen Mullen of Skeptic Review about neo-fascism and anti-fascism. We're currently on the fifth round of letters (my last one was a two-parter). Check out our exchange here!

16 Shots and a Cover Up

Was doing a lot of crying this morning educating myself on the shooting of Laquan McDonald. Among other things, I came across this podcast series. Anyone who knows me knows I don't listen to podcasts, but this one actually held my attention. Check it out here.

It's Like Angela Nagle Read Settlers and Sided with the White People

Angela Nagle pulls at our collective memory of decommunization by invoking Reagan's Berlin Wall speech in the lede of her latest for American Affairs Journal. In keeping with her steady slide into Strasserism, we find her parroting some of Tom Metzger's favorite talking points by positing unchecked immigration as inherently anti-working class (and the reverse position as the True Left).

HHS Proposes New Policy on Sex Discrimination

The New York Times got its hands on a memo suggesting the Department of Health and Human Services was considering a definition of sex for Title IX purposes to be determined by genetics. Per the Times:

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

This is problematic for a number of reasons: What of people who do not conform genetically to this binary conception of sex? What of people who have already undergone sexual reassignment surgery? Do people really face discrimination on the basis of what's on their original birth certificate?

If and when this new policy is put into effect, it will be at least the 3rd department to do so, following the Department of Defense and the Department of Education.

A comment on the Raworth-Milanovic debate

A friendly critique of Kate Raworth's book Doughtnut Economics by Branko Milanovic on the Brave New Europe blog has locked the two in a heated debate. One point of contention, has the two in a war of art references, Giotto's "St. Francis" versus Rodin's "Gates of Hell." This rhetorical sticking point appears to be a debate over nature versus nurture. While Raworth appears to regard such a debate sufficient to prove her point, Milanovic appears to take a more structural view. However, in his rejoinder to Raworth's reply, Milanovic plays to Raworth's critique on the question of human nature rather than reasserting his own.

PE of Fash Week III: Eugenics and the Alt-Right (Reading List)

This class is intended to address what I consider to be the closest historical precedent to the alt-right: the eugenics movement. I say this not only by manner of ideological comparison, nor only manner of social insertion. I say this because the core organizations the bred the original alt-right - VDare, New Century Foundation (American Renaissance), and the National Policy Institute - are part of a non-profit financial network that has preserved eugenics since its decline following the discovery of DNA and the sequencing of the human genome.

The "required" readings cover the history and present of the eugenics movement. The Belkhir & Duyme piece explores the core assertions and fallacies of the eugenics movement both in its historical manifestation, but also in the present day. The Smedley & Smedley piece adds color to the Belkhir & Duyme piece, going beyond the mere refutation of biological, especially genetic, origins of social identity and aptitude constructs to give an accounting of the historical and social origins of these constructs using race as its case study.

The piece by Baker is presented as a means of focusing on how eugenics functioned logistically to popularize their approach. Baker's piece, which highlights the attempts by the organized eugenics movement to appeal to Christianity, is especially illustrative given that the movement ultimately wasn't able to get enthusiastic support on the basis of tying eugenic beliefs to Christianity. However, in the process the movement underwent numerous, ultimately cosmetic changes, hiding and repackaging core principles to appeal to an audience averse to themes of biological evolution, birth control, and selective breeding.

Liberalism Is Probably Impossible Reader

Since the Democratic Party and its enabling non-profits have recently staked their hopes on an electoral process that they have insisted for over a year was compromised by foreign actors, I have been thinking about the consistent failure of electoral strategy in light of fascist upsurge. What history demonstrates time and again, from the Pact of Pacification to the Sermon on the Mount, is that a brutal government cannot be thwarted through obsequiousness. Liberalism, understood not as a political orientation but a governmental paradigm, ultimately proves impossible. Whatever is won in the moral spectacle of violence cannot make up for the literally everything that is materially lost. Suffering is suffering. Dying is dying. Below, I present five texts that tackle different aspects of the logic and application of liberalism which prefigures its own demise.

Shawn Rosenberg - Against Neoclassical Political Economy: A Political Psychological Critique

Ed White - The Value of Conspiracy Theory

Frederick Shauer - Uncoupling Free Speech

Mitch Berbrier - "Half the Battle": Cultural Resonance, Framing Processes, and Ethnic Affectations in Contemporary White Separatist Rhetoric

Frantz Fanon - On Violence (from Wretched of the Earth)

Jean Paul Sartre - Preface to Fanon's Wretched of the Earth

All That For This

Published an article over at Jewish Currents today about the first round of acquittals in the J20 trials. The process dragged out for almost a year, and somehow made it to a jury despite some rather unusual procedures. Here's a sample:

During the pretrial, hearing dates were rescheduled without notifying defendants who were required under penalty of arrest to attend. Law enforcement agents were demonstrated by the defense to be lying on the witness stand, and in closing arguments, lead prosecutor Jen Kerkhoff all but told the jury that their instructions were irrelevant and that reasonable doubt “doesn’t mean a whole lot.”
“We saw that the U.S. Attorney’s office has no problem with the fact that their interests overlap with [rightwing organizations] Project Veritas or the Oath Keepers,” explained Menefee-Libey. “We also saw that the DC Superior Court is willing to let all of these things proceed under their legitimizing purview. This was procedurally strange, but politically and morally terrifying and abhorrent.”

What the trials have helped bring to light above all else is the absolute disregard for procedure on the part of the police.

According to court documents, law enforcement had infiltrated the planning for all three events but zeroed in on the the anti-fascist, anti-capitalist bloc, which departed from Logan Circle at 10:00 that morning. Despite apparent concerns about their undercover infiltration methods, the DC police opted not to contact the protest organizers, as required by the department’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) regarding First Amendment activity. On the day of the protest, moreover, the police violated more of their SOP: In radio communications entered into evidence, the police commander and frontline officer discussed whether the protesters were anarchists, and made the call to mass arrest before the march even left the park, which violates their SOP requirement that protesters be arrested and charged individually. (Since the SOP was issued in 2004, mass arrests have been effectively prohibited in DC.)

Certainly going to be chilling to watch the prosecutor bring 188 more people to trial.

Why I Went on a Nazi's Podcast: Approaches and Goals

Plenty of far leftists have ended up in far right media in one way or another, mostly by accident. One of the hosts of a podcast I have been on twice (holiday episode coming soon!) called 2 Spicy actually got blindsided by Gavin McInnes in 2014 before he had made a name for himself beyond his status as persona non grata at Vice. (Apparently, McInnes only varied by degree from the rest of Vice's leadership.) Heather made the unfortunate mistake of taking an invite to do media without doing background research. Always do background research.

I've done a bit of background on the show I'm set to go on. (I'm writing this in advance of going on the show.) If you haven't heard of Millennial Woes, you're not missing much. His only noteworthy accomplishment seems to be speaking at the 2016 Maggiano's Seige NPI conference. Literally. Millennial Woes (who, despite having been doxxed as Colin Robertson still told me to call him 'Woes') is a 35 year old Scottish white nationalist with a mean antisemitic streak, anti-immigrant views, and a strange ambivalence towards bestiality. After he was doxxed (as a result of his only noteworthy accomplishment), his messaging suddenly became extremely conciliatory with regard to racial violence. You know how fash do.

Every year, Millennial Woes does a month long series of interviews he calls Millenniyule. This year he had designs to do 50 interviews in December. As a result of a fight on Twitter, I became one of them. What I hope to lay out here is how it came about that I got this "opportunity," my rationale for accepting it, my strategy for approaching it, and my goals.

Debunking Eugenics Reader

Back in August, I wrote an article for Red Pepper magazine asserting the synonymy of the alt-right and its historical antecedents in the eugenics movement. The breadth of the movement's influence at its height in late 2016 had it reaching in political spheres well beyond its original core in the white nationalist movement connected to Richard Spencer. That I catalogued this reach into GamerGate earned me quite a bit of impotent ire on the r/KotakuInAction Reddit where they claimed I didn't know what eugenics, the alt-right, or GamerGate are.

One of the more worrying claims on the Reddit was that my account and rejection of eugenics rejects evolutionary biology and sociology. Barring a restriction to literature from before 1950, little could be further from the truth. In actuality, these disciplines widely reject the key claims of biological determinism made by eugenicists by accounting for existing legal, economic, and political institutions. What follows is a list of readings that articulate contemporary critiques of eugenics.

Jean Belkhir - Intelligence and Race, Gender, Class: The Fallacy of Genetic Determinism

Francis Collins - What We Do and Don't Know About 'Race', 'Ethnicity', Genetics, and Health at the Dawn of the Genome Era

Audrey Smedley - "Race" and the Construction of Human Identity

Michael Barnshad et al. - Deconstructing the Relationship Between Genetics and Race

Graham Baker - Christianity and Eugenics: The Place of Religion in the British Eugenics Education Society and the American Eugenics Society, c.1907–1940

Universities Are Protecting Free Speech for Bigots at the Expense of Student Safety

"When I see these people on the roofs," said University of Florida (UF) student Ebony Love, gesturing to the groups of snipers on nearby campus buildings, "I understand the reason why they're up there, but at the same time, you have to take my money and pay for that, but I couldn't get an escort to walk me to my classes, and you said you were going to post security outside these classes and you didn't."

When I talked to her, Love was leaning on a police barricade set up outside of the auditorium on campus where prominent white supremacist Richard Spencer was due to speak on October 19. The night before, however, Love was escorting a student to an 8 pm exam. She and another student sat watch outside for two hours in lieu of the campus security she said the university had promised but failed to provide.

Continue reading at Truthout

Interview on "The Radical Imagination"

Last week, I sat down with Jim Vrettos for The Radical Imagination on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. We had an hour-long conversation about policing, pedagogy, and antifa. Watch it in full below.

The ‘alt-right’ is an unstable coalition – with one thing holding it together

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, the Associated Press (AP) has updated its style guide to change the standard usage of the term ‘alt-right’. The guide, widely followed across the US media, first added the term in November of last year, after Donald Trump won the presidential election, revealing the alt-right to be more than an electoral flash in the pan.

The update added anti-Semitism to the original definition. It now reads:

‘A political grouping or tendency mixing racism, white nationalism, anti-Semitism and populism; a name currently embraced by some white supremacists and white nationalists to refer to themselves and their ideology, which emphasizes preserving and protecting the white race in the United States.’

Both the original and updated AP definitions resemble early attempts to explain fascism in the decades following the second world war. Like the style guide versions, early writers focused attention on regime or movement attributes. This approach, often employing lists of various sizes, proved either too inclusive, or not inclusive enough.

Continue reading at Red Pepper

Political Economy of Fascism Syllabus

In the wake of the election of an outright racist, sexist homophobe, now seems as good a time as any to debut my Political Economy of Fascism syllabus. This course is designed to take students through the complex of political theories that were grafted together in the early 20th century to become the doctrine of fascism. After familiarizing students with the historical developments leading to fascism, the basic principles of fascist thought are explored.

Given the compelling nature of fascist anti-rationalism, students are provided critical texts to disabuse them of the rabbit holes that fascism builds to pull people in. Instructors using this syllabus are strongly encouraged not to take this lightly. As per the syllabus, students should be instructed to do secondary source readings and debrief readings before reading the primary source (fascist) texts. Please instruct students that if they do not intend to do the secondary source and debrief readings, they should not dip into the primary source texts.

You can download the syllabus as a PDF using the Dropbox link here
Syllabus

The readings are separated by week in this Dropbox folder along with a text list of readings accessible online here
Readings

Instructors feel free to use this syllabus and reading list, but please let me know in the comments below. If you would like to modify the syllabus, I would be happy to provide the source LaTeX file the syllabus was written in.

Full Amnesty

This week, I wrote a post on the New School Economic Review blog advocating for a complete abolition of immigration restrictions. Here's a sample:

From my interactions with Branko both in person and online, I'm fairly certain that he has absolutely no desire to embrace racism and would likely rebuke it at any opportunity. However, the geopolitical paradigm he crafts here makes such a result nearly inevitable. By essentializing historically fluid categories such as national culture and language, Milanovic sets up a framework in which migration is an invasive force. By treating geographic income disparities as historically neutral and sacrosanct, he sets up a Paretian world in which changes are only permissible insofar as they are immediately beneficial to everyone involved. In other words, Milanovic's assessment of migration creates a paradigm in which only the wealthy should be allowed to migrate.

For Milanovic, migrants bring nothing but their monetary endowments to their new host countries. Anyone migrating without her own wealth, according to this reasoning, will merely drain the system. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, studies show that more often than not, migrants end up in forms of employment that create the opportunity for the creation of new higher-skill job in complementary sectors. All of this amounts to the strengthening of the very systems which Milanovic claims they will destroy.

Far from being idle surplus population, migrants provide an overwhelming economic boon where institutional systems support it. Historically, this institutional support has not led to the destruction of national culture and language, but rather its expansion. When flocks of Jewish and Slavic migrants fled the Ottoman and Austrian persecution in Milanovic's native Serbia in the latter part of the 19th century, they brought with them cultural and linguistic traditions that have since become so sewn into the fabric of this country as to go without notice.

Read the full post here

Welcome to The Jungle

In the mess of the hours-long attacks in Paris resulting in over a hundred deaths, a certain well-meaning tweet captured the hearts of well-meaning Anglophone liberals:

To people blaming refugees for attacks in Paris tonight. Do you not realise these are the people the refugees are trying to run away from..?

— Dan Holloway (@RFCdan) November 13, 2015

From our Eurocentric perspective, this tweet is a slam-dunk for the champions of liberal hospitality. Certainly, it would be naïve -- worse, dangerous -- to assert that this attack is the mere consequence of immigration. Of course those seeking refuge in France from the Middle East and North Africa have done so out of fear for their lives and livelihoods. But for all that this tweet (unlikely) illuminates to reactionaries, it still succeeds in obscuring for liberals.

The sentiment of this tweet is predicated fundamentally on two falsehoods. The first is that this event is not unprecedented. The second is that the narrative this tweet presents is largely false.