Something that scares me

and other thoughts

Below, I’m going to talk about something that scares me a lot in this moment. And, in the next few weeks, I’m hoping to publish some more related reflections I’ve been working on to try and understand why so many liberal people I meet in elite spaces have such naive and dangerous misconceptions about how repression works. (That project started when a prominent pundit yelled at me online and said I was insulting voters because I don’t want to give police more money and power.) But first, a few miscellaneous thoughts!

Miscellaneous Stuff

Amidst the chaos of travel, I started making mosaics again using wine corks from friends, salvaged tile, and wildflowers from my garden. This isn’t as important as the cat photos I often share, but the rest of the newsletter is somewhat heavy, so I thought I’d share a photo above of one I made recently. I’ll share one next time with more flower petals. If you’re lucky, I may also have a photo to share of my old friend the very large one-eyed cat Wally, who I reunited with on my book tour in Minnesota and Wisconsin last week.

Speaking of which, the Copaganda book tour has been amazing. I have been blown away by how many people are genuinely engaging with and loving the book in so many places. Remember that you can order Copaganda here with the code TNP30 for 30%, or you can message me here on Substack if you’d like to order 10 or more, and I can get you much bigger discount. Also remember: I’m willing to zoom into book clubs who read it, and we have free copies for anyone in the U.S. in prison or for any teacher/professor who wants their students to read it but who can’t afford it. So, encourage groups in your communities to read it together! I also recently returned from a three-city Canadian tour, and I’m grateful to the amazing people who hosted me and to the Canadian publisher who just published my article on liberal propaganda around police body cameras as a small book in French. I’m winding down the public tour, but I hope to see more of you in the following places: October 17: Washington, DC (at Sankofa); October 28: USC Journalism School, Los Angeles; October 30: Arizona State University; November 3: Stowe, Vermont (Statewide conference for government employees and open to the public @ 3pm); November 20: Berkeley Law School (12:30pm); December 4: Washington, DC (Busboys and Poets).

Third, the engagement with my posts on social media has been throttled recently. (Before the current owner took over Twitter, my posts about propaganda, authoritarianism, and law received about a million views a day. Now, it is a tiny fraction of that.) As those platforms are increasingly consolidated in the hands of a small group of people who control the largest aggregations of wealth on earth—and an even smaller subset of them who have far-right politics—please encourage people to sign up for this newsletter to the extent they want to stay engaged with the things I write about and the vital work that we do at Civil Rights Corps to make our society more equal, more free, more just, and less corrupt and violent. I promise that while people are welcome to be a paid subscriber here (which goes to Civil Rights Corps and which you could also do instead by making a donation here without a percentage going to Substack), this newsletter will always remain free, and I don’t send very many so it won’t be a burden on your inbox. And, it will provide a way for me to reach your email in the event my accounts on other platforms are shut down.

I’m Begging the News Media to Heed a Warning

Did you know that, according to conservative estimates based on official statistics, well over 1/3 of all stranger homicides in the U.S. are perpetrated by police? When I talk about stuff like this on my book tour, many people’s minds are blown. But there’s something hidden here that is important to understand in this authoritarian moment.

The vast bulk of physical and sexual violence in our society is not perpetrated by strangers, but by people who know each other. Obscuring this fact is a critical feature of copaganda in the news. Why?

A simple answer that I elaborate on in Copaganda is that the news makes people extremely scared of strangers--the person next to you at CVS, the person walking down the street, the unhoused person in a tent, the anonymous burglar, etc. These are the kinds of crimes associated with surveillance, policing, so-called “order,” etc. But when you realize that most violence is not by strangers (hence police violence being such a large percentage), you see one reason it’s vital for cops to obscure it: almost no one believes more cash for the punishment bureaucracy is a good solution to the reasons people in some kind of relationship with each other hurt each other.

And this leads to one thing, among many, that scares me now: Things were already very bad on this front, but the unhinged gestapo tactics of ICE—and the further breakdown of certain forms of protection, accountability, and legal process—grant enormous power to predators across society in positions of power to prey upon vulnerable people: employers, abusers, etc. Everyone knows witnesses won’t come forward, and people will suffer in silence. The scope of this harm is hard to overstate--nothing short of millions of people enduring grotesque physical, sexual, and economic harm.

Much more generally, on a variety of fronts, we are seeing the attempted wholesale conversion of the coercive power of the state into a tool for small, organized groups of people to command obedience (ordinary bullies, universities, schools, businesses, cops, etc.). As I wrote in the first essay of my book Usual Cruelty, The Punishment Bureaucracy (which you can read for free at the link), in some sense this is always how the legal system has functioned. But throughout my legal career, there have been checks on this power and an ability to use the system’s own need for legitimacy to force people in power to abide by some of their stated values. It was this battle—to get the reality of the legal system to match the stated values of the law or to highlight gross injustices and contradictions while trying—that offered some strategic and narrative power to the civil rights work we did.

When the need to create a veneer of legitimacy ends—or when people in power perceive it as ending—we enter a period of the total, corrupt weaponization of state power for vigilante purposes, which then can lead to wholesale repression through anticipatory regression into private spheres because any public articulation of decency is corruptly and publicly crushed.

This is one reason that people in the conservative movement deemed insufficiently loyal and elite liberal institutions (universities, non-profits, foundations, news organizations, etc.) are among the first targets. They usually are when an authoritarian regime rises throughout history. If they can be brought to capitulate—one by one preferably because they stand no chance without acting in solidarity with each other—then the message to the rest of society is that any resistance at all is futile. What’s important is only who has power and their whims. (Civil rights work of the kind we do is still important in such periods, even if only to maintain some connection to truth, as I explained in this video.)

What does this mean right now? One thing is that, in addition to stopping their ludicrous validation of fascist fear-mongering lies about crime committed by the most marginalized people and about more repression being the supposed solution to those manufactured fears—which together form the bedrock public foundation for the most outrageous acts of federal force we are seeing in a number of cities now and the foundation for much more pervasive and sophisticated expansion of the policing and surveillance bureaucracies—Democrats and mainstream news must also attempt to make clear how this process of sliding into fascism actually works, and how it will transform daily life for essentially everyone in our society. A lot of good-faith people I meet are just not appreciating this right now, and it’s a failure of mass media.

The need to educate people about how this all works is also one reason why the precedent of Democratic Party officials and university administrators pervasively misleading people about public safety or ruthlessly crushing people for speaking out against genocide are both such ominous trends that must be reversed immediately. These are exactly the institutions that must instead act in solidarity and help people understand that the naked assertion of power in service of money and lies brings societies to a fascist cliff. I’m talking about examples like these, which I detailed in threads recently:

As I will explore in my next post, making people afraid of marginalized strangers and avoiding cultivation of skepticism of state power essential to any meaningful democratic civic life, is one of the most dangerous aspects of so much of liberal, mainstream punditry—such as the so-called Abundance agenda and other various corporate neo-liberal attempts to co-opt a coalition against fascism. Any approach that fails to grapple sufficiently with state repression and the ability of vigilante predators to weaponize corruption repression across a society will never be a solution to the urgent crisis we now face.