Up is down, left is right

In my last post, I talked about how the news either misstates or ignores the substance of what critics of the punishment bureaucracy are advocating, and the reasons that they hold those views. This leaves people in a state of ignorance and confusion about what progressives are proposing, whether those things were actually tried, and what kinds of solutions to our problems are even conceivable. Today, I talk about an important implication of this ignorance.

M&Ms

One of the most interesting features of the copaganda I’ve studied is how brutal things are laundered with progressive language to be sold under a new label.  This is what one of my clients once called “covering a turd with M&Ms.”

This happened last year when proponents of a failed recall campaign for the DA in Los Angeles tried to portray themselves as “progressive.” The idea that the Los Angeles Republican donors and carceral unions pushing the recall were also truly “progressives” was something that their public relations operatives repeated in nearly every interview I tracked. They knew that, whatever the content of what they are proposing and what they would implement if successful, in a city like Los Angeles, they couldn’t be seen as a purely right-wing effort even though funded by and organized by right wing money and police/prosecutor unions.  The campaign to entrench the same old policies that benefit (and harm) the same social groups only works in a place like Los Angeles if right-wing forces can convince people who want to identify as “progressive” that these racist, cruel, ineffective, and authoritarian policies are “progressive” and supported by other “progressives.” As I wrote in Usual Cruelty, this strategy of rendering much of the public unable to distinguish between real change and status quo labeled as “reform” is one of the main goals of those hoping to preserve and expand the size and power of the punishment bureaucracy.  As a result, it becomes a key feature of copaganda.

I will never forget the photograph of Eric Adams appointing a new NYPD Commissioner in front of a mural of mostly Black social movement leaders who police tried to (and often did) imprison and kill. This press conference is the visual representation of the copaganda concept I’m describing taken to its Platonic ideal:

Because we are made so uninformed about what policies are genuinely going to lead to things most of us want—like more equality, opportunity, and safety—and because many of the people pushing bad policies are marketed as “progressive” people who share these values, the rest of us are left in a stupor.  A great deal of the contemporary politics and news on “criminal justice” issues in the United States is about manufacturing this confusion.  As both Jacques Ellul and James C. Scott have written eloquently, this state of profound confusion and chaos makes the public too disoriented to meaningfully engage in the hard work of a tolerant democratic, participatory society.

San Francisco

The 2022 recall campaign of the San Francisco District Attorney is a remarkable example.  Chesa Boudin was elected on a specific platform, including his promise to use diversion more frequently because it reduces recidivism and other harms; prosecute police misconduct, something exceedingly rare in San Francisco and beyond; and go after corporations for things like wage theft and other violations. Moneyed interests—police unions, corporations, the real estate lobby, and wealthy individuals—found this intolerable, so they immediately mobilized against him before many of his policies even went into effect and waged a massive propaganda campaign in support of a recall.

The campaign was funded mainly by Republican billionaires and fueled by the far-right police and sheriff’s unions—many of their members even illegally spread recall campaign messaging to residents while on the job as police officers.  But its public relations strategy was to portray itself as “progressive.”  One of the key players in this charade was a prominent pro-police San Francisco Chronicle writer named Heather Knight, who produced a series of copaganda hall-of-famers leading up to the campaign.  In one memorable incident, she called Brooke Jenkins—a Black woman and the media star of the recall campaign who was eventually appointed to replace the elected DA by the Mayor—a “progressive prosecutor.”  It was a move designed to mask the truth, and it worked.

Around this time, Jenkins, who was a former corporate lawyer representing large corporations before she became a prosecutor, had hired a talent agent and appeared on tv news shows spewing right-wing misinformation. A local news outlet had found that she committed egregious prosecutorial misconduct while prosecuting poor people. And she had recently quit the DA’s office in scandal after she was not permitted to violate California law by sending a legally insane person to prison against the wishes of the victim’s family and medical experts.  She has publicly admitted to facts amounting to criminal offenses for illegally sharing of information about a juvenile, and numerous ethics complaints are open against her.  There are numerous pending ethics complaints against her filed by retired judges and prominent academics for her conduct as a prosecutor, none of them for her being too “progressive.”]  Rather, they set forth a litany of violations of her sworn duty as an attorney and prosecutor, including a number of instances where she indisputably committed various misdemeanors.  Indeed, Jenkins routinely prosecutes people for conduct far less serious than that which she has committed while on the job.

When the Chronicle published the article holding her up as “progressive,” she had signaled to police unions and Republican donors (who it turned out were paying her—a fact hidden in various disclosures and the subject of one of the ethics complaints), that she supported some of the most regressive policies in the criminal system.  She made clear that she would seek much longer prison sentences for predominantly poor people her office prosecutes, cage more people before trial whose families cannot pay cash bail, use “gang conspiracy” laws to target young people of color and poor people, charge more children as adults, prosecute more homeless people and people with mental illness, etc.  She has since received lavish praise from Fox News and other far-right outlets, including for refusing to prosecute police officers in prominent cases.  On every metric, she would have been more regressive than the previous two people to hold that office, and she was being platformed specifically for these regressive views. She would not have been newsworthy otherwise.  Words have lost all meaning when Brooke Jenkins is called “progressive.” 

But it was precisely this framing that the San Francisco Chronicle chose to assert in its headline, not as some kind of self-appointed but publicly disputed label, but as undisputed fact.  The paper could easily have told Jenkins’s story with the headline “Why This Prosecutor Just Left D.A. Chesa Boudin’s Office and Joined the Recall.” When you realize that adding the word “progressive” was unnecessary, you see that point was to mislead people about what frame to use to interpret Jenkins’ political intervention.  Jenkins would not have been newsworthy otherwise.  The effect sought from the typical reader is something like: “Oh, wow, even a progressive Black woman now opposes the D.A.!”  That framing helps give people who don’t have a lot of information about prosecutorial policies and how the punishment bureaucracy works permission to support the recall while still believing themselves to have progressive values.  And that is the point.

The political class in San Francisco engaged in a similar campaign on behalf of Matt Dorsey, the former head of public relations at the San Francisco Police Department.  Dorsey was caught sending scandalous texts to journalists encouraging copaganda, including the famous “Thank God for you” text.  Shortly after the same Mayor appointed him to a vacant seat on the County Board of Supervisors (again without an election), a prominent Democratic Party political organization called him a “progressive activist.”  His life’s work has been to manipulate public perception in service of expanding the severity of the War on Drugs, increasing police surveillance, and minimizing the perception of police violence.  When you see such a person being called a “progressive activist,” you know that you are in the midst of a counterinsurgency operation.

After both Jenkins and Dorsey were in office, they jointly spearheaded a reinvestment in the War on Drugs in San Francisco.  The City saw huge increases in overdose deaths after the City shut down a widely used treatment center, and then the City experienced massive increases in incarceration and policing, with lavish new spending.  The jail population rose over 30% in San Francisco after the first 13 months Jenkins was in office.  Copaganda works.

Detroit

But one of my all-time favorite examples of this phenomenon is an article in the Detroit Free Press profiling a local assistant prosecutor.  In the “news” article, the prosecutor asserts that Angela Davis—the prominent Black radical and one of the recognized founders of the modern prison abolition movement—is who inspired her to become a prosecutor.  You cannot make this stuff up.  The article portrays the prosecutor as a community and racial justice activist.  The mass human caging policies she implements are so wonderful that even the parents of people she sends to prison thank her for it because prison saves their kids’ lives.  After a series of quotes about how amazing prosecuting people is, she told the newspaper: “The type of police brutality that we have seen in other places has not been tolerated in Wayne County, and mostly Detroit.”  Neither the assertion that prosecution “saves lives” or the assertion that Detroit doesn’t tolerate police brutality like other cities were fact-checked.

Finding and profiling Black women prosecutors—who send almost exclusively poor people and disproportionately Black people to prisons without any evidence that it does good but with lots of evidence that it significantly reduces the entire U.S. life expectancy—and then framing them as left-wing political radicals in the tradition of Angela Davis is effective.  It allows punishment bureaucrats to dress up their assembly-line authoritarian policies with organic artisan labels.  But it's just putting M&Ms on a turd.

This is copaganda in the tradition of Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth.”  The function is to disorient people who think of themselves as progressive.  Oil companies paint their websites green, school privatization operatives talk about the importance of teachers, the bail bond industry paints reducing cash bail as a “civil rights issue” because it would hurt Black-owned small bail bond businesses, real estate developers talk about “building community with our neighbors,” corporate landlords frame eviction moratoriums in a global pandemic as harming “immigrant landlords of color.” Up is down, left is right.  Water is dry. Sand is wet. 2+2=5.  Prison abolition is the same thing as sending more people to prison. 

Only by confusing people can a tiny group of people get enough support for policies that destroy our connection to each other and our natural world.

We have to develop defense mechanisms against these attempts to disorient us.  When evaluating what a punishment bureaucrat or politician is saying or what they stand for, pay less attention to labels they use for themselves or to the labels the news puts on them.  Ask yourself some basic questions: How have they chosen to spend their life’s work?  Who is funding them? Who do they associate with in their social circles? Who does it seem like they are accountable to?  Do they represent wealthy and powerful or working class people? Do their proposals give more money and power to the punishment bureaucracy or corporations? Have they been fighting for the most vulnerable people in our society or exploiting them?  Do the things they have done or advocate result in more power and money for themselves? These questions are not a silver bullet, and they are only start.  Can you come up with more?

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