As much as I appreciate the BLM protests of 2020, I’m coming to the conclusion, that fighting for racial and gender justice is fighting on the enemy’s chosen battlefield. Banning CRT and trans people are distractions from the economic fight. The oligarchs worry about money and power. The don’t care how many middle class windows get broken. I think the solution will require things like unions, and anti-trust, and taxes. It’s going to take a lot of organizing, but it looks like we are entering a period of labor shortage. That will help. It’s taken all of my adult life to get the country into this mess. It will probably take most of my kids lives to get us out. 2020 may be remembered as the summer we stopped sleepwalking toward fascism.
I agree with a lot of this but not all of it--the race and gender vomit coming from the right is definitely offered in place of real economic solutions, but it does plenty of harm and we have to fight it. But we can't neglect the economic fight, and we can't always be on the damn defensive either. It's hard to fight on this many fronts...gonna be a hell of a time
As I wrote it, while putting off going to bed, I was not entirely happy with it, but wanted to say something. I should write a short essay to clarify my thoughts, but that’s an easy thing to procrastinate on.
We are all sleep walking in a nightmare. Seemingly endless it takes its perverse bends, turns and postures. None of us really knows, cause we are all dreaming, what's happening but expecting someday to wake the fuk up. Good luck and keep plucking hairs off the bloody, fucking beast we are riding.
Lot of thoughts going on here. Nobody knows what will happen, how we react to it, and what the consequences of those actions will be. I'm genuinely glad that things have worked out the way they have for you. I started following you to figure out WTF was going on in Portland. Robert Evans repeated your reporting and I already found a voice worth listening to and following. I've never regretted it since.
I have a fairly pessimistic outlook for our society but I take my wins where I can get them. Listening to you is a win.
I've been mulling on this for a few days and the failures and the things you've written about in this column feel... familiar?
There's a podcast by a guy named Mike Duncan called Revolutions, and he goes through a lot of the major revolutions from the 1600s through the Russian Communist revolution. Particular highlights include the French Revolution & the Hatian revolution. But in this case I think the 30 quadrillion revolutions of the 19th century after the French Revolution, and specifically the Revolutions of 1848, offer a lot of if not mirroring then at least rhyming to the BLM protests of 2020. Both were hard efforts at either dismantling or fundamentally changing social systems of political power.
Technological changes and industrialization were changing old ways of life, people in urban centers were undermined by industrial capital and made insecure, crop failures in 1846 resulted in food insecurity and rising food costs, and mass communication was becoming even more affordable as printing and the press extended political awareness on an accellerated scale. While the impetus of the 1848 revolutions kind of started with the middle class, it was the working poor in the urban cities that provided the actual blood and force of the revolutions. Sound kind of familiar?
In rural areas aristocratic wealth concentrated farms into the hands of the elite and wealthy, and between landowner pressures, famines, and the loss of the commons this stoked an almost entirely separate set of grievances from the urban working poor. Again, sound kind of familiar?
Finally, the revolutions of 1848 were considered failed revolutions and resulted in a lot of increased pressure from the surviving monarchies and governements, but that in turn did not end political dissent and progress. It just set up the pieces to move towards... well... WW1. Sorry.
Mike Duncan did a good job on covering 1848. I heartily encourage listening to the whole series, but if you don't have 500 hours to listen to a podcast (The Russian Revolution alone is over 100 episodes, and I want to say the French Revolution clocks in around 50), then the episodes from chapter 7 cover the revolutions of 1848, although to be fair you kinda need to go back to the French Revolution to really get the thread, since a lot of 19th century revolutions have seeds from that particular revolution.
If you want to start with the end of Napoleon and the mess that followed, you can start in Chapter 6 here:
Anyway I think that the BLM protests of 2020 are indicitive of a symptom that society has to, and is trying, to change. Our economic system, our climate, our communications systems, all make the old status quo of our youths not sustainable. Even the retro MAGA sentiment of going back to a "better" simpler time is only skin deep- you're not going to have Leave It To Beaver in a world where Tik Tok exists, and you're not going to git rid of the idea of something like Tik Tok from society. On a deep enough level, I think everyone understands this. It creates varying amounts of unease.
The problem is that there's like 8 different directions society is trying to move in, depending on your demographics. These aren't pulling in opposing directions all the time- the needs and unrest aren't mutually exclusive, but they are difficult to relate to one another. BLM had a straightforward message- that police were killing black people at an alarming rate for shocking minor reasons. But that doesn't help the working poor directly (it can be argued that police reform will indirectly help working poor by not fining them excessively over minor transgressions. CA is ending it's massive late fees over minor traffic violations that could double or triple the fine just by being late for example) but that takes a conversation and time and nuance. It's hard to make those arguments.
Plus, as Disco Elysium observed so expertly, one of the strongest abilities of Capitalism is it's ability to subsume anything and commodotize it- even up to and including it's most effective criticisms. I can tell you right now from the people I work around the awareness of BLM and it's negative connocations are more around the BLM business, and the multi-million dollar mansion bought with BLM funds, and things like that, than the actual message. BLM wasn't an explicitly economic protest but it became understood as one, and that undermined it.
I also suspect that as time goes on, and as the right becomes more shameless and embraces just being openly hypocritical and irrational becomes more acceptable, that the old tools of shaming and boycott and protest will become less useful. And I think the 2020 Floyd/BLM protests show that. It was the wrong tool for the moment I guess. I don't know what the *right* tool is at this point. There might not even be a right tool for society at this point. But the idea of protest and shaming and social pressure seems to be losing it's effectiveness, especially against the Right. Trump gave the Right the knowledge that being shameless publicly was okay. That the repercussions might not apply, and even if they do apply, whining enough kind of gets you out of them. We need different tools then- social pressure doesn't work on people without any sense of guilt or shame.
I do feel and almost certainly know this isn't the end of the unrest. It will continue, and if history rhymes, we haven't seen the last of it yet. Most revolutions, and I do believe we're going through a slow revolution right now, fail. And fail. And fail. Until they don't. The right social pressures, the right economic conditions, the right politics, the right communications, all come together and suddenly, the dam breaks and everything changes. The problem is that things may get worse, a lot worse even, before they get better.
I'm not surprised the 2020 protests failed. I'm not surprised that reactionary forces arguably made things worse. But I don't see how those protests couln't have happened. If not about George Floyd and BLM, then about something else similar.
I guess my overall point is that as disappointing as the 2020 protests are in retrospect, it's not the end of the fight. That fight is going to continue and while we can't predict the outcome, historically once this kind of unrest enters a population it doesn't go away. Either revolution, or upheaval and drastic political reform, or the general slow progress as generations give way to new generations, that pressure will work it's way through society. We felt like for a while there that was what was happening, but the Trump era showed a lot of people were only just quiet about their bigotry and beliefs (Personally I believe that a major problem with our society is that we don't directly address dangerous ideology in the aftermath of a crisis- look at not reconciling the post-civil war South, and I truly believe the big failure of the US in the 20th century was it's complete abandonment of dealing with it's own fascists in the aftermath of WW2, but that's a whole other ball of wax). In a way that's okay- at least we know now how strong that sentiment is and it can be faced.
"You're not going to have Leave It To Beaver in a world where Tik Tok exists" YEP.
I adore Revolutions--have not completed the Russian Revolution yet, but have finished the French one. Need to get back to it, and go to the 1848 revolutions next.
I have a rolling argument with a friend who also loves Revlutions that is not terribly dissimilar to this one--the idea that most revolutions fail, that you just sort of have to wait until they don't. And I agree, up to a point. Material conditions have to be right, they weren't right in 2020, it was a preliminary shock.
But I also think that, in order for a revolution to successfully establish something good on the other side of the chaos, revolutionary energy needs to be guided and channelled into directions that can actually change things. One way we can better prepare for that future moment, I think, is examining where past movements went wrong and what might have been more effective. This thing where capitalism captures movements, these impulses towards tactics I think are ineffective long-term (the first two weeks were great, what came after far less so IMO)--that's not going away. We need to at least think about it. We need to learn from our mistakes, even if those mistakes were inevitable, so that we can make different mistakes next time
I think you nailed it far more concisely than my rambling. The first few weeks the protests seemed to be having an effect on general public opinion and then as time went on they were static enough at a societal level that the system was able to adapt and in some cases capture the movement, or at least the narrative of the movement. It's not just enough to be the right time and place, it has to be the right tactics.
Sadly, I have zero idea what "the right tactics" are.
Also I admit that I haven't gotten into the Russian Revolution. I started to and didn't have time at the time. Now that it's over I might binge through it. But it is a fantastic podcast. And his story kind of mirrors yours- he started History of Rome as kind of a hobby/thing that fascinated him and eventually reached professional historian through that effort.
Regarding what we need from a new left, I think the left you're looking for might already be here and just not where you're looking? People bemoaning electoralism yet expecting that smashing windows will force elected leaders to do what they want just feels so removed from the actual work of making change. It's just such a shitty analysis, and it's no wonder it leads to shitty behavior and a "movement" that can't possibly sustain itself.
A left that takes seriously the work of making change has to study power and change. "We take care of us" isn't just a slogan, but a way forward. Making change requires collective power, which is harnessed by building a movement, and taking care of us means building community, prioritizing relationships, and creating in our organizing the world we want to live in. I've mentioned abolition feminism here before, and I do really think it has a lot to offer. I just picked up Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes, and I wish I could get it into the hands of every single person who was out there getting tear-gassed that summer.
First off Lady Happy Birthday to you. You definitely do not belong in a zoo. Wow an interesting 3 years. Who put the Chinese blessing on you "may you live in interesting times"? I feel like the protests while only partially effective did at least bring the hypocrisy, racism and fascist desires of the alt-right, GQP and LE into the light. Trump may of done a YUUUGE amount of bad shit but in a way his making the MAGAS and others feel like they could (and should) say the quiet parts out loud revealed just how deep the hate and fear of the "other" and institutional racism goes in America. IMO your work has helped clarify a lot of issues for people who are willing to listen and actually think about things. It has for me at the very least. By this time next year, Year 4? On the Jedeedian calendar we will probably have a fair idea who the 2 evils, or maybe 3 will be for November and if there is light at the end of that tunnel or just a cave in. Just know tgat I hold you in my thoughts and if you ever need anything I am willing to help however I can. You have but to ask Lady.
Happy Birthday Laura. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us.
The fight that flared up in 2020 still isn’t done. You know that, right? It’s still happening online, in courts, in DC politics, and on the streets of Atlanta. Just a few months ago, a city near me shut itself down in fear of a BLM protest. A month before that, a nearby church almost got blown up when they hosted a drag show. I live in nowhere suburbia, and these things were unheard of before 2020. I don’t know where the conflict will go from here, but it’s definitely not over.
Oh absolutely--the culture war rages on and nothing was solved so nothing can be over. But the 2020 BLM protests, I think, are over. Their legacy continues for good and ill. The goal is so important, the thing we were and are fighting for matters so much. I think we could have fought for it better, and that we can learn a lot by looking at what went right and what went wrong
I don’t understand the end of this paragraph and to me this may be the most interesting part of the story. What are you talking about here?
“Not everyone in the city believed I was some kind of secret fascist and cynical grifter and dangerous betrayer, but most of them sensibly kept their mouths shut about their support in public. Not all, and I am grateful to the ones who spoke out. But many. Most. I was no longer welcome at events–I'd been physically removed. Good night alt right, bash the fash, etc. Not safe.”
I probably should have gone into more detail and may edit this morning to add what's necessary. Essentially, this group of people in Portland who essentially seem to exist to go after people they dislike decided that my attitude towards conservatism and the far right, which is very much on display on this substack and has not changed, constitutes cryptofascism. My undergrad thesis was a 1.5 year participant observation study of Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys starting back in 2017. It's an academic paper written in an academic tone and though there's an entire chapter at the end of it that talks about how to push back against groups like this, the academic language out of context looked like fascism to a lot of them, apparently. The whole thing felt very personal and very sadistic, and to this day if you search my name and "fascist" on Twitter you will get some interesting results.
Oh! Thanks for this elucidation! It does sound like a pretty interesting story! I have read your article on your ‘participation observation study,’ and it was great, in fact I think it may have been the first article I read from you and have been following you since. I’d love to hear more of the details of how you got targeted (I am a disillusioned activist myself), but for the time being appreciate this explanation!
I'm sure there's some academic study on the mindset of people who need movements to be ideologically pure to the point of blind persecution but I haven't encountered them. I'd be interested in seeing what that mindset consists of. Because there's got to be some underlying idea or concept deep down that motivates it. The same way that some anti-vaxxers are obsessed with the idea of desecrating innocence- that injecting a vaccination into a child or a person makes them "unpure" and like spoils their state of grace.
There's also a group of people who thinks that by trying to understand the Right and their more violent movements is to possibly legitimize them, or maybe humanize them. It's easier to resist when you've dehumanized the other side. I think it's a dangerous take- no side in a conflict has ever benefitted from *not* understanding their opponents- but it seems to be a common one.
The obsessive desire for purity obviously extends far beyond America (maybe some kind of hideously misdirected instinct that helped our ancestors prevent disease?), but I think our puritanical roots leave us especially vulnerable to getting swept up in witch hunts, which is troubling
I don't know that we failed in 2020. There are times you're going to lose no matter what you do. At that point, the best thing you can accomplish is to control how badly you lose. The fash had been hyping up their race war fantasies to each other for years, the idiot that was president had spent two election cycles claiming that any election he lost was rigged, and our cops had spent decades collecting more militant gear and were just itching for an excuse to use it. In the face of all that, we didn't come out unscathed, but we also haven't ceded the country wholesale to the swine. There are lessons to be learned, but most of us are still here to learn them.
That's a very fair point--we didn't lose it all, and I agree that we couldn't win it all that time, for all the reasons you mentioned. But I think mistakes were made, and I hope we can learn from them. Keep pushing. Get there, someday
Oh, mistakes were made, without a doubt, but I think those are lessons that have to be learned the hard way. If you think about it, we made the classic American mistake: winning most of the battles while losing the hearts and minds.
Yeah the protests of 2020 failed, but it’s not all bad. A progressive got elected mayor here in Chicago, and maybe things will start to get better here, in this city that isn’t a smoldering pile of rubble either. And happiest of Birthdays Laura, you absolutely deserve that.
Got perm’d off Twitter a year ago or so, my opinion of drunken FOX hosts not appreciated by f-elon. Your voice is one of the few I’ve missed. Writing can be hard, writing regularly, to feed a fan base, definitely harder. I, for one, simply appreciate what you deliver, whenever. Thanks.
I somehow found you’re work during the summer of 2020. Probably because dear friends had relocated to Portland years before had a tied me in to local activist journalism. Like much of the country I was hooked. Almost flew out a few times but was brought back from the thought because, you know, there was a plague and flying wasn’t on the agenda due to being marginally reasonable. Or at least due to my friends being marginally reasonable. Anyway, I liked your angle, thought (think) you have a marvelous voice. Thought this might be the one. That something might change. I followed around both far right and leftist protests on my side of the country. Thought about using that journalism degree but never really wrote a word. You and others were doing it better than me anyway, which is totally fine. But the summer stretched out. I saw you run out of Portland. I saw how the movement ate itself in dumb vicious brutality. Everyone pointed a finger at someone. It all seemed inevitable by the end. Like it always is. But hey, you kept writing and your work has only gotten better. I stood on the Capitol steps on Jan 6 and still couldn’t find any words. But I was there, developing unpopular takes that I would tell friends and coworkers around the country. (Insurrection? I don’t exactly think so. Maybe to some who were there. But for the most part that ain’t it. They had watched 2020 happen and now is was their turn to fight the cops but the cops didn’t show and they broke the lines and that broke their brains while they wandered around, confused zombies waiting on orders from their guy.)
Anyway, long time listener more or less first time caller. Keep putting voice to the things. We’ll be out here reading and appreciating. There aren’t enough good voices screaming into the void.
First, Happy Birthday!
As much as I appreciate the BLM protests of 2020, I’m coming to the conclusion, that fighting for racial and gender justice is fighting on the enemy’s chosen battlefield. Banning CRT and trans people are distractions from the economic fight. The oligarchs worry about money and power. The don’t care how many middle class windows get broken. I think the solution will require things like unions, and anti-trust, and taxes. It’s going to take a lot of organizing, but it looks like we are entering a period of labor shortage. That will help. It’s taken all of my adult life to get the country into this mess. It will probably take most of my kids lives to get us out. 2020 may be remembered as the summer we stopped sleepwalking toward fascism.
I agree with a lot of this but not all of it--the race and gender vomit coming from the right is definitely offered in place of real economic solutions, but it does plenty of harm and we have to fight it. But we can't neglect the economic fight, and we can't always be on the damn defensive either. It's hard to fight on this many fronts...gonna be a hell of a time
As I wrote it, while putting off going to bed, I was not entirely happy with it, but wanted to say something. I should write a short essay to clarify my thoughts, but that’s an easy thing to procrastinate on.
likes "sleepwalking toward Fascism"
We are all sleep walking in a nightmare. Seemingly endless it takes its perverse bends, turns and postures. None of us really knows, cause we are all dreaming, what's happening but expecting someday to wake the fuk up. Good luck and keep plucking hairs off the bloody, fucking beast we are riding.
Bit wordy but happy birthdays whenever they are.
Lot of thoughts going on here. Nobody knows what will happen, how we react to it, and what the consequences of those actions will be. I'm genuinely glad that things have worked out the way they have for you. I started following you to figure out WTF was going on in Portland. Robert Evans repeated your reporting and I already found a voice worth listening to and following. I've never regretted it since.
I have a fairly pessimistic outlook for our society but I take my wins where I can get them. Listening to you is a win.
Happy Birthday Laura.
poetry. happy birthday
Fn A
Zayum
Oh lord Tosltoy warning this is a long comment.
I've been mulling on this for a few days and the failures and the things you've written about in this column feel... familiar?
There's a podcast by a guy named Mike Duncan called Revolutions, and he goes through a lot of the major revolutions from the 1600s through the Russian Communist revolution. Particular highlights include the French Revolution & the Hatian revolution. But in this case I think the 30 quadrillion revolutions of the 19th century after the French Revolution, and specifically the Revolutions of 1848, offer a lot of if not mirroring then at least rhyming to the BLM protests of 2020. Both were hard efforts at either dismantling or fundamentally changing social systems of political power.
Technological changes and industrialization were changing old ways of life, people in urban centers were undermined by industrial capital and made insecure, crop failures in 1846 resulted in food insecurity and rising food costs, and mass communication was becoming even more affordable as printing and the press extended political awareness on an accellerated scale. While the impetus of the 1848 revolutions kind of started with the middle class, it was the working poor in the urban cities that provided the actual blood and force of the revolutions. Sound kind of familiar?
In rural areas aristocratic wealth concentrated farms into the hands of the elite and wealthy, and between landowner pressures, famines, and the loss of the commons this stoked an almost entirely separate set of grievances from the urban working poor. Again, sound kind of familiar?
Finally, the revolutions of 1848 were considered failed revolutions and resulted in a lot of increased pressure from the surviving monarchies and governements, but that in turn did not end political dissent and progress. It just set up the pieces to move towards... well... WW1. Sorry.
Mike Duncan did a good job on covering 1848. I heartily encourage listening to the whole series, but if you don't have 500 hours to listen to a podcast (The Russian Revolution alone is over 100 episodes, and I want to say the French Revolution clocks in around 50), then the episodes from chapter 7 cover the revolutions of 1848, although to be fair you kinda need to go back to the French Revolution to really get the thread, since a lot of 19th century revolutions have seeds from that particular revolution.
If you want to start with the end of Napoleon and the mess that followed, you can start in Chapter 6 here:
https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/revolutions_podcast/2017/03/601-the-chain-of-time.html
Otherwise 1848 starts here:
https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/revolutions_podcast/2017/07/701-the-volcano.html
Anyway I think that the BLM protests of 2020 are indicitive of a symptom that society has to, and is trying, to change. Our economic system, our climate, our communications systems, all make the old status quo of our youths not sustainable. Even the retro MAGA sentiment of going back to a "better" simpler time is only skin deep- you're not going to have Leave It To Beaver in a world where Tik Tok exists, and you're not going to git rid of the idea of something like Tik Tok from society. On a deep enough level, I think everyone understands this. It creates varying amounts of unease.
The problem is that there's like 8 different directions society is trying to move in, depending on your demographics. These aren't pulling in opposing directions all the time- the needs and unrest aren't mutually exclusive, but they are difficult to relate to one another. BLM had a straightforward message- that police were killing black people at an alarming rate for shocking minor reasons. But that doesn't help the working poor directly (it can be argued that police reform will indirectly help working poor by not fining them excessively over minor transgressions. CA is ending it's massive late fees over minor traffic violations that could double or triple the fine just by being late for example) but that takes a conversation and time and nuance. It's hard to make those arguments.
Plus, as Disco Elysium observed so expertly, one of the strongest abilities of Capitalism is it's ability to subsume anything and commodotize it- even up to and including it's most effective criticisms. I can tell you right now from the people I work around the awareness of BLM and it's negative connocations are more around the BLM business, and the multi-million dollar mansion bought with BLM funds, and things like that, than the actual message. BLM wasn't an explicitly economic protest but it became understood as one, and that undermined it.
I also suspect that as time goes on, and as the right becomes more shameless and embraces just being openly hypocritical and irrational becomes more acceptable, that the old tools of shaming and boycott and protest will become less useful. And I think the 2020 Floyd/BLM protests show that. It was the wrong tool for the moment I guess. I don't know what the *right* tool is at this point. There might not even be a right tool for society at this point. But the idea of protest and shaming and social pressure seems to be losing it's effectiveness, especially against the Right. Trump gave the Right the knowledge that being shameless publicly was okay. That the repercussions might not apply, and even if they do apply, whining enough kind of gets you out of them. We need different tools then- social pressure doesn't work on people without any sense of guilt or shame.
I do feel and almost certainly know this isn't the end of the unrest. It will continue, and if history rhymes, we haven't seen the last of it yet. Most revolutions, and I do believe we're going through a slow revolution right now, fail. And fail. And fail. Until they don't. The right social pressures, the right economic conditions, the right politics, the right communications, all come together and suddenly, the dam breaks and everything changes. The problem is that things may get worse, a lot worse even, before they get better.
I'm not surprised the 2020 protests failed. I'm not surprised that reactionary forces arguably made things worse. But I don't see how those protests couln't have happened. If not about George Floyd and BLM, then about something else similar.
I guess my overall point is that as disappointing as the 2020 protests are in retrospect, it's not the end of the fight. That fight is going to continue and while we can't predict the outcome, historically once this kind of unrest enters a population it doesn't go away. Either revolution, or upheaval and drastic political reform, or the general slow progress as generations give way to new generations, that pressure will work it's way through society. We felt like for a while there that was what was happening, but the Trump era showed a lot of people were only just quiet about their bigotry and beliefs (Personally I believe that a major problem with our society is that we don't directly address dangerous ideology in the aftermath of a crisis- look at not reconciling the post-civil war South, and I truly believe the big failure of the US in the 20th century was it's complete abandonment of dealing with it's own fascists in the aftermath of WW2, but that's a whole other ball of wax). In a way that's okay- at least we know now how strong that sentiment is and it can be faced.
"You're not going to have Leave It To Beaver in a world where Tik Tok exists" YEP.
I adore Revolutions--have not completed the Russian Revolution yet, but have finished the French one. Need to get back to it, and go to the 1848 revolutions next.
I have a rolling argument with a friend who also loves Revlutions that is not terribly dissimilar to this one--the idea that most revolutions fail, that you just sort of have to wait until they don't. And I agree, up to a point. Material conditions have to be right, they weren't right in 2020, it was a preliminary shock.
But I also think that, in order for a revolution to successfully establish something good on the other side of the chaos, revolutionary energy needs to be guided and channelled into directions that can actually change things. One way we can better prepare for that future moment, I think, is examining where past movements went wrong and what might have been more effective. This thing where capitalism captures movements, these impulses towards tactics I think are ineffective long-term (the first two weeks were great, what came after far less so IMO)--that's not going away. We need to at least think about it. We need to learn from our mistakes, even if those mistakes were inevitable, so that we can make different mistakes next time
I think you nailed it far more concisely than my rambling. The first few weeks the protests seemed to be having an effect on general public opinion and then as time went on they were static enough at a societal level that the system was able to adapt and in some cases capture the movement, or at least the narrative of the movement. It's not just enough to be the right time and place, it has to be the right tactics.
Sadly, I have zero idea what "the right tactics" are.
Also I admit that I haven't gotten into the Russian Revolution. I started to and didn't have time at the time. Now that it's over I might binge through it. But it is a fantastic podcast. And his story kind of mirrors yours- he started History of Rome as kind of a hobby/thing that fascinated him and eventually reached professional historian through that effort.
You stumbled into journalism; you became a writer.
I fucking love the way you write. Happy birthday.
Regarding what we need from a new left, I think the left you're looking for might already be here and just not where you're looking? People bemoaning electoralism yet expecting that smashing windows will force elected leaders to do what they want just feels so removed from the actual work of making change. It's just such a shitty analysis, and it's no wonder it leads to shitty behavior and a "movement" that can't possibly sustain itself.
A left that takes seriously the work of making change has to study power and change. "We take care of us" isn't just a slogan, but a way forward. Making change requires collective power, which is harnessed by building a movement, and taking care of us means building community, prioritizing relationships, and creating in our organizing the world we want to live in. I've mentioned abolition feminism here before, and I do really think it has a lot to offer. I just picked up Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes, and I wish I could get it into the hands of every single person who was out there getting tear-gassed that summer.
I need to stop saying I'll check out abolition feminism and actually check out abolition feminism
First off Lady Happy Birthday to you. You definitely do not belong in a zoo. Wow an interesting 3 years. Who put the Chinese blessing on you "may you live in interesting times"? I feel like the protests while only partially effective did at least bring the hypocrisy, racism and fascist desires of the alt-right, GQP and LE into the light. Trump may of done a YUUUGE amount of bad shit but in a way his making the MAGAS and others feel like they could (and should) say the quiet parts out loud revealed just how deep the hate and fear of the "other" and institutional racism goes in America. IMO your work has helped clarify a lot of issues for people who are willing to listen and actually think about things. It has for me at the very least. By this time next year, Year 4? On the Jedeedian calendar we will probably have a fair idea who the 2 evils, or maybe 3 will be for November and if there is light at the end of that tunnel or just a cave in. Just know tgat I hold you in my thoughts and if you ever need anything I am willing to help however I can. You have but to ask Lady.
Happy Birthday Laura. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us.
The fight that flared up in 2020 still isn’t done. You know that, right? It’s still happening online, in courts, in DC politics, and on the streets of Atlanta. Just a few months ago, a city near me shut itself down in fear of a BLM protest. A month before that, a nearby church almost got blown up when they hosted a drag show. I live in nowhere suburbia, and these things were unheard of before 2020. I don’t know where the conflict will go from here, but it’s definitely not over.
Oh absolutely--the culture war rages on and nothing was solved so nothing can be over. But the 2020 BLM protests, I think, are over. Their legacy continues for good and ill. The goal is so important, the thing we were and are fighting for matters so much. I think we could have fought for it better, and that we can learn a lot by looking at what went right and what went wrong
I don’t understand the end of this paragraph and to me this may be the most interesting part of the story. What are you talking about here?
“Not everyone in the city believed I was some kind of secret fascist and cynical grifter and dangerous betrayer, but most of them sensibly kept their mouths shut about their support in public. Not all, and I am grateful to the ones who spoke out. But many. Most. I was no longer welcome at events–I'd been physically removed. Good night alt right, bash the fash, etc. Not safe.”
I probably should have gone into more detail and may edit this morning to add what's necessary. Essentially, this group of people in Portland who essentially seem to exist to go after people they dislike decided that my attitude towards conservatism and the far right, which is very much on display on this substack and has not changed, constitutes cryptofascism. My undergrad thesis was a 1.5 year participant observation study of Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys starting back in 2017. It's an academic paper written in an academic tone and though there's an entire chapter at the end of it that talks about how to push back against groups like this, the academic language out of context looked like fascism to a lot of them, apparently. The whole thing felt very personal and very sadistic, and to this day if you search my name and "fascist" on Twitter you will get some interesting results.
It really sucked.
Oh! Thanks for this elucidation! It does sound like a pretty interesting story! I have read your article on your ‘participation observation study,’ and it was great, in fact I think it may have been the first article I read from you and have been following you since. I’d love to hear more of the details of how you got targeted (I am a disillusioned activist myself), but for the time being appreciate this explanation!
It's something I'd like to talk about in this book I'm plotting--not the main focus, but as a component
Great, I look forward to the book! :)
I'm sure there's some academic study on the mindset of people who need movements to be ideologically pure to the point of blind persecution but I haven't encountered them. I'd be interested in seeing what that mindset consists of. Because there's got to be some underlying idea or concept deep down that motivates it. The same way that some anti-vaxxers are obsessed with the idea of desecrating innocence- that injecting a vaccination into a child or a person makes them "unpure" and like spoils their state of grace.
There's also a group of people who thinks that by trying to understand the Right and their more violent movements is to possibly legitimize them, or maybe humanize them. It's easier to resist when you've dehumanized the other side. I think it's a dangerous take- no side in a conflict has ever benefitted from *not* understanding their opponents- but it seems to be a common one.
The obsessive desire for purity obviously extends far beyond America (maybe some kind of hideously misdirected instinct that helped our ancestors prevent disease?), but I think our puritanical roots leave us especially vulnerable to getting swept up in witch hunts, which is troubling
Thank you for your service on this Memorial Day--in uniform or in civies.
I don't know that we failed in 2020. There are times you're going to lose no matter what you do. At that point, the best thing you can accomplish is to control how badly you lose. The fash had been hyping up their race war fantasies to each other for years, the idiot that was president had spent two election cycles claiming that any election he lost was rigged, and our cops had spent decades collecting more militant gear and were just itching for an excuse to use it. In the face of all that, we didn't come out unscathed, but we also haven't ceded the country wholesale to the swine. There are lessons to be learned, but most of us are still here to learn them.
That's a very fair point--we didn't lose it all, and I agree that we couldn't win it all that time, for all the reasons you mentioned. But I think mistakes were made, and I hope we can learn from them. Keep pushing. Get there, someday
Oh, mistakes were made, without a doubt, but I think those are lessons that have to be learned the hard way. If you think about it, we made the classic American mistake: winning most of the battles while losing the hearts and minds.
Exactly this
Yeah the protests of 2020 failed, but it’s not all bad. A progressive got elected mayor here in Chicago, and maybe things will start to get better here, in this city that isn’t a smoldering pile of rubble either. And happiest of Birthdays Laura, you absolutely deserve that.
The Chicago mayoral election is the best news of the decade so far IMO
Got perm’d off Twitter a year ago or so, my opinion of drunken FOX hosts not appreciated by f-elon. Your voice is one of the few I’ve missed. Writing can be hard, writing regularly, to feed a fan base, definitely harder. I, for one, simply appreciate what you deliver, whenever. Thanks.
I somehow found you’re work during the summer of 2020. Probably because dear friends had relocated to Portland years before had a tied me in to local activist journalism. Like much of the country I was hooked. Almost flew out a few times but was brought back from the thought because, you know, there was a plague and flying wasn’t on the agenda due to being marginally reasonable. Or at least due to my friends being marginally reasonable. Anyway, I liked your angle, thought (think) you have a marvelous voice. Thought this might be the one. That something might change. I followed around both far right and leftist protests on my side of the country. Thought about using that journalism degree but never really wrote a word. You and others were doing it better than me anyway, which is totally fine. But the summer stretched out. I saw you run out of Portland. I saw how the movement ate itself in dumb vicious brutality. Everyone pointed a finger at someone. It all seemed inevitable by the end. Like it always is. But hey, you kept writing and your work has only gotten better. I stood on the Capitol steps on Jan 6 and still couldn’t find any words. But I was there, developing unpopular takes that I would tell friends and coworkers around the country. (Insurrection? I don’t exactly think so. Maybe to some who were there. But for the most part that ain’t it. They had watched 2020 happen and now is was their turn to fight the cops but the cops didn’t show and they broke the lines and that broke their brains while they wandered around, confused zombies waiting on orders from their guy.)
Anyway, long time listener more or less first time caller. Keep putting voice to the things. We’ll be out here reading and appreciating. There aren’t enough good voices screaming into the void.