Author: Everett Acorn

“They’ve been pretty docile this year” -Jared Holt, senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, October 2024

“They might pop up somewhere else, but I have to say: militias in the last year or so have been relatively inactive compared to earlier eras.” -Heidi Beirich, Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, October 2024

Probably like you, I lose sleep each night lately wondering about the 2024 US elections. I think about many aspects, but one I ponder more than others is: what will the paramilitary Far Right do after the elections are over?

It’s not hard to visualize what the Far Right will do if Trump wins; in keeping with Trump’s 2020 encouragement to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” we can imagine that January 6th convicts will be immediately pardoned and released, that hate groups will be among the first wave of assaulters on “enemies within,” and that their recruitments will blossom as the paramilitaries assault, attack, and harass perceived enemies. It’s hard to overstate how ugly this could be, and American centrists and liberals remain completely unprepared for what could happen to them, but that’s a subject for another article. (1)

But I am honestly perplexed as to what might happen in the street if Harris wins. I spent a fair amount of time chasing down data about this, and professional speculations around it are similarly vague. A consensus among many experts is that enlistments in groups like the Oath Keepers is much reduced after the January 6th prosecutions: “many of those far-right networks have dissolved, splintered or receded from public view since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack,” says a recent report from PBS, and the report mentions specifically that the Oath Keepers have withered since Stuart Rhodes’ arrest and incarceration.

Many others similarly maintain that memberships generally in Far Right groups have plummeted; a group called Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) summarizes it in a September 18th 2024 report:

“It is difficult to overstate how different conditions are in 2024 compared to the previous presidential election year,” continues the ACLED report, when there was widespread unrest around Covid restrictions, the George Floyd protests, and the 2020 elections. Hate groups and paramilitaries may now favor a “clandestine approach,” although this “represent(s) a drastic departure for many of these groups whose previous tactics sought to radicalize the public through displays of force and strength.” A non-profit called the Soufan Center similarly says that hate and militia groups have recently increased their “activities in the disinformation space,” providing as example the posts on Telegram and Gab and X about Haitians and Black people eating pets, which garnered 4.9 million views on the latter platform. The ACLED report agrees, and adds that the move to online platforms may be to avoid law enforcement, citing Proud Boy chats wherein street mobilizations are called “traps” and “honey pots.” They conclude that there is “little indication that 2024 will see a repeat of the patterns that characterized 2020,” but add that mobilization/recruitment could proceed quickly, as when dozens of Proud Boys rapidly materialized for protests in Springfield Ohio having to do with the aforementioned alleged eating of pets.

There are sources that disagree with the benign assessments above. A think tank called the Counter Terrorism Group emphasizes risks having to do with local security around voting locations and government buildings, but when it comes to organized paramilitary threats, says that if efforts to overturn the election are unsuccessful:

“Militia groups will likely attempt a second Insurrection, to prevent the ratification of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris as president. Oathkeepers and Three Percenters will likely stockpile weapons necessary to escalate a potential insurrection through large-scale violence using urban guerrilla tactics like ambushes and hit-and-run attacks. They will likely openly carry weapons at political rallies to intimidate and threaten elected officials, law enforcement, and federal government workers.”

Well, that’s a mighty ominous and specific stance, but it’s stated without reference to data. While the violence and attacks it specifies are certainly consistent with what we remember from 4 years ago, most other sources disagree that there are sufficient resources for the Far Right to carry out such operations today.

Or do they? Maybe let’s talk Proud Boys for a minute, because they appear to be a possible exception to the pattern of decay mentioned in most of the sources above.

Unlike the other analyses above, a June 2024 Reuters piece titled The Proud Boys are back: How the far-right group is rebuilding to rally behind Trump by Aram Roston maintains that the Proud Boys are “rebuilding and regaining strength as Trump campaigns to return to the White House.” Roston cites examples about Proud Boys actively recruiting, ranging from news about a Miami chapter to interviews with founder Gavin McInnes; “as the Proud Boys regroup, they’ve made changes designed to make them less vulnerable to law enforcement scrutiny, including doing away with layers of top leadership.” This includes, since Jan 6th, adopting a more decentralized structure. One tack mentioned by McInnes is for the Proud Boys to adopt “a loose organizational structure similar to the Hells Angels partly to avoid federal charges” under RICO. “The Proud Boys now operate with self-governing chapters in more than 40 states, with little apparent central coordination,” says Roston in the article; Julie Farnam, a former U.S. Capitol Police assistant director of intelligence cited in the article, added that there were at the time of writing 154 Proud Boy chapters in 48 U.S. states.

In a superbly comprehensive and detailed piece written in October about the Proud Boy role in January 6th, Tom Joscelyn, on a forum called Just Security, makes an overwhelming case that January 6th, rather than being a rally that got out of hand, was orchestrated with forethought by the Proud Boys, who manipulated everyone from fellow travelers like the Oath Keepers to the “normies” who showed up for solidarity with Trump. Moreover, he faults the US government for lacking the hindsight to even properly frame the event afterwards: “the central lesson of January 6th clearly did not sink in,” he says; “the Proud Boys’ leadership marshaled a nationwide network, utilizing chapters in multiple states, to overrun the Capitol.”

Hmm. One would THINK that law enforcement and the US military might be prepared this time around, and that for January 6th 2025, there would be a surfeit of armed protection deployed in proper locations. But we should never underestimate the ability of government functionaries to misapprehend a given situation, such as when officials believed that the threats on January 6 would be from antifascists, or such as numerous other incidents where US government officials misread intentions about both foreign and domestic threats.

When I started writing this, my thinking was that if Harris wins, while of course nobody knows what will happen, it’s hard to imagine a Blackshirt march on Rome or another large-scale Capitol riot. (2) To be successful, magnetometers would have to be tampered with or destroyed, and locations like the Capitol and others will undoubtedly be heavily policed. Right now there aren’t even enough members in the paramilitaries to execute such operations; in order to muster enough rioters to carry things out, hate-group recruitment would have to blossom in a literal overnight fashion. Rather, as experts say lately, we should expect “lone wolf” events like the recent attempted assassinations of Trump, and, almost by definition, those are isolated and unpredictable.

But after reading some of these reports, although I still have trouble finding my crystal ball on all of this, I think I’ve changed my mind. I know what will happen if Trump wins, but I no longer think that the street will be secure from large-scale pre-planned ruination if Trump loses. I think that in the event of a Harris win and a failure to overthrow the result, there is a decidedly nonzero probability of directed and coordinated attack(s) by the paramilitary Far Right on American people, places, and institutions.

Notes

1. In the event of a second Trump administration, it’s likely that the paramilitary right will do the initial dirty work in the streets before the National Guard or active duty troops are called to continue the same work. Unfortunately for the paramilitaries, it’s also likely that after their coarse tactics are no longer useful in the street, they will be banned, much as the SA (Brownshirts) were in 1934 Germany and the Red Guard were in 1968 China. On a related subject, after successfully consolidating their power, both Nazi Germany and the USSR banned firearms for most non-party citizens (excepting for hunting in the USSR).
2. In October 1922, Mussolini was able to march to Rome with some 30,000 Blackshirts after King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini as Prime Minister.

References in no particular order

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/nearly-4-years-after-far-right-extremists-stormed-the-u-s-capitol-election-threats-persist

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/10/29/election-threats-persist-four-years-after-far-right-extremists-stormed-us-capitol.html

https://www.counterterrorismgroup.com/post/psa-far-right-militias-pose-significant-threat-to-the-2024-election-law-enforcement-will-very-like/

https://acleddata.com/2024/09/18/when-is-quiet-too-quiet-understanding-shifts-in-extremist-mobilization-in-2024/

https://www.justsecurity.org/103956/proud-boys-threat-assessment/

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-proudboys/

Lessons from the colossal failure of the 1930s German Left

“…to the leading Nazis it suggested something more sinister: the Communists were preparing in secret for a nationwide uprising. The fears of civil war that had plagued German politics in late 1932 and early 1933 did not vanish overnight… The more they waited, the more nervous the Nazi leaders grew. Surely something must happen soon?” -Richard Evans from The Coming of the Third Reich

Political upheaval from despots in modern times has happened in locations ranging from Cambodia to China to Chile, but for some reason, we in the US most often want to compare the prospect of fascism here to Nazi Germany.

It’s understandable; we share with Germany a common western heritage and a similar middle-class industrial/economic base dominated by oligarchs. At the risk of being sprawling and academic, for my own knowledge I’ve wanted for some time to look at the events in 1930s Germany to see if there are lessons for us in the modern USA, and the question seems especially relevant in 2024.

For me the journey started in 1970 in 10th-grade Social Studies, where Mr. Cady announced one day that anyone who read William Shirer’s RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH for their book report would get an automatic “A” for the entire semester. It didn’t matter how good the report was, one merely had to read it (over 1,200 pages), write something, and you’d get an “A” because the book was so massive & crucial. It was an important book for Americans of the World War II generation, and my mom similarly told me that if I never read anything else while she was alive, this was the one book I needed to read.

Before I actually read RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH late in the 12th grade (Mr. Cady had left by then so the book report deal was off), I’d assumed that because Hitler came to power, the Nazi stormtroopers must have triumphed in the streets. But I soon learned that this wasn’t necessarily so. I was surprised to read in Shirer about pitched street battles between the Brownshirts and Germany’s Communists, the Red Front Fighters’ League. In a book published decades later, historian Richard Evans, in part one of his three-part history of the Third Reich titled THE COMING OF THE THIRD REICH, confirmed the intensity of the German Communists: “Of all their opponents, the Nazis feared and hated the Communists the most. In countless street-battles and meeting-hall clashes the Communists had shown that they could trade punch for punch and exchange shot for shot with their brownshirt counterparts.” (1)

But let us start nearer the beginning. Germany’s dominant party at the time of the Weimar Republic, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), traced its foundations to the 1870s Bismarck regime, during which it was outlawed because of its socialist proclivities. By 1890, although they were legal again, the SPD had come to see their own revolutionary Left as a detriment, and so became a semi-socialist party of skilled functionaries. By the end of World War I, although not having enough votes to be exclusive, they became the majority party of the Weimar Republic; as “social democrats” rather than true socialists, the SPD from that point came to embody Weimar, dropping their former Marxist orientation as they sidelined their own left wing, and opting to make gains for the workers by “reform” within the system by way of “peaceful class struggle.”

But there was little peace to be had in Germany. By 1930, after a decade of hyperinflation, unemployment, war reparations, and street violence, Germany’s problems were compounded and exacerbated further by the Great Depression. Hitler and the National Socialists gained appreciable seats in the government that year, but when it came to open conflict, the SPD, much like liberals in the US today, always made sure to take the side of civility. A tragic event that initiated the 1930s downfall occurred in 1932 when von Papen was illegally installed as Reich Commissioner of Prussia, Germany’s largest state and an SPD stronghold, in a largely bloodless coup. There was no resistance from the police, who were, allegedly, sworn to uphold the Republic. In predictable form, the Social Democrats felt that the violation of civility embodied in the coup was not as bad as violating their own cherished principle of civility; they “trusted that the constitutional process… would assure the survival of the Weimar Republic… extra-paramilitary and ‘unlawful’ actions were condemned by a leadership which trusted that constitutional processes and the return of reason and fair play would assure the survival of the Weimar Republic and its chief supporters,” observed a historian named Edinger. “The Social Democrats refused to take the Nazi program too seriously. It sounded utterly absurd and appeared unlikely to receive the support of a majority of the electorate.” “Avoidance of civil war,” said a historian named Winkler, was the party’s “supreme guiding principle” during the revolutions of 1918-1919 (in which Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered) and remained so until the end. Winkler states that to cooperate with the Communists would have meant the SPD abandoning their coalitions with bourgeois parties, thus losing their hold on state power.

But true Leftists, even though cast off by the Social Democrats, still remained a legitimate force to be contended with on their own. In the 1930 elections, while the Nazis surprised everyone by electing 107 members to the Reichstag, the Communists also increased their representation from 54 to a respectable 77 seats. By 1932, membership in the Communist party (KPD) was 360,000, up from 117,000 in 1929, and by early 1933, they had 100 seats in the Reichstag; together by early 1933, the Communists and Social Democrats had a combined 221 seats in the Reichstag compared to the Nazis’ 196.

But the two parties would never cooperate. In an essay written from exile in Turkey in 1931 titled FOR A WORKERS’ UNITED FRONT AGAINST FASCISM, Leon Trotsky foresaw the inevitability of fascist takeover; he implored the German Communists: “We are unshakably convinced that the victory over the fascists is possible – not after their coming to power, not after five, ten, or twenty years of their rule, but now… you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you.

“Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time left!”

Unfortunately, the German Communists’ strategy was not directed by Trotsky, or even by anyone in Germany, but emanated directly from Stalin in Moscow. The Kremlin saw Social Democracy as the greater threat; fascism, they said, was a logical consequence of end-stage capitalism, and therefore should be allowed to occur naturally; “After Hitler, Our Turn” became the call of the German Communist Party, whose stated belief was that furthering social democracy would only serve to delay the inevitability of capitalism’s downfall. The SPD were now labeled as “Social Fascists,” and “Social Fascism” became an enemy greater than Nazi fascism. The historian Winkler takes this insidiousness even further, proposing that for Stalin, at least a Rightist military dictatorship in Germany had the advantage of creating the alienation, or potentially the defeat, of Germany’s pro-western allies, who were the USSR’s sworn enemies.

The German KPD and their leader, Ernst Thälmann, took this Soviet directive seriously. (2) “The Communists, convinced by the very violence of the Nazis that the class struggle against ‘monopoly capitalism’ was nearing a climax and the ‘proletarian dictatorship’ just around the corner, fell victim to their illusions,” wrote Edinger. The Communist KPD held stubbornly to the belief that fascism was the logical consequence of end-stage capitalism, that capitalism via the Nazis would “soon collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions.”

On the conservative end of the Left continuum, the Social Democrats remained steadfast believers in their tried & tested programme, clinging “to the organizational and tactical forms to which they attributed the party’s successes in the past,” including “respect for law and order.” Somewhat unbelievably, the SPD even had their own paramilitary wing, the Reichsbanner, who could have joined with the Communist Red Front Fighters in the streets, but usually ended up brawling with them instead; perhaps predictably, the Reichsbanner were mostly unarmed. (3)

After the substantial events of the aforementioned Prussian coup, which destabilized German government at large, on January 30, 1933, the aging Field Marshal Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reich Chancellor. With three Nazis (Goering, Frick, and Hitler) now holding cabinet positions, that night a parade of Brownshirts, SS, and Steel Helmets (the paramilitary wing of a Nazi-allied conservative party), estimated at some 61,000 men, marched for hours under torchlight in Berlin. Soon after, a February 4th decree made armed breaches of the peace illegal (except for those conducted by the Brownshirts); SPD members met with unionists on January 31th in Berlin to plan a nationwide general strike, but the SPD leadership backed down. Soon it became too late. Goering, now the Prussian Prime Minister, on February 22nd set up an auxiliary police force made up of SS and SA (Storm Troopers) that broke into and destroyed Communist and union offices, while local police either looked the other way or joined in; SPD newspapers came under bans in certain areas, while the SPD, in characteristic form, responded by attempting legal action; meanwhile, local police protections for the SPD were removed as well, and incidents of destruction and occasional murder proceeded apace throughout much of Germany.

And then came the burning of the Reichstag. In the days following the Reichstag fire, set by a supposed Communist, the Nazis warned of an “imminent German Bolshevik revolution” as some 4,000 Communists were arrested, many being dragged from their homes; by March 1933, the number of Communists under arrest was 10,000. Not immune from the destruction were Social Democrats, whose leaflets were burned, posters ripped down, and printing presses destroyed, and many of whom dragged from their homes. In the March 1933 elections, the last to be held before complete Nazi accession to power, the Nazis only gained a minority position of 44% in the Reichstag, but together with the Nationalists constituted a weak 52% majority. The fact that the Communists, Social Democrats, and Centrist parties had a combined 17.5 million votes to the Nazis’ 17 million “testified to the complete failure of the Nazis, even under conditions of a semi-dictatorship, to win over a majority of the electorate,” says the historian Evans. But the point was moot, because as long as Hitler and Goering held office, the legislature was irrelevant.

Much like the liberal critics of today, who take every blunder by Trump as a herald of his imminent downfall, the SPD, still in denial, predicted Hitler’s early demise. As late as March 18th an SPD party theorist predicted that Hitler would soon be abandoned by his supporters. Such views confirm the wisdom of Trotsky’s aphorism that “there is no greater crime in politics than that of hoping for stupidities on the part of a strong enemy.”

On March 6, the Nazis outlawed the Communist Party. On March 20, Himmler announced to the press that there would be “a concentration camp for political prisoners” opened at Dachau; the first of many, its wide publication in the press was meant to constitute a warning. (4) By the end of 1933, 130,000 Communist Party members had been arrested and an estimated 2,500 murdered. On June 23, 1933, Hitler also outlawed the German Social Democratic Party, and their members were similarly set upon, arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered.

After such a litany of horror, perhaps it’s time get back to the original stated question of this article: are there lessons from Germany’s 1930s failure for us today?

In the broad sense, similar to the German Social Democrats, there has been a general underestimation by US liberals about the ferocity of another Trump regime. While the mainstream finally has come to use words like “fascist” and “authoritarian” to describe Trumpism, they still fail to appreciate just how far this true authoritarianism will take us. For example, a special 2023 issue of Atlantic Magazine, assessing the likely effects of another Trump regime, employed a checklist approach about US institutions under Trump again – the military, NATO, journalism, and others – without seeming to consider the relevance of these institutions if all journalists are jailed or if the military becomes a domestic occupying force. A quote from historian Mark Bray bears repeating: the US media specifically (and mainstream liberal culture generally) “is not often attuned to politics outside of conventional elections” and “have no framework to interpret such a threat.… They are ill-equipped to contextualize this threat within the broader fascistic politics of Trump and his supporters.”

What about a more specific lesson? Can we learn from the failure of the German liberal Left (the SPD) and the Communist Left (the KPD) to unite in resistance against the threat of fascism? In other words, could we in the US become a more unified Left? I have to confess frustration with fellow Anarchists who insist on *not* voting this year, and the usual reason given is because both candidates will continue the US course of Zionism. This is undoubtedly true! But my response is that under one candidate you will at least be able to protest about US Zionism, while under the other candidate, you and I will likely end up dead or in prison. Of course, voting for many of us seems irrelevant anyway, because there are so few Leftists to vote, and many of us live in overwhelmingly red states anyway. Although cases have been made about spoiler candidates like Ralph Nader or Jill Stein ruining Democratic chances, in fact there is virtually no true American Left – Communist, Anarchist, or Socialist – whose votes number enough to matter in an election.

And when it comes to civil strife in the streets, it’s something that the far Right, and even the regular centrist Right, have been preparing for, for decades. You and I both know that they are well armed. We also all know that the liberal centrist Left, who make up such a large portion of the US, will always trust in the police to protect them when the shit finally comes down.

Notes
1. Statistics for 1931 bear out the ferocity of Communist street fighters, with the SA (Nazi stormtroopers) suffering the largest number of injuries and deaths – 4,699 compared to 2,924 casualties for the Communists and Reichsbanner (the unarmed paramilitary arm of the Social Democratic Party) combined. In looking at additional data, historian Daniel Siemens similarly concluded that between 1930 and 1932 Nazis were more often murdered in conflicts than their leftist and centrist paramilitary counterparts.

2. The Reichsbanner would be analogous to today’s U.S. Democratic party having their own paramilitary group like the Oath Keepers, which is an unlikely concept indeed. The Reichsbanner, which later became part of the Iron Front, considered both the far Right and far Left to be enemies of the Republic, and historians have said that the Red Front Fighters’ League and the Reichsbanner were often responsible for many of each others’ casualties.

3. Ernst Johannes Fritz Thälmann was imprisoned in 1933 and kept in solitary confinement at Buchenwald until he was ordered shot by Hitler in 1944.

4. In a recent column, historian Heather Cox Richardson rightly states that the first camps were for political prisoners, but neglects (perhaps deliberately) to mention that these political prisoners were Leftists.

References
https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2023/12/atlantics-janfeb-issue-next-trump-presidency/676227

https://truthout.org/articles/progressive-groups-are-mobilizing-to-de-escalate-far-right-violence-at-the-polls

Edinger, Lewis J. 1953. German Social Democracy and Hitler’s “National Revolution” of 1933: A Study in Democratic Leadership. World Politics, Vol. 5, No. 3 pp. 330-367.

Evans, Richard J. 2004. The Coming of the Third Reich. Penguin Press.

Shirer, William L. 1960. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. Simon & Schuster.

Siemens, Daniel. 2017. Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts. Yale University Press.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1931/311208.htm

Winkler, Heinrich A. 1990. Choosing the Lesser Evil: The German Social Democrats and the Fall of the Weimar Republic. Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 25, No. 2/3, pp. 205-227.

By Everett Acorn

The word “extremism,” much like the terms “common-sense gun control” or “assault weapon,” is a term thrown around quite causally these days, with a lot of assumptions about its meaning.

I spent some time online looking for definitions of “extremism” and at first didn’t have much luck; Merriam Webster defined extremism as: “the quality or state of being extreme…” not very helpful… while Oxford Languages stated that extremism is: “the holding of extreme political or religious views; fanaticism.” Because “extreme” by definition must be compared against a norm that is not extreme, other popular definitions seemed to evaluate extremism in a political context, which in our day & age would necessarily be the context of the state; thus, while clarifying that extremist groups do not necessarily perpetrate acts of terror, a UK government report says that extremism “is the vocal or active opposition to our fundamental values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and respect and tolerance for different faiths and beliefs.”

Fair enough. We live in the era of the state and its institutions and must generally accede to its context. In my encounters with liberal and centrist friends, I’ve found that they are happy to conflate extremism with the perpetration of not only violence – injury and death – but also with property destruction; to centrists, injury, death, and property destruction are all “violent” and generally perpetrated by “extremists.”

But can property destruction really be compared with death? Are people who perpetrate acts of property destruction, who prevent fascists from having a voice, or who stand ready to defend marginalized people with arms, really “extremists?”

A recent (April 20923) Atlantic article is titled The New Anarchy,* written by executive editor Adrienne LaFrance, begins by saying “for the past three years, I’ve been preoccupied with a question: How can America survive a period of mass delusion, deep division, and political violence without seeing the permanent dissolution of the ties that bind us?” I found in LaFrance’s paper the word “extremist” or variations thereof 31 times; 3 times when referring to left-wing groups or movements, 6 times when referring to right-wing groups like the Proud Boys, and 22 times in a general sense or one that might involve multiple sides. Focusing on conflicts in Portland, LaFrance assumes the same tone when lumping together left & right actions as “salad-bar extremism,” as if everyone reading should get this and agree; about Portland she writes “extremists on the left and on the right, each side inhabiting its own reality, had come to own a portion of downtown Portland,” and that “extremists on the left hijacked largely peaceful protests with their own violent tactics” during the anti-police protests of 2020. She goes on to compare Portland as a “concentrated manifestation of political violence” with the Capitol riot of January 6th 2021, neglecting the fact that antifascists had no role in the latter conflict… although Capitol intelligence predicted that “antifa” would be present on January 6th, antifascists in fact wisely stayed away in droves from the Capitol to let the far right and the state duke it out on their own.

Until Michael Reinoehl shot a far-right member of Patriot Prayer in 2020, there had not been a single death caused by an anti-fascist activist in 25 years. In 2022 the Anti Defamation League (ADL) documented that all extremist-related murders that year were committed by the right wing (25 people in the U.S. in 12 separate incidents, with 21 of the 25 murders linked to white supremacists), which, although marking a decline from 33 extremist-related murders documented in 2021, maintained an alarming increase in murders compared to 2010 and earlier. “Left-wing extremists,” they say, engage in assaults, fire-bombings, and arsons, “but since the late 1980s have not often targeted people with deadly violence… being far more likely to attack property.” The 2020 Michael Reinoehl incident was the first since the shooting of a racist skinhead by an anti-racist in Portland Oregon in 1993; because he was a leftist, unlike Kyle Rittenhouse, Reinoehl was apparently summarily executed by U.S. marshals.

LaFrance goes on: “I learned how cultures have managed to endure sustained political violence, and how they ultimately emerged with democracy still intact,” she says… yet the only culture she mentions outside of the U.S. is late 20th century Italy. Here she discusses the “Years of Lead” in 1969-1988 Italy to make the case that daily violence has creeping effect until either background situations, like the economy, greatly change, or until things end in a catastrophe; in Italy, apparently both things occurred, as the economy improved, but former prime minister Aldo Moro was brutally tortured and killed, his body left in a car on the street.

I think a lot of liberals thought that January 6th was just such the catastrophe to put an end to Trumpism, and that the election of a benevolent Joe Biden offered a post-catastrophic chance to “heal” (while people like me who disagreed were labeled as “pessimists”). A source for LaFrance’s article takes it further, though, and mentions that “if they had actually hanged Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi on January 6… it would have ended it.” He adds “I don’t think it ends without some sort of cathartic cataclysm… absent that, it just boils along for a generation or two generations.”

It certainly seems true that, from the killings by Robert Matthews and the Order in the early 1980s, through the Oklahoma City Bombing, through Charlottesville, through January 6th, right-wing violence has “boiled along” in events over multiple generations, worsening each time. And here I have to agree with LaFrance; we are living inside a period of creeping, accumulating violence, from the right, that will get worse before it gets better; the ADL’s data on increasing right-wing murders since 2010 certainly confirm this. Barring a catasrophe that further shocks the public into action – apparently mass murders in synagogues, shopping centers, and schools, don’t shock enough – it will take a significant background shift in our economic and cultural situation to calm these people and put an end to their violence. I would argue further that the background shift needs to be an end to the globalism that creates riches by exploiting pockets of world-wide poverty while impoverishing domestic U.S. workers spiritually and economically and priming them for authoritarianism – and in its place the creation of a nurturing localism – but that’s a topic for a different column.

While LaFrance is careful to describe antifa as a movement rather than a group, it’s disconcerting that she goes no further to understand the basic motivations that distinguish far-right hate groups from antifascists; the first is motivated on hate and fear, while the other is based on compassion; the first is offensive and shows up to provoke, while the other is defensive and shows up to resist. When it comes to the topic of extremism and the other “T” word that typically creeps into these discussions – Terrorism – was it really “extreme” for Nat Turner or John Brown to abhor and fight slavery? Or did things only become extreme when they took up arms? From the American University in Cairo: “Not all terrorists are extremists… For example, in the case of the National Liberation Front in Algeria or the secessionist movement in Ireland, you may hold a relatively reasonable view on the entitlements of your people to self-determination but still commit an act of terrorism because you feel you don’t have any other means.”

In conclusion: when talking about extremism** or violence in society, let’s not conflate those who arrive in hate, to cause death, with those who show up to defend the hated… and yes, the latter defenders will resort to blows when necessary. Antifascists will show up in the streets when fascism rears its head, and yes, sometimes windows are broken, people are punched, and fires are set. But if you think that broken windows are the same level of “violence” as the killing of 11 Jewish people in a Pittsburgh synagogue or the 10 Black people in a Buffalo grocery store, maybe it’s time to reevaluate your notion of what “violence” really is. In the meantime, it appears that those of us who oppose fascism will have to get used to the idea of being called “extremist.”

___________

*In the title and throughout the article LaFrance frustratingly uses the colloquial meaning of the word “anarchy” to describe the chaos informing/ensuing from the phenomenon of violence she is addressing. The proper use of the word is to describe anarchism as a form of anti-state socialism that seeks the abolition of systems of domination and exploitation. She tries to clear this up somewhat in an interview on Amanpour & Co. but doesn’t seem to grasp that anarchism remains a vital movement informing arguably the largest swath of leftist activity and thought in the current day, especially since the 1999 WTO protests. Modern-day governments in Chiapas Mexico and North and East Syria owe much of their foundations to anarchism.

** John Brown Gun Clubs are listed by at least two think tanks as “extremist;” the Counter Extremism Project and InfluenceWatch.

By Everett Acorn

“Mutual aid is a voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit.” – Wikipedia

“Mutual aid… is [to embrace] the idea that we can cooperatively reason with one another, and thereby instantiate our common inclination to build a society that benefits all without instituting any sort of hierarchy that functions to enforce such arrangements.” – Nathan Jun & Mark Lance, Anarchist Responses to a Pandemic: The COVID-19 Crisis as a Case Study in Mutual Aid

“…We see also that the practice of mutual aid and its successive developments have created the very conditions of society life in which man was enabled to develop his arts, knowledge, and intelligence; and that the periods when institutions based on the mutual-aid tendency took their greatest development were also the periods of the greatest progress in arts, industry, and science.” – Pëtr Kropotkin: Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution

A mid-November spate of below-freezing cold this year brought into relief the thin membrane between services and survival for those who, under capitalism, lack means, and this in turn got me to thinking about the notion of mutual aid.

A winter shelter program for the Columbia unsheltered, called Room At The Inn, begun 7 years ago and until this year housed by a conglomeration of churches, was delayed in their new digs this season until 28 November. That’s when a loose community of volunteers – volunteers from Room At The Inn, Loaves & Fishes, Columbia Mobile Aid Collective, Operation Safe Winter, John Brown Gun Club, Como for Progress, Wilkes Blvd Methodist Church, and more – came together to staff overnights for almost two weeks of below-freezing weather so that unhoused people could sleep indoors on carpeted floors with blankets and restrooms instead of on the concrete floor of a bus station. And luckily, just when our improvised aid network was about depleted of exhausted volunteers working 4-hour shifts at 2:00 AM (and still having to report to a job the next day), the cold abated.

But then it happened all over again. On the week of Christmas, when “bomb cyclone” conditions throughout the country unleashed more cold, once again an improvised network of shelters and food initiatives powered by volunteers staffed shelters and ran gloves, soup, and handwarmers to keep people from freezing to death or losing digits to frostbite. Before the Christmas weekend, John Trapp, Operations Manager at Room at the Inn Como, remarked that either this weekend “will be remembered as our finest moment, or as the time that we went down in flames.” The finest moment aspect prevailed, and like the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes in Luke 5:1-11, a situation that was at first overwhelming was handled by a city-wide care community… although not without uncertainty and confusion as well as external hardships like broken hot water tanks.

Each winter brings the fatigue and stress on our unsheltered population to the fore, but it also centers the way in which our already-thin volunteer community is stressed and stretched to the max, and my friends and I often notice how very few in a city of over 100,000 do the work of taking care of those most at risk. Room At The Inn has a regular volunteer staff of about 30 who provide repeated weekly service throughout the winter; our soup kitchen – the Catholic Workers’ Loaves & Fishes – provides nightly meals run by volunteer groups who cook once a month, but are anchored by weekly teams of “Doorkeepers” – about 14 people total – who have the challenging work of deescalation; the day shelter, Turning Point, is staffed by about a dozen volunteers who work regular weekly shifts; a mobile care collective, originated by Mid-MO JBGC but spun off to an incredibly vigorous and vital team of mostly women and now called Como Mobile Aid Collective (CoMac), serves hundreds of the unsheltered each week, but is literally staffed by under a dozen people (including a nursing team). Importantly, when it comes to the cumulative workload, there is overlap among all these groups; that is, many of the same people who volunteer for Turning Point and Room At The Inn also volunteer for CoMac and/or as Doorkeepers for Loaves and Fishes, etc. Although I could be missing some volunteers associated with additional homeless-oriented service organizations in Columbia, I figure that our pool of regular non-paid volunteer people doing this work on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis is thus around 70 people… but perhaps as few as 50.

One can certainly think, as I often do, of our homeless as the leading edge of a slow societal decline, like internally-displaced refugees, and for those of us lucky to be housed as only a few degrees of freedom or a few hundred dollars or a few decades away from not having places to live; but while this big-picture view provides a nice community perspective about the work, the “charity” look and feel of our work still nags. “Solidarity, not charity,” we proclaim about our mutual aid, but the thing some of us ask ourselves is: is our mutual aid really just service under a better-sounding name? Are volunteers from privileged backgrounds, who have warm houses and hot showers to come home to, really engaging in “solidarity” or “mutuality” by giving rides and serving food to individuals whose life belongings are contained in a few heavy-duty trash bags?

In a compelling blog piece titled Mutual Aid: A Factor of Liberalism*, Gus Breslauer, a former member of the Redneck Revolt network (to which Mid-MO JBGC also once belonged), asks just this question, saying that what we call mutual aid today is better termed “service work” instead.

“The appeal is hard to disagree with,” he says, but “the truth is, mutual aid isn’t a challenge or threat to the social order which produced hunger and precarity. The state is largely indifferent or even welcoming to it” – something we’ve certainly seen locally when Columbia city officials remark that our mutual aid group(s) can happily staff the warming centers and shower stations (which are beyond the current means of the city government, as presently construed, to manage). To me, this split between the city and the people shows an inherent dichotomous error in our notions of what citizenry and government should be… but more on that later.

Breslauer goes further to list examples of service work done by the fashy Identity Evropa, (now American Identity Movement), a rightist group that picks up trash and feeds the homeless in locations from places ranging to Orlando FL to Fort Lee NJ. “Solidarity isn’t about service,” says Breslauer, “it’s about reciprocal defense of each other because we are in the same social position.” From Breslauer’s piece: “by conflating “solidarity” with service work, we risk impoverishing what solidarity actually means and feels like. It’s a serious problem when we’re perplexed when a worker is having a conflict with their boss/landlord over stolen wages and rent, and the best thing we think we can do is start a GoFundMe for them. If your work is visibly indistinguishable from NGOs, capitalist firms, well-meaning religious groups, and even fascists, you cannot expect the political content to actually be different.” Breslauer’s tenet is that mutual aid projects, as presently configured, may alleviate conditions on an individual basis “many times over” – bringing to mind our own work in Columbia in repeatedly providing hundreds of individual meals each week – but that they don’t build fighting organizations that challenge the source of these conditions.

It’s hard to argue with these criticisms, but we don’t have to look far back in time for an example of what a more solidarity-based notion of mutual aid might look like. Covid provided a window into a more grounded notion of the possibilities of mutual aid, as the centralized state, weakened under pandemic conditions, offered us a brief glimpse of the “mutuality” of things. In many US cities in 2020, including Columbia, mutual aid groups sprung up block by block; in 2020 a brief initiative called CoMo Mutual Aid and staffed by a variety of community members, worked not just with homeless and food-insecure families, but with people of means but who could not risk going out for groceries or who were not able to do their own yard work or house care. As the year went on we extended this work into an even shorter-lived effort called the Community Block Initiative – an attempt to build neighborhood pods without using the cocoonish “pod” word in the name. But as things started to settle and supply lines resumed, interest and need waned, the power of the economy and of the state seemingly lessened our need to be our own caretakers, and Como Mutual Aid and the Community Block Initiative went into dormancy. For the time being.

And that gets to the dilemma, or maybe it’s a paradox, about mutual aid under capitalism: while the “we take care of us” sensibility of a mutual aid community is ever so much more nurturing than elected representatives and city councils, the power of community seems to rise only in times of necessity– in times of pandemics or natural disasters, or in locations like North and East Syria or Chiapas, when centralized systems are weak. The rest of the time, the powers that be – of the state, of capitalism, of institutions – are so prominent that most of us can get by without working to build community. Which is better after a tiring 40+ hour workweek? Watching Netflix, or attending a weekly meeting to see which neighbor needs their lawn mowed? Sadly, it seems that the much of the time most of us are covering our heads after work, taking relief in TV or social media or gaming – understandable after working 8 hours of sometimes soul-drenching labor.

And yet, as social animals, we humans crave community. How often do we hear, after natural disasters, about how wonderful it was that people “came together” while checking in on neighbors and shoveling others’ walks during an epic snowstorm. We are vitalized by helping one another! Yet the rest of the time you’d almost think that capitalism likes the bread-and-circuses way that we are sidelined and flabby and distracted from the work of taking care of each other. The libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin, who grew up in the heady street life of the Lower East Side of 1920s and 1930s New York, spent most of his life bemoaning the decline of citizenship in modern society. Describing a nightly atmosphere of meetings, protests, street fights, and public speaking on literal soapboxes in places like the Tompkins Square Park of his youth, Bookchin talked about speakers, including himself, who had to know all the nuances of thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg or risk ridicule from an inspired and knowledgeable working-class audience: “Emma Goldman lived in the neighborhood and spoke frequently in meeting halls. Eugene V. Debs, Bill Haywood of the IWW, and less luminous figures came around when they were in New York. Everyone lived on a rich diet of public lectures and meetings.” One sees in Bookchin’s writings how he tried to recover in (western) history the moments of community invigoration he grew up with in childhood. In what I think of as his most important work, The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship, he traced models of decentralized community solidarity from the Greek polis to medieval Italian city states to the German and Swiss confederations of the 1200’s and the 1300’s to the Comuneros of 1520’s Spain to the Paris Commune. These vital, citizen-based initiatives receded or failed as other forces became predominant, and he observed that “centralization becomes most acute when deterioration occurs at the base of society. Divested of culture as a political realm, society becomes an ensemble of bureaucratic agencies that bind monadic individuals and family units into strictly administrative structure… the city, in turn is no longer united by any sort of ethical bond.” It’s hard to argue right now that modern American society is not similarly in deterioration.

Does this resonate for my fellow volunteer types who brave 4-hour city council meetings or who serve on powerless citizen advisory boards? The city, we sometimes protest, should be doing more – so we might demand of them at city council meetings – but in Bookchin’s view of citizenship, we are the city… we are the ones who should be doing the work… the problem is that right now there are so few of us doing it.

While those of us in the work may often feel gratified after a given shift at Loaves & Fishes or a morning soup run, for many of us the cumulative experience remains one of exhaustion… because, instead of an involved citizenry of 100,000, there’s only about 70 of us. But even that doesn’t really cover it, because the real problem is lack of a vigorous community-oriented society. Bookchin’s point, one that I believed he gained from his childhood in the climate of New York’s activism, was that participating in citizenship and community should be invigorating and connective; they should be means for us to feel more alive. Citizenship and aid that are truly mutual – not just service – are certainly a way for us to give, but should be a way for us to receive energy as well, thereby keeping the spirit of citizenship and community going instead of depleting its workers.

How do we achieve that under capitalism? I have no ideas at the moment. But how great could things be if every one of Columbia’s 100,000 gave time as part of being members in an invigorated and caring mutual aid community?

*Kropotkin’s seminal 1902 work on mutual aid is titled: Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

References
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/nathan-jun-mark-lance-anarchist-responses-to-a-pandemic

https://regenerationmag.org/mutual-aid-a-factor-of-liberalism/

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/identity-evropaamerican-identity-movement

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/312962.Anarchism_Marxism_and_the_Future_of_the_Left

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/946885.The_Rise_of_Urbanization_and_the_Decline_of_Citizenship

Mainstream US culture’s ability to see fascism stops at the 2024 elections

By Everett Acorn

“This is it, comrades[…] after today, everything changes.” 

So warned a prescient friend about the looming escalation of events by the far right on August 11th 2017, the day before Heather Heyer was killed by fascists at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.  

Although the US paramilitary right has been growing for decades, leftists have warned specifically about a coming onslaught of large-scale rightwing violence since 2016. We have given public presentations, tabled at events, spoken on the radio, and used our personal and group social media platforms to advocate, at the very least, building community – that is, forming systems of dual power in order to take care of each other, especially when bad things happen. We have advocated, as part of this, and if necessary, armed community defense; responses to the latter have included laughter, or incredulity (“are you saying there will be a CIVIL WAR?”), or replies from friends and family criticizing our “pessimism;” most often, responses have included angry condemnations conflating/confusing our advocacy of firearms for community defense with the wash of firearms used in piteous mass shootings… the latter now occurring almost daily in a society gone mad with fear and meaninglessness.

Later, after January 6th – about which we also warned – some people came around to realize how big the threat of rightist violence really is, but public concern (and inquiries to us about training) waned quickly with the apparent return of apparent stability, apparently, via the Biden presidency. Also returned were over-reliance on the electoral process and public complacency about taking direct responsibility for the safety and welfare of our citizenry.

So here we are two years later, waiting for the presidential elections of 2024, and people like me get to read daily columns by Heather Cox Richardson, who, yes, very rightly focuses on the continued threat to “our democracy.”¹ Radio host Ian Masters of the show Background Briefing (broadcast every weekday for us in Mid-MO via radio station KOPN) has daily interviews with mostly mainstream academics who speculate about rising US fascism, using terms like “one-party rule” – presumably meaning rule by Republicans in the context of a fascist state. And it seems that even Joe Biden, who reportedly decided to run for president to unify the nation after Charlottesville, understands the threat; this past week, soon after using the term “semi-fascism” to describe the MAGA right, he made a televised speech about the threat of Trumpist Republicans. 

It’s great that academics like Heather Cox Richardson are concerned about election subversion and upcoming judicial decisions like Moore vs. Harper – so we should presume that the reasons for their concern are because of what might happen, right? Concerns like these are speculative, because they haven’t happened yet… so if speculation, by its nature, suggests something extrapolative, why not also speculate and extrapolate about what happens after elections are stolen? With few mainstream exceptions, almost nowhere have I heard speculation about rioting, about the likely complicity of local police and the national military in a nationwide breakdown, about community defense or citizen resistance, or, even in very general terms, about what widespread civil disorder might look like. 

Maybe the real reason for this is because, as historian Mark Bray said shortly in late 2020, the US media specifically (and mainstream liberal culture generally) lack a framework to consider the way such events might unfold. What he was saying is: we have so much institutional trust and history that we are blinded to see anything outside of the institutions we have grown up with. 

Well… I can name one group who has speculated and planned about what things will look like in the aftermath of the 2024 elections: the paramilitary far right, who are armed and ready. How about we speculate on soccer stadiums housing tens of thousands of political enemies, as happened in Pinochet’s Chile; or the 30,000 disappeared in the Argentine Dirty War, or the massacres in 1980s El Salvador, for which some estimates indicate as many as 75,000 murdered; or Syrian government bombings and chemical attacks against citizens in Allepo?

Granted, this kind of speculation is not fun to contemplate; bombed out buildings and soccer stadium concentration camps are pretty grim things to speculate about. But if you knew these things were coming – if you knew that people like Heather Cox Richardson or your favorite NPR and PBS hosts would be arrested and made examples of by the far right because they were part of “the vast liberal conspiracy” – wouldn’t you wish you had done more? Lincoln Mitchell, former faculty of Columbia University’s School of International Affairs, said on Background Briefing last week: “The historians may look back on this and say it was always inevitable. We’re looking at it – so many in America are still looking at it… and still saying it’s unimaginable. And that is preventing us from doing what it takes to stop this from happening.”

If we continue to consider looming threats to “our democracy” as serious and as having such serious consequences, shouldn’t we be speculating – and planning – just a bit harder? 

Footnotes

1. “Democracy” is a term that I think is exaggerated and glorified in the context of the US, and the US government on its own website categorizes itself otherwise: “With the exception of town meetings, a form of pure democracy, [emphasis mine with a nod to the late Murray Bookchin] we have at the local, state, and national levels a government which is: ‘‘federal’’ because power is shared among these three levels; ‘‘democratic’’ because the people govern themselves and have the means to control the government; and ‘‘republic’’ because the people choose elected delegates by free and secret ballot’ [emphasis mine again].” https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CDOC-108hdoc94/pdf/CDOC-108hdoc94.pdf

In the United States, the events of 6 January 2021 are fresh again, with live hearings scheduled to be broadcast on several networks later today. Earlier this week, the Department of Justice brought sedition charges against Enrique Tarrio and 4 other Proud Boys, which, along with charges brought against Stewart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers, make it appear that US institutions have held fast; an apparently disorganized state, operating in an atmosphere of economic crises, legal upheaval, cultural chaos, and widespread fear, seems to be working as it should after all. Perhaps a year from now, some Proud Boys and Oath Keepers will be in prison from activities of January 6th , where they might be expected to remain, depending on the nature of charges, appeals, and sentences, for awhile… who knows, perhaps until the November 2024 elections, or even later.

Liberal pundits like to compare the 6th January sacking of the US capitol to Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch (the failed attempt wherein the early National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis, tried to wrest power in a coup in 1923 Munich). There certainly are similarities between January 6th and the Beer Hall event. Both the 2021 January and 1923 Munich events started with a march and ended in failure less than 24 hours after they began. In Germany, Hitler was sentenced to prison, where he served less than a year and where he resolved afterward to never again attempt power by violence. It took another 10 years (March 1933) for the Nazis to achieve their goal of national rule, and it occurred amid an atmosphere of… economic crises, legal upheaval, cultural chaos, and widespread fear.

But I often think the more relevant comparison with January 6th in the US and Hitler’s Germany should be made to events closer to the 1933 Weimar collapse. Perhaps the most startling thing about the 1933 Nazi electoral ascent to power was that it occurred while stormtroopers were being held in prison for violence that, only months earlier, had been widely condemned throughout German civil society. When you think about it, it’s rather mind blowing; the political & cultural shift was so extensive that people who were once enemies of the state became heroes literally overnight.

In the early hours of 10 August 1932, in Upper Silesia, an area on the southeastern border of Germany and only 3 kilometers from the Polish border, drunken members of the Sturmabteilungen – SA, or stormtroopers – left a tavern and went to the home of an unemployed miner named Konrad Pietrzuch, a known Communist sympathizer, and beat him and his brother. The brother survived, but Konrad was “…marked by 29 wounds… the corpse was extremely bruised around the neck. The outer carotid artery was completely shredded. The larynx displayed a large hole. Death resulted from suffocation as blood from the outer carotid artery poured through the larynx into the lungs… In addition, the neck shows dermabrasion that is definitely the result of a kick. Apart from these wounds, Pietrzuch is battered all over his body. He has received heavy blows on his head with a dull-edged hatchet or a stick. Other wounds look like he was hit in the face with a billiard cue.”

Concerned that the incident would result in outrage and might empower Communist-party propaganda efforts in a political climate already brimming with unrest,¹ authorities confiscated the body and prohibited photos. Nonetheless, “the killing in Potempa quickly made nationwide headlines, thanks in large part to a new emergency decree ‘against political terrorism’ that had gone into effect at midnight on the night the attack was carried out,” according to a book by Daniel Siemens, an expert on the SA. “Armed with this anti-terror legislation, and in a desperate attempt to stem the wave of everyday political violence that was rapidly becoming impossible to control, the government of Chancellor Franz von Papen requested the death penalty for the perpetrators of these politically motivated murders.” Soon the perpetrators and other instigators were arrested, and 5 of them – the “Potempa 5” – were sentenced to death. Hitler condemned the verdict within hours of its announcement while the Nazi party line elevated the five “to heroes, extolled as brave men who were faithful to the Nazi cause and allegedly were supported by millions of fellow countrymen;” Goebbels got on the propaganda machine, Goering sent money to the murderer’s families, and soon von Papen reduced the charges against the Potempa 5 to life imprisonment.

Most of us know the general way in which things proceeded from there; Social Democrats and Communists, who together in late 1932 occupied more seats in the government than the Nazis, refused to cooperate with each other; in January 1933 Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reich Chancellor; in February 1933, a fire burned the Reichstag itself, and a decree was issued restricting assembly, association, property rights, and the press. The Nazis were still unable to win a majority of the electorate in elections of March 5th, but had enough in coalition with the Nationalists to form a government, which, with the Reichstag fire decree, was all they needed. Local stormtroopers, involved in the streets since the early 1920s, were now allowed to carry firearms, as municipal police throughout Germany either looked away or actively sided with rightist street violence. On March 23rd the Enabling Act was passed, which allowed the Nazis to issue laws without consent of the legislature.

Only 2 weeks after the March 1933 election, “as the first political prisoners filled the newly erected concentration camps in Oranienburg, Dachau, and elsewhere,” the condemned Potempa 5 were released from prison.

And just like that, the criminals of yesterday – indicted by a disorganized state operating in an atmosphere of economic crises, legal upheaval, cultural chaos, and widespread fear – became free heroes, literally overnight.

Notes
1. From Siemens: “In June and July 1932 alone, politically linked street riots, shootings, brawls, and assassinations in Germany caused the deaths of more than 300 people and injured more than 1,000. Within a political climate verging on civil war, the Potempa murder would probably not have made more than local headlines had it not been the first political felony to occur after President Hindenburg’s emergency decree on political terrorism came into effect.”

2. A mere 5 years earlier, it wasn’t forgone that the Nazis would be the ones to come out on top by 1933; in 1928 elections Communists had 10.6 percent of the seats in the Reichstag and the Nazis only 2.6 percent.

References

Siemens, Daniel, 2019. Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts. Yale University Press, 504 pages https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300246595/ref=ox_sc_act_image_2?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1

Evans, Richard J., 2004. The Coming of the Third Reich. The Penguin Press, 622 pages.
https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/0143034693/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2EUQR9554LH41&keywords=evans+coming+third+reich&qid=1654748021&s=books&sprefix=evans+com+ing+third+reich%2Cstripbooks%2C166&sr=1-1

In our work with the homeless, we see people daily who carry their entire worldly belongings in backpacks and plastic bags. There are perils during the warmer months for sure–infection, injury, overdose, and accidents by traffic or even by drowning; but the dangers of living rough are brought into fine focus in winter, when the difference in getting one’s needs met, or not, suddenly becomes a hairline’s width depending on which way the weather goes. It’s all hands on deck for many of us each winter in Columbia Missouri, as cold temperatures bring into relief how slim the cushion between existence and death is for disadvantaged members of our society.

Our Columbia homeless crisis, for whatever reason, has gained appreciable local attention the past year, with frequent media & social media stories about evicted families, a soup kitchen mutual aid program run out of the back of people’s cars, ARPA funding for the homeless, the kindness of a diner owner, the inhumane requirements for opening an overnight warming center, and a full-capacity-full-services Opportunity Campus shelter slated to open for the homeless sometime in the next several years.

It often helps me to stand back and look at our homeless population the way a biologist from another planet might. If one could view the pool of humanity as a giant whole, one would note variation in people’s conditions emanating from different sources; from genetic sources; from variation in parental or community care; and from variation in plain ol’ stochastic (the biologist’s fancy way of saying “random”) environmental luck–perhaps fire or disease or job loss. Some humans could end up in a bad state because of one of two of the above categories; some could end up in a bad condition due to all three; or someone profoundly suffering from just one of them–say, fetal alcohol syndrome–could be ruined for the rest of their life.

The question when viewed from the outside is a simple one: what are we to do?

Capitalism, as designed, has no answers to this question. In the US, social service programs from the Great Depression helped for a time and continue to help, but closures of mental institutions in the 1970s and 1980s, mass incarcerations, and welfare reform have weakened or overwhelmed these tools. In the 1980s, trickle-down economics was supposed to help the unfortunate, but was actually a disingenuous way to disguise globalism’s search for cheap labor, and resulted in the subsequent looting of the middle classes, creating not just a poorer population but also creating anger in a working class focused on the wrong enemy (immigrants and people of color) and leading to authoritarianism in the United States.

What are we left with? In the words of the late David Graeber, we are “a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another, and that those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated, and that a very large proportion of the population don’t do anything at all but spin fantasies, extract rents, and generally get in the way of those who are making, fixing, moving, and transporting things, or tending to the needs of other living beings.” Without thinking much about an alternative, we have tacitly given government (as we know it) decades to fix this mess, and while government continues to be the most powerful thing (next to weather and disease) that we encounter, it continues to fail (despite its embracement by an educated populace and their exhortations to “vote” ourselves to a good society).

The bottom line is this: if you strip off everyone’s clothes and put them next to each other–whether rich or poor, whether on one side of a border or another–we are all just a bunch of David Graeber’s fragile beings; all of us, including Donald Trump, will be wearing diapers again if we become old enough or lucky enough to die in a peaceful setting. And while perhaps there may be no easy cures for our failure to take care of one another, it seems that the decline and collapse of capitalism might offer an opportunity for a nurturing localism to grow a society, where, instead of relying on a distant representative government, we become the “government” and actually take care of each other. We here in Columbia see what this might look like each winter in our service with the homeless, where a community of dozens of the non-elected take up where the government fails–feeding people and providing them fuel, clothing, and shelter. While some local movements as presently constituted are overwhelmingly geared toward the privileged, we also see possibilities through shifting the focuses of local food, community gardening, homesteading, and community school movements toward the whole community instead of serving artisanal and elite sensibilities as most of them do currently; this may be something that happens naturally as society shifts. One can always hope.

One thing seems for sure: although we can protest and “speak truth to power,” such as when governments enact egregious things like 9-degree thresholds for an overnight warming center, when the outrage subsides the system will go back to normal, because “normal” means that distanced elected representatives will serve moneyed interests who keep them in power (except for notable exceptions whom we applaud). If nothing else, the withering of society in the face of climate change–if not replaced by an overreaching authoritarianism–may allow us to create dual power systems, such as we see in Columbia Missouri right now, to make good things happen as society continues to decline.

References
http://www.midmojbgc.org/2020/12/21/national-homeless-persons-remembrance-day-2020/

https://www.columbiatribune.com/story/news/local/2022/01/08/columbia-homeless-family-endures-cold-temperatures-after-eviction/9108625002/

https://www.komu.com/news/midmissourinews/mobile-soup-kitchen-provides-food-to-unsheltered-members-of-the-community/article_de9cfc3c-40c7-11ec-9682-2387944cbc2f.html

Columbia has a one-shot opportunity for the $25 million American Rescue Act funds

https://www.kbia.org/health-wealth/2022-02-02/winter-storm-highlights-concerns-for-columbias-unhoused-community

https://abc17news.com/news/columbia/2022/01/21/watch-live-dozens-are-protesting-at-wabash-bus-station-over-columbias-warming-center-policies/

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/opinion/guest_commentaries/opportunity-campus-provides-columbia-a-chance-to-address-homelessness-and-its-causes/article_a781a47e-3347-11ec-9ceb-d7ca1f9265c5.html

https://jacobinmag.com/2016/02/welfare-reform-bill-hillary-clinton-tanf-poverty-dlc

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/david-graeber-posthumous-essay-pandemic

http://www.midmojbgc.org/2021/06/26/when-a-lethal-globalization-is-the-sickness-a-nurturing-localism-is-the-cure/

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/covid19/council-members-weigh-in-on-wabash-warming-decision/article_01642b28-7ee4-11ec-a5f2-1346cb96387c.html

“Where have you guys been?” people ask us these days.

Well, the Mid-MO John Brown Gun Club is still here and still active… it’s just that the temporary fade of authoritarianism that happened after the January 6th sacking of the Capitol – about which we warned, at least in a general sense – has resulted in a quieter posture. As with everyone, contributing to our lower profile were continued COVID-19 outbreaks and related general public and societal fatigue. Firearms training – a small part of our work in any year – took a steep drop in 2021 compared to previous years. These requests are often from liberals and were especially prevalent especially prior to the November 2020 election. And yet, from other people who seem to like our work, we still received the predictable and incredulous, “Why do you guys have semi-automatic firearms?”¹ question (this from some of the same people who might proclaim in social media posts that “If you’ve ever wondered whether you would have complied in 1930’s Germany, now you know” or from people who might have flocked to see the movie about Fred Hampton). Despite the January 6th incident, it still seems that the people who are among the most horrified at the rise of authoritarianism and at police-caused deaths remain the most complacent about taking responsibility for their own community security.

Although we took part in no demonstrations as a group in 2021, individual members of the club attended or spoke at many public events and community meetings on topics ranging from abortion rights, to homelessness support, to drug abuse, to ARPA funding. And, although there was reduced turnout compared to previous years, the temporary falloff of COVID-19 cases in the Autumn allowed us to conduct another brakelight replacement clinic in October.

Homeless outreach continued to be a major part of our service work, and took several new turns this year; JBGC members and Friends initiated weekly trash pickups at Columbia’s largest homeless camp; also, inspired by the work of Huntsville’s Young Patriots, we built four tent platforms from pallets at the same camp. The JB Mobile Soup Kitchen, now entering it’s 4th winter season, was about to end its 2020-2021 season in early March like usual… when several stalwart community members picked it all up and valiantly continued the program through Spring, Summer, and Fall, feeding community members breakfast 2 mornings a week throughout the warm months, and 3 mornings a week during the cold months (in addition to supplying fuel and hard goods such as tents, sleeping bags, gloves, socks, and menstrual products – all of this involving a lot of attention to detail and coordinating on the part of the organizers). Although it has been dismaying to see the amount of need escalate – in previous winters we typically served 25-35 hot meals each morning, whereas this year the number rose to between 55-60 meals for each run – we couldn’t be happier to be able to hand this initiative off. Whether the increased need is due to a general increase in homelessness, increased homelessness due to evictions, or an improved ability to locate people in need, is hard to say; in any case, we are grateful that our allies opted to keep the “JB” part of the name of the Mobile Soup Kitchen, and whether they want it to stand for John Brown, James Brown, or James Baldwin, as long as people are being fed, it’s all good as far as we’re concerned. 🙂

In addition to the targeted efforts above, JBGC members continued to serve as doorkeepers at Wilkes Blvd UMC (the little hands-on church that does the bulk of Columbia’s work with the homeless community), and to serve along with Friends once a month at Wilkes for the Catholic Workers’ Loaves and Fishes soup kitchen. Individual JBGC members also continued to help with Room At The Inn and Operation Safe Winter-CoMo.

While we remain wary about the gentrified & individualistic nature of homesteading and alternative/artisanal food movements as currently manifested in the US, we still feel that dissemination of skills related to this is important as society continues to change and decline. The Friends of John Brown thus continued this year in a homesteading and bushcrafting direction, with workshops in chicken processing, a seed exchange, and a nettle & cordage workshop.

That’s about it for this year. Things are quiet right now, but we do not expect that to last. While Trump may have neutralized himself – ironically, by pointing out one of the few things his administration did right (supporting the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines) – the people who supported him are still out there, and they haven’t become any more moderate or reasonable in their beliefs or aspirations. Moreover, the circumstances that emboldened them have not changed.

We Can’t Believe Your Disbelief

Huntsville Young Patriots (Facebook)

Mobile Soup Kitchen Provides Food to Unsheltered Members of the Community (KOMU)

Notes:

1. Every time this happens, it eventually and invariably comes out that liberals either use “automatic” and “semiautomatic” interchangeably, or that they incorrectly believe a “semi-automatic” firearm means a firearm that fires automatically, maybe not all the time, but some of the time…

Additional text by Alan Buddug

Homeless Person’s Remembrance Day is a national event held on or near December 21^st – this Tuesday – the longest night of the year. Recent initiatives for a permanent year-round full-capacity homeless shelter in our city of Columbia show promise, but on this occasion we would like to draw attention to our unsheltered homeless campers – people who sleep in vacant lots, under bridges, or in structures like parking garages – sometimes even without tents.

There are a myriad of reasons why some homeless will never use shelters, including: social anxiety; previous experiences of abuse in shelters; the requirement for photo-ID; strict requirements about drugs; forced abandonment of pets; and others. Since 2018 the John Brown Gun Club and allies have served homeless campers with weekly trash pickups and each winter with our JB Mobile Soup Kitchen, which serves breakfast 3 mornings each week (it has been especially gratifying to have been able to hand over the JBMSK to allies this year, who have kept it going year round). This past Summer and Fall, inspired by work by Huntsville’s Young Patriots, we also built a series of raised tent platforms from wooden pallets at Columbia’s largest current homeless camp; unfortunately the latter camp is directly in the path of a proposed recreational bicycle trail, and we expect them to be forced out by the city in 2022. Over the 4 years that we have been doing this work, we have seen campers forced to vacate camps along Columbia’s Providence Road, Fairview Road, Bernadette Drive, Ash Street, and Garden Drive, usually by private owners with the use of the police – the latter who, throughout history, have always worked for the wealthy (i.e., property owners), even though the humans harmed through eviction usually suffer greater direct bodily harm in greater numbers than the owners would through them using their property. In our society the rights of the few to own property and do with it as they wish surely trump the rights of the many to eat, sleep, and have shelter.

In our work we have seen that homeless people who might never use a shelter may gladly use a camp. We suggest that in addition to a brick & mortar shelter, Columbia consider a sponsored camp, and point to our sister city of Lawrence Kansas, which set up a camp of heated tents in a city park starting in 2020. In the Great Depression, many American cities had government-sponsored camps with tents and showers; in 1937, the Farm Security Administration operated 95 such camps in California, housing some 75,000 people; it was in one of these camps that the fictional Joad family in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath started to turn their lives around. In the winter of 2018-2019, at a property listed at 1601 Rangeline, two of our campers, Donnie and Raymond, lost toes and fingers to frostbite despite our efforts to help them; this site, formerly the location of the Rainbow Village Trailer Park, is now owned by Boone Electric Cooperative. Located away from residential neighborhoods and yet proximate to city and community services, 1601 Rangeline remains one of the most promising sites for a permanent city-sponsored camp, complete with concrete pads, shady trees, and potential sites for restrooms, an office, and community grill and picnic area. Boone Electric has told me that they have plans to use this as a commercial property space. Recently, on December 8^th, about a dozen homeless campers were removed from this area while site grading occurred; their names include Billy, Raymond, Kenny, Saint, and Shane; at the time of this writing, we are not sure where they are sleeping.

In closing, we remember some homeless members of Columbia who passed away in 2021; the causes of their deaths range from pedestrian traffic accidents to metastatic cancer to drug overdoses to apparent suicide. Their names include James, Donnie, Raven, Cassandra, Denise, Matt, Corey, Crystal, Steven, George, and Myra. In addition to the ones who have passed, we would also like to recall the names of some formerly unsheltered homeless campers we have served who are no longer unsheltered, but who, thanks in part to our loving Columbia community, now have jobs and roofs over their heads; their names include Keith, Anthony, Nick, Derek, Shelia, Kimberly, Michael, and Angel.

But rebuilding community within globalism’s decline offers a way out

“We don’t fully understand why this is happening.” – Emily Brignone PhD, Highmark Health, Pittsburgh, PA

In 2017, studies conducted by a husband & wife research team made a brief wave in the national media when they documented “deaths of despair” — deaths due to alcoholism, drug overdose, dietary problems, and direct suicide — particularly among white Americans over age 50. Interestingly, this original study documented more despair in white people than people of color, with the described demographic being remarkably similar to how we often think of Trump voters — “White, middle-aged, undereducated, rural residents…” These people were “experiencing a substantial increase in mortality related to self-destructive behavior as opposed to others in different geographical, educational, and racial groups.”

In 2020 a new and larger study confirmed & expanded the findings, revealing that the symptoms have spread and increased among all age groups and sexes, and that in the past 10 years, drug and alcohol misuse and suicidal behaviors have increased across the board for men and women in all age groups. The researchers added that while it’s early to tell, increased isolation, unemployment, and other stresses from COVID-19 likely have compounded such effects. As is typical these days, there was a lot of arm waving about what to do about such an overwhelming problem; offered solutions invariably involve treatment, both medical and social, and include worthy words like “outreach” and “intervention” and “hard conversations.” Below are assorted quotes from authors and media about the studies:

“How do we show up where they are — at schools, churches, neighborhoods?”

“We have to look at how to embrace the hard conversations around mental health and addiction. We need to know how to talk to each other, and be empathetic and supportive.”

“We have to improve outreach to people in need and remove barriers to care…”

I reflect often on this type of post-hoc “treatment” approach to societal solutions, because it is one-of-a-part with the reformist (as opposed to systemic) remedies that usually comprise the liberal mindset; the idea being that, yes, society and capitalism suck, but if we vote and remain vigilant, we can correct the shortcomings. A week or two ago I attended a highly-publicized local workshop on drug overdoses in our small city, which has seen a huge-fold increase in overdose deaths in 2021 due to fentanyl (11 deaths since Aug. 1 2021 alone). Speakers, several of whom had experienced tragic family deaths due to overdoses, mostly offered post-hoc solutions, not dissimilar in tone to those above in the studies of deaths of despair:

“Let’s have more dialogue at home; let’s start raising our kids to have strong character and coping skills, so when the worst day of their life occurs they don’t run for an oxycontin.”

“Let’s expect for our schools and our educators to start pushing for this stuff in their curriculum too.”

“Give them coping skills and tools, and counselors, and more social workers… that’s awesome, let’s keep that going.”

One speaker almost got it; he said that “unfortunately we’ve been looking at the back end of substance abuse disorders for the last 25 or 30 years; we wait until the disease is set, and then try to figure out what to do;” in other words, he suggested that the treatment solutions we offer now, while helpful and necessary, are too late. As he said this, I reflected that 25 or 30 years ago is actually pretty recent history, only the 1990s; and that recreational drug use had been firmly in place in American society decades before that, since at least the mid-1960s, coming into mass public awareness by the late 1960s. In 1968, my usual 8th-grade Social Studies class was interrupted for a film called “Marijuana” narrated by Sonny Bono (former husband and abuser of Cher), wherein Bono talked over & over about how marijuana was a dangerous gateway to other bad drugs; he assured the children watching that the “hard choice” about drug use was up to us, but the message was clear that marijuana led down a deadly and dangerous road.¹ Over 30 years later, by the 1990s, my daughter attended the Columbia public school anti-drug DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program (eliminated in 2009), which was given locally by the popular & charismatic police officer John Warner; DARE worked on “strengthening children’s refusal skills so they can better resist social pressures to try and use drugs” — in other words, saying NO to drugs. Some twenty years after that, here we were having yet another discussion about the dangers of drug abuse.

It is striking that most Americans can’t see choices outside of the institutions that they have grown up with, and it’s hard to blame them for that; as a result, over and over, the options proffered by liberals and centrists² are to vote, vote, vote, to write their congressperson, and to have those “hard conversations.”³ The problem is that the system — the nation-state and the neoliberal economic system that guards it — are huge and pervasive, and their actions and power are all encompassing, like the weather. The overall effect is that many of us are forced to lead, essentially, meaningless lives; lives with limited community connection, lives employed in bullshit jobs — or worse, lives circumscribed by medical and college debt — all of which we compensate for by self-medication that in turn leads to deaths of despair.

My question to those who accept the current system would be: how do we vote away meaninglessness? How do we de-legislate the neoliberal economic system that has resulted in decades of working-class wage stagnation and exaggerated wealth inequalities to such extremes? How do we unconsolidate the huge school systems that arose in the past 80 years which, while saving tax money, have resulted in socially-disconnected & alienated young people, who are arguably more prone to drug use, and maybe even school shootings, because of such alienation? Can we really shop our way to a new and fairer economy? Can we really recycle our way out of environmental degradation? How do we undo the self-medicatory ravages of opioid addiction, obesity, and alcoholism — resulting in deaths of despair — that seem so pervasive now? While post-hoc remedies like education, coping skills, and “dialogue” are certainly necessary, the country has already fumbled these tools, without success, for many decades. If one steps back to look at the big picture, one might say that in this moment we are strung out on the end of a long, long journey, one in which each of the many fingers of modern life extend useless, flailing dead ends. Is this the “late-stage capitalism” people talk about on social media? Or perhaps this is the playing out of the “internal contradictions” of capitalism of which Marx & Engels spoke?

While the Biden election has bought time⁴, I firmly believe that there is no way to somehow “compromise” or “build consensus” to get ourselves out of the situation that faces us. I am aware that mine may be an extreme view, but offer instead that there are two choices for us: one, authoritarianism — undergirded and fed by the amorphous fear that embodies our times — will surely continue to emerge, even if temporarily, if the current trend of the Republican party to embrace Trumpism continues. If not stopped or eroded, this process will result in the US becoming something like a modern version of 1980s Argentina or Chile.

The other looming possibility is a more gradual and larger societal decline or collapse; something like what we saw during COVID-19 but longer, slower, and something that happens in the context of global warming. Paradoxically, provided we are able to save ourselves from the elemental forces that have existed in America from the beginning and which now seem to be massing inside the border, such a decline offers us the special chance to build a nurturing localism in our respective communities.

If nothing else, surely community is the one lesson we got from the Covid pandemic: we learned about taking care of neighbors, we relearned how to cook, we learned about growing front-yard victory gardens, about participating in mutual aid; in short, we gained insight about what community looks like. From anarchist David Graeber, in an essay he wrote shortly before he died in 2020:

“…we are a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another… those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated, and a very large proportion of the population don’t do anything at all but spin fantasies, extract rents, and generally get in the way of those who are making, fixing, moving, and transporting things, or tending to the needs of other living beings. It is imperative that we not slip back into a reality where all this makes some sort of inexplicable sense, the way senseless things so often do in dreams.”


Footnotes
1. Sonny Bono later joked that he was high on pot during the entire filming of the movie.
2. “These debates remain trapped within a fundamentally liberal view of history in which it is impossible to move beyond each group’s story of their struggle against oppressive forces. This can be seen as a form of identity politics in historical thinking and, as many Marxists have pointed out, identity politics in fact neatly reproduces the pluralistic liberal ideology that has emerged to represent the ruling factions of our contemporary ruling class.” White, J., Making our own History, 2021
3. Hard conversations with whom, I sometimes wonder? How often outside of social media do most of us really interact with those having opinions exactly the opposite of our own? These people for the most part don’t live in our neighborhoods; does a yelling match with an intractable father-in-law at Thanksgiving constitute a “hard conversation?” Such a conversation could be “hard” as in unpleasant, certainly, but how often does either party reassess their viewpoint or truly take consideration of another’s?
4. Although some liberals seem to think that the January 6th Capitol sacking marked the beginning of an end to the power of the far-right in the US, history shows that nations only unite in condemnation when the cumulative results & consequences of rightist activities lead to almost overwhelming and pervasive societal fatigue or societal collapse; witness Germany after World War II and the United States after the twin ravages of Vietnam and Watergate.

References
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/economic-despair/520473/

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/10/e037679

https://www.livescience.com/diseases-despair-rising-us.html

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-11-10/diseases-of-despair-skyrocket-in-america

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5607684/

https://www.columbiatribune.com/story/news/local/2021/10/20/alarming-increase-drug-overdose-deaths-columbia-mo-leads-public-meeting/8530914002/

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/obituaries/missourian_life_story/former-police-officer-john-warner-worked-to-make-students-and-schools-feel-safer/article_b83c3038-b88b-11e9-bb8a-b7c054ff627e.html

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/local/columbia-public-schools-eliminate-dare-program-consider-alternative-methods/article_db89b565-d0cd-5ab8-8a6b-deb23656f4d5.html

https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp/150114331X

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/local/eleven-drug-overdose-related-deaths-spurs-community-meeting/article_e0793096-3129-11ec-8a9b-374f2dcd3bf5.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfZqDRul3nw

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/obituaries/missourian_life_story/former-police-officer-john-warner-worked-to-make-students-and-schools-feel-safer/article_b83c3038-b88b-11e9-bb8a-b7c054ff627e.html

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/local/columbia-public-schools-eliminate-dare-program-consider-alternative-methods/article_db89b565-d0cd-5ab8-8a6b-deb23656f4d5.html

https://youth.gov/content/drug-abuse-resistance-education-dare#:~:text=Program%20Theory,to%20try%20and%20use%20drugs.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/03/david-graeber-posthumous-essay-pandemic

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9781935408543/undoing-the-demos

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/three-decades-of-neoliberal-policies-have-decimated-the-middle-class-our-economy-and-our-democracy-2019-05-13

https://www.aasa.org/schooladministratorarticle.aspx?id=13218

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6rAgHcuYtE

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/13/politics/congressional-republicans-trump-president-2024/index.html

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/why-historian-jon-meacham-is-endorsing-joe-biden/

https://www.midmojbgc.org/2021/06/26/when-a-lethal-globalization-is-the-sickness-a-nurturing-localism-is-the-cure/

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/13/big-houses-art-museums-and-in-laws-how-the-most-ideologically-polarized-americans-live-different-lives/