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      Rockin' in the free world? Inside the rightwing takeover of protest music

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      “Did you know that Born in the USA is actually an anti-Vietnam war anthem?” Since Donald Trump embraced the 1984 Bruce Springsteen song during rallies, the lyrics have prompted so much explanation it now borders on cliche. Yet it’s no less unsettling for it, becoming a prime example of a startlingly widespread trend for the right wing to co-opt music about struggle and progress.President Ronald Reagan made the first attempt to gloss over the context of the song’s ironically upbeat chorus after the release of the Born in the USA album. Reagan name-checked Springsteen during a New Jersey rally in an attempt to connect the musician to a “message of hope” for America. Springsteen’s opposition to its use didn’t affect the fervour for the song from Trump and his supporters. As Barack Obama noted in an episode of his podcast series with Springsteen this month: “It ended up being appropriated as this iconic, patriotic song. Even though that was not necessarily your intention.”Neither has the Clash’s status as leftist punk icons been a sticking point for Boris Johnson, who named the band one of his favourites in 2019; nor has Rage Against the Machine’s socialism and anti-police stance been a problem for anti-mask truthers and Trump diehards, who last year blasted the band’s Killing in the Name at a Trump rally.Neil Young had to weigh in after Trump repeatedly used his anti-America song Rockin’ in the Free World at campaign events. In a since retracted lawsuit, Young said that he couldn’t “in good conscience” allow his music “to be used as a ‘theme song’ for a divisive, un-American campaign of ignorance and hate”.The latest example comes from anti-lockdown protesters who, positioning themselves as oppressed, have contorted Twisted Sister’s We’re Not Gonna Take It into an anti-mask anthem. While the band’s guitarist Jay Jay French describes what has been called a quintessential American protest song as speaking “to the disenfranchised everywhere”, the band support social distancing, mask-wearing, and vaccination. “The fact that a health crisis solution has been politicised and characterised as a threat to someone’s personal civil rights is just impossible to comprehend,” he says. On their anti-lockdown track, Stand and Deliver, Eric Clapton and Van Morrison went further by using the language of liberation to deliver their message.Kevin Fellezs, associate professor at Columbia University, is researching “freedom musics”, a tradition through which artists and their communities “articulate their aspirations for individual or collective liberation”. Stand and Deliver twists the tradition, he says, blurring concepts of freedom and slavery with lyrics such as, “Do you wanna wear these chains / Until you’re lying in the grave?” He accuses Morrison and Clapton of “pursuing self-interest at the expense of a larger social good or need”.Elliott H Powell, associate professor at the University of Minnesota, says that this is especially troubling given pop music’s use by marginalised artists “to critique systems of domination and subordination … and to imagine life outside of these systems”, citing Public Enemy’s Fight the Power and Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit. By hijacking these forms and their languages, says Powell, the right wing dismisses and diminishes the social movements that use them. “It attempts to say that the anti-mask and anti-lockdown movement is no different from other freedom struggles,” he says. “It’s obviously a false equivalence when we follow the flows of power.”Linguistic and thematic appropriation is part of popular music history. “Long ago, Americans figured out ways to enjoy Black music while also being racist, while also being white supremacist,” says Jack Hamilton, a professor at University of Virginia. “Being able to separate out these things is an unfortunate feature of American popular music audiences – probably popular music audiences everywhere.”It’s been that way for centuries, according to Noriko Manabe of Temple University, who says that, in 17th-century England, folk songs were reinterpreted and rewritten by opposing social and political groups. Similarly, in 18th-century America, songs that were once used by loyalist or anti-loyalist groups in England were adapted by warring federalist and republican factions. Manabe says that popular music has always been an effective organising and emotion-rousing tool.She recently studied the sounds made during the storming of the US Capitol, where attackers chanted, “No Trump, no peace”, an inversion of Black Lives Matter’s “No justice, no peace”. “That is such an abomination of the original ideological framework that it makes me extremely mad,” says Manabe.Beyond the emotional triggers, Hamilton says the co-opting is part of an effort to link conservatism to rebellion and the idea that to be conservative is to be rebellious. This crops up in younger conservatives and Trump supporters, and even more visibly in anti-mask and anti-lockdown movements. “The anti-mask movement, at least on its face, is about, ‘Don’t tell me what to do,’” says Hamilton. “You can find that all over popular music. There’s so much pop music about freedom and being able to do what you want.”The journalist Charles Bramesco, who has analysed hate groups’ attempts to use work by the likes of Depeche Mode and Johnny Cash, echoes Hamilton’s assessment. “The persecution complexes of far-right groups compel them to gravitate toward language about oppression and rising up,” he says. “A lot of the music that touches on those themes happens to be made from a perspective completely alien to their own.”Benjamin Teitelbaum, an ethnomusicologist at the University of Colorado who studies music in far-right nationalist and white supremacist movements, says the far right’s use of music has deep roots. “The biggest stars in the [far-right] scene, the biggest financial initiatives, the largest gatherings, the ways that people identified themselves, all of those things had to do with music throughout the 1980s and 90s in particular,” he says. “Music often plays an outsize role for political causes that don’t have a lot of parliamentary, democratic or revolutionary options for themselves.” Teitelbaum cites the British National Party’s record label, Great White Records, as a vehicle for building power in lieu of institutional acceptance: “If you’re not going to win at the ballot box, you can still gain victory through symbolic expression like music.”In the 80s and 90s, these expressions were explicitly nationalist and fascist, with acts such as punk band Skrewdriver, Norway’s Black Circle bands, and the international music festival Rock Against Communism providing a musical staging ground for skinhead white nationalism and neo-Nazism. But in the 2000s, these movements began a significant rebrand, branching into rap (Germany’s Dissziplin), reggae (Nordic Youth in Sweden), singer-songwriter and pop forms (such as Swedish singer Saga). Teitelbaum says their songwriting message was: “We just love ourselves, we just want to be ourselves, I love our people so much and we’re dying, someone help us.”This shift, he says, dilutes the power and clarity of music that legitimately uses themes of struggle. “We know the chorus of Born in the USA, but we kind of hum through the rest of it.” Even Killing in the Name, written by strident leftwingers, isn’t immune: “If it keeps occurring in these [rightwing] settings and for these purposes, it will acquire those meanings.”Teitelbaum, who recently researched the growing far-right youth movement in the US, says that this dynamic demands more than ridicule. “We can be struck by the idiocy of it, but we should also be struck by the traces of intelligibility that are floating around there,” he says. “Calling them stupid isn’t gonna do anything. This act of appropriation is not taking place in a vacuum.”As Twisted Sister’s French says, “all any artist can really do is to publicly shame the user into stopping the use”. But artist rebukes and social media parody can only do so much to staunch the appropriation – the far right’s acceleration of this tactic could demand a more comprehensive, proactive approach. Fellezs says better music education could be necessary. “I don’t mean to teach children ‘good music’ so they won’t want to listen to ‘bad music,’” he says. “What we can do is educate, empower and encourage people to listen with a critical ear.”Powell agrees. “If we remain committed to following and critiquing the flows of power in how they manifest and operate in these songs, then the power of such music will not be lost.” So let’s remember Born in the USA for what it is: a portrait of a racist America focused on foreign wars while its economy flounders. Sound familiar? More

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      Atlanta spa shootings: Georgia hate crimes law could see first big test

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      A hate crimes law passed in Georgia amid outrage over the killing of Ahmaud Arbery could get its first major test as part of the murder case against a white man charged with shooting and killing six women of Asian descent at Atlanta-area massage businesses this week.Prosecutors in Georgia who will decide whether to pursue a hate crimes enhancement have declined to comment. But one said she was “acutely aware of the feelings of terror being experienced in the Asian American community”.Until last year, Georgia was one of four states without a hate crimes law. But lawmakers moved quickly to pass stalled legislation in June, during national protests over racial violence against Black Americans including the killing of Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was pursued by several white men and fatally shot while out running in February 2020.The new law allows an additional penalty for certain crimes if they are motivated by a victim’s race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender or mental or physical disability.Governor Brian Kemp called the new legislation “a powerful step forward”, adding when signing it into law: “Georgians protested to demand action and state lawmakers … rose to the occasion.”The killings of eight people in Georgia this week have prompted national mourning and a reckoning with racism and violence against Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic. The attack also focused attention on the interplay of racism and misogyny, including hyper-sexualized portrayals of Asian women in US culture.Many times Asian people are too silent, but times changeRobert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with the murders of six women of Asian descent and two other people. He told police the attacks at two spas in Atlanta and a massage business near suburban Woodstock were not racially motivated. He claimed to have a sex addiction.Asian American lawmakers, activists and scholars argued that the race and gender of the victims were central to the attack.“To think that someone targeted three Asian-owned businesses that were staffed by Asian American women … and didn’t have race or gender in mind is just absurd,” said Grace Pai, director of organizing at Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Chicago.Elaine Kim, a professor emeritus in Asian American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said: “I think it’s likely that the killer not only had a sex addiction but also an addiction to fantasies about Asian women as sex objects.”Such sentiments were echoed on Saturday as a diverse, hundreds-strong crowd gathered in a park across from the Georgia state capitol to demand justice for the victims of the shootings.Speakers included the US senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff and the Georgia state representative Bee Nguyen, the first Vietnamese American in the Georgia House.“I just wanted to drop by to say to my Asian sisters and brothers, we see you, and, more importantly, we are going to stand with you,” Warnock said to loud cheers. “We’re all in this thing together.”Bernard Dong, a 24-year-old student from China at Georgia Tech, said he had come to the protest to demand rights not just for Asians but for all minorities.“Many times Asian people are too silent, but times change,” he said, adding that he was “angry and disgusted” about the shootings and violence against Asians, minorities and women.Otis Wilson, a 38-year-old photographer, said people needed to pay attention to discrimination against those of Asian descent.“We went through this last year with the Black community, and we’re not the only ones who go through this,” he said.The Cherokee county district attorney, Shannon Wallace, and Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, will decide whether to pursue the hate crime enhancement.Wallace said she could not answer specific questions but said she was “acutely aware of the feelings of terror being experienced in the Asian-American community”. A representative for Willis did not respond to requests for comment.The US Department of Justice could bring federal hate crime charges independently of state prosecutions. Federal investigators have not uncovered evidence to prove Long targeted the victims because of their race, two unnamed officials told the Associated Press.A Georgia State University law professor, Tanya Washington, said it was important for the new hate crimes law to be used.“Unless we test it with cases like this one, we won’t have a body of law around how do you prove bias motivated the behavior,” she said.[embedded content]Given that someone convicted of multiple murders is unlikely to be released from prison, an argument could be made that it is not worth the effort, time and expense to pursue a hate crime designation that carries a relatively small additional penalty. But the Republican state representative Chuck Efstration, who sponsored the hate crimes bill, said it was not just about punishment.“It is important that the law calls things what they are,” he said. “It’s important for victims and it’s important for society.”The state senator Michelle Au, a Democrat, said the law needed to be used to give it teeth.Au believes there has been resistance nationwide to charge attacks against Asian Americans as hate crimes because they are seen as “model minorities”, a stereotype that they are hard-working, educated and free of societal problems. She said she had heard from many constituents in the last year that Asian Americans – and people of Chinese descent in particular – were suffering from bias because the coronavirus emerged in China and Donald Trump used racial terms to describe it.“People feel like they’re getting gaslighted because they see it happen every day,” she said. “They feel very clearly that it is racially motivated but it’s not pegged or labeled that way. And people feel frustrated by that lack of visibility and that aspect being ignored.” More

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      This is the Fire review: Don Lemon's audacious study of racism – and love

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      Don Lemon’s new memoir is an audacious and improbable book by a remarkable man. “We must summon the courage to love people who infuriate us, because we love the world we share,” he writes, near the start.

      Relatively young, a short 20 years ago, the CNN anchor was almost unknown. How then, without seeming arrogant or pompous, does he place his life and his experience beside the best-known champions from the pantheon of Black freedom fighters? Invoking the zeal and courage of Dr King and Sojourner Truth, portraying even the proscribed accomplishments of Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen in the same light of heroic survival, his is a voice as essential for our time as Ta-Nehisi Coates and as compelling as Caroline Randall Williams.
      Lemon was initially a Republican, he tells us, from a time in his Louisiana homeland when Republicans were still pro-civil rights. He has taken a circuitous route to ardent Black activism. He revealed three sensational secrets in a 2011 memoir, Transparent, and seemed destined to become a media star akin to Oprah Winfrey. But his nightly broadcasts as the only African American anchor in prime time, his Zoom chats and podcast on racism have been calculated towards his rise. Affectingly, he appeals to a growing fanbase by relating that success notwithstanding, his was a life as troubled as their own.
      For one thing, his parents hadn’t been legally wed. His mother, working for his dad as a legal secretary, was married to another man, his father to another woman. His dad died when Lemon was nine and his divorced mom remarried. His family were loving and even his relationship with his stepfather was good. But he realized he was a “double negative” – gay and Black – living in the south, undoubtedly confused by childhood sexual assaults at the hands of a friend of his mother. He overcame all of this but one media instructor later told him: “I don’t know why you’re here. You’ll never be a newscaster.”
      But he was, and he took off. And then, around 2014, he seemed to change. Out of the blue, he was hectoring Black youth on air to “pull up their pants!” Denouncing a rebel fashion which endures on account of its effectiveness at pissing off old people, particularly old white authority figures? One wondered, was he embracing Bill Cosby’s “respectability” political stand? Admonishing youth about the importance of being married before starting a family, even endorsing the value of New York’s discriminatory stop-and-frisk policing, many reasoned Lemon must be trolling for ratings from the enemy. Some denounced him as an “Uncle Tom”.
      The change of Lemon’s disappointing trajectory began before Trump. Certainly the threat the former president posed helped to radicalize someone who often seems happiest finding and presenting both sides. Trump’s recurring slur of “stupid”, alternating with, “the stupidest!”, was consistently met with good-natured laughter and ever more incisive analysis. Trump was Lemon’s trial by fire. White-hot, through it he was refined. From a mere Black pundit he was transformed into a tested, un-cowed combatant in the struggle for civil rights.
      Beginning with a cautionary letter to his nephews and nieces with his white fiance, Tim Malone, Lemon purposefully emulates his hero, James Baldwin. Explaining the killing of George Floyd, Lemon deliberately imitates a letter Baldwin wrote to his nephew in 1963. It is a preamble to a plea to learn all one can about the past. He warns of the omnipresence of patriarchal white supremacy, the west’s original sin.
      “Racism is a cancer that has been metastasizing throughout the land ever since Columbus showed up,” he states, making an excellent argument for replacing all memorials to Columbus with tributes to Frank Sinatra.
      Elucidating on the extent to which the wealth and might of America was derived from land appropriated from Native Americans and labor coerced from red, brown and especially enslaved Black Americans, he notes that even enterprises not directly involved in slavery benefited from the exploitative system. More

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      'It's a moral decision': Dr Seuss books are being 'recalled' not cancelled, expert says

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      A leading expert on racism in children’s literature has said the decision by the Dr Seuss Foundation to withdraw six books should be viewed as a “product recall” and not, as many claim, an example of cancel culture. Philip Nel, a professor of English at Kansas State University, is the author of Was The Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books. He told the Guardian the six titles by Theodor Geisel published between 1937 and 1976 that Dr Seuss Enterprises said it would cease printing contained stereotypes of a clearly racist nature.“Dr Seuss Enterprises has made a moral decision of choosing not to profit from work with racist caricature in it and they have taken responsibility for the art they are putting into the world and I would support that,” Nel said.The titles in question are And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super! and The Cat’s Quizzer. Dr Seuss books have sold some 700m copies globally.They’re not being banned. They’re not being cancelled. It’s just a decision to no longer sell themAfter this week’s announcement, amid uproar eagerly stoked by conservatives in the media and Congress, Dr Seuss books swiftly dominated sales charts. On Friday, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, went so far as to share a video of himself reading from Green Eggs and Ham, a perennial strong seller.“I still like Dr Seuss, so I decided to read Green Eggs and Ham,” McCarthy said, inviting viewers to respond “if you still like him too!”Geisel’s stepdaughter, Lark Grey Dimond-Cates, told the New York Post there “wasn’t a racist bone in that man’s body”, but also said suspending publication of the six titles was “a wise decision”. But the controversy left many perplexed, since the decision was made by Dr Seuss Enterprises and not as a result of public pressure that has preceded other such decisions.Nel said the decision to no longer publish titles including caricatures of people of African, Asian and Arab descent showed just one way to address problematic material.“[The books are] not going to disappear,” he said. “They’re not being banned. They’re not being cancelled. It’s just a decision to no longer sell them.”Geisel died in 1991. Later in life, he made efforts to tone down racial stereotypes in some of his books. Such revisions “were imperfect but will-intentioned efforts that softened but did not erase the stereotyping”, Nel said, noting that Geisel also made a joke of the changes, “which served only to trivialise the importance of the alterations”.Moves to correct dated or offensive cultural material take different forms. Turner Classic Movies, for example, has introduced Reframed: Classic Films in the Rearview Mirror, a series devoted to “problematic” films. TCM identified 17 films that five hosts will discuss, among them Gone With the Wind, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Tarzan, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Searchers and Psycho.“We are hearing more and more from audiences about moments they are really puzzling over, if not downright offended by, in light of all of the broader cultural and political conversations we are having,” the University of Chicago cinema studies professor Jacqueline Stewart, a Reframed host, told Variety.TCM’s decision to seek to contextualise the films but not alter or drop them may reflect the importance of the works and a more mature target audience. Nel said placing contentious work in a larger context and inviting discussion can be risky when the work is directed at a younger consumers.“Children understand more than they can articulate,” he said. “If you inflict racist images on them before they can express what they’re articulating they may endure a harm they cannot process.”In the case of Dr Seuss, Nel said, that “is itself a reason to withdraw the books or to bring in books or art that counter stereotypes with truth.”He pointed to statistics that show the publishing industry still has a way to go. According to a recent Diversity in Children’s Books study, only 22% of children’s books published in 2018 featured non-white characters.Nel pointed to The Indian in the Cupboard series by Lynne Reid Banks, Penguin Random House titles about a toy figure of a Native American that comes alive, first published in 1980, as an example of a book that remains in print without comment or apology.“There’s a lot of examples of contemporary as well as older work that the publishing industry should address,” he said, “and there are different ways to do that. There’s a debate on what the response should be but there should be a response.”Merely putting the question of what a child can or cannot see to parents would not be an adequate solution, Nel said.“Parents may not have training in anti-racist education,” he said, “or may not know how to have these conversations. So in the case of Dr Seuss it’s a way of addressing the gap in what one might hope a responsible adult would know and what we can expect a responsible adult to know.“Either way, children’s book publishing is facing a reckoning, as indeed it has been for some time. This decision, and all the attention it has received, I hope will create a broader reckoning in the publishing industry – the need for more diverse books and to address the problems in current books being published.” More

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      Peer is asked to investigate the activities of extreme right and left

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      The government has reportedly ordered an investigation into the extreme fringes on both ends of the political spectrum, with a peer tasked with offering recommendations to the prime minister and home secretary.The review will be led by John Woodcock, the former Labour MP who now sits in the upper chamber as Lord Walney and was appointed as the government’s independent adviser on political violence and disruption last November.Announcing the review in an interview with the Telegraph, the unaffiliated peer cautioned that the UK must take notice of the rise of far-right groups in the US following the storming of the Capitol building last month.Woodcock stressed that there was “not an equivalence of threat between the far-left and the far-right” in the UK, with the latter a far bigger issue.In September, Home Office data showed that right-wing extremists now make up almost a fifth of terrorists in jail, rising from 33 in 2018/19 to 45 in the year to 30 June 2020 in England and Wales.Furthermore, last year’s annual figures for the government’s controversial Prevent scheme showed that the largest number of referrals related to far-right extremism.James Brokenshire, the security minister, warned that far-right terror posed “a growing threat”, which had been accelerated by the amplification of conspiracy theories online during the pandemic. Of the cases ultimately referred to the government’s Channel programme for specialist support, 302 (43%) were referred for rightwing radicalisation.Walney told the Telegraph that there had also been isolated incidents of some leftwing causes “overstepping the mark into antisocial behaviour”, and the activities of these groups would also be investigated.He said: “There have been a number of, at the moment isolated, examples of climate change activist groups, particularly Extinction Rebellion, overstepping the mark into antisocial behaviour. I think there’s been a recognition that, even among that movement, they have at times risked undermining their own cause.“I’m coming at this with an open mind, but with an understanding that there is clearly a potential for groups to develop into increasingly problematic areas.”The home secretary, Priti Patel, has previously claimed Extinction Rebellion activists are “so-called eco-crusaders turned criminals” who threaten key planks of national life.In a speech to the annual conference of the Police Superintendents’ Association last September, Patel said XR was “attempting to thwart the media’s right to publish without fear nor favour”, and claimed their campaign of civil disobedience was “a shameful attack on our way of life, our economy and the livelihoods of the hard-working majority”. More

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      The Trump era wasn't all bad. We saw progress – thanks to social movements | Rebecca Solnit

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      The devastation of the Trump administration – to norms and values and public safety, to the climate and the environment and the rights of marginalized groups – is huge and undeniable. But Pablo Neruda’s old axiom “You can cut down the flowers but you can’t stop the spring” might describe what happened. Despite opposition, persecution and real losses, movements for liberation and justice continued to expand not only in power and achievement but in vision.People looked upward, in awe, during the last days of 2020, and I saw them again and again, watching the full moon of late December, the rare planetary conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn around that time, and here in the Bay Area a magnificent murmuration of starlings above an old Catholic cemetery in San Rafael, tens of thousands of birds swirling together in coordinated flight at sundown, evening after evening. In looking at these tangible spectacles, I believe people were, during this time of political strife and pandemic confinement, seeking the spaciousness of freedom and possibility.Looking back over the past four years, another kind of expansive and hopeful spaciousness can be found. Mostly these four years will be recounted as far-right brutality against truth, fact, rights and bodies, and that brutality and its consequences mattered. But that’s not all that happened since 2016. Grassroots movements for racial and gender justice, economic justice, climate justice and intersectional understanding of the relationships between these things grew in power, achievement and perspective.The white-supremacist and cult-follower assault on the Capitol on 6 January was historic, but so was the election the night before of the Rev Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff as Georgia’s first two Democratic senators in decades. Several young Sunrise Movement climate activists went to Georgia to work for their campaigns, recognizing the long game: that electing of this Black man and this Jewish man meant giving the Democrats a majority in the US Senate, which meant the possibility of passing strong climate legislation and supporting international climate agreements, which meant that this mattered for the fate of the world.Even in electoral politics, the last four years and last four November elections broadened the Democratic coalition in numbers and diversity, including an unprecedented eight trans people elected to public office in the election of 2017, the birth of “the Squad” with the 2018 election of Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Oman and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and its expansion in 2020 with victories by Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, election of the first Native American women to the House, of an out gay governor in Colorado, of two Democratic senators to Nevada (including the Senate’s first Latina, Catherine Cortez Masto), then Arizona, then Georgia, and more elected officials who were truly progressive around racial and environmental justice, and a more progressive vision overall. That came from outside, from the grassroots, the movements, the young.I believe that when we look back in 10 or 20 years, it is likely that the rightwing rage will be seen as backlash against the ripening vision and movement toward a more just and equal world. This is not a given, but it is a possibility; what we do going forward determines whether it is so.Many of the seeds planted in the Obama era bore fruit in the Trump era. Black Lives Matter came together in 2014, and the summer of 2016 saw its message amplified when sports stars began to speak up – and in the case of Colin Kaepernick, kneel down. The size of the protests was measurable, but something immeasurable mattered at least as much: the transformation of public consciousness. In the summer of 2020, after the public killing of George Floyd that erupted into the biggest protests in the history of this country, not only in the major cities, but in small towns across the country.One of the most important and least tangible effects of activism is introducing and popularizing new ideas and changing minds. For example, the racism behind unequal treatment by police and the courts and unequal sentencing, is now far more widely recognized than it was 20 years ago. Many cities have looked seriously at what defunding the police would look like – and in some it has already started. For example, in the Bay Area, where the 2009 murder of Oscar Grant by a transit policeman prompted strong reaction, the transit system has decided to hire 20 social workers rather than fill vacancies in its police force.Feminism has also been energized during the Trump years. At the beginning of 2017, the nationwide Women’s March – the biggest single-day protest in this country’s history, with marches in small towns from Alaska to Alabama as well as major cities – established that the Trump administration would be resisted, and women led much of the next four years of anti-Trump organizing. In October of 2017, what got dubbed #MeToo opened up unprecedented space to recognize both that some of the most powerful and famous men in the country were criminal sexual predators and that systemic injustice that had protected them.Some real legal reform resulted, including expanding or removing the statute of limitations for some sexual abuse crimes in 15 states, but more broadly, that machinery of silencing – the ways that victims have been routinely disbelieved, discredited, intimidated, harassed, shamed – became far more recognized, a first step in dismantling it. Once again the changes that will matter most will be hardest to measure – the crimes that don’t happen, at a minimum because would-be rapists are less confident that they can override their victim’s testimony or escape legal and professional consequences, ideally because the desire to violate other human beings and the entitlement to do so wither away.These were years of victory and defeat, of gain and loss. With Betsy DeVos dismantling Title IX rights for sexual assault victims on college campuses and a widespread war against reproductive rights, women lost as well as gained in the last four years. But abortion is one arena in which you can take away access, but you can’t so easily take away belief in the right to that access. The next four years will see a continued struggle around reproductive rights and other issues of gender justice.The climate movement grew remarkably in the last four years. The Trump era began as the Lakota water protectors’ encampment and resistance at Standing Rock had become a focal point and a powerful intersection between indigenous rights, environmental justice, the fight against pipelines specifically and the climate movement. More came out of Standing Rock than will ever be measured: education of non-Native people about Native rights and history, a sense of hope and possibility for Lakota and other Native youth, inspiration to decide to run for office for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who came to Standing Rock (as did the Laguna Pueblo organizer and then future congresswoman Deb Haaland, now Biden’s nominee to head the Department of the Interior), an apology for US military genocide by veterans of that military, alliances and visions. I remember in 2011, when KXL protesters were told that their activism was futile and the pipeline’s completion was inevitable. They were wrong.Activists helped bring the fossil fuel industry to the brink of collapse. Politico recently reported: “In 2017 when Donald Trump entered the White House, the US oil and gas industry was on a tear, with output climbing to record levels, while clean energy sources were still carving out their niche. Now, oil and gas producers are struggling amid weak prices and growing pressure to address climate change, while wind and solar technologies are soaring – a trend that will assist Biden in making a U-turn in energy policy from the Trump administration’s.” On 6 January, while insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol, the Trump administration held an underwhelming auction of drilling leases in the Arctic national wildlife refuge: all the big oil companies stayed away, in part because activists got banks to pledge not to finance Arctic drilling.As the industry crumbled, the climate movement grew. New voices emerged – Sweden’s uncompromisingly tough Greta Thunberg most prominent among them, and ranging from octogenarian Jane Fonda with her fire-drill Fridays to twentysomething Varshini Prakash, co-founder and executive director of the Sunrise Movement. The Sunrise Movement introduced and amplified the messages of the Green New Deal (GND), including that profound change was not only necessary but pragmatically possible and beneficial. The GND model has had an international impact, and it has undone the old arguments that jobs and the environment are conflicting goals.Progressive change, then, can happen at the worst of times. And often the process of change is so subtle we don’t even realize it’s happening until we look back. Just think of all the films and books and other works of art we once admired, but which we now see strewn with prejudices and oppressions that we hadn’t noticed before. That act of noticing something that we didn’t notice before – that is the result of a shifted consciousness, transformed through activism and progress.Sometimes we have specific new tools to measure oppression by – the Bechdel Test being the most famous among them – but often it’s just that we have subtly, slowly been educated to see more clearly and more inclusively than we did before, to recognize not only other viewpoints, but their exclusion, and the nuances of representation and discrimination.Such processes are invisible in their slow increments until you return to an artwork from the past and see that it is still what it was but you are no longer who you were. Looking back at 2016, I see that it was long ago, because these have been a long four years of destruction and conflict, but also of generation and transformation. We should feel a sense of accomplishment, not so that we can rest, but so that we can go forward. More

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      Portland: leftwing protesters damage Oregon Democrats’ headquarters

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      A group of mostly leftwing and anarchist protesters carrying signs against Joe Biden and police marched in Portland on inauguration day and damaged the headquarters of the Democratic party of Oregon, police said.Portland has been the site of frequent protests, many involving violent clashes between officers and demonstrators, ever since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May. Over the summer, there were demonstrations for more than 100 straight days.Some in the group of about 150 people in the protest smashed windows and spray-painted anarchist symbols at the political party building.Police said eight arrests were made in the area. Some demonstrators carried a sign reading “We don’t want Biden, we want revenge!” in response to “police murders” and “imperialist wars”. Others carried a banner declaring “We Are Ungovernable”.Police said on Twitter that officers on bicycles had entered the crowd to contact someone with a weapon and to remove poles affixed to a banner that they thought could be used as a weapon.Police said the crowd swarmed the officers and threw objects at authorities, who used a smoke canister to get away.The group was one of several that gathered in the city on inauguration day, police said. A car caravan in the city celebrated the transition of presidential power and urged policy change, the Oregonian/OregonLive reported. Another group gathered around 5pm in north-east Portland with speakers talking about police brutality.Ted Wheeler, the mayor, has decried what he described as a segment of violent agitators who detract from the message of police accountability and should be subject to more severe punishment.A group of about 100 people also marched in Seattle on Wednesday, where police said windows were broken at a federal courthouse and officers arrested three people. The crowd called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and, outside the federal immigration court, several people set fire to an American flag, the Seattle Times reported. More

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      Here’s how to understand the politics of the US Capitol breach | Heinrich Geiselberger

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      “When fascism comes back, it will not say ‘I am fascism’; it will say ‘I am antifascism’.” This prophecy, attributed to the Italian writer Ignazio Silone, has been appropriated by the online right and become a tired Twitter meme. Users now replace “antifascism” with basically anything. Some attempts to come to grips with the storming of the US Capitol have adopted a similar syntax: it was an (attempted) coup disguised as something else. Others insisted it wasn’t a coup but a “venting of accumulated resentments” (Edward Luttwak), “a big biker gang dressed as circus performers” (Mike Davis), an “alt-right charivari” (Alex Callinicos), or a “re-enactment” of fantasies originally tested on social media (Wolfgang Ullrich).Some of these interpretations have been accused of trivialising the events. But the semantic helplessness in face of the Washington events suggests a wider uncertainty about the more general phenomenon. The confusion about the event mirrors confusion about the movement as a whole. Is contemporary “rightwing populism” best described as “authoritarianism” or even “fascism”? The answer depends on which level one focuses on: the ideology, the structure of their institutions, the aesthetics, the supporters or the consequences of their actions. If we follow the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás, with his very broad definition of fascism as “a break with the enlightenment tradition of citizenship as a universal entitlement”, the similarities sharpen. A penchant for violence and machismo also points in that direction.But if we stick to strategies, aesthetics or demographics, the differences become more pronounced. When authors like Silone and Erich Fromm analysed interwar-period fascism, they interpreted it as an alliance between what once was called “fractions” of capital (ie business) and the petite bourgeoisie to fend off the challenge posed by workers in the labour movement. Intuitively, we think of fascism as the attempt to impose order, and deprive enemies of organisational power, with authoritarian means. The Nazis force-built a simulacra of civil society: organisations for young women and car owners (the NSDAP’s Kraftfahrkorps was the classic example). The coercive corporatism of German fascism forced employers and unions into the national Labour Front, while the goose steps of masses in brown or black shirts were strictly choreographed.What is different today? Most obviously, trade unions in Europe and the United States are weaker than they have been at any point in the last 150 years (with the exception of fascist periods). No longer threatened by its reality, the enemies of socialism can only invoke its spectre. Suddenly all kind of things are called “socialist”: demands for a speed limit on the German autobahn, stricter gun control, as well as the bond-buying programme of the European Central Bank.More glaringly, unlike in the interwar years, and despite the best efforts of political scientists, it is still not really clear which groups make up the social base of “rightwing populism” today. That certain business elites participate in “rightwing populism” – just think of Rupert Murdoch (media), Charles Koch (fossil fuels), Christoph Blocher (chemicals) and Donald Trump (real estate) – drops out of focus when “populism” is dismissed as a revolt by “hillbillies” or explained by the hardships of “the losers of globalisation”. Academics and pundits highlight the role of industrial workers who lost their jobs. But do unemployed workers still take to the streets or even vote at significant rates? Maybe the petite bourgeoisie, or the small-business-owning middle class, is the more significant second component of the alliance: the craftspeople or small shopkeepers who still have something to lose and who have been bamboozled into fear of anarchism (“Defund the police”) and socialism (higher taxes)?But categories such as petite bourgeoisie or working class are of little use when classes are disintegrating in an economy that pits permanent employees against contract workers, where an engineer at Volkswagen has more to lose than a gig driver for Uber or a woman running a boutique in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Among the crowd storming the Capitol were said to be nuns, soldiers, an Olympic swimmer, a Texas real-estate broker who flew in on a private plane and the son of a New York judge. If political attitudes themselves have always been hard to pin down, this is especially true today.The trouble with concepts such as “coup”, “fascism”, and “authoritarianism” is that they all date back to the period that the late philosopher Zygmunt Bauman called “solid modernity”. By “solid” he meant societies with large groups of people bundled up in intermediary associations (churches, unions, parties) with ideologies that were at least striving for some kind of consistency, and the predictability that comes with it.Tamás spoke of “post-fascism” back in 2000. But all the “post” concepts have the disadvantage of only saying what something is not or no longer. Bauman himself bristled at the term “postmodernity”, but used a positive, content-filled counter-concept: as a lot of solid things had melted into air, he argued, western societies entered a phase of “liquid modernity” in the final quarter of the 20th century at the very latest. Atomised, volatile, swarm-like, with porous borders between gravity and earnestness, sincerity and irony.Bauman, who was born in the Polish town of Poznań in 1925 and experienced the dark sides of solid modernity, applied his concept widely: “liquid love”, “liquid time”, “liquid surveillance”. Single events are by their nature liquid or transient, so while Bauman would probably not have spoken of a “liquid putsch”, it is quite possible that he might have spoken of “liquid authoritarianism”: irony instead of grim determination; social media instead of radio broadcasts; swarms instead of orchestrated formations; merchandise instead of uniforms; followers instead of members; flashmobs instead of regular meetings; erratic policies instead of long-term projects. Trump lards his speeches with references from pop culture. “Sanctions are coming,” he tweets, like a character in Game of Thrones.Attempts to distinguish the phenomenon of Trumpism from its predecessors do not have to trivialise it. What looks liquid or carnivalesque can have terrible consequences. Pipe bombs may still lie in wait for already vulnerable groups or government employees or certain elites.Arnold Schwarzenegger compared the storming of the Capitol to the November pogroms in Nazi Germany in 1938. The Twitterati pounced and proposed the Beer Hall Putsch as the better comparison. The Nazi movement itself was still in a liquid stage in 1923 before it solidified organisationally and institutionally in the 1920s and 1930s. States of matter can change into different compounds: from solid to liquid to gas and the other way round. In this sense one could interpret “Trumpism” or “rightwing populism”, at least when it comes to its diverse base, as an attempt to use liquid-authoritarian means to react to a situation of cultural and economic liquidity. All with the goal of realising the nostalgic utopia of a more solid modernity. More