I went for a short walk this morning and had multiple telling conversations.

On West 4th Street, a Palestinian-Jordanian “essential worker,” with whom I’m friendly, opined of the demonstrations, “People will exhaust themselves soon. Yesterday was quieter. By Monday, this will all be over.”

On the Hudson River Park esplanade, a Doe Fund worker with an accent from the islands explained to me that the commotion – signaled by the presence, on the West Side Highway and the esplanade itself, of multiple vehicles of the FDNY, NYPD, and Parks Department and the gathering by the River of perhaps fifteen officers and employees of the same – centered on the attempt, by all these representatives of municipal power, to clear the belongings (which I could see scattered indiscriminately) of two (white, male) homeless men who’ve been residing in the Park. The men, both of whom I recognized (in fact, I saw them feeding geese from their makeshift bed – a comforter spread on the grass and stacked high with scavenged pillows – just yesterday morning) were understandably incensed – shouting, stalking about, and wildly gesticulating – as the dispassionate city employees encircling them looked on.

After some humane, perfunctory conversation between us about the City’s failure to provide for needs of the unhoused even during the best of times (“It’s very easy to become homeless in America.”), the immense human suffering brought on by the pandemic, and what alternative forms of housing might look like, the Doe Fund worker volunteered, “You know what I think about the virus, though?” and then went on to confide in me that he believed that SARS-CoV-2 (like HIV, Ebola, and Chikungunya before it) had been created in a lab to “test” and “thin” the population. He was about my age, the worker, and a very sweet guy.

A white lady jogger – turned back from her intended route by two Parks employees waving hands and redirecting her to the bike path – injected herself emphatically, mask-less, into our conversation to assert that it was terrible, because obviously the men needed a place to sleep, but on the other hand, “We don’t want homeless people just living in the park.” I had a pressing obligation to my partner and hadn’t budgeted time to disabuse people of conspiracy theoretical conceptions or utter lack of politics, so, reluctantly, I excused myself and left.

On Twitter, last night, I saw multiple posts about a police killing in Brooklyn. I almost thought this was more online misinformation, so surprised was I to not find the incident trending this morning, but it evidently happened. I will withhold further comment for now, as I have no meaningful information about the incident, but it seems clear, at least, that a man was killed in a hail of police bullets in Crown Heights. One could see this driving an explosive escalation in the protests here.

This is the information and political environment in which we’re operating. As Steve Randy Waldman Tweeted this morning, “[I]t’s hard to keep your bearings in a world where everything you see is because somebody wants you to see it.”

Mayor de Blasio, whose political career is over, Tweeted last night, “At Barclays Center now. Very calm situation. So far, the curfew is certainly helping, based on everything I’ve seen in Brooklyn and Manhattan over the last three hours.” Comedian Kate Willett replied, “The police murdered someone in Crown Heights tonight and more than a 1000 people were illegally detained.” For real comedy though, I suggest you read the replies to de Blasio’s patronizing Tweet, from 8:34 PM yesterday evening, that began, “It’s time to go home now, New Yorkers.”

Anyway, enough of Twitter. My State Senator, Brad Hoylman, listed a number of bills which he introduced, sponsored, or is carrying. Don’t consider this an endorsement (I’ve found Brad very nice in our limited interactions), but his links may be helpful, as he calls:

 [To] repeal 50-a […] that helps to shield police officers’ disciplinary records from public scrutiny[;] […] [pass] the Police STAT Act, which for the first time would require police departments across New York State to record and report information on who is arrested and ticketed, what race they are, where it happened, and how many people are dying in police custody[;] […] repeal the “walking while trans” ban[;] […] [pass] legislation to offer an automatic parole hearing to elder incarcerated New Yorkers; [pass] legislation to ban the NYPD’s rogue DNA database, which endangers New Yorkers’ civil liberties; and [pass] the Protect Our Courts Act, which would restrict ICE arrests of undocumented immigrants in and around New York State courthouses. [He] also co-sponsor[s] the Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act, which would make it a class B felony for police officers to cause serious physical injury or death to a person using a prohibited chokehold maneuver.

I invite any reader interested in doing so to create (and share with me, please!) a list of action items, legislative and other, as having a clear public repository would be helpful. If no one takes me up on this, I’ll try to do it myself this week.

The Bronx Defenders, along with other racial justice orgs, have issued a statement “On NYPD Brutality” while the Police Benevolent Organization – “the city’s most powerful police union” – is “Poised to Tap [Its] War Chest to Shield Cop Discipline Records” through lobbying and campaign donations. Meanwhile, Governor Cuomo is getting public pushback from the NYPD for stating that the police “did not do their jobs” (in a statement that was also highly critical of Mayor de Blasio). I’d expect the Mayor to be the one left holding the bag when all is said and done.

Albert Wenger has a short, first-principles post up in solidarity with the uprising that readers at the intersection of engineering and social justice may find particularly valuable. I’ll be curious if this structural approach leads him to any conclusions regarding tactics and strategy beyond what he’s already outlined.

Useful reporting from The Intercept today on the history of “US Law Enforcement Infiltrating Protests” and the NYPD’s culture of impunity, and I’m looking forward, if that’s the way to put it, to finishing listening to the latest episode of Jeremy Scahill’s podcast, Intercepted, on how “The Rebellion in Defense of Black Lives Is Rooted in the U.S. History.”

Finally, lest we forget, the COVID-19 pandemic is still a thing, as is the struggle (primarily between the US and China) over the narrative regarding the pandemic’s emergence, and a new AP report – entitled “China delayed releasing coronavirus info, frustrating WHO” – is adding further fuel to that fire. The climate crisis is also still a thing, and, unfortunately, “A billion-dollar program to protect cities from climate change is at risk of failing because of the pandemic,” according to the New York Times. None of this has stopped the President and his cronies from continuing to rob the rest of us blind.

And if you missed yesterday’s Democracy Now!, I strongly recommend you at least watch this segment with “Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law [and] William Arkin […] a longtime reporter on military and nuclear policy.” Most chilling to me were Arkin’s explanation that:

The federal government has done many things, including the monitoring of social media, the intercepting of phone calls, the intercepting of cellphones, the use of cellphones to locate people, the use of drones, surveillance aircraft, flown by the FBI, by Customs and Border Protection and by the military, including helicopters that have been flying over U.S. cities conducting surveillance missions. This has all been done in the last 24 to 48 hours. And it is a questionable use of the military force.

And Clarke’s statement that:

[The President] single-handedly seeks to deploy the military to states all across our country over the objections of state officials and with the sole and singular purpose of silencing Americans. In many ways, this is the death of democracy, because people who are out right now have one singular goal: to ensure that at this moment we not turn our backs on the long-overdue work that’s necessary to rid our nation of the scourge of police violence that has resulted in numerous deaths of unarmed African Americans.

I fear that the nationwide uprising may serve as just the pretext the President sought to pursue his goals and fantasies for domestic military mobilization (not that he wouldn’t have continued to pursue his anti-democratic and fascist agenda in the absence of mass movement). It’s not quite a coup, or martial law just yet, but we might remember Masha Gessen’s warning from 2016 in her much-read piece, “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” that, “Institutions will not save you.” We’re doing a good job with, “Be[ing] outraged,” but I fear we’re a little late, and when thousands of protesters get trapped by militarized police on a bridge which, only days before, some of those same protesters had been triumphantly Tweeting about “occupying” and “taking,” it tells us that we and our adversaries are playing two very different games here. We didn’t even bring a knife to what we saw – and rightly, if perhaps tragically see – as a non-violent confrontation; our adversaries, meanwhile, are bringing tanks to what they have unilaterally defined as a gunfight.

Institutions won’t save us, and neither will fast-disappearing norms. I have no easy answer here, so am simply maintaining Gramscian optimism of will beside growing pessimism of intellect (and looking to find a copy of Machiavelli’s Prince to borrow). Since the news broke last week that Minneapolis’s 3rd Police Precinct had been overrun and lit on fire, the NYPD precinct in our neighborhood has had approach streets barricaded from all directions, officers posted on at least all-day guard duty, and a far larger than usual number of police vehicles in evidence. We may believe we’re undertaking a non-violent campaign of civil disobedience, but our adversaries – as has been the domestic norm at least since Standing Rock – have defined us “extremists”; see themselves as an occupying force in hostile territory; and believe themselves to be engaged in a righteous counter-revolution. The potential ramifications of all this are terrifying, and, again, I have no real answers to offer here, only love, support, strength, and encouragement to carry on.

What disturbed me most during my short stints living in Oakland and Los Angeles in the noughts was the seeming ever-presence of helicopters overhead and sirens in the night. I hadn’t understood what military occupation felt like until then. Such is the soundscape of Manhattan today. A soundscape of occupation. A soundscape of stress, fear, anxiety, and anger. There is a sense that, at any moment, the City could explode.

On March 12th, I started reading Boccaccio’s Decameron as a way of marking time during the pandemic. At first, I read 10 pages a day; then, upon noting that Wuhan had been shut for 76 days before reopening, and the book was only 562 pages long, I slowed down. Eventually, I decided to read a story a day or so, such that I’d finish on May 31st, which is what I did. I’d planned a post in reflection to commemorate, but history intervened, and so I’ll just briefly note that, most disturbing of all about the raucous, violent collection of tales, I found the book’s conclusion: After 10 days away from Bubonic Plague-stricken Florence, the ten rich young people conclude their sojourn and storytelling in the countryside, and promptly return to their “most beautiful [but still very much plageu-stricken!] of Italian cities”

A pin could’ve dropped in my mind.

Of course, 15th century Florentines didn’t have the advantage of germ theory, whereas we do, and yet we are following a very similar course. Already, with the hasty reopenings, I was deeply worried and sounding the alarm. Now with the mass uprising nationally, and the “national police riot” (to borrow Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s phrasing) which has met it, I’m quite terrified of where we’re headed. My three recent pieces have summed up my perspective on the uprising, its attendant risks and pitfalls, and the seminal struggle in which we now find ourselves.

Yesterday, I wrote twice, and today, I planned not to write at all, but this daily practice has become habit and one I now find myself disinclined to break. I almost concluded yesterday by pointing to the Poor People’s Campaign as a model for how we begin to converge around demands and program. I encourage you to spend some time familiarizing yourself with the Campaign if you’re not familiar with it already.

Starting to see a lot of lists of actions and demands, including the following from: the New York Immigration Coalition; Alliance for Quality Education; and a private individual. Lots of focus (finally) on repealing the 50-a law (which shields police records from public scrutiny) at the New York State level – which repeal is apparently likely to happen soon. Kesi Foster of Make the Road NY has a good, scathing piece on Mayor de Blasio’s failure to take any meaningful action on police accountability, and always incisive Ross Barkan has a similar piece up criticizing Governor Cuomo’s long failure to act on 50-a in particular.

Much has been said about the attempt to impose a curfew on uncurfewable New York City (I had some choice words on the matter myself last night) but this, from Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer: “While I understand impetus for a curfew, increasing police presence and adding another reason for police to make arrests only increases the criminalization of our population” was refreshing from a public official, and this – from aya tasaki on Twitter – was even more apt: “#Curfew is rapid “temporary” creation of a new crime category. […] another excuse for increased police interaction –> harassment –> violence.”

The Sparrow Project reports that the “Acting Director of National Intelligence [is] in a private DM chat group with an Infowars correspondent”; a “White nationalist group” was evidently “posing as antifa […] on Twitter” and calling for violence; the LAPD is being critiqued for focusing on peaceful protesters rather than looters; while Decolonize This Place has issued a “Communique” – criticizing the distinction being made between “Peaceful” and “Destructive Protest” – which makes the connection between “18th century Slave Patrols” and contemporary police forces in the US, and centers the role of police as “the frontline enforcers of this system” of private property. I still think that property destruction is a losing tactic and that urban insurrection alone is a failed strategy, but I respect their thinking and their work nonetheless.

On the flip-side, Chad Loder has a good, awful round-up on Twitter of videos of police violence from all across the country. David Dayen sums up well the fiscal obscenity encoded in all this brutality:

The thing I kept thinking about was that nobody in this group had to worry about having enough personal protective equipment. Police budgets are obscenely large. There’s been a lot of talk in recent days about defunding, and you get an appreciation for the need for it when you’re confronted up close with the—I think the best would is richness—of the police presence. I heard helicopters and sirens all night: those came from our tax dollars. The batons flying indiscriminately came from our tax dollars. The tear gas cannisters and rubber bullets and pepper pellets and the rest, our tax dollars. We generously fund the terrorizing of certain people and certain communities.

Finally, DC’s mayor is “concerned about virus rebound” and so am I. Already, pre-uprising, many states and cities were seeing “[r]ising ICU bed use,” and we can expect this to get much worse soon. We should be planning for how to sustain this nationwide uprising in case public health interventions necessitate a pullback from the streets; one can already foresee how fraught those dynamics will be. I mentioned yesterday that pandemic-related measures had served to quell popular uprisings in both Hong Kong and Chile, but my partner pointed out what should have been obvious, that, in India, the explosion of anti-Muslim violence in the aftermath of the Delhi elections, followed by India’s extreme, useless nation-wide COVID-19 lockdown had also halted months of nationwide anti-CAA demonstrations. Hard to believe – given the telescoping of time since early March  – that my partner and I were in India in the early days of that movement less than six months ago.

As it is, it feels like many people in this country have half-forgotten the pandemic. The world historical maelstrom that envelops us engenders amnesiac tendencies. We can hope that SARS-CoV-2 may actually have mutated and “be losing its potency”; in the meantime, the NYC DoHMH is inviting protesters to get COVID-19 tested.

After Cyclone Amphan pummeled parts of India’s West Coast, New York’s sister city – Bombay – is now bracing for the impact of Cyclone Nisarga. As New York was the epicenter of COVID-19 spread in the US, so too, Bombay is the epicenter of spread in India. As New Yorkers are today, so too, at the time the pandemic hit India, Bombayites were up in arms protesting social injustice (against Muslims) and the authoritarianism of their national government. We might learn from the Indian example the risk to our organizing of facing further pandemic-related shutdowns/lockdowns in the midst of mass uprising; and we might further witness the extreme violence – even by our admittedly dismal standards – being carried out by US police (for example, against journalists) and wonder what other largely-respected domestic norms will soon be breached. What comes next?

We should be prepared for local internet and wireless data shutdowns, and might look to the example of Hong Kong (where protesters have previously used mesh nets to circumvent draconian restrictions on telecommunication) as we plan accordingly.

What else? I fear the vigilantism will get much worse. Already seeing lots of posts – including about a roving all-white-male mob carrying rods and baseball bats through the streets of Philly – about armed Right-wing groups and their threats of violence.

Meanwhile, incessantly as I’ve been writing, a helicopter has thrummed with dull menace overhead. Stay healthy, stay safe, stay engaged, stay sane, and stay in the streets, or on the phone, or on Twitter, as case may find you.

We have now committed to fighting the most consequential fight of our generation, under the most disadvantageous conditions, at the most inopportune (and some might say idiotic) time. Perhaps there was no other option, as clearly no real “choice” was made about this, except the choice those four officers made to kill George Floyd on the side of a road in Minneapolis. The rest has proceeded like an unstoppable chain reaction – the mechanisms and institutions of our society of spectacle catalyzing the combination of long-building popular anger and resentments with the volcanic rage building as a byproduct of the catastrophic mis/handling, in this country, of the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps it was inevitable, but a reaction it was, and that’s what worries me. For 50 years, the US Left has been back-footed, and has always found itself fighting losing battles, on its enemies’ terms, at the times of its enemies’ choosing, and this time feels little different. For the future, we can’t lose, and yet, we very well might, so dismal are the conditions under which we now struggle.

Lest my work inadvertently serve to demoralize though, I’ll be proactively shifting from my position of the past two days. I believe there’s no turning back from this now, so I’ll only briefly elaborate what I fear, beyond that which I’ve already elaborated upon enough.

Perhaps there was no alternative but to fight this fight now as phenomena converge that, outside film, history, and fiction would seem almost unimaginable. Perhaps this is actually our last chance to stop the fascists – or our best chance – before they rig and steal the November election and follow in the footsteps of the governments of Putin, Modi, Orban, Duterte, and so many other Right-wing, strongman-ocracies that have worked assiduously in recent years to undermine democracy. I’ve written elsewhere that we are in a now-or-never moment, more or less for the future of “organized human life on Earth,” as Noam Chomsky often puts it, and I continue to feel that way, but I couldn’t have foreseen that we’d have to fight on quite these terms. Democratic and Republican politicians alike seem largely united in using the power and force of the state to suppress the uprisings, and it seems more than plausible to me that, if the confrontations persist and escalate, we will see deadly explosions of violence not only from the police, but from their armed ideological allies in other quarters (I’m talking, of course, about the white supremacist militias and neo-Nazis). Additionally, given the high likelihood that the pandemic will soon be spiraling once again out of control across much of the United States, we’re likely to see tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of additional deaths in the coming months, but also the use – both rightly and wrongly, at once – of COVID-19 as a pretext for quelling the insurrection. We should remember that Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and Chile’s militant anti-austerity street protests were both quieted, of necessity, by the coming of this plague.

At every level, the scales are tilted against us, and yet, it’s beyond inspiring to see tens of millions of us rising. The hour is very late to be recognizing just how far along the road to police state and fascism we’ve come since 9/11 (though the groundwork had been laid long before), and, of course, many individuals and many communities have understood these truths in heart, head, and gut for a long time, but never in my lifetime have I witnessed such a cross-sectional political mobilization for justice in this country.

It’s now my conviction that we have no alternative but to attempt to see this through, and so going forward, I’ll continue to be focused on not losing what we can’t afford to lose, but without any question that this struggle will go forward as it has.

So fuck these assholes who think – after everything they’ve done (see all of my writing for the past five years) – they can curfew New York City. Fuck these assholes who think they can unleash the police to brutalize and murder people on the daily. Fuck these assholes who think they can call out the US military to suppress protests calling for justice. Fuck these assholes who think they can turn turn to the Pentagon to provide signals intelligence on people fighting for justice. And fuck these assholes who think they can deploy drones to surveil us in the streets, who thought it was right to have not one, but three helicopters hovering above a peaceful demonstration outside Stonewall this evening. No one in the world ever should’ve been subjected to such treatment in our names, and we’re at a now-or-never moment as a country, a once-in-a-civilization juncture on the planet, to steer the future away from the planned (by the powerful) and promised (by Hollywood, et alia) apocalypse and dystopia.

Death to fascism. Black Lives Matter. Here’s to a sane, just, livable future on Earth.

Postscript: Thank you to Nick Estes. When he speaks, I listen, and when he Tweets, I heed his words.

Sirens and helicopters all night. We live in a crazy fucking country.

Here in New York City, we sit on occupied territory twice over: Unceded Lenape land – because we know the founding myth of the purchase of Manhattan is a Big Lie, and that the dispossession of the indigenous population of this place was accomplished through force, deceit, disease, destruction of lifeways (including through ecological violence), and fostered/forced dependence (narrowly, on alcohol, and more broadly, on Euro/settler trade goods) – and the conflicted space of the contemporary metropolis in which settlers, migrants (turned settlers), and the descendants of enslaved people alike find themselves subject to the rule of capital as enforced by militarized police.

I’m going to engage with some constructive feedback on my piece from yesterday – “Rage Is Not a Strategy” – and get into the rapid evolution of my own thinking in view of changing circumstances, but first, a brief, somewhat random overview: In Minneapolis, authorities announced they were “contact tracing” people who had been arrested during the uprising and at first claimed that “outside forces” (which is to say, outside agitators, for those familiar with the ugly historical usage) were responsible for most of the violence in the Twin Cities – hinting that white supremacist groups or organized crime might have been involved – before significantly stepping back these assertions. Evidently from DC, video circulated of protesters tackling and turning over to police an agent provocateur who’d been smashing the sidewalk with a hammer. In Atlanta, police in body armor smashed the car window of two black college students and dragged the young people from their vehicle, tasing and beating them, with no provocation. From Dallas, a doctored video was circulated that had been “edited to remove footage of a white man who was beaten [first] charging at black protesters with a machete before they pummeled him” – pointing, as Robert Mackey of The Intercept opined, to “the danger of relying on fragmentary video clips posted on social media by politically motivated witnesses to news events.” In LA, at least one journalist was shot in the throat with a rubber bullet. In NYC, one such “fragmentary video clip” seemed to show an NYPD officer making a white supremacist hand gesture in Union Square, and organizers urged against looting, but, in spite of their exhortations and a massive police presence, SoHo luxury stores were looted for a second straight night anyway and another police vehicle was torched, leading Mattilde Bernstein Sycamore to quip, “Meaningful art has returned to Soho, at last,” while on CNN, former National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, explained to Wolf Blitzer, regarding the protests, “This is right out of the Russian playbook as well.”

Fuck. As my partner put it, “It’s impossible for any one person to make sense of all this,” but to lighten the mood, here’s a funny Tweet from the “President and CEO of Antifa.” Enjoy.

The police, meanwhile, continued to brutalize people all across New York City as the Mayor – who’s daughter was apparently arrested protesting on Saturday night – live-Tweeted a bizarre stream of blithely journalistic reports of his whereabouts and what he was seeing – “Just checked on situation around the Barclays Center. Lots of protesters moving around and plenty of police presence. On my way now to check on Lower Manhattan” – and was met with a wall of pure ridicule and calls to resign.

Jeremy Scahill Tweeted:

DeBlasio had an opportunity to be on the right side of history. Instead he chose to align himself with the brutality and injustice. He chooses to further empower the militias with badges and guns who ram SUVs into crowds of civilians. Through his actions, he stands with Trump.

Travis R. Eby Tweeted:

We need very specific questions for @NYCMayor tomorrow about why the NYPD m.o. is to repeatedly charge people with their hands up and then beat the shit out of them, and we need to know why he’s ok with that. This is a pattern, and it is fucked up.

In linking to video footage of a brutal arrest, evidently “sparked by a tossed water bottle,” Josh Fox Tweeted: “This is my fucking neighborhood right now,” although not long before this very brutal arrest and outbreak of renewed police riot in the vicinity of the Barclays’s Center, police kneeled in unison with protesters and did some hand holding kumbaya.

Corporate media continue to be friendlier than usual towards the protests, while still hedging in the direction of both-sides-ism. Headlines in the New York Times this morning include: “Overnight Mayhem Follows Peaceful Rallies”; “N.Y.C. Protests Turn Violent: Large crowds of demonstrators clashed with the police throughout the city”; but also “Facing Protests Over Use of Force, Police Respond With More Force“; while Crain’s headlined: “Day of peaceful city marches gives way to chaos after dark.” On the NY Times op-ed page, Philip and Thenjiwe McHarris call for “No More Money for the Police: Redirect it to emergency response programs that don’t kill black people,” while in the LA Times, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar calls for “not a rush to judgment, but a rush to justice” in his op-ed entitled “Don’t understand the protests? What you’re seeing is people pushed to the edge.”

Andrew Yang wants a “George Floyd Police Misconduct division of the DOJ with a budget of $6 billion a year,” while John Legend wants to “[t]ake away police funding and reroute it towards community needs.” Kanyi Maqubela has a helpful “mini-thread on police unions.” (Spoiler: They’re regressive and pose a problem for Left supporters of organized labor.) Scahill further points out:

Police forces have regularly attacked and arrested journalists at protests in this country [but] unfamous journalists [link is my insertion] from non-corporate outlets, so no one paid attention to it. Now, the police are deliberately & consistently attacking corporate journalists too.

Lots of imagining what it would be like if US corporate media covered these domestic uprisings as they do uprisings elsewhere in the world (e.g, by calling them, “The American Spring… [or] The Minneapolis Intifada…”), and Ari Weil has a great post up on the evolution of “vehicle ramming attacks” as a tactic embraced by “1) the American far-right, 2) mainstream conservatism, and 3) US law enforcement over the last 5 years.”

Okay, that was a lot, but coming back around to feedback I received yesterday, it was mostly positive and all constructive, for which I’m thankful. One brief point of clarification: In spite of my own deep misgivings about the likely epidemiological consequences of the uprisings, I did participate in protests on both Saturday and Sunday, but only to the extent that they passed through the area to which I’ve confined myself since March (a roughly 5-block radius around my residence, as I’ve written elsewhere). It’s been super moving to see these large, peaceful, as-socially-distant-as-possible marches in the streets of New York, and I wish circumstances were such that I didn’t feel duty-bound – in view of the mass death and illness in NYC in March and April – to remain peripheral to all this.

On the feedback, one childhood friend offered – on Twitter, and with a great GIF from Sidney Lumet’s Network: “Counterpoint: First, you have to get mad,” to which I replied, “With you. And been mad. But what if you keep getting mad every few years for half a century in the same fashion and w/the same (lack) of results?”

Another elementary school classmate of mine wrote, on Instagram: “[W]e as white people don’t own this rage and that makes it not our place to denounce,” before qualifying that that’s “not necessarily what you’re doing in this piece but I don’t know if I would have gotten that had I not read the full article.” She also makes some acute points about Killer Mike’s class positionality, and about the meaning of the fact that he’s a son of a police officer.

Other friends wrote about how the “wry Zizek and Lacan quotes align with my misgivings about all of this”; about concerns regarding the “the useful idiot contingent of “anarchists” allowing these protests to function as a release valve of the organic pressure building on the state,” “the level of “revolutionary” posturing on Instagram,” and that “the police laid a trap to escalate the violence a la the strategy of tension and it worked”; and about “hearing way too much boyish laughter in these videos (oftentimes where dangerous shit ends up going down).”

Impossible to sum up all my responses, but in one instance, I wrote back, “I find the spirit of all this very thrilling, the timing impossible, and the implications inscrutable and fraught,” and more broadly, I hope it is now clear that I do not “denounce” the rage, the protests, or the looting – the last of which I see as understandable, predictable, and counterproductive, but about which I don’t moralize – and that I’m committed as ever to racial justice in this country, but also sick of losing in these struggles.

For more than 50 years – since the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. – sporadic urban uprisings of this sort (that seem to follow a logic different from, but in some ways analogous to, the fluctuations of our financial markets) have “rocked” the United States. In those 50+ years, we’ve seen voting rights gradually undermined; the widening of the racial wealth gap; the rise of a system of race-and-class-based mass incarceration; and, of course, plenty of progress when it comes to racial justice, although relatively little of it at the legislative or policy level. We’ve also witnessed the terrifying rise of increasingly militarized police apparatuses across the country, and the expansion of the internal surveillance capacities of local, state, and national governments – capacities which were already fearsome in the mid-twentieth century as the example of COINTELPRO makes clear. (I believe there’s a through thread from the militance of the Black Panthers – which was crushed through murder, infiltration, and politicized imprisonment – to the quixotic and ineffectual terrorism of the Black Liberation Army and the secessionism of the Republic of New Afrika, to the Reaganite counterrevolution (most clearly symbolized by the bombing of the MOVE house in Philadelphia in 1985, that I think definitely ended the long ’70s of fringe liberationism), the so-called War on Drugs and its accompanying gang wars, and the resultant void of leadership which Black Lives Matter came to fill, though this is necessarily a highly reductive sentence.)

I think the strategy of urban uprising, the unfolding of which we’re now watching and/or participating in today, is a failed one. I believe it is too-easily coopted by provocateurs who are next to impossible to control in a mass context (in view of their cooperation with police who are all too eager to violently suppress peaceful demonstrations); it generally lacks coherence in its political demands and organization; it too easily devolves into looting which – moralizing aside – undermines credibility and moral standing even while it may frighten certain subsets of the ruling classes; it tends to fizzle out of its own accord (“the release valve,” to which my friend Dan referred above); and it makes especially easy the violent police repression and judicial persecution that will confront even the most well-organized social movements for racial justice. Plus, the perception/mischaracterization of the uprisings as violent can serve, dialectically, to reinforce the social and political position of the police.

Rick Perlstein has a good piece in Mother Jones – entitled, “Will Urban Uprisings Help [the President]? Actually, They Could Be His Undoing.” – in which he argues that “it is simply incorrect to argue that mass political violence inevitably spurs a backlash that benefits conservatives” and suggests that anti-incumbency on top of the President’s open racism may lead to his electoral defeat in November. I hope he’s right. Yesterday, I pointed to some examples where it seemed such “backlash [had] benefit[ed] conservatives” while qualifying that it “is well beyond the scope of this piece to examine if correlation implies causation”; Perlstein points to some counterexamples (Stonewall, chief among them), but also opines that “[the] politics of riots are complex, ambiguous—and especially, in our present circumstances, unpredictable.” Time will tell.

In NYC, I was pleased to see an “[o]rganizer explaining the movement’s goals: legislative change, making demands of [our] representatives”; I hope momentum builds around a coherent set of demands.

Now, some closing thoughts before I end this long post: New York State and City budgets are already under immense pandemic-related strain. The uprisings will likely delay NYC’s reopening and lead to a temporary deterioration of our progress in confronting COVID-19. Police officers also get paid overtime when the entire force is called out to violently suppress peaceful demonstrations for racial justice, which is a sad irony.

Always perceptive, my partner points out what seems to be obvious, in the process, uncovering its underlying significance: “Things always seem to escalate at night.”

We all know that night brings out different energies, but there may be forces more quotidian at work in the escalations. Birthworkers, like my partner, are familiar with the “Friday Evening C-Section” phenomenon, in which an obstetrician – eager not to miss a dinner reservation, or to make it out to a house in the Hamptons on time – pushes a birthing person into an unnecessary Caesarian. The mandate of the police is to protect capital – and in particular, private property and the public infrastructures (like roads and bridges) which make its accumulation possible – from damage, disruption, or expropriation. As a byproduct, the police can’t go home until the demonstrators do. One can imagine that, at the end of a long day, having been yelled at a lot, operating within a culture of violence and impunity, and with no meaningful mechanisms of accountability in place, police might simply decide they’re ready to go home and that attacking protesters is the best way to bring standoffs – rooted in dynamics that extend far beyond street confrontation – to a temporary conclusion that will allow the officers to go home and go to bed.

I don’t know. It’s interesting/horrible that so much effort and public money was expended by and on the police over the weekend, and so much senseless violence perpetrated by them, and yet, SoHo was still looted. Twice. Doesn’t make much sense, but perhaps it’s that there’s a limit to what even 40,000 officers can do in a City of 8 million residents (that’s a 1/200 ratio)  when a sizable percentage of those residents are mad and take to the streets. This relates to what the organizers, whom I admire, of Decolonize This Place (DTP), call “becoming ungovernable.” I fear, again, that this strategy is unlikely to lead to long-term gains (witness the 50+ year collapse of the US Left during a time when urban uprising has served as the primary “release valve” for social discontent), but smart and principled people will disagree, and some of that will no doubt be based in relative degrees of privilege. The DTP organizers believe in actual revolution, the overthrow or collapse of the United States, and in literal (rather than vague, metaphorical) decolonization; under our current circumstances, and occupying the position I do, I’m in favor of radical incrementalism, if such can be said. I love New York in spite of its brutal contradictions. I believe things can get a lot worse if we allow the decay/destruction of our core infrastructures (witness our current public health crisis); fail to meaningfully address/prepare for climate crisis; or lose what remains of our democracy, and I don’t see a path to a non-catastrophic transition to a post-US configuration.

What do I think will happen? Ross Barkan, who takes my perspective a step further to argue that “nonviolent protesting is both morally correct and tactically correct” while opining that “setting fire to businesses isn’t forwarding the movement against police brutality,” has elsewhere Tweeted that calling for de Blasio’s resignation without calling for Cuomo’s is nonsensical. I don’t disagree with him, but while the President hides in his bunker and the Mayor live-Tweets the end of his own political career, New York’s all-powerful and until-recently-omnipresent Governor has suddenly disappeared from the scene, while his (black, female) Attorney General, Letitia James, is suddenly front and center in the State’s response to the “unrest” in New York City. Say what you will about Andrew Cuomo, he’s a masterful politician – his deftness, inversely proportional to de Blasio’s daftness, even as the two men share in common their immense moral cowardice.

Should events continue to unfold as they have in NYC, I’d say it’s likely that the Governor uses his emergency powers, still in effect, to more stringently reassert the stay-at-home order (still in effect, also), though not before a sufficient period of career-ending humiliation has passed for de Blasio and sufficient epidemiological evidence has accrued of the harm to public health being done by the massive demonstrations (which are very much in contravention of the prevailing guidance about best practices).

Is this unfortunate? Terribly. Do I want it to happen? Obviously, not. Should it come to pass though, by the time it does, SoHo will be devoid of watches and shoes, and the demonstrations will have cost our City – already tilting, once again, towards receivership – a great deal of money, but it’s unclear to me that we’ll have made substantive progress towards ending police brutality or beginning to root out the inordinate power of the police in our City or our society (and in the meantime, we may have reinitiated significant community spread of COVID-19). The police are uniquely positioned to wreak havoc on a politician’s career, which is no doubt why de Blasio – having, early in his years as Mayor, clashed with the NYPD – is now so bizarrely standing by his police force in defiance of all the facts, and unless these days or weeks of rage fuel a sustained, policy-informed mass movement, I expect we’ll get fooled again. Maybe the Mayor will actually resign, and his resignation will be hailed as a victory, which it won’t really be. Maybe a few gestures towards police accountability and budget cuts will be made, even as our public schools and healthcare systems are subjected to massive austerity. It’s easier to get upset and take to the streets than it is to build a popular culture of understanding what’s actually happening in City Hall, Albany, and DC, but if we don’t accomplish the latter, we’ll keep getting screwed.

What will it take to actual root out this reactionary, often explicitly white supremacist institution – the police – from the strategic position it now holds? That’s probably for another post, and we can hope the seismic shift we’re witnessing now in public opinion is a real and lasting one, but we should have space to strategize beyond anger and slogans, unless the plan is really to carry this to revolution, or to fully shutdown New York until our demands are met, in which case, I’ll see you out there. In the end, I supported the uprisings in Hong Kong, and Chile, and Puerto Rico, and Lebanon, and Algeria, and Sudan, and this uprising here in New York, I support it, too. I’d just like to see us win for a change.

Post-script: Regarding the pandemic, case counts are rising in a number of states (as this Imperial College study previously estimated); “One Of The First California Counties To Reopen Is Closing Again“; and even this conservative effective reproduction number tracker now shows ten states with values at or above one, including both Texas and California. Things are not going well.

If the NYPD were an army, it would be among the most well-funded in the world. The NYPD is an army. It has at least an ~$6 billion annual budget (greater than the military spending of Ukraine or Vietnam) that, owing to lack of true public oversight, may be significantly larger. According to Wikipedia, the NYPD has ~40,000 officers and ~20,000 other employees; nearly 10,000 police vehicles; 11 boats; eight helicopters; and a number of non-human support animals who have been enlisted into the force.

We have to ask the question: Do we defeat an army of such magnitude by burning and smashing perhaps 15 or 20 of its vehicles?

Now, before anyone accuses me of being reactionary or engaging in liberal “tut tut tactics,” the problem – as I’ve written about at great length for years – is obviously white supremacy; corporate neoliberalism and its discontents; and, most immediately, the murderous brutality of the police.

That being said, I’m with Killer Mike: We shouldn’t burn our own houses/cities down, and this is “the time to plot, plan, strategize, organize, and mobilize.”

And I share Steve Randy Waldman’s fear “of the interaction between these protests and the coronavirus, both epidemiologically and politically.”

And I do not agree with New York City’s Mayor that “the NYPD has acted appropriately,” or that the NYPD has “showed amazing restraint” in recent days, or that “if those protesters had just gotten out of the way [of the police vehicles] we would not be talking about this situation.”

We’ve seen “New York lawmakers […] pepper-sprayed by New York City police officers”; we’ve seen NYPD officers “respect[ing] peaceful protest” (in the immortal words of our Mayor, who should resign) through riotous violence perpetrated against non-violent demonstrators; we’ve seen a big male NYPD officer shove a petite female protester to  the ground, resulting in her hospitalization; we’ve seen a white, male NYPD officer pull the mask from the face of and pepper-spray in the face an unarmed black teenager who has his hands up; we’ve read of the NYPD arresting journalists; we’ve seen an NYPD sergeant assault an unarmed male protester, evidently for the crime of talking back; we’ve seen NYPD officers drive their vehicles into crowds.

What’s the upshot of all this? The liberal corporate media are coming out more on the side of anti-police violence demonstrations than I can recall them doing in my adult lifetime (as my partner pointed out, likely because journalists and media workers are being targeted by the police). Still, I’d say there’s been a disproportionate emphasis in media coverage on “looting,” “rioting,” and the like, whereas, from videos, personal experience yesterday, and many, many testimonials online, my impression is that the vast majority of protesters and protests in recent days have been peaceful (which is to say, they involved neither assaults on police, nor damage to private property), and that provocateurs, including undercover police officers, have played a disproportionate role in inciting the the so-called looting and rioting. In fact, in many instances, organizers of protests intervened to prevent property damage.

There’s also been plenty of actual looting, which is to be expected in the midst of a nationwide uprising, and there have been some smart takes on the same, including this one by Arlene Dávila who writes:

Anyone surprised that protests include looting of luxury stores in Soho & elsewhere doesn’t know the 1st thing about racial capitalism & luxury consumption. Racial exploitation is at the root of consumer capitalism built on the commodification of black bodies through slavery […]

On the flip side, NBC News reporter, Sahil Kapor, writes without much context: “A Spanish flu-type pandemic threat, Great Depression-scale job losses and 1968-style violence all happening at the same time.”

Great observations, but I prefer LeVar Burton’s take: “Don’t f*ck with me today, people. Today is not the day!”

Obviously, we’re all just living on Twitter at the moment to the extent that we’re not in the streets, in jail, or on the Right. But here’s an obvious, uncomfortable truth I haven’t seen addressed enough on Twitter or otherwise (and which I’ve written on each of the previous two days): “It’s hard to socially distance in an uprising.”

Remember the (justified) outrage at the comparatively-very-small astroturfed reopening protests? The masks are nice, but let’s not kid ourselves. There have been at least hundreds of thousands, and probably millions of people in the streets across every major US city in often chaotic and densely-packed settings, made worse by the violence and vindictiveness of the police. We know that things like singing, loud talking, or in this case, thousands of people chanting as one, increase the risk of transmission of COVID-19, and while the fact that most of this is happening outside significantly mitigates the risk, if we don’t think that these demonstrations will increase, probably dramatically, the already escalating spread of the pandemic in our country, we are delusional.

Again, even under a best-case scenario, these massive demonstrations would’ve been problematic from an epidemiological standpoint, but this is not a best-case scenario; this is the United States. Here’s how Keith Boykin of CNN and the New York Times described some of his experience yesterday in NYC:

The police locked me in tight zip ties that bruised my wrists. They held me in a van for an hour. Then a hot police bus for an hour. Then they took me to 1 Police Plaza and held me in a jail cell with about 35 others with no social distancing and many of the others unmasked.

Add onto this known police tactics like kettling (some of which I witnessed in person yesterday when a large protest march found itself temporarily trapped and sharply compressed on our block), and it becomes clear that best-laid plans to protest socially distantly will, in many cases, come to nought.

Okay. So the massive nationwide demonstrations centered in some of the already hardest hit cities and communities will almost certainly serve as an accelerant to our renewed national first wave of COVID-19 infections (and are likely to delay the much-awaited, phased reopening of New York City). It’s good not to be in denial; it’s good not to be delusional; and it’s probably also advisable to recognize that there will be not-unjustified (if opportunistic) accusations of hypocrisy leveled by many on the Right.

Coming back to where I started though, what’s the end game here? The best breakdown I’ve come across of the bind in which we find ourselves comes from this short video of a heated, loving conversation which Twitter user Momba captioned: “This shit has me in tears because what is the answer? If being peaceful and compliant ain’t it and fucking shit up ain’t it? WHAT IS it?”

For epidemiological reasons, I’ve stayed out of these protests – for which people can blame me if they like – but during a different time of life, I was an active participant in the protests against the police murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland (where I was living as a gentrifier at the time in my early, and very confused 20s) from the time of the initial explosion of anger, through the cooptation of the movement, and to the point of its eventual suppression under withering assault by militarized police and a politicized judiciary. When the man in the “FREAK” t-shirt in the video above breaks it down, to the 16-year-old to whom he’s speaking:

It’s gonna happen ten years from now […] Come up with a better way, because how we doing, it ain’t working […] He’s angry at 46. I’m angry at 31. You’re angry at 16 […] I marched four years ago. Keith Lamont Scott. Did the same shit […] night, after night, after night. […] Come up with a better way.

I believe he gets to the heart of the matter. Every major US city burned during the second half of the 1960s, and what we got from that was “law and order” and Richard Nixon. After May 1968 in France, de Gaulle won a smashing electoral victory, and across Europe, in the aftermath of early ’70s actions by Italy’s Red Brigades, Germany’s Red Army Faction, and other such aligned groups, we’ve witnessed the long, slow decline of the institutional and political left. It’s well beyond the scope of this piece to examine if correlation implies causation in these instances, but if we actually want lasting political change, we should probably examine past precedents. After the 1992 uprising in Los Angeles, triggered by the brutal police beating of Rodney King, Los Angeles saw the election of its only Republican mayor in the last 60 years. Obviously, it’s not all about Democrats and Republicans, or about electoral politics, but if people think things can’t get worse through a hard-right, reactionary turn, I fear they are mistaken.

Like Killer Mike said, “Now is the time to plot, plan, strategize, organize, and mobilize.”

If I told you the NYPD now has 9,610 vehicles rather than 9,624, would you think New York’s police force got a lot weaker? Obviously, the bad publicity accompanying the vicious behavior of many NYPD officers may partially undermine the political position of the police in the City, but don’t count on that effect being overly powerful; a large portion of the City’s (and Country’s) population is not in sympathy with the demonstrations, and are reading these incidents in very different ways.

When people Tweet, no doubt exhilarated, about protesters “taking” the Brooklyn Bridge, they are delusional. Temporarily stopping traffic is one thing, “taking” territory or a position in the military sense, quite another; this morning, as yesterday morning, the City of New York – backstopped by its militant branch, the NYPD – controls the Brooklyn Bridge, and behind police, City, and State sits the full power of the Federal Government, as we’ve already seen in Minneapolis. The Nation reports that “The US Military Is Monitoring Protests in 7 States”; there are ample precedents of the National Guard, FBI, and other Federal agencies working to suppress movements for social change and social justice, and we’d be foolish not to think that just such efforts at suppression aren’t afoot at present.

Is there a plan for actual revolution? That is, the overthrow and seizure of the state? Does this movement have the militance and staying power to besiege unjust city, state, and national governments, as we saw other movements do during the bracing year past in Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, and many other places? The timing could not be worse to attempt something of this nature in the United States, and I have serious doubts about the organization and vision behind these uprisings.

Case in point, this is a music video or wannabe rock star exhibitionism masquerading as political action. Look at all the “protesters” streaming the episode live on their social media as the police approach, unimpeded, to begin arresting people. The antics of the dumb white guy doing the Jesus routine on top of the ruined police SUV do not condemn the entire movement, which could not be less about him, but it does force us to question: Is this a movement that has the organization, the vision, and the strategy to actually mobilize for the long haul and take political power against the most implacable of foes? A foe which has organized violence and a world-historically-unparalleled intelligence apparatus on its side? That has very clear conceptions of use of force and political power, and clear imperatives around its class goals? A foe which has at least decades of experience in infiltrating and undermining social movements?

Basically, great – you burned a few police vans (that may or may not have had bullets in the back). What next? Is this a movement at all, or is it just a bunch of angry and pent-up crowds?

Here’s what Slavoj Žižek wrote in the Guardian in 2012 about Occupy Wall Street:

Such statements [that “We have no program. We are here to have a good time.”] display one of the great dangers the protesters are facing: the danger that they will fall in love with themselves, with the nice time they are having in the “occupied” places. Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end.

In that piece, he quotes Jacques Lacan’s famous quip regarding the May ’68 uprisings: “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.”

Will we get one? After decades of failure and Left collapse, I hope we will not, but for those exhilarated into obliviousness of the pandemic; filter bubbled into numbness of the threat from the Right; or outraged into binary consciousness regarding this latest, justified explosion of anger – that either you’re in the street, now, or you’re a counterrevolutionary – I’d caution: Time will tell. You can say that if we were all there now, we’d make the revolution, and when that moment comes, rest assured, I’ll be there. I certainly thought it had back in early 2009 in Oakland, and there I was, but I fear what we’re witnessing, living through, and participating in right now is something more equivocal, the likely outcomes of which remain uncertain and, in my view, fraught with profound dangers.

Perhaps, as my partner opined, this was inevitable, because, “What else could people do?” These uprisings are, of course, about the deep history of this country – about racism, white supremacy, slavery, and genocide. They are also, of course, about the pandemic – the economic and social devastation, the mass death and criminal political negligence. The stress, the anxiety, the anger. The “volcanic rage” that Mike Davis spoke about.

What do we do? I don’t know. But it’s not enough to be angry, or to torch a few police vans and stream the torching online (to make it extra easy for the authorities to destroy the lives of those involved). We have to be smart. We have to be strategic. We probably actually have to have leaders, who know what they’re doing, and follow them. And we have to understand that our adversaries are smart, strategic, well-organized, and have the preponderance of force and capital on their side. If we fail to do all this, we’ll lose again, just like we have many times before.

Postscript: One clear tactic in NYC is building on the proclaimed support for the uprisings of certain “progressive” politicians, and forcing them to actually take action to decrease police budgets, increase oversight of the police, and otherwise curtail police power through persistent pressure from us on these elected officials. Most of these statements read, to me, as grandstanding (especially given histories of some of the relevant politicians of voting for expanded police budgets, increased numbers of officers, etc.), but winning concessions at City Hall and in Albany would constitute modest but tangible progress.