#I still have SO MANY QUESTIONS about what police abolition is

[gayleviticus]

there are many weird reactionary ways in which people fetishise discipline/consequences of kids as like, giving them what they deserve, or necessary for 'toughening them up', but at the end of the day a healthy philosophy of 'discipline' is basically just about setting and maintaining boundaries

as adults, there are a lot of rules, whether as law or in the workplace or in public spaces, that we kinda just accept nobody really cares about. the reason wacky articles about how it's illegal to flush a public toilet in public in Missouri or whatever inspire laughter rather than horror is bc we know these laws are so patently absurd nobody would enforce them.

on the other hand, there are lots of placrs a few years ago, that would be plastered in posters advising you to wear a mask and social distance, and yet because they had absolutely no follow through from anyone only ever remained at the level of polite request. today there are places that still have these posters up, but because there's no follow through everyone assumes they're just a relic of the past and not an actual ongoing request.

that follow through doesn't have to be punitive. it could be simply having someone who reminds visitors to wear masks and socially distance (altho the question is then how to escalate if this doesnt work). but for anyone, adult or child, setting an expectation and then not following through on it communicates that you don't care.

that's true in many contexts. you can tell shitty parents their behaviour is unacceptable, but it's a total bluff unless you actually enforce those boundaries. it's all well and good if a retail store has posters up saying please don't abuse our staff but if management don't have your back when abuse happens then it's obvious what their real priorities are.

and for kids it's even more of a thing that they can discern as easily what's a real expectation you actually care about, and what you're just saying. it can feel confusing and unfair if you give them a list of rules and then only enforce the ones you really care about. it's like you have some arbitrary secret set of rules.

contra the discipline fetishists, the severity of the punishment isn't really a central issue here. some level of proportionality helps to communicate how strongly this expectation matters; it makes sense that interrupting someone else would get a talking to and pushing your sister down the stairs would get a time out. but consistency of following through, imo, seems far more important in teaching kids pro social behaviours than severity of consequences.

often from people who are pro prison abolition you see mixed feelings abt stuff like, say, killer cops getting off without a jail sentence. but I think it can be true both that people can be opposed to prison as a concept, and also that, in a world where 'prison' is our main go-to for communicating 'we consider this behaviour unacceptable', letting serious crimes off without jail time ends up conveying the message 'this is OK'. and the frustration is not so much that prison abolitionists think that murder inherently deserves jail, so much as that by the standards of the system of consequences the world runs on, the judicial system is saying 'police brutality is fine.' not about the severity of the punishment per se, but the follow through

[xtruss]

When The New York Times Lost Its Way! America’s Media Should Do More To Equip Readers To Think For Themselves

— 1843 Magazine | December 14th, 2023 | By James Bennet

Are we truly so precious?” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, asked me one Wednesday evening in June 2020. I was the editorial-page editor of the Times, and we had just published an op-ed by Tom Cotton, a senator from Arkansas, that was outraging many members of the Times staff. America’s conscience had been shocked days before by images of a white police officer kneeling on the neck of a black man, George Floyd, until he died. It was a frenzied time in America, assaulted by covid-19, scalded by police barbarism. Throughout the country protesters were on the march. Substantive reform of the police, so long delayed, suddenly seemed like a real possibility, but so did violence and political backlash. In some cities rioting and looting had broken out.

It was the kind of crisis in which journalism could fulfil its highest ambitions of helping readers understand the world, in order to fix it, and in the Times’s Opinion section, which I oversaw, we were pursuing our role of presenting debate from all sides. We had published pieces arguing against the idea of relying on troops to stop the violence, and one urging abolition of the police altogether. But Cotton, an army veteran, was calling for the use of troops to protect lives and businesses from rioters. Some Times reporters and other staff were taking to what was then called Twitter, now called X, to attack the decision to publish his argument, for fear he would persuade Times readers to support his proposal and it would be enacted. The next day the Times’s union—its unit of the NewsGuild-cwa—would issue a statement calling the op-ed “a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent”.

The Times had endured many cycles of Twitter outrage for one story or opinion piece or another. It was never fun; it felt like sticking your head in a metal bucket while people were banging it with hammers. The publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, who was about two years into the job, understood why we’d published the op-ed. He had some criticisms about packaging; he said the editors should add links to other op-eds we’d published with a different view. But he’d emailed me that afternoon, saying: “I get and support the reason for including the piece,” because, he thought, Cotton’s view had the support of the White House as well as a majority of the Senate. As the clamour grew, he asked me to call Baquet, the paper’s most senior editor.

Whether or not American democracy endures, a central question historians are sure to ask about this era is why America came to elect Donald Trump, promoting him from a symptom of the country’s institutional, political and social degradation to its agent-in-chief

Like me, Baquet seemed taken aback by the criticism that Times readers shouldn’t hear what Cotton had to say. Cotton had a lot of influence with the White House, Baquet noted, and he could well be making his argument directly to the president, Donald Trump. Readers should know about it. Cotton was also a possible future contender for the White House himself, Baquet added. And, besides, Cotton was far from alone: lots of Americans agreed with him—most of them, according to some polls. “Are we truly so precious?” Baquet asked again, with a note of wonder and frustration.

The answer, it turned out, was yes. Less than three days later, on Saturday morning, Sulzberger called me at home and, with an icy anger that still puzzles and saddens me, demanded my resignation. I got mad, too, and said he’d have to fire me. I thought better of that later. I called him back and agreed to resign, flattering myself that I was being noble.

Whether or not American democracy endures, a central question historians are sure to ask about this era is why America came to elect Donald Trump, promoting him from a symptom of the country’s institutional, political and social degradation to its agent-in-chief. There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.

I hope those historians will also be able to tell the story of how journalism found its footing again – how editors, reporters and readers, too, came to recognise that journalism needed to change to fulfil its potential in restoring the health of American politics. As Trump’s nomination and possible re-election loom, that work could not be more urgent.

I think Sulzberger shares this analysis. In interviews and his own writings, including an essay earlier this year for the Columbia Journalism Review, he has defended “independent journalism”, or, as I understand him, fair-minded, truth-seeking journalism that aspires to be open and objective. It’s good to hear the publisher speak up in defence of such values, some of which have fallen out of fashion not just with journalists at the Times and other mainstream publications but at some of the most prestigious schools of journalism. Until that miserable Saturday morning I thought I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him in a struggle to revive them. I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.

Tom Cotton speaking at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2020 (Top). James Bennet (Second Left) with Hillary Clinton (Far Right) on Her Trip as First Lady to North Africa in 1999 (Bottom).

But Sulzberger seems to underestimate the struggle he is in, that all journalism and indeed America itself is in. In describing the essential qualities of independent journalism in his essay, he unspooled a list of admirable traits – empathy, humility, curiosity and so forth. These qualities have for generations been helpful in contending with the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias. I have no doubt Sulzberger believes in them. Years ago he demonstrated them himself as a reporter, covering the American Midwest as a real place full of three-dimensional people, and it would be nice if they were enough to deal with the challenge of this era, too. But, on their own, these qualities have no chance against the Times’s new, more dangerous problem, which is in crucial respects the opposite of the old one.

The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.

Don’t get me wrong. Most journalism obviously doesn’t require anything like the bravery expected of a soldier, police officer or protester. But far more than when I set out to become a journalist, doing the work right today demands a particular kind of courage: not just the devil-may-care courage to choose a profession on the brink of the abyss; not just the bulldog courage to endlessly pick yourself up and embrace the ever-evolving technology; but also, in an era when polarisation and social media viciously enforce rigid orthodoxies, the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.

One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down. In the face of this, leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around. This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles.

It is hard to imagine a path back to saner American politics that does not traverse a common ground of shared fact

Over the decades the Times and other mainstream news organisations failed plenty of times to live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness. The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered. As everyone knows, the internet knocked the industry off its foundations. Local newspapers were the proving ground between college campuses and national newsrooms. As they disintegrated, the national news media lost a source of seasoned reporters and many Americans lost a journalism whose truth they could verify with their own eyes. As the country became more polarised, the national media followed the money by serving partisan audiences the versions of reality they preferred. This relationship proved self-reinforcing. As Americans became freer to choose among alternative versions of reality, their polarisation intensified. When I was at the Times, the newsroom editors worked hardest to keep Washington coverage open and unbiased, no easy task in the Trump era. And there are still people, in the Washington bureau and across the Times, doing work as fine as can be found in American journalism. But as the top editors let bias creep into certain areas of coverage, such as culture, lifestyle and business, that made the core harder to defend and undermined the authority of even the best reporters.

There have been signs the Times is trying to recover the courage of its convictions. The paper was slow to display much curiosity about the hard question of the proper medical protocols for trans children; but once it did, the editors defended their coverage against the inevitable criticism. For any counter-revolution to succeed, the leadership will need to show courage worthy of the paper’s bravest reporters and opinion columnists, the ones who work in war zones or explore ideas that make illiberal staff members shudder. As Sulzberger told me in the past, returning to the old standards will require agonising change. He saw that as the gradual work of many years, but I think he is mistaken. To overcome the cultural and commercial pressures the Times faces, particularly given the severe test posed by another Trump candidacy and possible presidency, its publisher and senior editors will have to be bolder than that.

Since Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896, one of the most inspiring things the Times has said about itself is that it does its work “without fear or favour”. That is not true of the institution today – it cannot be, not when its journalists are afraid to trust readers with a mainstream conservative argument such as Cotton’s, and its leaders are afraid to say otherwise. As preoccupied as it is with the question of why so many Americans have lost trust in it, the Times is failing to face up to one crucial reason: that it has lost faith in Americans, too.

For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole. It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe. The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

It is hard to imagine a path back to saner American politics that does not traverse a common ground of shared fact. It is equally hard to imagine how America’s diversity can continue to be a source of strength, rather than become a fatal flaw, if Americans are afraid or unwilling to listen to each other. I suppose it is also pretty grandiose to think you might help fix all that. But that hope, to me, is what makes journalism worth doing.

The New York Times taught me how to do daily journalism. I joined the paper, for my first stint, in the pre-internet days, in an era of American journalism so different that it was almost another profession. Back in 1991 the Times was anxious not about a print business that was collapsing but about an industry so robust that Long Island Newsday was making a push into New York City. A newspaper war was under way, and the Times was fighting back by expanding its Metro desk, hiring reporters and opening bureaus in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.

Metro was the biggest news desk. New reporters had to do rotations of up to a year there to learn the culture and folkways of the paper. Baquet, surely among the greatest investigative journalists America has produced, was then in Metro. I was brought on as a probationary reporter, with a year to prove myself, and like other new hires was put through a series of assignments at the low end of the hierarchy.

After about six months the Metro editor, Gerald Boyd, asked me to take a walk with him, as it turned out, to deliver a harsh lesson in Timesian ambition and discipline. Chain-smoking, speaking in his whispery, peculiarly high-pitched voice, he kicked my ass from one end of Times Square to the other. He had taken a chance hiring me, and he was disappointed. There was nothing special about my stories. At the rate I was going, I had no chance of making it onto the paper.

The next day was a Saturday, and I reached Boyd at home through the Metro desk to rattle off the speech I’d endlessly rehearsed while staring at the ceiling all night. The gist was that the desk had kept me chasing small-bore stories, blah blah blah. Boyd sounded less surprised than amused to hear from me, and soon gave me a new assignment, asking me to spend three months covering the elderly, one of several new “mini-beats” on subjects the desk had overlooked.

I was worried there were good reasons this particular beat had been ignored. At 26, as one of the youngest reporters on the desk, I was also not an obvious candidate for the role of house expert on the wise and grey. But Boyd assigned me to an excellent editor, Suzanne Daley, and as I began studying the city’s elderly and interviewing experts and actual old people, I began to discover the rewards granted any serious reporter: that when you acknowledge how little you know, looking in at a world from the outside brings a special clarity.

The Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist

The subject was more complicated and richer than I imagined, and every person had stories to tell. I wrote about hunger, aids and romance among the elderly, about old comedians telling old jokes to old people in senior centres. As I reported on Jews who had fled Germany to settle in Washington Heights or black Americans who had left the Jim Crow south to settle in Bushwick, Brooklyn, it dawned on me that, thanks to Boyd, I was covering the history of the world in the 20th century through the eyes of those who had lived it.

After joining the permanent staff, I went, again in humbling ignorance, to Detroit, to cover the auto companies’ – and the city’s – struggle to recapture their former glory. And again I had a chance to learn, in this case, everything from how the largest companies in the world were run, to what it was like to work the line or the sales floor, to the struggle and dignity of life in one of America’s most captivating cities. “We still have a long way to go,” Rosa Parks told me, when I interviewed her after she had been robbed and beaten in her home on Detroit’s west side one August night in 1994. “And so many of our children are going astray.”

I began to write about presidential politics two years later, in 1996, and as the most inexperienced member of the team was assigned to cover a long-shot Republican candidate, Pat Buchanan. I packed a bag for a four-day reporting trip and did not return home for six weeks. Buchanan campaigned on an eccentric fusion of social conservatism and statist economic policies, along with coded appeals to racism and antisemitism, that 30 years earlier had elevated George Wallace and 20 years later would be rebranded as Trumpism. He also campaigned with conviction, humour and even joy, a combination I have rarely witnessed. As a Democrat from a family of Democrats, a graduate of Yale and a blossom of the imagined meritocracy, I had my first real chance, at Buchanan’s rallies, to see the world through the eyes of stalwart opponents of abortion, immigration and the relentlessly rising tide of modernity.

The task of making the world intelligible was even greater in my first foreign assignment. I arrived in Jerusalem a week before the attacks of September 11th 2001, just after the second intifada had broken out. I had been to the Middle East just once, as a White House reporter covering President Bill Clinton. “Well, in at the deep end,” the foreign editor, Roger Cohen, told me before I left. To spend time with the perpetrators and victims of violence in the Middle East, to listen hard to the reciprocal and reinforcing stories of new and ancient grievances, is to confront the tragic truth that there can be justice on more than one side of a conflict. More than ever, it seemed to me that a reporter gave up something in renouncing the taking of sides: possibly the moral high ground, certainly the psychological satisfaction of righteous anger.

Pat Buchanan during the New Hampshire primary (Top). A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher of the New York Times (Right).

But there was a compensating moral and psychological privilege that came with aspiring to journalistic neutrality and open-mindedness, despised as they might understandably be by partisans. Unlike the duelling politicians and advocates of all kinds, unlike the corporate chieftains and their critics, unlike even the sainted non-profit workers, you did not have to pretend things were simpler than they actually were. You did not have to go along with everything that any tribe said. You did not have to pretend that the good guys, much as you might have respected them, were right about everything, or that the bad guys, much as you might have disdained them, never had a point. You did not, in other words, ever have to lie.

This fundamental honesty was vital for readers, because it equipped them to make better, more informed judgments about the world. Sometimes it might shock or upset them by failing to conform to their picture of reality. But it also granted them the respect of acknowledging that they were able to work things out for themselves.

What a gift it was to be taught and trusted as I was by my editors – to be a reporter with licence to ask anyone anything, to experience the whole world as a school and every source and subject as a teacher. I left after 15 years, in 2006, when I had the chance to become editor of the Atlantic. Rather than starting out on yet another beat at the Times, I felt ready to put my experience to work and ambitious for the responsibility to shape coverage myself. It was also obvious how much the internet was changing journalism. I was eager to figure out how to use it, and anxious about being at the mercy of choices by others, in a time not just of existential peril for the industry, but maybe of opportunity.

The Atlantic did not aspire to the same role as the Times. It did not promise to serve up the news of the day without any bias. But it was to opinion journalism what the Times’s reporting was supposed to be to news: honest and open to the world. The question was what the magazine’s 19th-century claim of intellectual independence – to be “of no party or clique” – should mean in the digital era.

A journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers can be far less valuable to the reader than a journalism that starts out with a humbling awareness that it knows nothing

Those were the glory days of the blog, and we hit on the idea of creating a living op-ed page, a collective of bloggers with different points of view but a shared intellectual honesty who would argue out the meaning of the news of the day. They were brilliant, gutsy writers, and their disagreements were deep enough that I used to joke that my main work as editor was to prevent fistfights.

The lessons we learned from adapting the Atlantic to the internet washed back into print. Under its owner, David Bradley, my colleagues and I distilled our purpose as publishing big arguments about big ideas. We made some mistakes – that goes along with any serious journalism ambitious to make a change, and to embrace change itself – but we also began producing some of the most important work in American journalism: Nicholas Carr on whether Google was “making us stupid”; Hanna Rosin on “the end of men”; Taylor Branch on “the shame of college sports”; Ta-Nehisi Coates on “the case for reparations”; Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt on “the coddling of the American mind”.

I was starting to see some effects of the new campus politics within the Atlantic. A promising new editor had created a digital form for aspiring freelancers to fill out, and she wanted to ask them to disclose their racial and sexual identity. Why? Because, she said, if we were to write about the trans community, for example, we would ask a trans person to write the story. There was a good argument for that, I acknowledged, and it sometimes might be the right answer. But as I thought about the old people, auto workers and abortion opponents I had learned from, I told her there was also an argument for correspondents who brought an outsider’s ignorance, along with curiosity and empathy, to the story.

A journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers, it seemed to me then, and seems even more so to me now, can be far less valuable to the reader than a journalism that starts out with a humbling awareness that it knows nothing. “In truly effective thinking”, Walter Lippmann wrote 100 years ago in “Public Opinion”, “the prime necessity is to liquidate judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-hearted.” Alarmed by the shoddy journalism of his day, Lippmann was calling for journalists to struggle against their ignorance and assumptions in order to help Americans resist the increasingly sophisticated tools of propagandists. As the Atlantic made its digital transition, one thing I preached was that we could not cling to any tradition or convention, however hallowed, for its own sake, but only if it was relevant to the needs of readers today. In the age of the internet it is hard even for a child to sustain an “innocent eye”, but the alternative for journalists remains as dangerous as ever, to become propagandists. America has more than enough of those already.

What we did together at the Atlantic worked. We dramatically increased the magazine’s audience and influence while making it profitable for the first time in generations. After I had spent ten years as editor, the last few as co-president, the publisher, A.G. Sulzberger’s father, also an Arthur Sulzberger, asked me to return to the Times as editorial-page editor.

His offer, I thought, would give me the chance to do the kind of journalism I loved with more resources and greater effect. The freedom Opinion had to experiment with voice and point of view meant that it would be more able than the Times newsroom to take advantage of the tools of digital journalism, from audio to video to graphics. Opinion writers could also break out of limiting print conventions and do more in-depth, reported columns and editorials. Though the Opinion department, which then had about 100 staff, was a fraction the size of the newsroom, with more than 1,300, Opinion’s work had outsized reach. Most important, the Times, probably more than any other American institution, could influence the way society approached debate and engagement with opposing views. If Times Opinion demonstrated the same kind of intellectual courage and curiosity that my colleagues at the Atlantic had shown, I hoped, the rest of the media would follow.

No doubt Sulzberger’s offer also appealed not just to my loyalty to the Times, but to my ambition as well. I would report directly to the publisher, and I was immediately seen, inside and outside the paper, as a candidate for the top job. I had hoped being in Opinion would exempt me from the infamous political games of the newsroom, but it did not, and no doubt my old colleagues felt I was playing such games myself. Fairly quickly, though, I realised two things: first, that if I did my job as I thought it should be done, and as the Sulzbergers said they wanted me to do it, I would be too polarising internally ever to lead the newsroom; second, that I did not want that job, though no one but my wife believed me when I said that.

It was 2016, a presidential-election year, and I had been gone from the Times for a decade. Although many of my old colleagues had also left in the interim and the Times had moved into a new glass-and-steel tower, I otherwise had little idea how much things had changed. When I looked around the Opinion department, change was not what I perceived. Excellent writers and editors were doing excellent work. But the department’s journalism was consumed with politics and foreign affairs in an era when readers were also fascinated by changes in technology, business, science and culture.

The Opinion department mocked the paper’s claim to value diversity. It did not have a single black editor. The large staff of op-ed editors contained only a couple of women. Although the 11 columnists were individually admirable, only two of them were women and only one was a person of colour. (The Times had not appointed a black columnist until the 1990s, and had only employed two in total.) Not only did they all focus on politics and foreign affairs, but during the 2016 campaign, no columnist shared, in broad terms, the worldview of the ascendant progressives of the Democratic Party, incarnated by Bernie Sanders. And only two were conservative.

This last fact was of particular concern to the elder Sulzberger. He told me the Times needed more conservative voices, and that its own editorial line had become predictably left-wing. “Too many liberals,” read my notes about the Opinion line-up from a meeting I had with him and Mark Thompson, then the chief executive, as I was preparing to rejoin the paper. “Even conservatives are liberals’ idea of a conservative.” The last note I took from that meeting was: “Can’t ignore 150m conservative Americans.”

I was astonished by the fury of my Times colleagues. I found myself facing an angry internal town hall, trying to justify what to me was an obvious journalistic decision

With my Opinion colleagues, I set out to deal with this long list of needs. I restructured the department, changing everybody’s role and, using buyouts, changing people as well. It was too much, too fast; it rocked the department, and my colleagues and I made mistakes amid the turmoil, including one that brought a libel suit from John McCain’s vice-presidential running-mate, Sarah Palin, dismissed twice by a judge and once by a jury but endlessly appealed on procedural grounds. Yet we also did more in four years to diversify the line-up of writers by identity, ideology and expertise than the Times had in the previous century; we published more ambitious projects than Opinion had ever attempted. We won two Pulitzer prizes in four years – as many as the department had in the previous 20.

As I knew from my time at the Atlantic, this kind of structural transformation can be frightening and even infuriating for those understandably proud of things as they are. It is hard on everyone. But experience at the Atlantic also taught me that pursuing new ways of doing journalism in pursuit of venerable institutional principles created enthusiasm for change. I expected that same dynamic to allay concerns at the Times.

In that same statement in 1896, after committing the Times to pursue the news without fear or favour, Ochs promised to “invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion”. So adding new voices, some more progressive and others more conservative, and more journalists of diverse identities and backgrounds, fulfilled the paper’s historic purpose. If Opinion published a wider range of views, it would help frame a set of shared arguments that corresponded to, and drew upon, the set of shared facts coming from the newsroom. On the right and left, America’s elites now talk within their tribes, and get angry or contemptuous on those occasions when they happen to overhear the other conclave. If they could be coaxed to agree what they were arguing about, and the rules by which they would argue about it, opinion journalism could serve a foundational need of the democracy by fostering diverse and inclusive debate. Who could be against that?

Out of naivety or arrogance, I was slow to recognise that at the Times, unlike at the Atlantic, these values were no longer universally accepted, let alone esteemed. When I first took the job, I felt some days as if I’d parachuted onto one of those Pacific islands still held by Japanese soldiers who didn’t know that the world beyond the waves had changed. Eventually, it sank in that my snotty joke was actually on me: I was the one ignorantly fighting a battle that was already lost. The old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of views had given way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of American voters. New progressive voices were celebrated within the Times. But in contrast to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, conservative voices – even eloquent anti-Trump conservative voices – were despised, regardless of how many leftists might surround them. (President Trump himself submitted one op-ed during my time, but we could not raise it to our standards – his people would not agree to the edits we asked for.)

About a year after the 2016 election, the Times newsroom published a profile of a man from Ohio who had attended the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which a white nationalist drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing one. It was a terrifying piece. The man had four cats, listened to National Public Radio, and had registered at Target for a muffin pan before his recent wedding. In exploring his evolution from “vaguely leftist rock musician to ardent libertarian to fascist activist” the article rang an alarm about how “the election of President Donald Trump helped open a space for people like him”.

The profile was in keeping with the Times’s tradition of confronting readers with the confounding reality of the world around them. After the 9/11 attacks, as the bureau chief in Jerusalem, I spent a lot of time in the Gaza Strip interviewing Hamas leaders, recruiters and foot soldiers, trying to understand and describe their murderous ideology. Some readers complained that I was providing a platform for terrorists, but there was never any objection from within the Times. (Nor did it occur to me to complain that by publishing op-eds critical of Hamas the Opinion department was putting my life in danger.) Our role, we knew, was to help readers understand such threats, and this required empathetic – not sympathetic – reporting. This is not an easy distinction but good reporters make it: they learn to understand and communicate the sources and nature of a toxic ideology without justifying it, much less advocating it.

Today’s newsroom turns that moral logic on its head, at least when it comes to fellow Americans. Unlike the views of Hamas, the views of many Americans have come to seem dangerous to engage in the absence of explicit condemnation. Focusing on potential perpetrators – “platforming” them by explaining rather than judging their views – is believed to empower them to do more harm. After the profile of the Ohio man was published, media Twitter lit up with attacks on the article as “normalising” Nazism and white nationalism, and the Times convulsed internally. The Times wound up publishing a cringing editor’s note that hung the writer out to dry and approvingly quoted some of the criticism, including a tweet from a Washington Post opinion editor asking, “Instead of long, glowing profiles of Nazis/White nationalists, why don’t we profile the victims of their ideologies”? The Times did profile the victims of such ideologies; and the very headline of the piece – “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland” – undermined the claim that it was “glowing”. But the Times lacked the confidence to defend its own work. (As it happens, being platformed did not do much to increase the power of that Ohio man. He, his wife and his brother lost their jobs and the newly married couple lost the home intended for their muffin pan.)

I felt some days as if I’d parachuted onto one of those Pacific islands still held by Japanese soldiers who didn’t know that the world beyond the waves had changed

The editor’s note paraded the principle of publishing such pieces, saying it was important to “shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life”. But less light is what the readers got. As a reporter in the newsroom, you’d have to have been an idiot after that explosion to attempt such a profile. Empathetic reporting about Trump supporters became even more rare. It became a cliché among influential left-wing columnists and editors that blinkered political reporters interviewed a few Trump supporters in diners and came away suckered into thinking there was something besides racism that could explain anyone’s support for the man.

I failed to take the hint. As the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration approached, the editors who compile letters to the Times, part of my department, had put out a request to readers who supported the president to say what they thought of him now. The results had some nuance. “Yes, he is embarrassing,” wrote one reader. “Yes, he picks unnecessary fights. But he also pushed tax reform through, has largely defeated isis in Iraq,” and so forth. After a year spent publishing editorials attacking Trump and his policies, I thought it would be a demonstration of Timesian open-mindedness to give his supporters their say. Also, I thought the letters were interesting, so I turned over the entire editorial page to the Trump letters.

I wasn’t surprised that we got some criticism on Twitter. But I was astonished by the fury of my Times colleagues. I found myself facing an angry internal town hall, trying to justify what to me was an obvious journalistic decision. During the session, one of the newsroom’s journalists demanded to know when I would publish a page of letters from Barack Obama’s supporters. I stammered out some kind of answer. The question just didn’t make sense to me. Pretty much every day we published letters from people who supported Obama and criticised Trump. Didn’t he know that Obama wasn’t president any more? Didn’t he think other Times readers should understand the sources of Trump’s support? Didn’t he also see it was a wonderful thing that some Trump supporters did not just dismiss the Times as fake news, but still believed in it enough to respond thoughtfully to an invitation to share their views?

And if the Times could not bear to publish the views of Americans who supported Trump, why should it be surprised that those voters would not trust it? Two years later, in 2020, Baquet acknowledged that in 2016 the Times had failed to take seriously the idea that Trump could become president partly because it failed to send its reporters out into America to listen to voters and understand “the turmoil in the country”. And, he continued, the Times still did not understand the views of many Americans. “One of the great puzzles of 2016 remains a great puzzle,” he said. “Why did millions and millions of Americans vote for a guy who’s such an unusual candidate?” Speaking four months before we published the Cotton op-ed, he said that to argue that the views of such voters should not appear in the Times was “not journalistic”.

Conservative arguments in the Opinion pages reliably started uproars within the Times. Sometimes I would hear directly from colleagues who had the grace to confront me with their concerns; more often they would take to the company’s Slack channels or Twitter to advertise their distress in front of each other. By contrast, in my four years as Opinion editor, I received just two complaints from newsroom staff about pieces we published from the left. When I was visiting one of the Times’s West Coast bureaus, a reporter pulled me aside to say he worried that a liberal columnist was engaged in ad hominem attacks; a reporter in the Washington bureau wrote to me to object to an op-ed piece questioning the value of protecting free speech for right-wing groups.

This environment of enforced group-think, inside and outside the paper, was hard even on liberal opinion writers. One left-of-centre columnist told me that he was reluctant to appear in the New York office for fear of being accosted by colleagues. (An internal survey shortly after I left the paper found that barely half the staff, within an enterprise ostensibly devoted to telling the truth, agreed “there is a free exchange of views in this company” and “people are not afraid to say what they really think”.) Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy. I once complimented a long-time, left-leaning Opinion writer over a column criticising Democrats in Congress for doing something stupid. Trying to encourage more such journalism and thus less such stupidity, I remarked that this kind of argument had more influence than yet another Trump-is-a-devil column. “I know,” he replied, ruefully. “But Twitter hates it.”

The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious. Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias. By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”. And sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left.

Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy

The Times’s failure to honour its own stated principles of openness to a range of views was particularly hard on the handful of conservative writers, some of whom would complain about being flyspecked and abused by colleagues. One day when I relayed a conservative’s concern about double standards to Sulzberger, he lost his patience. He told me to inform the complaining conservative that that’s just how it was: there was a double standard and he should get used to it. A publication that promises its readers to stand apart from politics should not have different standards for different writers based on their politics. But I delivered the message. There are many things I regret about my tenure as editorial-page editor. That is the only act of which I am ashamed.

As I Realised How Different the New Times had become from the old one that trained me, I began to think of myself not as a benighted veteran on a remote island, but as Rip Van Winkle. I had left one newspaper, had a pleasant dream for ten years, and returned to a place I barely recognised. The new New York Times was the product of two shocks – sudden collapse, and then sudden success. The paper almost went bankrupt during the financial crisis, and the ensuing panic provoked a crisis of confidence among its leaders. Digital competitors like the HuffPost were gaining readers and winning plaudits within the media industry as innovative. They were the cool kids; Times folk were ink-stained wrinklies.

In its panic, the Times bought out experienced reporters and editors and began hiring journalists from publications like the HuffPost who were considered “digital natives” because they had never worked in print. This hiring quickly became easier, since most digital publications financed by venture capital turned out to be bad businesses. The advertising that was supposed to fund them flowed instead to the giant social-media companies. The HuffPosts and Buzzfeeds began to decay, and the Times’s subscriptions and staff began to grow.

I have been lucky in my own career to move between local and national and international journalism, newspapers and magazines, opinion and news, and the print and digital realms. I was even luckier in these various roles to have editors with a profound understanding of their particular form and a sense of duty about teaching it. The wipeout of local papers and the desperate transformation of survivors like the Times have left young reporters today with fewer such opportunities.

Though they might have lacked deep or varied reporting backgrounds, some of the Times’s new hires brought skills in video and audio; others were practised at marketing themselves – building their brands, as journalists now put it – in social media. Some were brilliant and fiercely honest, in keeping with the old aspirations of the paper. But, critically, the Times abandoned its practice of acculturation, including those months-long assignments on Metro covering cops and crime or housing. Many new hires who never spent time in the streets went straight into senior writing and editing roles. Meanwhile, the paper began pushing out its print-era salespeople and hiring new ones, and also hiring hundreds of engineers to build its digital infrastructure. All these recruits arrived with their own notions of the purpose of the Times. To me, publishing conservatives helped fulfil the paper’s mission; to them, I think, it betrayed that mission.

Dean Baquet, Former Executive Editor of the New York Times Addressing the Newsroom (Top).

And then, to the shock and horror of the newsroom, Trump won the presidency. In his article for Columbia Journalism Review, Sulzberger cites the Times’s failure to take Trump’s chances seriously as an example of how “prematurely shutting down inquiry and debate” can allow “conventional wisdom to ossify in a way that blinds society.” Many Times staff members – scared, angry – assumed the Times was supposed to help lead the resistance. Anxious for growth, the Times’s marketing team implicitly endorsed that idea, too.

As the number of subscribers ballooned, the marketing department tracked their expectations, and came to a nuanced conclusion. More than 95% of Times subscribers described themselves as Democrats or independents, and a vast majority of them believed the Times was also liberal. A similar majority applauded that bias; it had become “a selling point”, reported one internal marketing memo. Yet at the same time, the marketers concluded, subscribers wanted to believe that the Times was independent.

When you think about it, this contradiction resolves itself easily. It is human nature to want to see your bias confirmed; however, it is also human nature to want to be reassured that your bias is not just a bias, but is endorsed by journalism that is “fair and balanced”, as a certain Murdoch-owned cable-news network used to put it. As that memo argued, even if the Times was seen as politically to the left, it was critical to its brand also to be seen as broadening its readers’ horizons, and that required “a perception of independence”.

Perception is one thing, and actual independence another. Readers could cancel their subscriptions if the Times challenged their worldview by reporting the truth without regard to politics. As a result, the Times’s long-term civic value was coming into conflict with the paper’s short-term shareholder value. As the cable networks have shown, you can build a decent business by appealing to the millions of Americans who comprise one of the partisan tribes of the electorate. The Times has every right to pursue the commercial strategy that makes it the most money. But leaning into a partisan audience creates a powerful dynamic. Nobody warned the new subscribers to the Times that it might disappoint them by reporting truths that conflicted with their expectations. When your product is “independent journalism”, that commercial strategy is tricky, because too much independence might alienate your audience, while too little can lead to charges of hypocrisy that strike at the heart of the brand.

To the horror of the newsroom, Trump won the presidency. Many Times staff members – scared, angry – assumed the Times was supposed to help lead the resistance

It became one of Dean Baquet’s frequent mordant jokes that he missed the old advertising-based business model, because, compared with subscribers, advertisers felt so much less sense of ownership over the journalism. I recall his astonishment, fairly early in the Trump administration, after Times reporters conducted an interview with Trump. Subscribers were angry about the questions the Times had asked. It was as if they’d only be satisfied, Baquet said, if the reporters leaped across the desk and tried to wring the president’s neck. The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.

In my experience, reporters overwhelmingly support Democratic policies and candidates. They are generally also motivated by a desire for a more just world. Neither of those tendencies are new. But there has been a sea change over the past ten years in how journalists think about pursuing justice. The reporters’ creed used to have its foundation in liberalism, in the classic philosophical sense. The exercise of a reporter’s curiosity and empathy, given scope by the constitutional protections of free speech, would equip readers with the best information to form their own judgments. The best ideas and arguments would win out. The journalist’s role was to be a sworn witness; the readers’ role was to be judge and jury. In its idealised form, journalism was lonely, prickly, unpopular work, because it was only through unrelenting scepticism and questioning that society could advance. If everyone the reporter knew thought X, the reporter’s role was to ask: why X?

Illiberal journalists have a different philosophy, and they have their reasons for it. They are more concerned with group rights than individual rights, which they regard as a bulwark for the privileges of white men. They have seen the principle of free speech used to protect right-wing outfits like Project Veritas and Breitbart News and are uneasy with it. They had their suspicions of their fellow citizens’ judgment confirmed by Trump’s election, and do not believe readers can be trusted with potentially dangerous ideas or facts. They are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on. The term “objectivity” to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cosying up to power, as journalists often have done.

And they do not just want to be part of the cool crowd. They need to be. To be more valued by their peers and their contacts – and hold sway over their bosses – they need a lot of followers in social media. That means they must be seen to applaud the right sentiments of the right people in social media. The journalist from central casting used to be a loner, contrarian or a misfit. Now journalism is becoming another job for joiners, or, to borrow Twitter’s own parlance, “followers”, a term that mocks the essence of a journalist’s role.

This is a bit of a paradox. The new newsroom ideology seems idealistic, yet it has grown from cynical roots in academia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative – whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears – has the whip hand. What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine both in the public mind.

By contrast, the old newsroom ideology seems cynical on its surface. It used to bug me that my editors at the Times assumed every word out of the mouth of any person in power was a lie. And the pursuit of objectivity can seem reptilian, even nihilistic, in its abjuration of a fixed position in moral contests. But the basis of that old newsroom approach was idealistic: the notion that power ultimately lies in truth and ideas, and that the citizens of a pluralistic democracy, not leaders of any sort, must be trusted to judge both.

Our role in Times Opinion, I used to urge my colleagues, was not to tell people what to think, but to help them fulfil their desire to think for themselves. It seems to me that putting the pursuit of truth, rather than of justice, at the top of a publication’s hierarchy of values also better serves not just truth but justice, too: over the long term journalism that is not also sceptical of the advocates of any form of justice and the programmes they put forward, and that does not struggle honestly to understand and explain the sources of resistance, will not assure that those programmes will work, and it also has no legitimate claim to the trust of reasonable people who see the world very differently. Rather than advance understanding and durable change, it provokes backlash.

The impatience within the newsroom with such old ways was intensified by the generational failure of the Times to hire and promote women and non-white people, black people in particular. In the 1990s, and into the early part of this century, when I worked in the high-profile Washington bureau of the Times, usually at most two of the dozens of journalists stationed there were black. Before Baquet became executive editor, the highest-ranked black journalist at the Times had been my old Metro editor, Gerald Boyd. He rose to become managing editor before A.G. Sulzberger’s father pushed him out, along with the executive editor, Howell Raines, when a black reporter named Jayson Blair was discovered to be a fabulist. Boyd was said to have protected Blair, an accusation he denied and attributed to racism.

The accusation against Boyd never made sense to me. In my experience he was even harder on black and brown reporters than he was on us white people. He understood better than anyone what it would take for them to succeed at the Times. “The Times was a place where blacks felt they had to convince their white peers that they were good enough to be there,” he wrote in his heartbreaking memoir, published posthumously. He died in 2006 of lung cancer, three years after he was discarded.

Illiberal journalists are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on. The term “objectivity” to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cosying up to power

Pay attention if you are white at the Times and you will hear black editors speak of hiring consultants at their own expense to figure out how to get white staff to respect them. You might hear how a black journalist, passing through the newsroom, was asked by a white colleague whether he was the “telephone guy” sent to fix his extension. I certainly never got asked a question like that. Among the experienced journalists at the Times, black journalists were least likely, I thought, to exhibit fragility and herd behaviour.

As wave after wave of pain and outrage swept through the Times, over a headline that was not damning enough of Trump or someone’s obnoxious tweets, I came to think of the people who were fragile, the ones who were caught up in Slack or Twitter storms, as people who had only recently discovered that they were white and were still getting over the shock. Having concluded they had got ahead by working hard, it has been a revelation to them that their skin colour was not just part of the wallpaper of American life, but a source of power, protection and advancement. They may know a lot about television, or real estate, or how to edit audio files, but their work does not take them into shelters, or police precincts, or the homes of people who see the world very differently. It has never exposed them to live fire. Their idea of violence includes vocabulary.

I share the bewilderment that so many people could back Trump, given the things he says and does, and that makes me want to understand why they do: the breadth and diversity of his support suggests not just racism is at work. Yet these elite, well-meaning Times staff cannot seem to stretch the empathy they are learning to extend to people with a different skin colour to include those, of whatever race, who have different politics.

The digital natives were nevertheless valuable, not only for their skills but also because they were excited for the Times to embrace its future. That made them important allies of the editorial and business leaders as they sought to shift the Times to digital journalism and to replace staff steeped in the ways of print. Partly for that reason, and partly out of fear, the leadership indulged internal attacks on Times journalism, despite pleas from me and others, to them and the company as a whole, that Times folk should treat each other with more respect. My colleagues and I in Opinion came in for a lot of the scorn, but we were not alone. Correspondents in the Washington bureau and political reporters would take a beating, too, when they were seen as committing sins like “false balance” because of the nuance in their stories.

My fellow editorial and commercial leaders were well aware of how the culture of the institution had changed. As delighted as they were by the Times’s digital transformation they were not blind to the ideological change that came with it. They were unhappy with the bullying and group-think; we often discussed such cultural problems in the weekly meetings of the executive committee, composed of the top editorial and business leaders, including the publisher. Inevitably, these bitch sessions would end with someone saying a version of: “Well, at some point we have to tell them this is what we believe in as a newspaper, and if they don’t like it they should work somewhere else.” It took me a couple of years to realise that this moment was never going to come.

Top: Arthur Sulzberger, Former Publisher of the New York Times (left) with his Son A.G. Sulzberger at the Times building in 2017

More than 30 years ago, a young political reporter named Todd Purdum tremulously asked an all-staff meeting what would be done about the “climate of fear” within the newsroom in which reporters felt intimidated by their bosses? The moment immediately entered Times lore. There is a lot not to miss about the days when editors like Boyd could strike terror in young reporters like me and Purdum. But the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that editors now tremble before their reporters and even their interns. “I miss the old climate of fear,” Baquet used to say with a smile, in another of his barbed jokes.

During the First Meeting of the Times Board of Directors that I attended, in 2016, Baquet and I hosted a joint question-and-answer session. At one point, Baquet, musing about how the Times was changing, observed that one of the newsroom’s cultural critics had become the paper’s best political-opinion columnist. Taking this musing one step further, I then noted that this raised an obvious question: why did the paper still have an Opinion department separate from the newsroom, with its own editor reporting directly to the publisher? If the newsroom was publishing the best opinion journalism at the paper – if it was publishing opinion at all – why did the Times maintain a separate department that falsely claimed to have a monopoly on such journalism?

Everyone laughed. But I meant it, and I wish I’d pursued my point and talked myself out of the job. This contest over control of opinion journalism within the Times was not just a bureaucratic turf battle (though it was that, too). The newsroom’s embrace of opinion journalism has compromised the Times’s independence, misled its readers and fostered a culture of intolerance and conformity.

The Opinion department is a relic of the era when the Times enforced a line between news and opinion journalism. Editors in the newsroom did not touch opinionated copy, lest they be contaminated by it, and opinion journalists and editors kept largely to their own, distant floor within the Times building. Such fastidiousness could seem excessive, but it enforced an ethos that Times reporters owed their readers an unceasing struggle against bias in the news. But by the time I returned as editorial-page editor, more opinion columnists and critics were writing for the newsroom than for Opinion. As at the cable news networks, the boundaries between commentary and news were disappearing, and readers had little reason to trust that Times journalists were resisting rather than indulging their biases.

The publisher called to tell me the company was experiencing its largest sick day in history; people were turning down job offers because of the op-ed, and, he said, some people were quitting

The Times newsroom had added more cultural critics, and, as Baquet noted, they were free to opine about politics. Departments across the Times newsroom had also begun appointing their own “columnists”, without stipulating any rules that might distinguish them from columnists in Opinion. It became a running joke. Every few months, some poor editor in the newsroom or Opinion would be tasked with writing up guidelines that would distinguish the newsroom’s opinion journalists from those of Opinion, and every time they would ultimately throw up their hands.

I remember how shaken A.G. Sulzberger was one day when he was cornered by a cultural critic who had got wind that such guardrails might be put in place. The critic insisted he was an opinion writer, just like anyone in the Opinion department, and he would not be reined in. He wasn’t. (I checked to see if, since I left the Times, it had developed guidelines explaining the difference, if any, between a news columnist and opinion columnist. The paper’s spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha, did not respond to the question.)

The internet rewards opinionated work and, as news editors felt increasing pressure to generate page views, they began not just hiring more opinion writers but also running their own versions of opinionated essays by outside voices – historically, the province of Opinion’s op-ed department. Yet because the paper continued to honour the letter of its old principles, none of this work could be labelled “opinion” (it still isn’t). After all, it did not come from the Opinion department. And so a newsroom technology columnist might call for, say, unionisation of the Silicon Valley workforce, as one did, or an outside writer might argue in the business section for reparations for slavery, as one did, and to the average reader their work would appear indistinguishable from Times news articles.

By similarly circular logic, the newsroom’s opinion journalism breaks another of the Times’s commitments to its readers. Because the newsroom officially does not do opinion – even though it openly hires and publishes opinion journalists – it feels free to ignore Opinion’s mandate to provide a diversity of views. When I was editorial-page editor, there were a couple of newsroom columnists whose politics were not obvious. But the other newsroom columnists, and the critics, read as passionate progressives.

I urged Baquet several times to add a conservative to the newsroom roster of cultural critics. That would serve the readers by diversifying the Times’s analysis of culture, where the paper’s left-wing bias had become most blatant, and it would show that the newsroom also believed in restoring the Times’s commitment to taking conservatives seriously. He said this was a good idea, but he never acted on it. I couldn’t help trying the idea out on one of the paper’s top cultural editors, too: he told me he did not think Times readers would be interested in that point of view.

As the Times tried to compete for more readers online, homogenous opinion was spreading through the newsroom in other ways. News desks were urging reporters to write in the first person and to use more “voice”, but few newsroom editors had experience in handling that kind of journalism, and no one seemed certain where “voice” stopped and “opinion” began. The Times magazine, meanwhile, became a crusading progressive publication. Baquet liked to say the magazine was Switzerland, by which he meant that it sat between the newsroom and Opinion. But it reported only to the news side. Its work was not labelled as opinion and it was free to omit conservative viewpoints.

This creep of politics into the newsroom’s journalism helped the Times beat back some of its new challengers, at least those on the left. Competitors like Vox and the HuffPost were blending leftish politics with reporting and writing it up conversationally in the first person. Imitating their approach, along with hiring some of their staff, helped the Times repel them. But it came at a cost. The rise of opinion journalism over the past 15 years changed the newsroom’s coverage and its culture. The tiny redoubt of never-Trump conservatives in Opinion is swamped daily not only by the many progressives in that department but their reinforcements among the critics, columnists and magazine writers in the newsroom. They are generally excellent, but their homogeneity means Times readers are being served a very restricted range of views, some of them presented as straight news by a publication that still holds itself out as independent of any politics. And because the critics, newsroom columnists and magazine writers are the newsroom’s most celebrated journalists, they have disproportionate influence over the paper’s culture.

And yet the Times insists to the public that nothing has changed. By saying that it still holds itself to the old standard of strictly separating its news and opinion journalists, the paper leads its readers further into the trap of thinking that what they are reading is independent and impartial – and this misleads them about their country’s centre of political and cultural gravity. “Even though each day’s opinion pieces are typically among our most popular journalism and our columnists are among our most trusted voices, we believe opinion is secondary to our primary mission of reporting and should represent only a portion of a healthy news diet,” Sulzberger wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review. “For that reason, we’ve long kept the Opinion department intentionally small – it represents well under a tenth of our journalistic staff – and ensured that its editorial decision-making is walled off from the newsroom.”

I came to think of those caught up in Slack or Twitter storms as people who had only recently discovered that they were white and were still getting over the shock

When I was editorial-page editor, Sulzberger, who declined to be interviewed on the record for this article, worried a great deal about the breakdown in the boundaries between news and opinion. At one town hall, he was confronted by a staffer upset that we in Opinion had begun doing more original reporting, which was a priority for me. Sulzberger replied he was much less worried about reporting in the Opinion coverage than by opinion in the news report – a fine moment, I thought then and think now, in his leadership. He told me once that he would like to restructure the paper to have one editor oversee all its news reporters, another all its opinion journalists and a third all its service journalists, the ones who supply guidance on buying gizmos or travelling abroad. Each of these editors would report to him. That is the kind of action the Times needs to take now to confront its hypocrisy and begin restoring its independence.

The Times could learn something from the Wall Street Journal, which has kept its journalistic poise. It has maintained a stricter separation between its news and opinion journalism, including its cultural criticism, and that has protected the integrity of its work. After I was chased out of the Times, Journal reporters and other staff attempted a similar assault on their opinion department. Some 280 of them signed a letter listing pieces they found offensive and demanding changes in how their opinion colleagues approached their work. “Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility,” shrugged the Journal’s editorial board in a note to readers after the letter was leaked. “The signers report to the news editors or other parts of the business.” The editorial added, in case anyone missed the point, “We are not the New York Times.” That was the end of it.

Unlike the publishers of the Journal, however, Sulzberger is in a bind, or at least perceives himself to be. The confusion within the Times over its role, and the rising tide of intolerance among the reporters, the engineers, the business staff, even the subscribers – these are all problems he inherited, in more ways than one. He seems to feel constrained in confronting the paper’s illiberalism by the very source of his authority. He is sensitive about the idiosyncratic way he reached the pinnacle of American news media, via his family’s control of the paper’s voting stock. Once, when I told him we were preparing an editorial series on nepotism within the Trump White House, he was quick to note that the Times was in a glass house when it came to such criticism.

The paradox is that in previous generations the Sulzbergers’ control was the bulwark of the paper’s independence. For this publisher, it seems also to be a vulnerability. He noted in the Columbia Journalism Review that he is “a wealthy white man who succeeded a series of other wealthy white men with the same first and last name.” His background, he wrote, may make him “uniquely, perhaps even comically, unpersuasive” in the debate over journalistic principles. That confession read like throat-clearing before his lengthy exposition of “independent journalism”, and it is right for people to be aware of the blinders and biases created by their upbringing. But if he is going to instil the principles he believes in, he needs to stop worrying so much about his powers of persuasion, and start using the power he is so lucky to have.

Tom Cotton Had Written two op-eds for us in Opinion, making the case for buying Greenland and defending Trump’s decision to assassinate the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, General Qassem Suleimani. Adam Rubenstein, a rising talent in Opinion, had helped edit the second of these pieces. Rubenstein had brought in dozens of op-eds by then that reflected a variety of voices, ideas and politics, and had received a note of praise from Sulzberger himself, for a piece by a former congressman, Joe Walsh, a Tea Party favourite who had called for a primary challenge to Trump. But Rubenstein had a background in conservative journalism, and within the Times his work in soliciting pieces from conservatives had put a target on his back.

Top: Donald Trump with Cotton (Left) Speaking at the White House in 2017. Bottom: A Man Smashing a Cash Register Following the Death of George Floyd in 2020

In early June 2020 Cotton’s office pitched a piece about Twitter’s curation of its platform. Cotton had tweeted that Trump should call out troops to stop the “anarchy, rioting and looting” if “local law enforcement is overwhelmed”, and Twitter had threatened to censor his account. Jim Dao, the op-ed editor, was more interested in the substance of the tweet and, via Rubenstein, asked Cotton to write an op-ed about that.

That was the right thing to do. Trump was starting to call for the use of troops, and on May 31st the mayor of Washington, DC, had requested that the National Guard be deployed in her city. After police gassed protesters before Trump posed for a photo in Lafayette Square on June 1st, the editorial board, which I led, weighed in against that use of force and Trump’s “incendiary behaviour”, and the op-ed team had pieces planned for June 3rd arguing he did not have a sound basis to call out federal forces and would be wrong to do so. In keeping with the basic practice of the op-ed page, which was created to present points of view at odds with Times editorials, Dao owed readers the counter-argument. They also needed to know someone so influential with the president was making this argument, and how he was making it.

I knew the piece was coming, and that Dao had asked for substantive revisions to the first draft. At the time, Rubenstein was assisting me with research for a daily newsletter I was writing, and I asked him when we met on the morning of June 3rd to make sure Cotton was distinguishing clearly between rioters and protesters. He did: “A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants,” Cotton wrote. From Cotton’s perspective, it was leftist elites who were confusing the two. In the op-ed, he decried any “revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters”.

Rubenstein also told me that in one draft Cotton had linked disapprovingly to a tweet from a Times reporter that could be read as expressing support for the rioters. I told Rubenstein to make sure that this link was removed. I had prohibited criticising any work, including any social-media activity, from the newsroom, unless I ran the idea by a senior newsroom editor first.

Shortly after we published the op-ed that Wednesday afternoon, some reporters tweeted their opposition to Cotton’s argument. But the real action was in the Times’s Slack channels, where reporters and other staff began not just venting but organising. They turned to the union to draw up a workplace complaint about the op-ed. At least one of the reporters who covered news media took a strong position in this internal debate: “Amplifying a message that argues for MORE force only puts our own people in harm’s way, and undermines the paper’s commitment to their safety,” this reporter argued to colleagues in Slack, going on to offer suggestions for how the union should attack the op-ed: “I think it’s good that a lot of us will put our names on a strong condemnation.”

Their work does not take them into shelters, or police precincts, or the homes of people who see the world very differently. It has never exposed them to live fire. Their idea of violence includes vocabulary

The next day, this reporter shared the byline on the Times story about the op-ed. That article did not mention that Cotton had distinguished between “peaceful, law-abiding protesters” and “rioters and looters”. In fact, the first sentence reported that Cotton had called for “the military to suppress protests against police violence”.

This was – and is – wrong. You don’t have to take my word for that. You can take the Times’s. Three days later in its article on my resignation it also initially reported that Cotton had called “for military force against protesters in American cities”. This time, after the article was published on the Times website, the editors scrambled to rewrite it, replacing “military force” with “military response” and “protesters” with “civic unrest”. That was a weaselly adjustment – Cotton wrote about criminality, not “unrest” – but the article at least no longer unambiguously misrepresented Cotton’s argument to make it seem he was in favour of crushing democratic protest. The Times did not publish a correction or any note acknowledging the story had been changed.

Seeking to influence the outcome of a story you cover, particularly without disclosing that to the reader, violates basic principles I was raised on at the Times. I asked the Times if the media reporter’s behaviour was ethical. The spokeswoman, Ms Rhoades Ha, did not answer the question but instead wrote in an email that the reporter was assigned to the story after posting the messages in Slack and the “editors were unaware of those Slack messages”. The reporter, apparently asked by the Times to write to me, immediately followed with an email that said: “In the heat of the moment, I made comments on an internal Slack channel that, as a media reporter, I should not have” but that “the factual reporting I contributed to the story is not at issue.” (I am not naming this journalist because I do not want to point the finger at a single reporter when, in my view, an editor should be taking responsibility for the coverage.) Ms Rhoades Ha disputes my characterisation of the after-the-fact editing of the story about my resignation. She said the editors changed the story after it was published on the website in order to “refine” it and “add context”, and so the story did not merit a correction disclosing to the reader that changes had been made.

I asked if it was accurate and fair to report that Cotton called for “the military to suppress protests against police violence”, as the June 4th story still does. In response, Ms Rhoades Ha supplied an opinion from a Times lawyer which noted that Cotton called for a military presence to “deter lawbreakers”. The lawyer argued that because some protesters violated curfews, failed to get permits or disperse when police ordered them to, they could be considered “lawbreakers”, just like the rioters and looters Cotton explicitly referred to. I followed up, saying I was seeking an editorial rather than a legal opinion, and asking again whether the Times believed its characterisation of Cotton’s argument was not just accurate, but fair. Ms Rhoades Ha again referred me to the lawyer’s opinion.

She also defended the Times more broadly: “The New York Times believes unequivocally in the principle of independence, as has been demonstrated consistently by our journalism before and since that episode. There are countless examples of the Times standing strong against pressure and protest, whether from governments, companies, politicians, activist groups or even internally. In the case of the Tom Cotton op-ed, the handling of such a sensitive piece, specifically the decision to rush it into publication without key leaders having read it because it was “newsy”, made it unusually vulnerable to attack. Good principles, as the Cotton op-ed demonstrated, cannot be an excuse for bad execution.”

In retrospect what seems almost comical is that as the conflict over Cotton’s op-ed unfolded within the Times I acted as though it was on the level, as though the staff of the Times would have a good-faith debate about Cotton’s piece and the decision to publish it. Instead, people wanted to vent and achieve what they considered to be justice, whether through Twitter, Slack, the union or the news pages themselves. Engaging with them at all was a mistake. That first night after the op-ed was published, when I called Baquet, his sage advice was to say nothing. Give it time, he said. Let this play out. The publisher disagreed. He thought we needed to say something that night explaining why we chose to publish the piece, and so we kept heaping more logs on the fire.

My colleagues in Opinion, together with the pr team, put together a series of connected tweets describing the purpose behind publishing Cotton’s op-ed. Rather than publish these tweets from the generic Times Opinion Twitter account, Sulzberger encouraged me to do it from my personal one, on the theory that this would humanise our defence. I doubted that would make any difference, but it was certainly my job to take responsibility. So I sent out the tweets, sticking my head in a Twitter bucket that clangs, occasionally, to this day. At the publisher’s direction, I then wrote an explanation of the decision to publish the op-ed for the next day’s edition of the Opinion newsletter. Reading that piece now, I think it holds up. It was not defensive and it dealt with the strongest criticisms. It concluded with a sentiment that I’ve always thought journalists should bring to all their work, and which I intended as an invitation to debate. (“It is impossible to feel righteous about any of this. I know that my own view may be wrong.”) But no one took me up on that.

What Is Worth Recalling Now from the bedlam of the next two days? I suppose there might be lessons for someone interested in how not to manage a corporate crisis. I began making my own mistakes that Thursday. The union condemned our publication of Cotton, for supposedly putting journalists in danger, claiming that he had called on the military “to ‘detain’ and ‘subdue’ Americans protesting racism and police brutality” – again, a misrepresentation of his argument. The publisher called to tell me the company was experiencing its largest sick day in history; people were turning down job offers because of the op-ed, and, he said, some people were quitting. He had been expecting for some time that the union would seek a voice in editorial decision-making; he said he thought this was the moment the union was making its move. He had clearly changed his own mind about the value of publishing the Cotton op-ed.

Times readers are being served a very restricted range of views, some of them presented as straight news by a publication that still holds itself out as independent of any politics

I asked Dao to have our fact-checkers review the union’s claims. But then I went a step further: at the publisher’s request, I urged him to review the editing of the piece itself and come back to me with a list of steps we could have taken to make it better. Dao’s reflex – the correct one – was to defend the piece as published. He and three other editors of varying ages, genders and races had helped edit it; it had been fact-checked, as is all our work. But I resisted, worried that we had put Sulzberger in a hard position. In Opinion we had grown accustomed to the wrath of our colleagues, but this time the publisher was in the line of fire as well.

I told myself there was nothing false about this. There isn’t an article out of the many thousands I have written or edited that I do not think, in retrospect, could have met a higher standard in some way – and Cotton’s op-ed is no exception. And I thought that by saying we could have somehow made the piece better, we would dispel the heat within the Times but affirm the principle that it was the kind of piece we should publish. This was my last failed attempt to have the debate within the Times that I had been seeking for four years, about why it was important to present Times readers with arguments like Cotton’s. The staff at the paper never wanted to have that debate. The Cotton uproar was the most extreme version of the internal reaction we faced whenever we published conservative arguments that were not simply anti-Trump. Yes, yes, of course we believe in the principle of publishing diverse views, my Times colleagues would say, but why this conservative? Why this argument?

Most of the union’s assertions were wrong, but in going back over the piece the fact-checker did find a minor error. Cotton had accidentally left some words from a legal opinion in quotation marks that he should have put in his own voice. Dao also dutifully itemised language that we might have softened, and said the headline, “Send in the Troops” should in retrospect have been made more palatable, if duller. I doubt these changes would have mattered, and to extract this list from Dao was to engage in precisely the hypocrisy I claimed to despise – that, in fact, I do despise. If Cotton needed to be held to such standards of politesse, so did everyone else. Headlines such as “Tom Cotton’s Fascist Op-ed”, the headline of a subsequent piece, should also have been tranquillised.

As that miserable Thursday wore on, Sulzberger, Baquet and I held a series of Zoom meetings with reporters and editors from the newsroom who wanted to discuss the op-ed. Though a handful of the participants were there to posture, these were generally constructive conversations. A couple of people, including Baquet, even had the guts to speak up in favour of publishing the op-ed. Two moments stick out. At one point, in answer to a question, Sulzberger and Baquet both said they thought the op-ed – as the Times union and many journalists were saying – had in fact put journalists in danger. That was the first time I realised I might be coming to the end of the road. The other was when a pop-culture reporter asked if I had read the op-ed before it was published. I said I had not. He immediately put his head down and started typing, and I should have paid attention rather than moving on to the next question. He was evidently sharing the news with the company over Slack.

Top: Baquet (Second left) and Bennet (Third left) Applauding a Pulitzer-prize Winner from the Times in 2019. Bottom: A Black Lives Matter Protest in New York, Four Days after George Floyd’s Death, on May 15th 2020

If he had followed up, or I had, I might have explained that this was standard practice. Dao’s name was on the masthead of the New York Times because he was in charge of the op-ed section. If I insisted on reviewing every piece, I would have been doing his job for him – and been betraying a crippling lack of trust in one of the papers’ finest editors. After I departed, and other Opinion staff quit or were reassigned, the Times later made him Metro editor, a sign of its own continued confidence in him. Every job review I had at the Times urged me to step back from the daily coverage to focus on the long term. (Hilariously, one review, urging me to move faster in upending the Opinion department, instructed me to take risks and “ask for forgiveness not permission”.)

It was important to me to read pieces in advance that might cause an uproar, and I had asked Dao and his deputy to alert me to any they thought would be particularly sensitive, but they did not think the Cotton piece rose to that level. I had also instituted an “if-you-see-something-say-something” policy in Opinion as a whole. Nobody raised a red flag with me. To be clear – I don’t fault anyone for this; I mention it only as an index of how much easier it was to judge in hindsight, after publication, when a piece was explosive. In any event, if anyone had raised an alarm, I might have edited the piece differently, but that would not have changed the outcome. Given the pieces we had already published and planned to publish opposing the position Cotton argued, we would still have published it – it was, in my view at the time, the kind of viewpoint the Sulzbergers had said they wanted to see also represented in the Times. And the critics would hardly have been mollified had it been more persuasive.

I learned when these meetings were over that there had been a new eruption in Slack. Times staff were saying that Rubenstein had been the sole editor of the op-ed. In response, Dao had gone into Slack to clarify to the entire company that he had also edited it himself. But when the Times posted the news article that evening, it reported, “The Op-Ed was edited by Adam Rubenstein” and made no mention of Dao’s statement. One of the ironies of this episode was that it was not any newsroom reporter but Rubenstein who wound up receiving death threats because of the Cotton op-ed, and it was the newsroom that put him in harm’s way. I would put Times Opinion’s standards for the editing of Cotton’s op-ed up against the Times newsroom’s standards for its coverage of the op-ed any day of the week.

By unhappy – but, really, also quite funny – coincidence, a meeting of the entire company had been scheduled over Zoom for the next morning. The plan had been for the newsroom to talk about its coverage of the protests. Now the only subject was going to be the op-ed. Early that morning, I got an email from Sam Dolnick, a Sulzberger cousin and a top editor at the paper, who said he felt “we” – he could have only meant me – owed the whole staff “an apology for appearing to place an abstract idea like open debate over the value of our colleagues’ lives, and their safety”. He was worried that I and my colleagues had unintentionally sent a message to other people at the Times that: “We don’t care about their full humanity and their security as much as we care about our ideas.”

One of the ironies was that it was not any newsroom reporter but a comment editor who wound up receiving death threats, and it was the newsroom that put him in harm’s way

Like his cousin, the publisher, Dolnick is a smart guy with a good heart, and I know he meant well. But I was staggered by his email, by how different his conception was of the role of journalism, and of my own commitment to it. Did he really think I saw this as an academic exercise, or some kind of game? My mother survived the Holocaust in Poland, and it took years for her and the remnant of our family to be admitted to the United States. Did he really think I believed ideas had no consequences for people’s lives? I guess I was also fed up. I wrote to the publisher, who had been copied in on Dolnick’s note.

“I know you don’t like it when I talk about principles at a moment like this,” I began. But I viewed the journalism I had been doing, at the Times and before that at the Atlantic, in very different terms from the ones Dolnick presumed. “I don’t think of our work as an abstraction without meaning for people’s lives – quite the opposite,” I continued. “The whole point – the reason I do this – is to have an impact on their lives to the good. I have always believed that putting ideas, including potentially dangerous one[s], out in the public is vital to ensuring they are debated and, if dangerous, discarded.” It was, I argued, in “edge cases like this that principles are tested”, and if my position was judged wrong then “I am out of step with the times.” But, I concluded, “I don’t think of us as some kind of debating society without implications for the real world and I’ve never been unmindful of my colleagues’ humanity.”

Sulzberger did not reply. But in the end, one thing he and I surely agree on is that I was, in fact, out of step with the Times. It may have raised me as a journalist – and invested so much in educating me to what were once its standards – but I did not belong there any more.

In retrospect, it seems clear that I was done by then. The executive committee gathered that morning to prepare, and for the first time I was not invited to join them. They had solicited questions in advance, and I got a glimpse at the list only as the company-wide meeting was about to start. I did not hear from Sulzberger, but the speechwriter who drafted many of his remarks, Alex Levy, contacted me just before the meeting began to tell me to use whatever question I got first to apologise, and at some point to acknowledge my privilege.

A Zoom call with a couple of thousand people is a disorienting experience, particularly when many of them are not particularly mindful of your “full humanity”. I do not recommend it. As my first turn to speak came up, I was still struggling with what I should apologise for. I was not going to apologise for denying my colleagues’ humanity or endangering their lives. I had not done those things. I was not going to apologise for publishing the op-ed. Finally, I came up with something that felt true. I told the meeting that I was sorry for the pain that my leadership of Opinion had caused. What a pathetic thing to say. I did not think to add, because I’d lost track of this truth myself by then, that opinion journalism that never causes pain is not journalism. It can’t hope to move society forward.

Baquet spoke movingly about how, as a black man, he was vulnerable in ways a white man was not when he left his apartment wearing a hoodie and a mask, to ward off covid. Speaking into the void, via the unblinking eye above my computer screen, I said I knew, as a white man, I was in a very different position. When I stepped out into the street, I was protected by my privilege. But I added that I did know what it was like to be a reporter out in the field, alone, surrounded by armed, hostile people. I knew what it was like to be shot at, and to see a fellow journalist shot in front of me. And so I took to heart the criticism that I’d endangered my colleagues. I’d been raised – raised at the Times – to believe the best way to confront ideas that some people might consider dangerous was to bring them out into the open. But I recognised that many of my colleagues thought that was wrong. And I said I would like to debate with them whether it was time to discard the old approach, and, if that was the case, what role opinion journalism should have at the Times.

As I look back at my notes of that awful day, I don’t regret what I said. Even during that meeting, I was still hoping the blow-up might at last give me the chance either to win support for what I had been asked to do, or to clarify once and for all that the rules for journalism had changed at the Times.

But no one wanted to talk about that. Nor did they want to hear about all the voices of vulnerable or underprivileged people we had been showcasing in Opinion, or the ambitious new journalism we were doing. Instead, my Times colleagues demanded to know things such as the names of every editor who had had a role in the Cotton piece. Having seen what happened to Rubenstein I refused to tell them. A Slack channel had been set up to solicit feedback in real time during the meeting, and it was filling with hate. The meeting ran long, and finally came to a close after 90 minutes.

A Zoom call with a couple of thousand people is a disorienting experience, particularly when many of them are not particularly mindful of your “full humanity”. I do not recommend it

One last dismal task lay ahead. I had agreed to take the rare step of posting an “Editor’s Note” on the Cotton op-ed describing what was supposedly wrong with it, and the publisher had asked a newsroom editor to draft it for him. Although I had urged Dao to come up with “process” criticisms, I tried to insist, as did Dao, that the note make clear the Cotton piece was within our editorial bounds. Sulzberger said he felt the Times could afford to be “silent” on that question. In the end the note went far further in repudiating the piece than I anticipated, saying it should never have been published at all. The next morning I was told to resign.

What An Intense Period That Was, inside the Times and across America. In spring 2020 covid-19 chased people into their homes in fear, and then, as spring turned to summer, the murder of George Floyd brought many of them out into the streets in anger. Or maybe the emotions were the other way around. We were also angry at the virus, and at the government’s handling of it, and at our employers; and we were afraid of the police, or of the rioters, or of white people or black people, Democrats or Republicans. It was a terrible moment for the country. By the traditional – and perverse – logic of journalism, that should also have made it an inspiring time to be a reporter, writer or editor. Journalists are supposed to run towards scenes that others are fleeing, towards hard truths others need to know, towards consequential ideas they would prefer to ignore.

But fear got all mixed up with anger inside the Times, too, along with a desire to act locally in solidarity with the national movement. That energy found a focus in the Cotton op-ed. Scattered as we were by covid, none of us at the Times could speak face to face, and nobody was thinking very clearly. That seems understandable, given the frantic pile-up of circumstances. It would be reasonable now for all of us – me, Sulzberger, the journalists who were declaring their fright on Twitter – to look back, shake our heads and say that was a crazy time, and we all made some mistakes.

But the Times is not good at acknowledging mistakes. Indeed, one of my own, within the Times culture, was to take responsibility for any mistakes my department made, and even some it didn’t. To Sulzberger, the meltdown over Cotton’s op-ed and my departure in disgrace are explained and justified by a failure of editorial “process”. As he put it in an interview with the New Yorker this summer, after publishing his piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, Cotton’s piece was not “perfectly fact-checked” and the editors had not “thought about the headline and presentation”. He contrasted the execution of Cotton’s opinion piece with that of a months-long investigation the newsroom did of Donald Trump’s taxes (which was not “perfectly fact-checked”, as it happens – it required a correction). He did not explain why, if the Times was an independent publication, an op-ed making a mainstream conservative argument should have to meet such different standards from an op-ed making any other kind of argument, such as for the abolition of the police. “It’s not enough just to have the principle and wave it around,” he said. “You also have to execute on it.”

To me, extolling the virtue of independent journalism in the pages of the Columbia Journalism Review is how you wave a principle around. Publishing a piece like Cotton’s is how you execute on it. As Sulzberger also wrote in the Review, “Independent journalism, especially in a pluralistic democracy, should err on the side of treating areas of serious political contest as open, unsettled, and in need of further inquiry.” It matters that conflicting views do not just appear before different audiences in politically rivalrous publications or cable news networks, but instead in the same forum, before the same readers, subject to the same standards for fact and argumentation. That is also, by the way, an important means by which politicians, like Cotton, can learn, by speaking to audiences who are not inclined to nod along with them. That was our ambition for Times Opinion – or mine, I guess. Americans can shout about their lack of free speech all they want, but they will never be able to overcome their differences, and deal with any of their real problems, if they do not learn to listen to each other again.

Baquet Outside the New York Times Building in 2019

If Sulzberger must insist on comparing the execution of the Cotton op-ed with that of the most ambitious of newsroom projects, let him compare it with something really important, the 1619 Project, which commemorated the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia. Like Cotton’s piece, the 1619 Project was fact-checked and copy-edited (most of the Times newsroom does not fact-check or copy-edit articles, but the magazine does). But it nevertheless contained mistakes, as journalism often does. Some of these mistakes ignited a firestorm among historians and other readers.

And, like Cotton’s piece, the 1619 Project was presented in a way the Times later judged to be too provocative. The Times declared that the 1619 Project “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding”. That bold statement – a declaration of Times fact, not opinion, since it came from the newsroom – outraged many Americans who venerated 1776 as the founding. The Times later stealthily erased it from the digital version of the project, but was caught doing so by a writer for the publication Quillette. Sulzberger told me during the initial uproar that the top editors in the newsroom – not just Baquet but his deputy – had not reviewed the audacious statement of purpose, one of the biggest editorial claims the paper has ever made. They also, of course, did not edit all the pieces themselves, trusting the magazine’s editors to do that work.

If the 1619 Project and the Cotton op-ed shared the same supposed flaws and excited similar outrage, how come that one is lauded as a landmark success and the other is a sackable offence? In asking this, I am not running down the 1619 Project. It was excellent, above all because it made arguments readers should hear and consider. And to be clear: unlike Sulzberger, I do not see any equivalence between any huge project like that and a single op-ed piece. The parallel is absurd. I am comparing them only to meet Sulzberger on his terms, in order to illuminate what he is trying to elide. What distinguished the Cotton piece was not an error, or strong language, or that I didn’t edit it personally. What distinguished that op-ed was not process. It was politics. It is one thing for the Times to aggravate historians, or conservatives, or even old-school liberals who believe in open debate. It has become quite another for the Times to challenge some members of its own staff with ideas that might contradict their view of the world.

The lessons of the incident are not about how to write a headline but about how much the Times has changed – how digital technology, the paper’s new business model and the rise of new ideals among its staff have altered its understanding of the boundary between news and opinion, and of the relationship between truth and justice. Ejecting me was one way to avoid confronting the question of which values the Times is committed to. Waving around the word “process” is another.

What still seems most striking about the Cotton episode is how out of sync the leaders of the paper were with the ascendant, illiberal values within it. Cotton’s essay brought into focus conflicts over the role of journalism that had been growing within the Times for years, and that the leadership has largely ducked away from. Is it journalism’s role to salt wounds or to salve them, to promote debates or settle them, to ask or to answer? Is its proper posture humble or righteous? As journalists trained in what was once the conventional way, with the old set of principles, Sulzberger, Baquet and I reacted similarly to Cotton’s essay: here’s a potentially consequential idea from an influential voice. It may make readers uncomfortable, and they should know about it and evaluate it partly for that very reason.

What still seems most striking about the Cotton episode is how out of sync the leaders of the paper were with the ascendant, illiberal values within it

Times colleagues who were frightened or angry about the piece had the opposite view: that readers should not hear Cotton’s argument. To expose them to it was to risk that they might be persuaded by an elected politician.

As he asserts the independence of Times journalism, Sulzberger is finding it necessary to reach back several years to another piece I chose to run, for proof that the Times remains willing to publish views that might offend its staff. “We’ve published a column by the head of the part of the Taliban that kidnapped one of our own journalists,” he told the New Yorker. He is missing the real lesson of that piece, as well.

That op-ed was a tough editorial call. It troubles my conscience as publishing Tom Cotton never has. But the reason is not that the writer, Sirajuddin Haqqani, the deputy leader of the Taliban, kidnapped a Times reporter (David Rohde, now of nbc, with whom I covered the Israeli siege of Jenin on the West Bank 20 years ago; he would never be afraid of an op-ed). The case against that piece is that Haqqani, who remains on the fbi’s most-wanted terrorist list, may have killed Americans. It’s puzzling: in what moral universe can it be a point of pride to publish a piece by an enemy who may have American blood on his hands, and a matter of shame to publish a piece by an American senator arguing for American troops to protect Americans?

As Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, said on the Senate floor about the Times’s panic over the Cotton op-ed, listing some other debatable op-ed choices, “Vladimir Putin? No problem. Iranian propaganda? Sure. But nothing, nothing could have prepared them for 800 words from the junior senator from Arkansas.” The Times’s staff members are not often troubled by obnoxious views when they are held by foreigners. This is an important reason the paper’s foreign coverage, at least of some regions, remains exceptional. It is relatively safe from internal censure. Less than four months after I was pushed out, my former department published a shocking op-ed praising China’s military crackdown on protesters in Hong Kong. I would not have published that essay, which, unlike Cotton’s op-ed, actually did celebrate crushing democratic protest. But there was no internal uproar.

The opportunity the Times threw away in repudiating the Cotton piece goes deeper than a setback to Sulzberger’s hopes that the paper will be seen as independent by anyone disinclined to nod along with its representation of reality. What seems most important and least understood about that episode is that it demonstrated in real time the value of the ideals that I poorly defended in the moment, ideals that not just the Times’s staff but many other college-educated Americans are abandoning.

After all, we ran the experiment; we published the piece. Was any Times journalist hurt? No. Nobody in the country was. In fact, though it is impossible to know the op-ed’s precise effect, polling showed that support for a military option dropped after the Times published the essay, as the Washington Post’s media critic, Erik Wemple, has written. If anything, in other words, publishing the piece stimulated debate that made it less likely Cotton’s position would prevail. The liberal, journalistic principle of open debate was vindicated in the very moment the Times was fleeing from it. Maybe if the Times would put more trust again in the intelligence and decency of Americans, more Americans would again trust the Times. Journalism, like democracy, works best when people refuse to surrender to fear. ■

— James Bennet is The Economist’s Lexington Columnist | Illustrations: Michelle Thompson | Images: © New York Times/Redux/Yevine, Natan Dvir/Eyevine, Getty Images, AP

[leupagus]

“Police Response Slowed. The Community Stepped In.”

X

In Minneapolis this summer, 911 response times increased as officers left the force. Instead of asking for more police, some residents reimagined public safety for themselves.

By Sarah Holder, Rachael Dottle, and Marie Patino, 

October 30, 2020, 11:14 AM EDT; Updated on October 30, 2020, 1:17 PM EDT                                       

Every night for the past several months, pairs of bicyclists in high-visibility vests fanned across Minneapolis’s Powderhorn neighborhood after sunset, and stayed out until 2 or 3 in the morning. They were there to keep watch over the neighborhood, but they don’t have any affiliation with the police or city government. Instead they’re residents of the community, there to de-escalate or monitor incidents they hear about by scanning their social media and group chats.

The team, which calls itself the Powderhorn Safety Collective, is one of a handful of ad hoc community safety groups that have emerged in the city’s south side after a police officer killed George Floyd in May. They’re taking an unconventional approach to answering the question echoing in cities across the country: What would a community that was less reliant on police look like?

Minneapolis City Council members started asking that question in earnest this June, pledging to dismantle the existing police department and start from the ground up. Activists, reformers and abolitionists have been exploring the path to a police-free future for decades. But in the Ninth Ward, says Pouya Najmaie, an environmental lobbyist and a founding member of the Powderhorn Safety Collective, creating an alternative to traditional law enforcement wasn’t a thought experiment. It was a necessity.

For many Black and brown Minneapolitans, calling 911 had never been an impulse, and watching Floyd die under the knee of an Minneapolis Police Department officer further eroded trust in the institution. This summer, however, residents also observed that even for those who did call 911, the police were responding more slowly. In some cases, it seemed they might not be responding at all. “People are very distrustful that [police] can actually do their job, and they're just not doing their job,” said Oluchi Omeoga, an organizer with Minnesota’s Black Visions Collective, a queer-led group that’s become a leading voice in the movement to remake policing in Minneapolis. “It's both, and.��� A Bloomberg CityLab analysis puts numbers to that emerging dynamic. In June, the average time it took for the police to assign a unit to 911 calls — the first step to dispatching officers — had slowed by 88% across all five precincts compared to the average from 2019 to early 2020. By August, it was still about 40% slower than before May. A previous CityLab report found that traffic stops were down 80% from the period before May 25, the day of George Floyd’s death. Not all these trends appear destined to stick. As protests die down, the colder winter months arrive, and the calls to disband the police department soften, response times have begun recalibrating back to pre-May levels. But the department may end the year with at least one longer-term change in resources: There are about 130 fewer officers than there were a year ago, Police Chief Medaria Arradondo told MPR News. Many of them are retiring early, and more are likely in the process of leaving; hundreds have reportedly applied for medical leave, citing post-traumatic stress disorder. An MPD spokesperson said there were 830 sworn officers as of Oct. 15, but didn’t respond to any other requests for comment. Locals have debated any number of reasons why such a slowdown in 911 response time might be happening, from an act of political retaliation in the face of scrutiny, to a reflection of depleted morale, to the aforementioned lack of personnel. Whatever the reasons, with rates for some violent crimes spiking in the city amid economic devastation from Covid-19, the trend illuminates another dimension of police accountability: Just as over-policing can have disproportionate adverse consequences for Black people, the impacts of withholding police response from communities can be harmful, too. “Despite our name, we have always considered lack of police service to be the flip side of police brutality, and sometimes just as damaging,” says Dave Bicking, an organizer with Minneapolis’s Communities United Against Police Brutality.

A Minneapolis Star-Tribune analysis of rising crime rates found that while the trend has been observed citywide, “in terms of raw numbers, the increase in violence that intensified after the unrest over the police killing of George Floyd is exacting a heavier toll on neighborhoods already suffering the effects of trauma, poverty and lack of access to adequate health care.” Slowed response times have happened before; so have crime spikes that disproportionately affect already-burdened neighborhoods. What’s different this year, in this city, is how the community and the reform-minded council have reacted to the reports of insufficient police service. The mayor has released a proposal for next year’s budget ahead of a December vote, and demands to substantially reduce funding for the department are not reflected. Several members of the city council have walked back earlier sweeping pledges to disband the department. But as calls grow to divert some non-violent incidents from the police to crisis intervention teams or mental health responders, the department’s disengagement has also been taken as more evidence that the public safety models that exist aren’t working — and as motivation to create new ones, faster. “Previously, I would get really angry calls that say, hey, why aren't you funding the police more?” said Steve Fletcher, a Minneapolis Council member who represents the city’s Third Ward and has proposed reforms unpopular with the police department in the past. “And now the calls I'm getting are much more reflective of the moment we’re in, I think, where they’re saying: ‘What are we paying them for at all? They’re saying they can’t help, they’re saying they don’t have a strategy. Why the hell do we have them?’”

For some residents, the city’s response hasn’t been fast enough. And they’re starting to fill what they see as a void on their own.

‘The phones could ring forever’

In January, before the pandemic threw a wrench in daily activities, Minneapolis police would take an average of 23 minutes to arrive at the scene after responding to the average 911 call. Priority 1 calls, which concern the most urgent issues — shots fired, threats to life or assaults, along with suspicious vehicles or domestic disturbances — took the shortest, at 10 minutes, and Priority 3 calls, like parking problems, road hazards, loud music and thefts reported after the fact took the longest on average, at 40 minutes.

On May 25, it took one minute for the call about Floyd’s alleged forged bill to be assigned to a unit, and four minutes for the officers to arrive at the scene. After that day, police started taking a lot longer to arrive when called.

CityLab data shows that average response times this summer went up about 40% from January to more than 14 minutes for the most urgent calls, Priority 1. They also went up 43% for Priority 2, and 28%, to about a 51-minute response time, for Priority 3.

This slowdown was especially apparent in the city’s 3rd Precinct, where Floyd was killed.

Source: Minneapolis Police Department

During the same period, the volume of 911 calls has risen only marginally, and doesn’t match the spike in response times Minneapolis saw in June and July. That suggests that the police were not experiencing an increase in demand for their services commensurate to their more sluggish response. Aside from volumes of calls, there were other factors: The precinct's headquarters, which serves several wards including 8 and 9, was burned down completely and relocated to a downtown convention center farther away from the neighborhoods it was meant to serve. With potentially hundreds of fewer officers and a frayed relationship with citizens, the department was under greater strain.

“They’re getting worn out. They’ve been working non-stop with limited resources,” Minneapolis Police Federation President Bob Kroll told the Minnesota Reformer this summer.

“My own sense is that this isn’t retaliation as much as it is just everybody’s humanity in this moment,” said council member Linea Palmisano, who represents Ward 13, the southwest corner of Minneapolis. She’s advocated for more mental health support and coaching for police officers who she says have experienced trauma. As the head of the city’s budget committee, Palmisano will also have a say in department funding this winter and has said that more resources, not fewer, will be needed for reform.

Some say changed policing in the zone was intentional. Reports from residents and local news have described the area around the Floyd memorial as a “no-go zone,” where police appear to be unwilling to engage — and unwelcome by many residents.

Especially in cases of enforcing minor infractions, “not every decision to not engage in something is a bad decision,” said council member Fletcher. But even in dangerous instances, residents say something changed.

“In the period directly after George Floyd was killed, during the uprising, the service from 911 was essentially nonexistent,” said Bicking. “People had the feeling that everybody must have just gone home. The phones could ring forever, you could call 20 times and never get an answer.”

‘No Man’s Land’

Minneapolis’s Eighth and Ninth Wards have been ground zero for the city’s season of change. Their border is marked by the corner of 38th and Chicago, where a clerk working at a store called in a forged $20 bill, and where then-Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on May 25. Now a memorial to Floyd, the intersection draws visitors from across the city and country, who come to pay tribute to his memory.

Over the summer, the area felt like “a disaster zone,” said Alondra Cano, the city council member who represents the Ninth Ward. Lake Street, a thoroughfare that bisects the district, was overtaken by peaceful protesters marching for Black lives, but also by fire and chaos. New reporting from the Minneapolis Star Tribune indicates that some of the destruction was caused by far-right agitators, like the Boogaloo Boys. Residents felt abandoned. “There weren't any firefighters that were readily available. And there weren't any police that were readily available,” said Cano. “A lot of residents took it upon themselves to put out fires and to engage with folks who might be doing some harm out on the street.”

Members of Agape in downtown Minneapolis, after they were called to help respond to looting. Steve Floyd

It was out of that “no-man’s land” that five resident-led safety groups were born, she said, each covering different Ninth Ward neighborhoods, none of them officially designated by the city. In the months following the height of the protests, the groups got more organized and centralized. There’s the Little Earth Protectors, a group of American Indians who patrol the neighborhood around their federally-subsidized housing complex in the East Phillips neighborhood, and the Rock Steady Alliance, which Najmaie describes as a citywide coalition of racial justice activists and harm reduction workers who emerged to provide aid at protests. Agape, a group of 25 to 30 men, many of whom are former gang members, post up near the George Floyd memorial and respond to issues in the 40-block radius around it; they sometimes combine efforts with the Brown Berets, a group of Hispanic and Latino residents. The Powderhorn Safety Collective is run by a loose group of neighbors living in the Powderhorn Park neighborhood, a diverse but majority-white enclave historically home to leftists, artists and working class folks. They patrol the Powderhorn neighborhood by bike and on foot.

The demographics, tactics and territories of each collective vary, but a shared mission appears to unite them: to take elements of public safety out of the hands of the police, and into the hands of the community.

The Powderhorn neighborhood was profiled in the New York Times in June for its residents’ pledge to “check their privilege” after Floyd’s killing. Part of their reckoning was choosing not to call 911 for incidents large and small, out of a fear that the police would inflict more violence on the communities they pledged to protect. When unhoused residents started building a tent encampment down the street, the community resisted the city’s initial push to evict them, instead assigning volunteers to offer food, support and security. Later, when several volunteers pulled out of the area, Najmaie and a few other neighbors decided to start informal patrols that became the Safety Collective, to “make the housed people feel safe, so that they will hopefully not be calling 911 on the unhoused,” he said. (At the end of July, the city removed the encampment.)

The homeless encampment at Powderhorn Park in July, which was later cleared by the city. Photographer: Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune via Getty Images

Since they started patrolling in July, Powderhorn volunteers receive reports of incidents through the app Discord, where their neighborhood group chat has had between 1,000 and 1,300 active members. They also proactively monitor activity through the Citizen app, which culls 911 logs for geo-located crimes-in-action, and another older-fashioned tool: the police scanner. Often, what they’re responding to is the sound of gunshots. Their intervention is “full-service,” Najmaie says: they arrive at the scene of the incident, assist in whatever way they can, and report back with updates.

Agape, another one of the patrol groups, formed after young men who lived near 38th and Chicago observed what they saw as opportunistic vendors and gang violence take over the George Floyd memorial, says Steve Floyd, who’s lived in the area for 40 years and acts as an adviser to Agape. “What happened when George Floyd was killed, it made them change their lives and find a different direction,” says Steve Floyd. The group members put up barricades, and started a security patrol.

They aim to “let people understand that we have to protect our own community even if police are not going to be here,” says Floyd, “and then how it would look if we didn’t have police.”

The group has gone through several trainings on mental health, mediation and de-escalation training, and by now they’ve become a visible presence in the neighborhood, there to break up assaults and relieve tension on the street. “A lot of us don’t wear bulletproof vests, and so it just has to depend on the situation,” said Floyd. “Most of the time we can intervene with our voice.”

The groups often work together. For altercations that Powderhorn residents feel unequipped to handle, they seek out other groups like Agape for reinforcement. But even for incidents when neighbors might want to call 911, Najmaie says it hasn’t always felt like a viable option. “During the uprisings, you probably had a 30% chance to 20% chance of any kind of police answering to anything,” said Najmaie. “By mid-summer, it was up to a 50% to 60% chance, if I was to guess, and then slowly rising. Now, we're at a much higher percent chance.”

Because the Powderhorn Safety Collective is embedded within the community, the collective will often show up before police squad cars do, Najmaie says. “Other times when they do show up, what we've noticed is a very quick drive by and if you're lucky, you'll get a searchlight,” he said. “And then that's it.”

A New Playbook

Fletcher believes that some individual officers have actually exaggerated the impression among residents that police are unresponsive. “I have a lot of instances of officers telling businesses, telling residents, ‘I don’t know if we’d be able to get to you if you called and something happened,’” Fletcher said. “That kind of building cynicism and building doubt and building fear has a political impact.”   The MPD did not respond to requests for comment on this allegation.

The time it takes for the police to answer Priority 1 calls did not slow as much as the total average did this summer, indicating that the most urgent calls continued to be answered in a timely fashion. This could be partially thanks to actions by the police department to recalibrate its work: After complaints, the department has triaged its depleted number of officers to prioritize answering 911 calls and pursue investigations of serious incidents.

“In these very challenging times of COVID, budget cuts and retirements, the MPD continues to evaluate and reallocate the resources that we currently have to best serve the City of Minneapolis, focusing on the core responsibilities of a police department; responding to 911 calls and investigations,” the MPD told CBS Minnesota in a statement.  

Using fears about unanswered 911 calls as a justification for increasing police resources has been a familiar playbook in Minneapolis in the lead-up to budget processes, said Fletcher and Bicking, the community activist. “It works to the advantage of the police department, as propaganda: you need us, and there aren't enough of us,” said Bicking. In fact, it’s a familiar playbook in many American cities.

This time, it’s not having the same effect as it used to in Minneapolis, says Fletcher.

“The answer used to be we need 200 more cops and now people are like, we need a whole new division that handles this a different way that’s a non-police approach, if policing is not solving the problem,” he said. “That’s a really important political shift and it’s a potentially really generative moment, because I think people are thinking more critically than they have.”

Andrea Jenkins, vice president of the Minneapolis City Council, during a meeting in which council members declared they would disband the police. Rhetoric on that plan has softened since. Photographer: Star Tribune via Getty Images/Star Tribune

The mayor’s proposed budget includes a suggested $2.5 million in funding for alternative violence prevention programs, and a 7.4% cut to the police — far smaller than proposed cuts to other departments. Many of the city council members who once vowed to abolish the police have since clarified that they’ll focus on systemic reforms — though not all of them agree on what those should look like.

But there are signs that the community safety monitors and the city's efforts may start to converge as both groups explore what future policing might look like.

As of September, there’s yet another group of community members patrolling some of the same neighborhoods in South Minneapolis, but these individuals are paid by a new city “violence interrupter” program with $1.1 million in funding. Participants and leadership in the Office of Violence Prevention program are clear that they do not want to replace police, but instead focus on long-term relationship building. In many cases, they use their community connections to try to defuse tensions before they turn violent.

“We don't want to wait for it to get worse to address it, when we can see the writing on the wall,” said Sasha Cotton, the director of the Office of Violence Prevention, referring to concerns about gun violence. Agape recently started conducting regular nighttime patrols alongside the violence interrupters.

At a meeting with the Office of Violence Prevention and city council members, several of the community safety groups gathered to discuss how they could support each other, and whether they could receive city resources to buy tools like walkie talkies. Cano has given Agape members access to an office on 37th and Chicago, which they use as a “safe house and hotspot,” says Floyd. Cotton, of the city’s Office of Violence Prevention, says “there’s more than enough work” to keep both city and civilian efforts busy so long as gun violence remains a top concern.

Still, there’s debate about whether the community groups that coalesced in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s death are sustainable in their current form. “Nobody’s getting paid, there’s not a lot of structure, accountability,” said Fletcher. In one indication of potential safety risks, Cano said a member of the Little Earth Collective had been shot while out on patrol, bringing up questions of liability and insurance. (The group was not available for an interview before publication.)

Kaitlin Wolfgram-Gunderson of the Powderhorn Collective hangs signs in the neighborhood about a meeting to seek community feedback on the group’s model. Photographer: Emilie Richardson/Bloomberg

In the Powderhorn neighborhood, Najmaie says that even as the upheaval of the summer dissipates, and the group stops its nightly patrols for the coldest winter months, he wants the collective to live on. They’re readying for Election Day and night, and for potential protests in the lead-up to Inauguration Day. There’s a trial for Derek Chauvin coming up next year. Unrest aside, the mission statement of the Powderhorn Collective describes its end goal as something broader than safety or security: "strengthening the social fabric of the neighborhood."

“People need to be involved in their communities,” said Najmaie. “People need to feel like they have a stake in things, and that they can change things.”

   (Corrects the date of Floyd’s death in paragraph 16. )

[keplercryptids]

I'm very in favor of abolishing the police and prisons, but I still have strong feelings of wanting to see the "bad person get what they deserve". I know the vast majority of people in prison are in for nonviolent crimes and prison is torture and the whole system's fucked but I don't know what to do with the beliefs about justice I've been taught my whole life. I know revenge/punishment isn't justice but I'm not sure I know what is. Do you have any recommendations (books, articles, videos, etc)?

hey, grappling with this is normal. if you’ve ever heard the phrase “kill the cop in your head,” that’s partly what it refers to. reframing what justice means to us and the kinds of justice we can envision is one of the first and most important steps of thinking about abolition.

luckily, abolitionists have been organizing, thinking about, writing about, dreaming about, and sharing this information for decades. people who are new to abolition don’t have to imagine a new kind of justice. in many areas, that justice is already in practice.

i’m going to link to and mention a lot of information here, so i really advise that interested folks take their time and come back to these resources as they’re able.

Abolition Journal put together a study guide here that’s full of great resources. i recommend checking the whole thing out, but Week 6 in particular goes into alternatives to prison.

Transformharm.org, created by Mariame Kaba, is truly a treasure trove of resources, articles, and curricula for people who are new to transformative justice.

The Abolitionist Toolkit created by Critical Resistance is another great resource that I frequently share. (Critical Resistance in general is a terrific place for more info.)

Survived and Punished is an amazing organization and they’ve curated a bunch of resources here.

Here’s a Police and Prison Abolition Resource Guide (PDF) with just. So many links to resource kits, articles, videos, etc etc etc.

Many of the above guides and hubs combine written, audio and visual resources so I hope people are able to find what works for them. If you have specific access needs, let me know and I’ll see what I can round up.

For podcasts, I highly recommend Rustbelt Abolition Radio.

For books that I personally have read/own, I recommend Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis; Conflict is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman; The Revolution Starts at Home (anthology); and We Do This Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba.

as you can see, there is just so, so much information out there, developed over decades by people who intimately understand harm, injustice and the carceral system. I actually had to reign in how much info I could have shared just to keep this post from being eight miles long lol. The question of “what do we do instead of police and prisons?” isn’t a simple one, of course, and it isn’t a question one person has the answer to. Hopefully these resources are a useful jumping off point for you.

[lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers]

So, I read Lenin’s The State and Revolution over the past day or so, and I want to share some initial thoughts.

I am not the best at reading theory, and I’ve never read any Lenin before, and I honestly wish I’d read this sooner, because there are so many things he articulates in terms of critiques of the state, and abolition of parts of the state such as the armed forces and the police which I think are hugely valuable to all leftists right now.

He talks explicitly about how a capitalist democracy is thus a limited democracy and how it is therefore impossible for the proletariat to bring about change in their conditions through democratic means. And thus, the only solution is revolution.

It’s interesting to me that what he proposes in the immediate aftermath of the revolution is not that radical, in many ways. He talks about having elected officials but reducing their importance, that elected representatives can be subject to recall at any time, paid the same as the average worker, and argues against career bueruacrats and politicians. And he talks about the redistribution of housing, where housing is communally owned and initially rented by workers according to their needs.

And yes, obviously he talks about how society will progress onwards from this point, including taling explicitly about how the need for the police will diminish over time until they wither away.

But you know, the initial society he argues for is not so very different to what Corbyn was arguing for- the key difference, to me, is that Lenin explains why revolution is necessary to get there. And yes, he talks about where society would go after the revolution, and I don’t agree with everything he says about this (particularly on anarchism) but a lot of his points are hugely interesting and valuable.

To be clear, this is a book of its time, written before the October revolution and therefore based mainly on the model of the Paris commune, without the advantage we have of having seen many more “people’s/proletariat/socialist” revolutions than Lenin had. And yet a lot of what he says is still very relevant today.

I am not normally like “read some theory” because I know that can be difficult and inaccessible for people, and I don’t think reading theory is essential to being “a good leftist”, but I do think this would be a hugely valuable read for those who think party politics within the confines of our limited democracy is still the answer.

I also found it a lot easier to read than e.g. Marx or Engles, or, hell, your average classic novel. Like, far be it from me to tell you what to do, but if you are asking questions like:

“Why can’t we elect truly leftist politicians?”

“How could police abolition work in practice?”

“How could we organise society immediately post revolution?”

“How can we ensure everyone gets the resources they need to survive?”

It might be a useful read.

I do have critiques of this, which I will probably share at a later time, but I feel genuinely enthused after reading this, so I’m going to share regardless:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

[whatsyourcolor]

Dragnet - Chapter 9 - Kingdom of Thieves.

Read on Ao3

Thank you to those of you that are still reading Dragnet! In previous chapters Kogami and Akane conducted a mission that resulted in technology malfunctioning, suspicions arising and Akane almost getting killed. Kogami broke up their short-lived (or so he thinks) association for reasons and emotions still confusing to him. Here’s Chapter 9:

KINGDOM OF THIEVES

Pliable, suspiciously warm, the sofa's leather cushions in the analysis lab sank underneath Kogami's weight, comfort suffusing his tense limbs like an anxiolytic. Undoubtedly, Kunizuka had made a routine pitstop here prior to heading to the interrogation room with Ginoza for another round of fruitless grilling. Which would explain the mellow, secret melody Shion was humming as she typed away on her keyboard. At least someone in Division 1 was having fun. Banished from the interrogation room and having severed the only connection he had to that other world, lulls of silent anticipation such as this had become nearly intolerable for him because, like a stray dog, his mind would go—insistently, shamelessly—back to her.

If only his ruminations had been centered in the pragmatic aspects of their relationship (what was her exact link to the syndicates? When did it start? And why?), he could have forgiven himself more easily. But it was the way his name sprung from her direct mouth, and how it meant she was not cross with him (as opposed to Inspector), and that furrowed brow each time she sermonized about things not unlike those he’d spend hours perusing in books—things he had strictly forbidden himself to linger on; things he’d never dream to speak about out loud. It was her scrutiny, never sub rosa. Not when she looked at him with unabashed eyes, not searching for a weakness or a fault—he suspected—but for something like a virtue, something that would warrant their unlikely partnership in her eyes.

So what did it mean for him to be sitting here while she was still out there, meandering in the dark? Stubbornly continuing this, insisting on this, and she would lose more than her hue. Kogami palmed the cellphone inside his pocket and then thought better of it because—what right did he have to care? To ask anything from her? Who was he in her life but an accident of chance? Or, perhaps, had his threats managed to compel her, and had she gone back to an ordinary life where she didn’t want to change the world? No, he thought sullenly. Even I know that about you. But it’s not like you’re alone either, is it, Tsunemori? Not that it makes you any safer.

On a large screen, a corner-side vantage of the dark interrogation room. Light spilled from a lamp above onto a table as a cuffed man swaggered in like a circus bear that's figured out the master's whip is made of hay. A braggart's smirk splashed across his face as he flumped on a chair. Kogami perched his elbows on his legs, interlaced hands under his nose to summon all his objective focus on the screen, but all he could think about was how much he'd love to pummel that sneer off again.

"A different species of inspector today," proclaimed the Arumajiro man, all affected bravado to Gino's bespectacled, sober professionalism. Still bearing the marks Tsunemori had gouged on his tattooed skin, he slammed his arms on the table, presumably to stir a wince from Ginoza, who only blinked with imperturbable disdain. "And you even brought a woman to protect you. That a habit of Sibyl's dogs?"

"The type of technology found in the interior of the truck you and your comrades were riding on is not something that can be built with metal scraps scavenged from Ougishima,” Gino said with no inflection in his voice. "Who is funding your association?"

The man acknowledged the question with a caustic snort for answer, a sort of growl. His eyes slithering over the less illuminated corners of the room—methodically, as if searching for something.

“He’s watching, ain’t he?” he eventually muttered. “He wouldn’t miss this.”

"You'll have enough time to look at walls when you go to the isolation facility. No need to strain your eyes so hard on these,” Gino spat back. “Answer the question. Your syndicate knew about the crackdowns by the MWPSB. How did you acquire a signal jammer? Who programmed it?"

"Inspectors in the blocks," the man began in a low voice. "You lot stick out like a pack of wild hens running around with your dominators. Of course, everyone always knows when you're there, with your holos and your drones. You’re not exactly low-key, you know? The eyes of Sibyl might see us only when they want to, but we’re always watching.”

"And so your syndicate figured they'd try to go undetected and invest on an illegal piece of technology impossible to acquire within the abolition blocks.”

"Impossible,” the man echoed as if mulling the meaning of the word. As if, Kogami thought, what a Sibyl detective would deem impossible, even preposterous in his world, was something that acquired a different value where he came from. A perverse grimace spread on the man’s face, a sort of smiling frown full of certitude. "Nothing is impossible in the abolition blocks. Not anymore.”

“Not exactly a charmer when he finally decides to talk, is he?” Shion drawled with a slow plume of smoke, her profile silhouetted by blue light in the haze. “What could he possibly mean?”

"At least he's taunting us now,” Kogami murmured dryly. “But I don’t perceive urgency in his behavior. No negotiation or surrender. If he’s decided to talk it must be for more than dull temporizing, though I don’t think his objective is to necessarily give us what we want.”

“Hmm. Who knows.” Shion gave an affected gasp. “Could it be he likes Ginoza better?”

Kogami chuckled softly, and Shion smiled, proud of herself. He figured he probably had been looking as dismal as he felt.

“Definitely,” he acknowledged with a cool sigh, lifting himself up from the softness of the sofa, and starting to hanker for a smoke. He shoved the flaps of his navy windbreaker aside and thrust his hands in the pockets of his pants. “Gino can be a darling when he wants to. But I should head over there now. Might as well put some pressure now he’s talking.”

“I thought Ginoza said—”

“I know. I know he instructed all of you to keep me at bay. But this case might be bigger than we think and I can’t just wait idly by.”

Shion exhaled coolly, swiveling her chair toward her station again. “Very well. Just be careful.”

Freely, brashly for an interrogation, the man went on blathering on the screen. “But impossible things have been happening. People disappearing. Tunnels hidden behind holo. Miracles, even. The last of which involved a woman intercepting a truck in the tunnels, armed with nothing but a bat—so what I’ve been wondering is, how did the excellent and competent MWPSB get a double-crossing bitch to do their job for them?”

Doors glided open in front of him as Kogami’s step came to a standstill. Jaw clenching, he whirled round to face the grainy image of the man again.

“You’d do well to remember I’m the one asking questions here,” Ginoza retorted impatiently, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “This isn’t an exchange of particulars between two commensurate parties. This is an interrogation, and your time is running out.”

The man leaned in over the table and Kunizuka’s back went upright, her hand circling around her waist as a warning. “You see,” he said. “I can’t help but be intrigued as to how a single woman gained the trust of the underground resistance and helped them against the syndicates, all while working with the police.”

Kogami stiffened. Was that the reason behind Tsunemori’s ironclad secrecy? Did the man not kill her only because he was working information out of her? Even if Kogami had entertained a similar notion before—with her overt spurning of the system and her criminal consorts—something in him refused to admit that she could be, for lack of a better word, his enemy. But if what was being said was true, then the accusations he’d hurled at her—the same ones that had been tormenting him since he’d said them—may have been wholly understating.

“Justice for traitors and informers, know what that is? That wretched girl hanging from a wire in the ports of Ougishima where anyone else with funny ideas can see. Or worse—No. Better—her chained to a bed in the filth of a brothel. See that pretty hue turn black.” The man spoke slowly but without pause, in his visage a pained expression that evoked menace in lieu of sorrow. “Imagine, if you can, in a place crawling with people both desperate to cleanse their sins and itching for something unsullied to defile, just what coveted merchandise a clear-hued Sib would be. Not just any Sib, no. A plant by the MWPSB. A traitor. Hell, for all we know it might be her own people that get her first.”

With clenched fists, Kogami made his way back toward the screen. It wasn’t that the man’s tirade didn’t incense him greatly, considering to whom his poisoned darts were being aimed. But there was something else: the fact that he spoke as if he wasn’t in Sibyl’s claws. In his claws.

“That brat is too smart for her own good. Messing with things she don’t understand. Stealing things that don’t belong to her. Out of all the crummy chumps the so-called resistance has produced, this one might be the trickiest one. Should’ve snuffed her out when I had the chance.”

“This resistance,” Ginoza cleared his throat, “is it an anti-governmental group?”

The man stared superciliously, almost amused. “You Sibs think the blocks are seedbeds of chaos where the scum of society oozes like a weeping blister in your clean world. It’s not for me to deny it. I’ve seen men rip out each other’s guts over a cigarette. I’ve slain many more myself, men and women, for less than that. Why? You worried the pus might spill onto your streets? You afraid hearing these things will make you catch that disease?” A spark of relish in his eye. “What if I told you there’s a cure for that?”

“A—a cure? A cure for what?”

“The illness of evil—the illness the Sibyl system diagnosed for the rest of us. In fact, I’ll prove it to you right now,” the man invited with an almost affable tone. “Point your dominator at me.”

“What? What are you talking abou—H-Hound 2! No one ordered you to withdraw your dominator!”

Kunizuka, arm fully extended next to Ginoza’s face, had her sights aimed directly at the space between the eyebrows of the Arumajiro man. “I’m sorry, Inspector. This is the only language men like these speak.” A heavy mute second was filled with Ginoza’s eyes flitting from the dominator, to the man, back to Kunizuka until at last, haltingly, she lowered her arm and her jaw dropped with shock. “Th-There has to be a mistake. We checked his hue this morning and it was—a-and besides, he just said—”

Kogami didn’t wait to hear the rest. He bolted out of the analysis lab and down the corridor in the direction of the emergency stairs. His mind raced. One victim found dead in a factory. A second victim mauling herself to death in Nona Tower. Disparate timelines and intervals in both casualties, as if the pill’s dual mechanism could be detonated at a distance, at will. It made no sense. He hurtled down endless flights of stairs many floors below, gnawing despair lodged deep in his stomach. He’d seen him strangling her. He’d tried to drown him. No doubt he was a murderer. It couldn’t be. Nausea and doom had overtaken him by the time he tore past the doors of the last hallway and turned the last corner, silvered walls bouncing all around him as he caught sight of his mark leaving the interrogation room behind Ginoza and Kunizuka. He couldn’t see or hear until his hands were on the man. Until he felt other hands trying to pull him away.

“Shepherd 2! Get a hold of yourself!” Ginoza thundered, forcefully jostling against him. “Stop this right now! Kogami!”

“You fucking bastard,” Kogami growled, both hands yanking the manacled Arumajiro man by his threadbare shirt. “You know about the pill. You know what it is. You’re gonna tell me everything even if I have to kick it outta you!”

“Seems like someone’s found the antidote to Sibyl,” the tottering man hissed back, reveling in Kogami’s stunned expression. “Whatever it is you want to call it.”

“Yeah?” Kogami’s grip was taut on the collar around the man’s neck. “Then you must know about its side effects. Does that make you smile also?”

“I’d be more worried about that hue of yours, Inspector. I’d even go as far as advising you to choose your friends and allies wisely. Before she ruins you.”

A sobering shudder ran through Kogami.

“Search for her,” he rasped with bared teeth, “touch her again, and I swear I’ll find you and kill you with my own hands!”

“That’s enough of that!” Masaoka shouted from somewhere. Next thing he knew, Sasayama was there too, shouldering his way between them, tearing Kogami off as Kunizuka and Gino pulled the man away. Still, Kogami shoved and kicked and cursed as the man crossed the threshold of a door shutting closed, and then his vision went askew as a sharp pain had him hunching down and looking at the ground, immobilized.

“You need to cool down, son.” Masaoka tightened his armlock and Kogami heard himself pant helplessly, his forehead beading with sweat.

“Don’t you realize,” Kogami grunted through the pain, “that’s the one lead we have in this case?”

“And what good will it do if you end up in a rehabilitation facility?” Sasayama’s shoes came into view and Kogami was just able to shift his head up to shoot a glare at him. “How is pulling this bullshit gonna help you catch him then?”

There was the slow squeak and hush of a door opening and closing again.

“I hope you know this is all your influence, Sasayama,” Ginoza roared. “And if you think I won’t have a few words to say about you in the report of this incident, then you’re awfully misguided.” Masaoka loosened the grip of his metallic arm, and Kogami yanked his own free. He straightened up to meet the withering, unforgiving gaze of his partner. “Masaoka, go assist Kunizuka in the discharge of the witness. Kogami, you and I need to talk.”

“Gino, we can’t let him go,” Kogami protested with a gruff voice. “You saw what just happ—”

“Would you rather we do this in the presence of the Chief?”

Kogami squeezed his eyes shut, attempting to steady himself, but rage still boiled inside of him. “Fine,” he grumbled with frustration. “Fine.”

---------

Outside of Nona Tower the sun had set but the city was blazing like it was the middle of the day. A shine as artificial as that of the abolition blocks, though sleeker, clearer, new. Not the dizzying red and yellow twilights that led the way through the narrower, angular alleys of the abolition blocks, nor the darkened hollows and crannies where eyes and knives glinted. From a holographic billboard the large face of a woman donned in traditional garb gazed at him, her pale face dissolving into a pink forest, carpeted with what looked like pink snow. The next thing he noticed was that there was no distinct smell.

He walked the stretch of the plaza. Guardedly. Drawing near to where another hologram had attracted a multitude, but still keeping a cautious distance, he stood to watch. Three large fish swam in a hoop, floating in sync until one of them broke the formation to playfully pursue the others, making a squealing sound similar to that of rats, but louder and full of delight. Something like a fog, a vague sensation taking form, disturbed him. A nebulous recollection from years ago, of childhood in the blocks. A discoloured picture of animals like these nailed to a cracking wall. A wrinkled old lady calling him evil before falling with a thud. He remembered her body being warm even after he’d withdrawn his knife more times than he could count. The eyes in the eyes of his first kill looking deep into him and then…nothing. It’s cold, he thought, and that’s why I’m shivering. He peered at the crowd. Oblivious onlookers and their marveled profiles. His gaze drifted upwards and behind the surrounding skyscrapers. They didn’t know a few kilometers from here people burned. Soon they would.

He pivoted to two pairs of gawking eyes pegged on him. Youngsters. They approached him with slimy passivity, before gushing admiringly.

“Woah, mister, you really went out of your way with that cosplay! See? I told you the tattoos weren’t holo!”

“Of course they’re holo! How do you think he’d show to work with those tattoos? But isn’t the convention until next February though? If it was today I’m sure he’d win first prize!”

He snarled at the two pests, which only seemed to excite them more. A flashing light blinded him for a second, and before he could curse them out, they were scuttling away. It was then he took notice of the woman wearing a red long coat standing beside him.

“Do you actually know where you’re going, Igarashi-san?”

Unblemished skin. Long, silky hair. Almond eyes evenly shaped with a strange green sheen to them, and a thin, pointy nose. An enigmatic smile that could’ve been wider but wasn’t.

“Choe Gu-sung?”

“I knew Makishima-san was right to put his trust in the Arumajiro.”

“Your holo is too perfect,” Igarashi answered with blunt disdain. “No one looks like that.”

“That may be true in the abolition blocks, but as you can see, people love illusions here.”

Minutes later they were driving through the elevated highways of Tokyo. A light rain fell aslant, pins of purple and pink hitting on the windshield of the driverless vehicle. Igarashi kept a wary side-eye on Makishima’s lackey sitting beside him, though underneath that stupid holo he was more unreadable than usual. Not that he didn’t understand how such concealment was necessary for serious matters, but it pissed him off that important work should fall on the lap of a foreigner out of all people.

“I hope your doubts about our plan are settled now, Igarashi-san,” said Choe Gu-sung as if reading his mind, the faintest hint of mockery in his voice.

“Our plan requires certain arrangements we’ll overlook for the moment, but I know the Arumajiro won’t be so sparing afterwards.”

“It’s precisely that ruthlessness that Makishima found so compelling for this project to start with. In this brave new world of Sibyl, few men are willing to go where the Arumajiro go, and so your clan is instrumental for what needs to be done.”

All the sickly ass-licking made Igarashi turn his face toward the city flashing past. “To think you’re the first person to

address me by my name since I was arrested,” he muttered with disgust.

Once they had arrived at the high-rise hotel, an elegant wooden door embellished with the metal knocker of a spider admitted them into a vast suite decked out with fine furnishings. A low gray sofa with plush cushions half-mooned around a glass table where a steaming cup of tea had been set. An open book rested onto the lid of a black piano, and above it, a strange light fixture glittered from the ceiling like a dancing bride. Igarashi was becoming acutely aware of the thick, green rug underneath his tatty boots, but unlike him, the silver-haired man contemplating Tokyo out of the ceiling-to-floor windows fit into the room perfectly. Deceptively.

“I’m glad you made it out safely, Igarashi-san.”

Obscured on the reflection, Makishima’s features betrayed his otherwise harmless semblance as a truer, more sinister face smiled at Igarashi from the glass. Long gone was his first impression of a wealthy, over-spoilt child uttering words of revolution because, where the pointless, clumsy violence of the blocks rose and fell with no consequence or significance, Makishima had given them the means to overthrow an evil bigger than all the gangsters of the underground.

“The MWPSB has an informer in the blocks. That’s how they were able to get us. It’s Lemonade Candy.”

Piqued by his words, Makishima looked briefly over his shoulder. “The mastermind of the resistance works with the MWPSB,” he said, turning again toward the city. “How interesting. It only makes it the more impressive for you to have survived such a predicament, being attacked, as you were, by both sides.”

“It was one of their own group who gave them away. An unregistered who’d worked for Bunzo.” Igarashi’s fingers trailed the soft fabric on the arm of the sofa without daring to sit. “Wanted to settle a score or somethin’. Went mad, and for a moment there I really thought we’d turned the tables on her.”

“Her, you said?”

“Lemonade Candy is a twenty-something woman. Small and thin as a reed. And still the bitch was able to take out our lights singlehandedly and then escape through one of their hidden tunnels. We followed, and for a moment I had her, until an inspector showed up.”

“She ensnared you,” murmured Makishima. “She used herself as bait knowing you’d follow her. What appeared like recklessness at a cursory glance, was a calculated gamble.” He turned around and ambled across the room, feathery and lithe, with hands in his pockets. “We’re not the only ones with the will to choose to bet, it seems.”

Again there was that mysterious smile on Makishima’s lips and, like an obedient disciple, Igarashi felt the irresistible urge to supply more. “The resistance is not our biggest problem. Getting the syndicate to get rid of her now that I’ve seen her should be easy. But there’s also the police. That detective, especially. He don’t seem the type to let go of things.” An ear-to-ear grin spread on his face. “And he’s a hot head for that woman. Nearly slugged me when I mentioned her to him. Threatened to kill me, even.”

“Are they not merely enforcers?”

“No,” Igarashi assured with a sharp shake of his head. “He’s the one who’s been interrogating me. Or trying to, at least. Today I heard his partner refer to him as Kogami. As for the woman…haven’t seen her since that night.”

“Kogami,” Makishima echoed with flash of eagerness in his amber eyes. “Are there still humans in this city who are not afraid of themselves, I wonder? And, if so, is it a coincidence that we happened to lure two of them out of hiding? Is this what the sentimentalist calls ‘destiny’?”

Across from him, Choe Gu-sung ambled over and sat on the other side of the sofa where he opened a laptop. He’d remained so quiet, Igarashi had but completely forgotten about his presence, and his appearance, now devoid of holo, glared like a sour reminder. He began typing something hurriedly.

“They’re vermin—that’s what they are,” crossing his arms, Igarashi commented while looming over Choe. “All those who can’t rise by their own strength deserve to be squashed like roaches. It’s the rule of the world. Eat or be eaten.”

“You know, Igarashi-san,” Makishima lingered by the piano, slowly turning over the pages of the book. “I’ve always admired men like you. The ones who agitate the whole world through the sheer strength of your desire. If the world sings blue, you’ll force it to sing red until it matches your vision. A common man in an uncommon world. Please,” his eyes rose from the page to watch him intently. “Understand that this is the deepest of compliments. You see, in this sterile, plastic world, that type of primal life force has been forgotten. The human animal domesticated, his soul depurated, sterilized, until he became nothing more than the ruins of what he once was—and ruins are only beautiful after a great war. Anything else is…mockery.”  

“Well, that’s the way of the blocks. The only way we know. And now, thanks to you, these things will be ours too.” Not until he said it did it seem true to Igarashi—that they would rule over this world just like they ruled over the underground. Dominators, cymatic scanners and drones could not stop them anymore, and the weak children of Sibyl would succumb just like their evil mother. “And even the enemies of the Arumajiro won’t mind it if it means destroying this system.”

“You are correct. Anger has an interesting way of vitalizing people in ways no other need or cause does, notwithstanding how pure or lofty. That vein those spurned by the system share is what the Sibyl system has cut off and anesthetized, to the extent where the masses can’t even recall it ever being there. Their senses lay dormant as if they could truly exist as humans without them. Others even claim to want to live forever. But what value does a life have when it’s benumbed and protected from the knowledge of its own mortality? When it loses all primitive instincts in a beautiful cage where there’s no danger? As in the yesteryear, we need men like you to remind us what it means to be alive.”

In more ways than he could understand, Makishima’s words made Igarashi feel strangely satisfied. Comforted, even. Never before had he thought of his life in any aspect beyond, well, living.  What for was a question that hadn’t occurred to him. But for all the things he’d seen and done, he never would have guessed it’d be this man the one to weave meaning into his life.

“Do you know what intrahistory is, Igarashi-san?”

Choe Gu-sung’s annoying typing made it difficult for him to hear the question. “Huh?”

“Intrahistory,” Makishima continued as he ran his finger down a yellowed page in the book, “Is the history that’s left outside of the books. Think of it as the blank margins on the paper. It’s the story of the nameless people who made history but who are never mentioned. Without them, History with a capital H is unconceivable.”

Igarashi gave a sly smile. “Is that the people from the blocks?”

“Indeed. The men who wrought the world and thrust it forward through blood and fire. You can see why the system made sure we never hear about them. Those who dare to be the actors of their own existence have no need for Sibyl.”

“Like the Arumajiro in the blocks.”

Makishima closed the book carefully. “Like the gladiators who died devoured by the lions under the impassive eyes of an Emperor. Or the soldiers in the vanguard bringing us closer to victory with their sacrifices. The anonymous martyrs who enrage the survivors. The strongest within the strong.”

It was quiet now. Choe Gu-sung had abruptly stopped his noise. A bizarre, undeniable aura of expectation hung in the air. Igarashi swallowed something he’d not felt in years down his parched throat, his mind scrambling to decipher what Makishima was getting at with his incessant blabber.

“Violence can be captivating, even beautiful. But like any art, when it’s empty, it’s hopelessly corrupted and vulgar. You do not need to worry about that, Igarashi-san. I’ll be sure to make your sacrifice meaningful.”

Dread surged in Igarashi like a freezing chill. “What the hell are you talking about?” he murmured. He’d kill the two of them. He could take them both easily, rip them apart with his hands, bludgeon them to death.

With a flourish, Choe Gu-sung made a single clicking sound on his keyboard, and Igarashi felt his body drop and crash into the glass table. A hail storm of white particles infested his vision, followed by a green crooked line and a tea cup rolling on the floor. Beyond that, Makishima’s feet trod toward him with the precision of a ropewalker, and he felt fear.

“I know you don’t like this gruesome part, Choe. You may go.”

Igarashi’s wild eyes tried to meet the mechanical eyes of the hacker, but he couldn’t move because a rumbling began inside his body; his blood boiling and searing and cauterizing from the inside. He clenched his teeth and grunted, his body growing rigid as pain travelled through his veins like a jagged marble—excruciating pain that made it impossible to think on anything except on it being over. With what little mind he had, he started wide-eyed at a slice of a window visible between Makishima’s legs, wishing with all his rotten heart he could jump from it. Then he heard himself howl a beast-like howl over and over again.

“’Alas, what is good and what is evil?’” Makishima said looking down on him. “’Are they both one single thing with which we furiously attest our impotence and passion to attain the infinite by even the maddest means? Or are they two different things? Yes…they had sooner be one and the same…for if not, what will become of me on Judgement Day?’”

[kjack89]

AITA

My bestie’s latest quarantine hobby is trolling through AITA on reddit and sending me ones she thinks will make me mad, so. I got inspired.

E/R, modern AU.

The sun was bright and the mood, all things considered, was high, as the crowd gathered by the river in preparation for the march downtown to call for defunding the police. Black Lives Matter was leading the protest, and Enjolras had volunteered Les Amis to serve as support and allies in whatever way they could, which mostly meant making sure folks were wearing masks and that no one decided to try something stupid with the cops.

“Good crowd,” Courfeyrac remarked, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet as he glanced around before looking back at Enjolras. “As much as I’m sure it’s killing you that they’re only calling for defunding and not abolition.”

“Yeah, well, not even a year ago, no one was talking about defunding the police,” Enjolras pointed out, a little sourly, adjusting his mask, which was emblazoned with WHITE SILENCE IS VIOLENCE. “I’ll take what progress I can get.”

Courfeyrac smirked. “You sound practically moderate.”

Enjolras scowled. “Take that back, or—”

His threat was cut off by the arrival of Joly, Bossuet and Grantaire. It was hard to tell by the masks all three wore, but Enjolras was pretty sure that all three were grinning, and judging by the way Bossuet was swaying, just slightly, it wasn’t just because they were in a good mood.

“I’ll take it you three decided to hit up a brunch spot on your way here?” Enjolras asked, even more sourly than before.

“A man has to eat,” Joly said innocently, which would have gone over much more believably had he not giggled at the end.

“Besides, we only ordered one drink,” Bossuet assured him.

Enjolras pinched the bridge of his nose. “Let me guess,” he said dryly, “you each ordered a bottomless mimosa.” He didn’t wait for any of them to confirm it. “And how many refills of said drink did you also order?”

Joly and Bossuet looked at each other and laughed, and Grantaire pulled his mask down to grin lazily at Enjolras. “Let me put it this way,” he said, “more than one and less than ten.” He paused. “Probably. I did lose track after about seven.”

Snickering, Joly and Bossuet headed over to join the rest of Les Amis, but when Grantaire made to follow, Enjolras blocked him, his arms crossed in front of his chest. “You’re drunk,” he said accusingly, and Grantaire’s grinned widened.

“Well, I’m sure as shit not sober.”

“Put your mask back on,” Enjolras ordered, less concerned for himself, as Grantaire was part of his quarantine bubble, and more for everyone else milling around before the march started. Especially any journalists who might love to get a shot of BLM protesters breaking the mask mandate. “And go home, Grantaire.”

Grantaire slowly pulled his mask back up over his mouth and nose, smoothing it into place before looking at Enjolras plaintively, all trace of humor vanishing from his expression. “Let me stay here,” he said, his voice soft, and not just from the cotton that covered his mouth.

Enjolras shook his head, well aware that even if Grantaire might suddenly sound sober, he wasn’t. “Go home,” he repeated. “The last thing we need is your drunk ass picking a fight with the cops or something worse and turning this whole thing into a riot instead of the peaceful protest its organizers intended.”

“What, you think I’m incapable of going two or three hours without starting a brawl?” Grantaire asked, incredulous.

Enjolras arched an eyebrow. “I think you’re incapable of a great many things.”

Grantaire’s lip curled. “Like believing, thinking, willing, living and dying?”

“Only you seem to think you’re incapable of dying,” Enjolras said quietly, before repeating, one more time, “Go home.”

But Grantaire shook his head, taking a step toward him. “If you’re so worried about it, then send Bahorel home, too!” he insisted. “Send home Joly and Bossuet who are just as drunk as I am. Or else let me stay.”

“No.”

Enjolras said the word calmly, but Grantaire recoiled as if he had shorted. “And why not?”

“Because I trust them!” Enjolras burst, his temper getting the better of him, and he scrubbed a hand across his face before adding, what he hoped was a calmer way, “I trust them to actually listen to my instructions and keep themselves out of trouble.”

But something in Grantaire’s face clouded as soon as Enjolras had said that he trusted them, and Enjolras had a bad feeling that he hadn’t really listened to the last part. “Right,” Grantaire said, a little dully, already turning away. “Well. I’ll see you later, I guess.”

“Grantaire,” Enjolras sighed, reaching out to catch his arm, but Grantaire shrugged him off, wandering towards the river, the hunch of his shoulders the only indication that he had any care in the world. Enjolras stared after him for a long moment, his expression troubled.

----------

Four days later, Grantaire rolled over in bed when his phone buzzed. He picked it up off his nightstand, saw that it was a text from Enjolras, and immediately tossed it down again, groaning.

He hadn’t talked to Enjolras since that morning of the BLM protest, and at this rate, he wasn’t sure he ever wanted to. Not when he knew that Enjolras didn’t trust him.

Joly would tell him he was being dramatic, and Bossuet would tell him to just text Enjolras and apologize and move on, and since Grantaire wanted to hear neither of those things, he also wasn’t talking to Joly or Bossuet.

Instead, he rolled over onto his stomach, grabbing his phone and stubbornly ignoring the text message from Enjolras still sitting, unread, in his messages. Instead, he clicked on twitter, figuring if he was going to sulk, he might as well sulk while reading about someone else’s misery.

A half hour later, Grantaire had scrolled through what felt like half of twitter before he stumbled upon a random tweet that linked to an ‘Am I the Asshole?’ post on the subreddit of the same name, and he glanced at the clock before deciding he had enough time to waste a couple of hours on a whole new level of misery.

He might’ve kept scrolling for hours, when he stumbled upon an AITA post that was surprisingly familiar.

Suspiciously familiar.

Like he had lived it.

He hesitated for only a moment before clicking on the post.

Posted by u/RadianceoftheFuture 8 hours ago AITA for kicking my friend out of a protest?

So I (25M) was attending a BLM protest the other day with the social justice organization I run. One of my friends, who we’ll call ‘R” (28M), showed up drunk and, IMO, looking to start a fight. This was the last thing I wanted, since we were there to be good allies, and starting fights or inciting a riot as white folks who will get away with it ain’t it. So naturally, I told him to go home.

Now here’s where I may be the asshole. R started arguing with me, and pointed out that some our other friends who were also there were also drunk, and one of our other friends who was there has a history of starting fights, so he asked me why I wasn’t making them leave. I told him it was because I trusted them.

Which is true, but not exactly how I wanted to word it, and I could tell that he was hurt by the implication that I didn’t trust him. And I do trust him, but I also didn’t want to spend the entire time worried about him. Anyway, he left, and he hasn’t talked to me since. If I’m the asshole, I want to apologize so that we can go back to being friends, and even if I wasn’t, I still want to figure out a way for us to talk again. I miss him. So tell me, AITA?

Grantaire stared at his phone, torn between something warm spreading in his chest at the fact that Enjolras cared enough to ask anonymous strangers on the internet about this, and freaking out because Enjolras had posted about their disagreement on the internet.

The man had only two speeds, it seemed, and somehow, Grantaire always ended up dealing with Enjolras on the highest speed.

Numbly, and mostly in an attempt to gather his thoughts, Grantaire scrolled through the comments on the post, unsurprised to see a decent mix of judgements from the redditors. More than expected YTAs (you’re the asshole), plus a number of NTAs (not the asshole), and, predominantly, a smattering of NAH (no assholes here).

Halfway down the page, he paused, realizing that the person who had written the post had responded to a question.

u/oldcoats_oldfriends - 7 hours ago INFO: why do you trust your other friends and not R?

u/RadianceoftheFuture - 6 hours ago Because R has a history of getting himself in trouble, whether by running his mouth off when he shouldn’t or picking fights with guys twice his side, and the trouble he gets into tends to happen after he’s been drinking. So when you put the two together, I was worried he’d do something stupid and get himself locked up or worse. And since keeping an eye on the rest of the protest was important, I knew I couldn’t afford to be distracted by also keeping an eye on him.

And for the record, I trust R with a lot. He’s not as ideological as a lot of us, doesn’t even have a lot of the same beliefs, but I know he would never do anything to hurt the cause, or me. Of course, he might not HELP the Cause, or me, but still. I’ve never once doubted that R would take a bullet for me, if it came to that. I would just never in a million years want him to.

Grantaire swallowed, hard. Of course he would take a bullet for Enjolras, or more, but it had never occurred to him that knowing that might make Enjolras worried. Worried that Grantaire would do something stupid.

If only the man knew that Grantaire worried about Enjolras in exactly the same way.

Hesitating for only a moment, he decided to leave a comment of his own.

u/MyFullGlass1832 - 1 minute ago NAH. Sure your friend shouldn’t have been drunk and you were right to kick him out, but drinking doesn’t make him an asshole (though not talking to you might). I am curious why you would have been worried about him. He’s a grown man and not your responsibility.

He quickly closed out of reddit, not wanting to do something stupid and refresh until Enjolras responded, but he only half-paid attention to the tweets he scrolled past, glancing at the clock to see if it was still pathetic for him to check for a response.

But to his shock, when he finally gave in and checked forty-five minutes later, Enjolras had answered, and something in Grantaire’s stomach twisted to know that he was still checking the thread, still seeking a resolution.

u/RadianceoftheFuture - 39 minutes ago Maybe ‘worried about’ is the wrong term, but he’s my friend. I didn’t want him to get hurt, or worse, because he was drunk. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s gotten hurt on my watch, and everytime it happens, it’s awful. And not just because he won’t shut up about it for the next six months - I always feel so guilty, like I should’ve been protecting him. I know that’s not realistic, so the very least I can do is send him home when I think he’s liable to hurt himself. That way I can sleep at night knowing I did what I could.

The breath caught in Grantaire’s throat, and his chest felt tight, especially as he read the follow up comments.

u/valiant.artisan - 34 minutes ago INFO: Are you and R gay?

u/tremble_b4apoppy - 26 minutes ago Dude you may be in love with R.

u/timidinrepose - 21 minutes ago OMG this is the sweetest thing I’ve read all day.

u/Lymantria_dispar - 12 minutes ago. Pretty sure this might go a little beyond just friendship. Either way, I’m glad you care about your friend, and even though you weren’t TA, you should call him and explain why you told him to go home. 

Grantaire couldn’t seem to stop his stupid smile as he stared at the computer, and this time, he didn’t hesitate, opening his text chain with Enjolras without reading any of Enjolras’s previous texts. He didn’t need to read them know.

NTA.

He sent the text and held his breath, wondering if Enjolras would acknowledge it, immediately, or try to play it cool. His one word answer indicate the former: Sorry?

But Grantaire wasn’t nearly as willing to play it coy. Not anymore. Your AITA post. I’m giving you my judgment. NTA.

In his mind, he could see Enjolras blush, that same way he did when he was frustrated, two spots of color rising high in his cheek as he stared at Grantaire. You saw that?

Even in his mind, it was a beautiful sight. Yeah

Then you should know, I agree with the majority opinion.

The image of Enjolras blushing disappeared, leaving Grantaire blinking at his phone, his brow furrowed as he tried to think of what the majority option would have been. Oh?

NAH.

Grantaire grinned, but before he could respond, Enjolras texted, Want to come over? I think I owe you an explanation in person.

I thought you’d never ask.

----------

u/ RadianceoftheFuture - 45 minutes ago UPDATE: AITA for kicking my friend out of a protest?

(Original.)

Thank you all very much for your feedback in the original post. There were a variety of perspectives on this, but some of the comments on the original post made me realize that I may in fact feel something more than friendship towards R, and it’s a good thing I figured it out, because he found the post, and even commented on it without me knowing! Anyway, we talked, I explained how I felt, and it turns out R’s had a thing for me pretty much since he’s known me. Anyway, we’re dating now, and while this isn’t exactly going to solve my problem of worrying about him, I also think he’ll be on somewhat better behavior now. For my sake at least.

We still have a lot to work on together, but we’re moving in the right direction. And to think, I probably never would’ve figured it out if it weren’t for reddit, of all the websites. 

u/MyFullGlass1832 - 3 minutes ago WIBTA for hijacking my boyfriend’s reddit post to tell him that I love him?

u/ RadianceoftheFuture - 2 minutes ago YTA for sitting literally two feet away from me and responding to a reddit post when we could be doing something far more exciting.

u/MyFullGlass1832 - 1 minute ago ...good point.

[brywrites]

Long-winded thoughts on canceling the Criminal Minds cast and accountability from an abolitionist perspective below, if you’re into that sort of thing

Yes, the cast has done some problematic things. Also yes, many of them occurred years ago when "times were different.” That doesn’t mean it was okay then - it’s always been offensive, but people didn’t automatically go “oh hey we shouldn’t do/say that” because it was considered normal. Aisha’s SoupTalk video is yikes, but bear in mind that jokes like that were very common before women started speaking out about things and #MeToo became a movement. The r-slur has always been offensive but it was incredibly commonplace for a long time. 

Which is to say that it is important to hold people accountable for when they’ve done wrong, and to explain why things aren’t okay - but it’s also important to recognize when people have changed and give them space to do so. MGG for example has done a lot to support and raise money for an organization that offers programming and resources to adults with intellectual disabilities that he’s clearly very passionate about – he’s doing work to be better. Would a “hey I said this thing a few years ago and definitely should not have said it but now I know better and etc etc” be nice? Yeah, it definitely wouldn’t hurt. But in an age of 40 minute long YouTube apologies and half-hearted notes app screenshots, I (personally) would rather see someone putting their money where their mouth is and doing the work.

I think calling people out when appropriate is important. Holding people accountable is important. But I also think cancel culture is toxic and antithetical to the world we’re trying to achieve. We want people to want to learn and change and be better. If we say they’re cancelled forever, that defeats the point**. Especially if you’re an abolitionist!! Abolition is all about grace, forgiveness, and growing together. Cancelling began as a form of accountability but has now become a toxic culture of performative woke-ness. It’s not woke to tell people they can never do better. True radical thinking is believing that people can do better, and working together to raise our collective consciousness. Radical accountability looks less like “you did/didn’t do X and now you’re cancelled,” and more like “you did/didn’t do X - do you realize why that was harmful/offensive/disappointing/etc? Here’s a thoughtful explanation and some recommendations for further reading, I would be happy to answer any questions or talk more about this.” It looks like an invitation to educate themselves and ask questions rather than an assertion that because they don’t have the knowledge already they can never be redeemed.

Celebrities are not heroes. Class privilege is a hell of a drug, and while many have begun doing the hard work of learning, they still live in a relatively isolated world in which the everyday experiences of discrimination, poverty, etc. affect them very differently. Shemar Moore said “all lives matter” in 2017 and recently talked about how there’s “good and bad on both sides” in regards to racism. Caitlyn Jenner thought Trump was going to help LGBTQ+ people. When you’re famous and wealthy, you experience the world differently, and you aren’t radicalized as easily because things don’t affect you the way they do the rest of us! We shouldn’t excuse all their bad behavior, but we should be mindful of the fact that it might take them longer to learn to do better. 

You’re allowed to be upset and hurt and offended and disappointed by things the cast have said/done. That is COMPLETELY valid. You’re allowed to decide you don’t want to be in the fandom anymore! You’re allowed to express your frustration or disappointment! But when it comes to calling people out online or in person, I think it’s important to keep all of the above in mind. Are the ways in which we hold people accountable encouraging them to reflect and learn? Or are we just shouting into the void with no real strategy?

Especially if we’re for the abolition of prisons and policing because everyone deserves grace and the chance to be held accountable and restore justice for harms they caused in a way that allows them to grow while supporting the people they’ve hurt - we cannot just apply that grace in places we see fit***. We have to be willing to apply it to celebrities who did something problematic, to people we knew who used to say problematic things but are now trying to learn in the wake of BLM, and so on. We all had to learn at one point. And it’s amazing that we all learned so young and have fought for so much. But not everyone has had the same experiences and the same education.

Anyways. 

**obviously this is meant for people who said or did something problematic, not for someone who is like a literal Nazi or actively advocating for conversion therapy or something

***there are types of harm that are extremely harmful and you should not at all feel pressured to give grace to someone who has deeply harmed you (eg someone who assaulted you) if you aren’t in a place to do that! You can! But you don’t have to! Also we’re talking grace for people who have made mistakes and are ready to change and recognize they did wrong, not for like Harvey Weinstein or people who commit the same grave harm over and over and over for their own pleasure knowing full well what they are doing.

[uncloseted]

my mom keeps badgering me about the capital event bc i really hated it but i support the blm protests and she says it’s hypocritical of me bc the protests were just as “violent” as the capital and “caused lots of deaths”. i never really have anything to say back to justify what went down, do you have any info i could use to explain myself? i know they were for completely different causes and one actually matters, but i don’t know how to justify the “violence” (i personally don’t think a majority of them were violent, all the ones where i lived were routinely peaceful and i think the extreme ones were sensationalized for the news). anyway sorry if it’s dumb i’m 14 and just trying to get into politics and stuff so i’m not super well informed and just trying to learn.

I’m sorry this has taken me a few days to get to.  What happened at the Capitol is complicated, and I want to make sure I give you as full of an answer as possible.  I also want to just quickly say that it’s awesome you’re getting involved in politics at such a young age and trying to help your parents understand these issues.  I would love to answer any questions you have about politics or social issues (or just kind of anything in general, I’m not picky).  Last thing and then I’ll get into the meat of this post- I’m a huge supporter of the BLM and police abolition movements and was a protestor over the summer, so I’m maybe a little bit biased.  This situation makes me really angry on a personal level, but I’ll try to stick to just the facts as much as possible in this post and let you know when I’m showing my own opinions.

So the first thing I want to talk about is language.  The Black Lives Matter protests were protests- a public expression of objection, disapproval or dissent towards a political idea or action, usually with the intention of influencing government policy.  In the US, protesting is a constitutional right protected by the First Amendment.  The storming of the Capitol was not a protest, and it wasn’t intended to be.  It was planned several weeks in advance with the explicit intention of disrupting the counting of Electoral College ballots.  Their stated goal was to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in the presidential election, an election that is widely considered to be the freest, fairest, and safest election in US history (ironically, in part due to Trump’s insistence that there was voter fraud in the 2016 election).  Storming a public building is not a form of protest protected by the US Constitution.  Further, an attempt to overturn a democratic election is an attempt to carry out a coup.  The Capitol rioters will likely be charged with sedition (conduct that incites rebellion against the established order) and/or insurrection (a violent uprising against an authority or government).  The Black Lives Matter protestors were not attempting to carry out a coup against the US government, and none have been charged with offenses as big as those.

Next, I want to touch on motivation.  The Black Lives Matter protesters were protesting against police brutality towards minorities, particularly Black people.  There has long been a documented history of police misconduct and fatal use of force by law enforcement officers against Black people in the US.  Many protests in the past have been a response to police violence, including the 1965 Watts riots, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the 2014 and 2015 Black Lives Matter protests in response to the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray.  By contrast, the Capitol rioters were not motivated by fact.  They were called to action by the President of the United States, Donald Trump.  They were told that the election had been “stolen” from Trump, and were encouraged to march over to the Capitol to “take back our country”.  The idea that the election was stolen from the president is demonstrably false.  They weren’t motivated by a social issue, a concern for their own lives, facts, or even really principle.  “Our president wants us here...we wait to take orders from our president,” was what motivated them. The affiliations of those rioters are varied, but many of them are affiliated with either the far-right, anti-government Boogaloo Boys, the explicitly neofascist Proud Boys, the self-proclaimed militia The Oath Keepers, or the far-right militia group Three Percenters.  Many are also on the record as being QAnon followers (followers of a disproven far-right conspiracy that started off as a 4chan troll, which states that an anonymous government official, “Q”, is providing information about a cabal of Satan-worshiping, cannibalistic pedophiles in the Democratic party who are running a child sex trafficking ring and plotting against Trump.  Yes, really).

The intentions of BLM were largely peaceful.  BLM protest documents encouraged protesters to be peaceful even in the face of police violence, because the BLM protesters knew what the price of being violent would be.  We were encouraged not to bring weapons or anything that could be misconstrued as a weapon.  Even non-violent protests were met with tear gas, rubber bullets, and riot gear.  A reported 96.3% of 7,305 BLM protests were entirely peaceful (no injuries, no property damage).  The 292 “violent incidents” in question were mainly the toppling of statues of “colonial figures, slave owners, and Confederate leaders”.  There were also several instances of right wing, paramilitary style militia movements discharging firearms into crowds of protesters, and 136 confirmed incidences of right-wing participation at the protests (including members of the aforementioned Boogaloo Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, and Proud Boys).  It was also rumored that off-duty police were inciting violence (although to my knowledge, that is unconfirmed).  There is no evidence that “antifa” (a decentralized, left-wing, anti-racist and anti-fascist group) played a role in instigating the protests or violence, or even that they had a significant role in the protests at all.  People who were involved in crimes were not ideologically organized, and were largely opportunists taking advantage of the chaos for personal gain.  

By contrast, the “Storm the Capitol” documents were largely violent; messages like, “pack a crowbar,” and “does anyone know if the windows on the second floor are reinforced” were common on far-right social media platforms.  One message on 8kun (formerly 8chan, a website linked to white supremacy, neo-Nazism, the alt-right, etc) stated, "you can go to Washington on Jan 6 and help storm the Capitol....As many Patriots as can be. We will storm the government buildings, kill cops, kill security guards, kill federal employees and agents, and demand a recount."  The speakers at the Trump rally encouraged attendees to see themselves as foot soldiers fighting to save the country, and to be ready to “bleed for freedom”.  The Capitol rioters were mostly armed; rioters were reportedly seen firing pepper spray at police officers, and pipe bombs, molotov cocktails, and guns (including illegal assault rifles) were found on the protesters. One protester was filmed saying, “believe me, we are well armed if we need to be.”  Some protesters arrived in paramilitary regalia, including camo and Kevlar vests.

I quickly want to touch on scale.  The George Floyd BLM protests are thought to be the largest protests in US history, with between 15 and 26 million (largely young, sometimes children, minority) people attending a protest in over 2000 cities in 60 countries.  There were around 14,000 arrests, most being low-level offenses such as violating curfews or blocking roadways. 19 deaths have been reported, largely at the hands of police.  Only one death is known to have been a law enforcement officer.  The number of people who stormed the Capitol is still somewhat unclear, but it seems to be between 2,000 and 8,000 (largely older white, cis, straight, Christian men) people.  80+ people have been arrested for federal crimes, including 25+ who are being charged with domestic terrorism (something nobody associated with BLM is being accused of).  There have been five deaths reported.  One was a police officer, and the other four were rioters.  Of those deaths, one was a police related shooting (a female Air Force veteran).  The other three died of unrelated medical emergencies.  One reportedly had a history of high blood pressure and suffered a heart attack from the excitement.  

Now I want to look at government response.  During the BLM protests, there was a huge response from law enforcement.  200 cities imposed curfews, 30 states and Washington DC activated over 96,000 National Guard, State Guard, 82nd Airborne, and 3rd Infantry Regiment service members.  The deployment was the largest military operation other than war in US history, and it was in response to protests concerning, in part, the militarization of police forces.  The police were outfitted in riot gear.  They used physical force against BLM protesters, including batons, tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets, “often without warning or seemingly unprovoked,” per the New York Times.  Anecdotally, everyone I know now knows how to neutralize pepper spray, treat rubber bullet wounds, build shields out of household items, how to prevent cellphones from being tracked, and how to confuse facial recognition technology to prevent being identified (as six men connected to the Ferguson protests mysteriously turned up dead afterwards, and the police were using cellphone tracking technology).  Amnesty International issued a press release calling for police to end excessive militarized response to the protests.  There were 66 incidents of vehicles being driven into crowds of protesters, 7 of which explicitly involved police officers, the rest of which were by far-right groups.  Over 20 people were partially blinded after being struck with police projectiles.  When the BLM protests were happening, Trump said that, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

In contrast, the response to the Capitol protesters was relatively tame, especially given that the US Capitol’s last breach was over 200 years ago (when British troops set fire to the building during the war of 1812) and the rioters weren’t being shy about their aspirations to conduct an armed insurrection incited by the sitting president.  There was (widely available, able to be found through a Google search, everyone saw it) prior intelligence that far-right, extremist groups were planning on (violently) Storming the Capitol on January 6th, with the intention of interrupting the Electoral College ballot counting and holding lawmakers hostage.  However, the US Capitol Police insisted that a National Guard presence would not be necessary for the protests, and Pentagon officials reportedly restricted DC guard troop from being deployed except as a measure of last resort, and restricted them from receiving ammunition or riot gear.  They were instructed to engage with rioters only in self-defense, and were banned from using surveillance equipment.  Despite prior knowledge of the “protests”, Capitol Police staffing levels mirrored that of a normal day, and no riot control equipment was prepared.  The Capitol Police weren’t in paramilitary gear the way they were for the BLM protests.  The mob walked in to the Capitol with little resistance.  Some scaled walls, some broke down barricades, some smashed windows, and one video even seems to show Capitol Police opening a gate for the mob. Rioters traipsed around the Capitol (one of the most important government buildings in the country) with little resistance, looting and vandalizing offices of Congress members.  Some rioters felt safe enough to give their names to media outlets, livestream their exploits, and take selfies with police officers.  One man was (ironically) carrying a Confederate flag, a symbol of a secession attempt on the part of the South (and of racism). It took 50 minutes for FBI tactical teams to arrive at the scene, and the National Guard were initially directed by Trump not to intervene.  Pence later overturned that ruling and approved the National Guard.  Police used finally used riot gear, shields, smoke grenades, and batons to retake control of the Capitol, but notably no tear gas or rubber bullets.  Video showed rioters being escorted away without handcuffs.  Trump’s response to the riot was, "we love you. You're very special ... but you have to go home." 

This is where I’m going to get a little editorial, but I think it’s important to say.  If the people storming the Capitol Building were Black, they would have been met with a large, pre-coordinated military presence, violent restraint, arrests, and quite possibly would have been shot.  They wouldn’t have made it inside the Capitol, much less been given free rein to wander around without immediate consequence. Hundreds of people during the George Floyd protests were arrested for just being present- 127 protesters were arrested for violating curfew on June 2nd in Detroit alone, twice the number of arrests made during the storming of the US Capitol.  It turns out that the police do know how to use restraint, after all.  What an absolute shock.  It’s almost like they’re a corrupt and racist institution we should get rid off...

The last big thing I want to talk about is the outcome.  The BLM protests were meaningful, but the outcome from them has been tame.  Nobody has been accused of domestic terrorism. State and local governments evaluated their police department policies and made some changes, like banning chokeholds, partially defunding some departments, and passing regulations that departments must recruit in part from the communities they patrol.  Only one city, Minneapolis, pledged to dismantle their police force.  The response has largely been localized.  I think the biggest impact it’s had is introducing people to the concept of police abolition and getting more people involved in the movement.  By contrast, the Capitol riots have resulted in over 25 people being accused of domestic terrorism and the second attempt to impeach Donald Trump, something that has never happened before in the history of the US.  

But what really concerns me is the precedent this sets.  Donald Trump is an idiot, and he’s gotten this far.  We can’t count on the guy who takes his place to be an idiot, too.  The next guy could be clever, strategic, well-spoken, well-mannered... not to invoke Godwin’s law here, but people liked Hitler.  He was a persuasive speaker and capitalized on conspiracy theories about World War 1 to gain support.  His 1923 attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government failed, but sympathy for his aims grew.  He painted himself as a good, moral man who loved dogs and children and was trying to do right by his country (by, among other things, arresting communists and leftists, and then eventually all minorities).  Trump isn’t Hitler.  He’s not even a Hitler analogue.  But Trump has already done this much damage to the fabric of our society.  He’s worn down our relationship with the media, with one another, with democracy, with morality, and with truth itself.  We have to be prepared for the idea that the next guy might be a much better politician.  Getting rid of Trump isn’t the end; it’s the beginning of a fight against fascism that’s only going to grow from here.

There are other differences you could point to.  BLM protesters wore masks to prevent the spread of COVID (and indeed, researchers have reported that the protests did not drive an increase in virus transmission), for example, while the rioters were largely unmasked.  But I think the bottom line is that the millions of BLM protesters were doing their best to be responsible citizens fighting peacefully for an evidence-based, human rights cause, even though they knew that as a primarily minority group of people, they would be met with violence.  The thousands of far-right, white, Capitol insurrectionists were doing their best to overturn a free, fair, safe, and democratic election because of a call to action by Trump and a stringent belief in disproven conspiracy theories, which they knew would be met with minimal resistance despite the severity of their actions.  The insurrectionists are fascists, full stop, and we should call them what they are.  The BLM protesters were by and large just people, of all different political views and motivations, who wanted to fight against something they saw as unjust.  

I’m sorry that this is such a long post. This topic has been on my mind all week, and I wanted to give it the nuance it deserves.  All we can do from here is to keep fighting- for justice, for truth, and, hopefully, for peace.

[boykeats]

Hey, I'm just curious what people who are against "vote blue no matter who" think we should do? Since not voting is obviously bad and voting third party is like throwing your ballot in the trash since we unfortunately have a two party system. I think it's important to criticize centrist Democrats obviously but any dem is better than a republican. I just don't know what they think the best way forward is if not voting for more and more progressive candidates in each election starting w centrists

I appreciate this question! Voting is an important part of civic engagement, and the fact that so many people are denied the right to vote in this country is an injustice that needs to be fought, but voting also shouldn’t be both the beginning and end of your activism. Imo, even candidates that we consider to be ‘more progressive’ and that we turn up for on election days still have the potential to put their own interests, and the interests of their big financial backers, before the interests of the working class, the marginalized, and anyone else in need of support, which is why we can’t rely on them as the sole force in solving the disparities in this country.

The answer to your query is going to differ depending on who you talk to, but I prefer putting my efforts into mutual aid and community support. Reach out to your nearest socialist groups, join the IWW, volunteer at homeless shelters and food banks, donate to bail funds, write to prisoners, write to your state senators, sign petitions, attend your town hall meetings to advocate for more budget to your schools instead of police, donate to grassroots organizations, boost and support people’s fundraisers for healthcare or rent, support and volunteer at pop-up clinics, push for the abolition of police and prisons, push to decriminalize sex work, attend protest and rallies, uplift and affirm the voices of your local activists speaking about being people of color, being disabled, etc. Something as simple as taking five minutes out of your day to get a toothbrush and socks for the homeless person sitting outside your local CVS helps. If we want our communities to have the strength and support they need, we have to get out there and do the groundwork ourselves. Compassion, optimism, and working together to build mutual aid networks are more valuable than politicians who can’t be trusted to save us

[vibratoryblurriness]

Something's been bugging me for the past couple hours. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go through the trouble of doing something about it, but eventually I noticed the more I thought about it the more I was clenching my jaw, so probably there's something that needs to get out. It wasn't prompted by any particular person or event or anything, and I already forget what got me on the topic, but it's something that's bugged me for a while...

It's a bit of a controversial opinion (or in some circles will get you insta-cancelled), but I would like everyone to acknowledge that people are people, not inhuman monsters, no matter what they think or do. I've seen it come up this year in at least a few discussions of what defunding the police or prison abolition would look like in the grand scheme of things, how we have to acknowledge that the people in question are people. If we write them (or any other group) off as not human, whether literally or just implied through the way we talk about and frame things, it become really easy to not have to think about their experiences or beliefs and how that led to them doing whatever it is we don't approve of, or to address the situations that lead to those experiences and beliefs. I was mostly thinking of the prevailing US attitude toward people we've labeled criminals while writing that, but it happens with all sorts of groups in all sorts of situations.

The specific thing that prompted this though is the way what feels like the majority of people treat certain "dark" things, whether it's certain tropes in fiction, especially fanfic, or certain kinks, or things like that. Whichever one makes you personally the most uncomfortable, that's what I'm referring to. The ones where it's easy to find tons of people arguing that anyone who writes or reads or even thinks about that kind of stuff is irredeemably a terrible person, no exceptions. And I'm going to need you to stop that if you're one of those people.

I rarely talk about it, but I've been through some terrible things when I was younger and have plenty of trauma to show for it. That doesn't make me unique or special, because sadly far too many other people have too, but hopefully even without getting into any details I can get my point across. Unless you're one of the couple of people I've ever told any of it to, you'll just have to use your imagination. You probably won't actually guess the right thing, but just think of it as whatever the previous paragraph made you think of, with me on the receiving end of it.

Do you know why it took me so many years to talk to anyone about any of it, why I've still hardly told anyone, and why I'm still afraid to tell anyone? Because of that shitty absolutist attitude that anyone who dares even think about the wrong things is themself a Wrong Person. Sure, there are some people who are drawn to those things because they want to do those things for real, and that's its own problem, but you know who a lot of the people involved are? People just trying to understand themselves in some way.

It took me a while to even acknowledge that words like "trauma" or "abuse" could apply to me in any way or that things that have happened to me actually were those things. I spent several years basically not having emotions because I got that good at repressing them. And yet I still sought out things that reminded me of what had happened, because I had no other way to even begin to attempt to process it. And I felt incredibly guilty about it, because everything everywhere constantly told me that made me a bad person. Imagine if I could've spent all that time actually understanding what had happened to me and recovering from it and being the semi-functional person I am now while I was still a kid in school, instead of not even getting started on it until the past few years after I was already an adult and had spent all that time dead inside and not really able to do anything with my life because I wasn't even capable of caring.

And then think about how the same thing applies to millions of other people, not just me, and far more than that when you apply the same ideas to broader ideas like I mentioned at the beginning. You don't have to like people who do things you don't agree with, or be ok with them, or understand them, but I'd really appreciate it if you could approach these things with a little nuance. People are weird and complicated, but they're still people, and there's a reason for the things they do. It might not be a good reason in some cases, and some of them may choose to do Bad Things as a result, but most of the time it's more complex than "thing bad".

If we really want to improve people's lives and the world we live in, we're going to have to put in the effort to figure out how those things ended up the way they did, and not just on a superficial level. The good news is that it'll probably also help you understand people who are different from you, understand and advocate for your own beliefs better, and be better eqiupped to actually make the changes that need to happen. So, let's get to work.

[xtruss]

— The Economist

America Is Becoming Less Racist But More Divided By Racism

How it confronts ethnic divisions matters to multiracial democracies everywhere

Editor’s note: Twelve months on from the killing of George Floyd, The Economist is publishing a series of articles, films, podcasts, data visualisations and guest contributions on the theme of race in America. We begin our coverage with the publication of a special report by our US editor.

When derek chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck at the corner of 38th and Chicago on a warm, cloudy night in Minneapolis a year ago, there was little unusual about the scene. Not for Mr Floyd, who had been arrested before. Not for Mr Chauvin, who had been disciplined twice for misconduct and had 17 complaints against him. And not for America, where police kill over 1,000 people a year—three-quarters of them, unlike Mr Floyd, armed. Sorted by race, more whites die like this than any other group. But black Americans (13% of the population) are over twice as likely to be killed by the police. In this, as in many other ways, African-American men who are poor are at the bottom of the heap. To find someone else’s knee on their throat is, sadly, unsurprising.

The reaction to this murder was a shock, though. Mr Floyd’s death, which was filmed by a bystander, sparked the biggest civil-rights protests in America’s history. Some 20m Americans took part, flouting covid-19 restrictions. There were 7,750 protests in over 2,440 places, in every state. Beyond America, Black Lives Matter protests were staged in Brazil, France, Japan and New Zealand, among others. Companies around the world have been busily examining whether, through their hiring, buying and selling, they play a part in perpetuating racism. A year on, footballers in England’s Premier League, who play in a country where just 3% of the population is black, still take a knee before games, a gesture that is broadcast to 188 countries. Thus America’s struggle to defeat racism shapes other societies too.

The image of a white-skinned man, wearing a uniform that reads “To Protect With Courage, To Serve With Compassion”, kneeling on the neck of a dark-skinned man evokes the worst of America’s past so strongly that there seems little doubt what killed Mr Floyd. Police violence was part of it, as was poverty. But the real culprit was racism. The jury that on April 21st, after a short deliberation, convicted Mr Chauvin of murder seemed to agree.

For many African-Americans, watching a constant stream of death videos, combined with the country’s still racialised politics, feels like “drowning in the news”, according to Eddie Glaude of Princeton University. “I never really had faith in the United States in the strongest sense of the word,” he writes in “Begin Again”, a book about James Baldwin published after the protests. “I hoped that one day white people here would finally leave behind the belief that they mattered more. But what do you do when this glimmer of hope fades, and you are left with the belief that white people will never change—that the country, no matter what we do, will remain basically the same?”

Drowning in the news makes it easy to miss the profound improvements in racial attitudes in America that have taken place just in the past generation, a change reflected in the scale of outrage about Mr Floyd’s murder (and the rare conviction of a police officer for it). When Bill Clinton became president, a majority of Americans disapproved of interracial marriages. Cynthia Duncan, a sociologist who worked in the Mississippi Delta during the 1990s, observed that “when blacks describe a white who does not seem racist, they say, ‘she treated me like a person’, repeating the phrase to emphasise how rare and remarkable the encounter had been.” And this was 30 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Now another 30 years have passed, 90% of Americans approve of mixed-race marriage. Measuring changes in racial attitudes is fraught, because as people become more conscious that prejudices they hold are no longer widely accepted, they may become more reluctant to admit them. Yet changes in behaviour suggest the shift is real, not just what people believe they should say to pollsters. More than 10% of babies born in America are now mixed-race. Research drawing on data from dating apps suggests that one in three couples who meet online are too. This is part of a demographic transformation. Since 2019, white, non-Hispanic children have been in a minority in America.

African-Americans, whose opinion on the matter ought to count, think there is less racial discrimination than there was. In 1985 three-quarters of African-Americans thought that the fact that whites had better jobs, better wages and better houses was mainly down to discrimination. By 2012, less than half thought this was the case (a share that rose after Donald Trump was elected). And yet among the general population, racism is rated a more important issue in Gallup’s polling than health care, poverty, crime, the environment or national security.

How can the country have become both less racist and yet more worried that the prevalence of racism is growing? And if racism is indeed declining, why do so many African-Americans still seem to be so stuck?

Racism and awareness of racism are related but distinct. Sometimes they move in opposite directions. In the old South, where people were denied the right to vote for a century after the abolition of slavery because of the colour of their skin, it was a cliché for whites to claim not only that they were not racist but also that they understood African-Americans better than did those progressives in northern cities. Similarly, many whites who may have been unaware of racism when it was far more prevalent are more conscious of it now, as the protests after Mr Floyd’s murder showed.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

Since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, left-leaning white Americans have undergone what Matt Yglesias, a journalist, dubbed a Great Awokening on race. R.T. Rybak, a former mayor of Minneapolis, calls it “reality therapy”. The Trump-powered birther movement, which asserted that the country’s first black president was a foreigner, the well-publicised killings by police of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Eric Garner in New York, a mass-shooting at a black church in South Carolina: all these made people realise that racism was more widespread than they had thought. And then Mr Trump was elected president.

The share of whites who thought black Americans had worse jobs, lower incomes and crummier houses because of discrimination shot up. The share of whites who thought government should give no special treatment to black Americans shrank by a third in six years. In the year Mr Obama was elected, half of white Americans thought racial differences in incomes and wealth were caused mainly by lack of will. By 2018 that share had fallen by 15 points. Now black respondents are slightly more likely to blame African-Americans for their circumstances than whites are.

Understanding race and racism in American means grasping a set of contradictions. Despair at the slowness of improvement can be a sign of progress. Racial attitudes have changed, but black and white Americans are as segregated as they were in the era of James Brown and John Denver. As a true multiracial democracy, America has existed for less than the span of a lifetime. It is home to the biggest black middle class in the world, but also to a large black underclass that has made little economic progress since the 1960s. Writing about race is normally shorthand for writing about African-Americans, Hispanics or Asians. But as they are becoming more aware, whites are a race too.

In a multiracial democracy, emphasising race can be a recipe for zero-sum competition for public resources. Partly for this reason, the French government largely bans collection of data on race. But ducking the issue can mean that racial inequality persists. In 1967, another time of despair at racist violence, James Baldwin wrote that he wanted black Americans “to do something unprecedented: to create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy.” America’s task now is to make multiracial politics work without setting groups against each other. No other big, rich democracy is as multiracial, but plenty will be one day. So America is once again a testing-ground for a great democratic experiment. For it to work, the first thing to understand is why it was Mr Chauvin’s knee that was on Mr Floyd’s throat, and not the other way around.■

Reparations Alone Will Not Heal America’s Racial Divides

And practical questions over how they would work remain formidable

Editor’s note: Twelve months on from the killing of George Floyd, The Economist is publishing a series of articles, films, podcasts, data visualisations and guest contributions on the theme of race in America. Among them is a piece offering a different view on reparations.

Drive south-east from Minneapolis for an hour and you come to the Prairie Island Indian reservation, home to one of Minnesota’s 11 federally recognised Native American tribes. The federal government built a dam in the 1930s, flooding the place. In the 1970s it allowed the construction of a nuclear-power plant. Despite these blots, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon Prairie Island is full of visitors. People have come from Minnesota and Wisconsin to play the slot machines and blackjack and poker tables at the Treasure Island casino, operated by the tribe.

The Native American story runs through Minnesota. The largest mass-execution in American history took place at Mankato, south-west of Minneapolis, when 38 Dakota tribesmen were hanged in 1862. Today a small memorial garden in Mankato has a bench inscribed “forgive everyone everything”. Native Americans also receive reparations. In most states they take the form of land, though it is often useless for farming or property development. But federally recognised tribes are not subject to state laws against casino gambling. So Native Americans with reservations near cities have a near monopoly over a lucrative industry. Yet gambling has been only a partial success. Native Americans still have lower life expectancy and educational attainment than any other group.

The federal government has made some attempts similarly to recompense African-Americans, but these efforts were either ineffective or withdrawn after meeting too much opposition. The unpopular attempt to redistribute land in the South after the abolition of slavery was soon suspended. From the 1960s, various schemes were tried to favour minority-owned businesses in government contracting. They have not made much difference. For private businesses, reserving jobs for people of one race is illegal. Affirmative action, which gives African-Americans favourable treatment in university admissions and federal contracting, is being litigated away, mainly because it tends to discriminate against Asian-Americans.

Yet the idea of paying reparations for slavery has moved from the fringe since 1989, when John Conyers, a Michigan congressman, first introduced a reparations bill in Congress. Mr Conyers persisted in every Congress until he retired. It was not until Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an article in the Atlantic in 2014 that the idea became more mainstream among Democrats. In the party’s 2020 primary the leading contenders all supported reparations. Since he moved into the White House, Joe Biden has announced his support for studying the issue, which looks like a case of a politician signalling support for an idea without actually having to do anything to advance it.

Even if a reparations bill passed the House, which is unlikely, it would have no chance in the Senate. The idea, which is popular among upscale Democrats, has the support of only half of African-Americans. Practical questions, such as who should receive any payment and who should be obliged to contribute, remain formidable. The political backlash against a party that made a determined push for reparations from the federal government would be fierce. This has not stopped some towns and institutions from trying. Asheville in North Carolina, Evanston in Illinois and Georgetown University have all taken steps in this direction by acknowledging a moral responsibility for slavery and segregation.

Initiatives like this may be worthy, but they will not deal with disparities in income, wealth, education and housing. The reparations movement is driven by arguments about justice, but the economic arguments for it are weak. The bulk of the black-white wealth gap is accounted for not because white Americans have inherited far more than black Americans. It is caused by African-Americans having lower incomes which, compounded over time, lead to less wealth. A one-off reparations payment would not fix that.

Race in America

A year ago George Floyd’s murder gave rise to a movement to end racial disparities. How can that be done?

Editor’s note: Twelve months on from the killing of George Floyd, The Economist is publishing a series of articles, films, podcasts, data visualisations and guest contributions on the theme of race in America. To see them visit our hub.

When george floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin a year ago, the sense of injustice was tinged with despair. Why, many Americans asked, is this still happening in our country? Why, many foreigners asked, does the story of race in America never seem to change? Except this time was different. Mr Floyd’s death prompted the biggest civil-rights protests in American history. Mr Chauvin, unusually, was convicted of murder. And institutions in America and beyond looked at themselves in a different light. Something needed to change. But what exactly?

The Biden administration and the Democratic Party have made reducing racial disparities an organising principle of government. That sounds straightforward, but it is not. Despite the gains in legal and political rights made by African-Americans since the civil-rights era, measures of relative poverty and black-white segregation have barely moved for half a century. Tackling enduring injustices requires clear thinking about their causes.

Most racial disparities come about when three things collide: secular economic trends, the aftershocks of slavery and segregation and present-day bigotry and racism. The first two are usually the biggest causes of bad outcomes for African-Americans, but the third—racism today—gets most of the attention.

This is backwards. Covid-19 has killed African-Americans at higher rates than whites or Asian-Americans. The causes are still unclear, but the blame is unlikely to lie with racist doctors, nurses and insurers. Instead, for reasons that include past racism and present-day poverty, African-Americans are more likely to suffer from pre-existing conditions and to have to work outside the safety of their homes, and less likely to have health insurance.

Racism remains a curse in America, though it is less widespread than 30 years ago, let alone in the civil-rights era. But, since it is lodged in bigoted minds, rooting it out is largely beyond the power of any government. Poverty and the structural legacy of racism in institutions are different. Take the Biden administration’s new child tax credit, which looks likely to reduce child poverty by 40%. Because African-Americans are disproportionately poor, this race-neutral policy should halve the number of poor black children.

Given that the problem is racial disparities, why not target help directly at African-Americans instead? One reason is practical. People are more likely to support measures that they themselves might benefit from. The child tax credit enjoys broad backing. Were it designed to benefit only one group, support for it would plummet. Any administration that targeted policies on African-Americans alone—using, say, reparations and more affirmative action—would soon be out of power.

By contrast, policies that help all poor Americans are popular and effective. Since the Affordable Care Act in 2010, 39 states have expanded the availability of Medicaid, the health-insurance programme for low-income Americans. As a result, the share of uninsured African-Americans has fallen by 40% over a decade. A government that wanted to spend more could provide baby bonds for poor Americans and vouchers to move out of areas of concentrated poverty. A government less inclined to spend could relax zoning rules, making it easier to build apartments near good schools. None of these policies is race-based, but all of them would greatly reduce the disparity of outcomes.

These broad-based policies are not just practical, but moral too. Racial injustice is particularly searing in America because of the horrors of slavery, the violence of Reconstruction and the institutionalised racism of Jim Crow. African-Americans have had legal rights to vote, to marry whom they want and to live where they choose for just the span of a single lifetime.

Yet not all African-Americans need help. Despite the disadvantages they face, the country’s large, thriving black middle class is often overlooked in talk of race in America. Moreover, people who are not black also face prejudice and inherited disadvantages. How much better if government policy lessens Latino, Native American, Asian and white poverty, too. To deny aid to people in the name of racial justice would be perverse.

What is true of poverty is also true of police reform. Here there have been notable advances in the past year, as cities and states have trimmed “qualified immunity”, a broad defence available to police officers who kill civilians. Police killings of unarmed young men are often presented as overwhelmingly a racial issue, because police officers kill a disproportionate number of African-Americans. Even before Mr Floyd’s murder, the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Eric Garner in New York and Breonna Taylor in Louisville rightly brought attention to this fact.

Yet police officers kill Americans of all races more often than they should. Separating the many police shootings that are justified from those that should never have happened ought to be a national priority. This would be easier if policing was understood as a civil-rights issue affecting all Americans.

A race-neutral approach will not always work. To create more diverse organisations, companies, all too often run by white people, need to pay more attention to race in hiring. Unless elite universities take positive steps, their intake will not be representative of the country. But where practical, a race-neutral approach to opening up opportunities is more likely to help America—and especially its African-American citizens.

One year on from a terrible injustice, the United States is confronting not just its past but its future, too. In the next 50 years it will be the first big, rich country where no single racial group, ethnicity or religious denomination will be in the majority. The more politicians exploit the tribal fears of some voters, the more turbulent this transition will be. The Republican Party’s enthusiasm for rewriting voting rules in states such as Arizona and Georgia shows how democracy could suffer.

Yet America also has the chance to set an example to other countries. A smooth transition is more likely if politics is not set up as a fight for resources between groups that people are born into and cannot leave. Instead, the country can make common cause to shrink enduring racial disparities while helping all Americans leave injustices behind. That must be the aim. ■

[keplercryptids]

I hope you don't mind if I ask a question about police abolition (from someone who supports it but is still new to the concept). Few people around me are discussing it except Black acquaintances on insta and I don't feel it's appropriate to ask them. As I learn more about abolition and break down my notions about crime and prisons, the more I support it. But this is a new subject for me, and I only approached it (outside of your blog) with the recent increase in BLM protests (1/2)

(2/3 i need more space) I am seeing many people around me, mostly over insta (cause quarantine) calling for the arrest of the officers who killed Breonna Taylor (among others, but her murderers are the ones being called out the most). While I am trying to avoid sharing posts that explicitly call for that (since using the prison system as the main form of justice perpetuates the PIC), I'm not really engaging these people in conversation or saying anything about transformative justice.

(3/3) I'm finding it difficult to feel confident in my support of prison abolition when most people around me, including Black peers, are calling for prison as a solution for police brutality. How have you reckoned with that recently? 

i hear you. it’s complicated. for the record, i am a prison and police abolitionist who has called for the arrest of breonna taylor’s murderers, as well as other cops who have killed people. on the surface, this might seem contradictory. but at the end of the day, we don’t live in a world with transformative justice frameworks in place. so the options for people who have caused grievous harm are either: no accountability, or “accountability” through state-sanctioned violence and our current justice system. it’s not a great choice.

but one of the ways i reckon with this is that as a white person, i am coming at this from a position of privilege. my skin color shields me from police brutality; i am not their target or their victim, and partly because of that, i am not ever going to tell their victims what justice is appropriate. breonna taylor’s family and community are calling for the arrest of the police officers who killed her. i stand with them. in a world that lacks other systems of accountability, i don’t actually think it’s a contradiction to make these calls, as long as it’s not the ONLY thing we’re calling for. which hopefully, if you’re following police abolitionists on IG, you’re seeing some of that nuance.

the arrest and conviction of breonna taylor’s murderers are PART of what’s being called for. but it’s not and it shouldn’t be the whole demand. this article, written by abolitionist visionaries mariame kaba and andrea ritchie, is a great read. this quote from the article is especially relevant:

People who have consistently been denied protection under the law desperately want the law to live up to its promises. There are ways to support families calling for arrests without legitimizing the system, including by meeting material needs, providing safety for families and communities, and working to disempower police. Turning away from systems of policing and punishment doesn’t mean turning away from accountability. It just means we stop setting the value of a life by how much time another person does in a cage for violating or taking it – particularly when the criminal punishment system has consistently made clear whose lives it will value, and whose lives it will cage.

so in these cases of cops killing people, we can’t view an arrest, a conviction or a prison sentence as the be all, end all of justice. we can’t stop calling to defund and abolish the police even if police officers start getting punished (which is...unlikely anyway). in other words, we can and should do both. we can fight for immediate justice within our current framework now, and longterm accountability in the future, and a world without police beyond that.

[ill-will-editions]

QUARANTINE LETTER #5: UNRECONCILED Ron Sakolsky

Stop blaming me, accusing me, stalking me. Working yourselves into an anti-viral paralysis. All of that is childish. Let me propose a different perspective. See me as your savior instead of your gravedigger. You’re free not to believe me, but I have come to shut down the machine whose emergency brake you couldn’t find. I have come in order to suspend the operation that held you hostage. I have come in order to demonstrate the aberration that normality constitutes. Ask yourselves how you could find it so comfortable to let yourselves be governed. Don’t let those who’ve led you to the abyss claim to be saving you from it: they will prepare for you a more perfect hell, an even deeper grave. Thanks to me for an indefinite time you will no longer work, your kids won’t go to school, and yet it will be the opposite of a vacation. Vacations are the space that must be filled up at all costs while waiting for the obligatory return to work. I render you idle. Use the time I’m giving you to envision the world of the aftermath in light of what you’ve learned from the collapse that’s underway. The disaster ends when the economy ends. The economy is the devastation.

                          from “What the Virus Said”

Just when I was feeling most elated about prospects for the future given the strength of the Indigenous resistance sweeping Canada in early 2020, the coronavirus arrived on the scene with whiplash-inducing force to upstage everything in its deadly path unexpectedly shutting down whatever parts of the Canadian economy had not already been intentionally shut down by the Wet’suwet’en land defenders and those involved in solidarity actions that had immediately preceded the spread of the disease. Rather than framing The Virus exclusively within the kind of nightmare scenario that is typically associated with the mainstreaming of the term “surreal” (as if all there ever is to surrealism’s critique of reality is this dark side), I want to instead illuminate the surreal possibilities for social transformation that can be revealed by creating a surreal (rather than literal) analogy between the contagion of the virus and the contagion of revolt.

Starting in February of this year the appearance of a widespread Indigenous uprising on the stage of Canadian history swiftly moved the realm of the surreal from dreams of radical transformation to the direct action undertaken to bring it about. Railways, highways and ferries were blockaded, provincial legislatures, government administrative offices, banks and corporate headquarters were occupied. For many inconvenienced Canadians, such actions as these were considered to be unacceptable even though they would prove to be only a fraction as disruptive as the more authoritarian forms of state control that would later shelter under the legitimacy of saving us from The Virus.

Though the immediacy of the COVID-19 pandemic would quickly overshadow the earlier Indigenous revolt in the public eye, it is now evident to many that the smiley-faced mask of Canadian colonialism has been pulled off to reveal a state that in spite of its professed human rights and climate change awareness rhetoric continues to have no compunctions about invading Indigenous territory without consent to build pipelines for fracked natural gas and tar sands oil because of what it considers to be in the best interests of the almighty economy. As Tawinikay (aka Southern Wind Woman) has written, “If only one thing has brought me joy in the last few weeks, it began when the matriarchs at Unist’ot’en burned the Canadian flag and declared reconciliation dead. Like wildfire, it swept through the hearts of youth across the territories. Out of their mouths, with teeth bared, they echoed back: reconciliation is dead! reconciliation is dead! Reconciliation was a distraction, a way for them to dangle a carrot in front of us and trick us into behaving. Do we not have a right to the land stolen from our ancestors? It’s time to shut everything the fuck down”.

Just as Indigenous peoples have demanded their land back in rural areas while pronouncing the false hope of government-brokered reconciliation to be dead, the systemic dislocations to the economy brought on by the coronavirus have led urban anarchists to address fundamental land issues by calling for rent strikes. But why stop there? In response to the devastation associated with The Virus, we have heard calls for the cessation of not only rent, but mortgage and utility payments, even the cancellation of debt itself, the end of wage slavery, and demands for the cessation of arrests for minor offenses, the release of prisoners who have committed non-violent crimes, or flat-out prison abolition. As surrealists we might ask ourselves what other noxious aspects of reality might be called into question and transformed by beginning to imagine what might exist in their place.

Where I live in British Columbia, resource extraction has always been the name of the game, but the emergence this year of a widespread oppositional network ranging from “land back” Indigenous warriors to elder traditionalists and from Extinction Rebellion activists to anarchist insurrectionaries has been heartening. Together, this multi-pronged force disrupted business as usual in solidarity with Unist’ot’en and Wet’suwet’en land defenders, and threatened to bring the Canadian economy to a grinding halt. This time growing numbers of Indigenous peoples were not willing to be bought off by corporate bribes or mollified by a legal system that has never done anything but pacify, brutalize, or betray them in the process of stealing their land. This time people fought back in droves against the forces of colonial law and order. This time the air was alive with a spirit of refusal and rebellion with one action building upon another in a burgeoning movement that could not be stopped. When one railroad blockade would be busted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), another would spring up in its place elsewhere extending the frontlines of the battle all across the continent.

As I write, the wheel of change is still in spin. What the final outcome will be in relation to either the COVID-19 virus or the virus of revolt is unknown, especially in relation to the predatory nature of the times in which we live where the emphasis is often placed on the institution of statist forms of social control rather than grass roots mutual aid efforts in relation to the immanence of societal upheaval. Even though the pandemic has supposedly shut down the provincial economy with lightning speed, Coastal Gas Link’s pipeline construction efforts with their invasive industrial “man-camps” have still been allowed to continue to exist on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory with RCMP logistical support, thereby callously endangering the health and safety of the Indigenous inhabitants. It's abundantly clear whose lives matter to the Canadian government and whose don’t. Consequently, it will remain very hard for the authorities to put the genie of Indigenous rebellion back in the colonial bottle in the future. In the meantime, we are mourning what of value we’ve lost from the past, celebrating what we’ve created in the present, and still demanding the impossible.

[decolonizationxabolition]

Leftist politics, prison abolitionist politics, and some distinctions we really need to talk about

Hey folks, and thanks for coming back to my blog if you’re reading this! So the topic for this blog post is basically going to be pointing out some important contrasts between leftist politics and prison abolitionist politics. I am especially going to be roasting the radical left so just be ready for that. 

Anyways, the way I am going to unpack this is through criticizing the way that “revolutionary” leftists criticize the actions of one of my favorite politicians Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom is a young Latina representing the Bronx in the House of Representatives. I will be referring to this article first specifically and point out some things, and then we will get right to it. I would also like to note, that I am going to be keeping my commentary specific to the context of the United States, so please keep that in mind. 

So, in regards to criticizing the actions of politicians through the lens of prison abolitionist politics, it is important to point out that the people/communities within the United States that support prison abolition do not support any type of politician that embraces the prison industrial complex for any reason at all. In the article that I linked above, it talks about how AOC and Bernie Sanders “supported” a coup in Venezuela. Well, I’ll have you know that the incumbent president at the time (Maduro) essentially embraced the prison industrial complex and arrested people that were criticizing him. Which is a big no no for prison abolitionist politics/principles. Maduro is essentially being a neofascist in doing that, so is it really a coup if Maduro is behaving that way? To prison abolitionists, it really doesn’t matter if he is left or not, the fact that he did that is enough for us to remain neutral on what was happening in Venezuela in that moment in time. The prison system is still capitalistic, and on top of that dehumanizing as fuck. So no, we don’t care about him, literally at all. His actions are not revolutionary. 

The thing that radical leftists need to realize (for folks that identify as radical left and are serious about police/prison abolition) is that prison abolitionist politics are not exactly the same as leftist politics, they do in fact intersect frequently within the spectrum of leftist politics (socialism, communism, anarchism, etc.) but they are not one and the same. The reason for this is because of the fact that prison abolitionists are mainly concerned with dismantling the prison system itself, that is the MAIN focus. And in order to do that, we must be open minded and not take hard stances on our political views, especially because prison abolition is a long term goal. This instagram post on @blackabolitionist’s profile explains how prison abolitionists are looking for “abolishing reforms” and views criminal justice reforms (ex. restoring the right to vote) as ways to move towards the abolition of prisons, which contradicts the stances that “change won’t come from the system” and that “all reforms are racist”. 

I would also like to point out that taking hard stances on leftist views is not helpful because this white colonizer government studies your political ideologies and “went to the books to read about how policies would affect black and brown folks” with reforms that appear to benefit low-income black and brown folks in an immediate sense, but ultimately strengthen the prison industrial complex. So, you’re lack of participation (not voting on reforms because you’re “anti-system” lmao) and educating yourself on the specific policies and reforms (that do not necessarily lean right or left per se and are nuanced in nature) has strengthened the PIC because all the folks that are left to vote are racist white folks that have little to no idea about how these policies are going to actually affect people  in the long run and on top of that the government suppresses the vote. Hence why so many racist reforms have passed and made the PIC powerful as fuck. Fortunately for those that desire to educate themselves, there is a book called The End of Policing by Alex Vitale that is not only a deeply researched book, but also extremely accessible to read if you’re not an avid academic reader (free pdf here), where he fully unpacks the reforms made to the prison system that have made the PIC so powerful, the impacts that they have had on people, and alternative policies that move away from the prison system all together. 

I also would like to point out to people on the radical left that hold the views of restorative justice (which has been criticized and has it’s limits) as a practice of abolition, that their views actually differ from some of the community art spaces within the United States that are active in not only as abolition as a practice, but are also some of the activists on the political front working towards the agenda of prison abolition through community organizing and the use of a transformative justice approach and community accountability rather than a restorative justice approach (these are also some of the folks building formal discourse on what TJ is and how it can aid towards the agenda of abolition, especially for survivors of sexual abuse/assault) [resources on TJ v. RJ: (1/2)]. And as someone that has had the privilege of being apart of an amazing community that uses transformative justice and community accountability as a practice for abolition and has friends that are prison abolitionist activists, it is very apparent to me how TJ and community accountability is playing out in the realm of politics with AOC, what is really shocking to me is that she appears to be running in the same circles/networks (it is surprising but also not surprising since she used to be a bartender in the Bronx hmmm, it appears that she is working with prison abolitionist activists, especially the formerly incarcerated and it appears that our community circles are quite close even though we are West Coast). 

Anyways, an example that is very apparent to me is when both leftists and conservatives questioned why AOC distanced herself from Bernie Sanders after Joe Rogan gave him an endorsement. But honestly, as someone that is relatively up to date with pop culture, lives in the United States, and knows who Joe Rogan is (and if you don’t, he is a comedian) and for those of you who do know who JR is, then you probably know that he runs a podcast where he has openly expressed his cop apologist views . So it appears that she distanced herself from him because of that, which honestly makes a lot of sense when you view it in those terms, it’s very apparent to me that she is likely apart of a prison abolitionist community that is holding her accountable, not the justice democrats. 

Leftists, AOC is not a communist, anarchist, or a socialist. She is a PRISON ABOLITIONIST first and foremost, whose politics intersects with some of yours, but is primarily relying on strategy, community accountability, and direct feedback as a way to move closer towards the objective of prison abolition. And no, she is not going to be perfect, which is why we need shared analysis and realistic expectations. It is actually very encouraging that someone like AOC is in office right now (along with the rest of the squad), and it is extremely obvious to activists on the frontlines that she will not save us. What we need is more people like her to go into office in huge numbers, which requires community organizing. And guess what, the prison industrial complex is powerful as fuck here in the United States (it’s insane, people are genuinely afraid to come against this system and it’s very understandable), and the reason why that is has a lot to do with politics and the complex network between corporate interests and our bureaucracy. Some leftist folks have unrealistic expectations that are actually extremely unhelpful. Especially since some of these folks read at an academic level, have class privilege, and express their views without educating themselves first. And as someone who has been personally affected by the PIC at a very young age (and no I am not going to elaborate on it), it is very frustrating.

Okay, so to end this blogpost I am going to leave you all to ponder the revolutionary act of direct feedback, transformative justice practices, and how necessary it is in community spaces, abolition, and building decolonial futures. 

And if any of you are interested in TJ practices a couple of books are: Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories From the Transformative Justice Movement and Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication. 

[theculturedmarxist]

What will reading Marx do for my bank account?

At the very least, because the people that determine what is in that bank account study Marx, and so you should as well.

A valid, but very revealing question. It’s a common sentiment, especially considering all the economic factors effecting the working class today, everywhere in the world. The accumulation and capital is an overriding concern, both for practical reasons, as well as the logic we absorb from living in a capitalist society. All human endeavor is reduced to cost analysis. Time spent not making money is time wasted, and wasting time—not making money, either for yourself or others—is a cardinal sin of capitalism. The drive to convert every aspect of the lives humans live into a monetary transaction is relentless, and has become so common that it simply goes without question. It has seeped into and colored everything people do, their romances, their careers, their passions, their lusts. The logic of accumulation and transaction eliminates the person and in its place leaves a bank account, a debit card, a dumb repository of value in relation to what they can do for someone else.

The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save  – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything ||XVI| which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice. The worker may only have enough for him to want to live, and may only want to live in order to have that.>

So entrenched has this mindset become that in the mainstream it goes utterly unquestioned. People are immersed in it from birth, and might go to their grave without even knowing that there was any possible alternative, or even that they should desire one. Marx (for instance, he’s certainly not the only one) offers both a perspective outside of this logic as well as the analysis that can not only allow people to see it, but dismantle it. Marx and Marxist analysis provide a vocabulary and framework otherwise missing from the average worker’s lexicon. They are missing not because they are so esoteric and abstract that they require an imparted understanding, like a teacher to a child, but because the people in charge of workers’ lives—government officials, police, landlords, institutional educators, and bosses most of all—have done everything they can to strike them from the record. Billions are invested in making the thoughts themselves impossible, in inverting human tendencies and behaviors and values to make even the idea that the system is unfair a shameful one. Everything drives at ensuring that the worker stays isolated, ashamed, and desperate.

The benefit of reading Marx and other communists is that they understand this arrangement, go to great lengths to explain its whys and wherefores, and offer workers the tools not only to reframe the narrative in a manner of speaking, but the ideological guidance necessary to undo and escape it. Where capitalism breeds alienation, communists advocate socialization. Where capitalism fosters isolation, communists urge community. Where capitalism cultivates war and hatred, communism professes peace and international solidarity.

Marx tells the worker why he has to consider his bank account in the first place. He explains the mechanisms by which it is filled and drained and to whose profit. The confusion of chauvinism, nationalism, racism, classism, genderism, and so on is dispelled when revealed to be the deceptive antics of the very people that keep the working individual in perpetual anxiety over their bank account.

And still, even though Marx was writing about events that seem like a distant memory, does any of this sound familiar?

Dazzled by the “Progress of the Nation” statistics dancing before his eyes, the Chancellor of the Exchequer exclaims in wild ecstasy:

“From 1842 to 1852, the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent; in the eight years from 1853 to 1861, it has increased from the basis taken in 1853, 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing to be almost incredible! ... This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power,” adds Mr. Gladstone, “is entirely confined to classes of property.”

Again, reverse the medal! The income and property tax returns laid before the House of Commons on July 20, 1864, teach us that the persons with yearly incomes valued by the tax gatherer of 50,000 pounds and upwards had, from April 5, 1862, to April 5, 1863, been joined by a dozen and one, their number having increased in that single year from 67 to 80. The same returns disclose the fact that about 3,000 persons divide among themselves a yearly income of about 25,000,000 pounds sterling, rather more than the total revenue doled out annually to the whole mass of the agricultural laborers of England and Wales. Open the census of 1861 and you will find that the number of male landed proprietors of England and Wales has decreased from 16,934 in 1851 to 15,066 in 1861, so that the concentration of land had grown in 10 years 11 per cent. If the concentration of the soil of the country in a few hands proceeds at the same rate, the land question will become singularly simplified, as it had become in the Roman Empire when Nero grinned at the discovery that half of the province of Africa was owned by six gentlemen.

In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the materials it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest. The English Established Church, e.g., will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income. Now-a-days atheism is culpa levis [a relatively slight sin, c.f. mortal sin], as compared with criticism of existing property relations. Nevertheless, there is an unmistakable advance. I refer, e.g., to the Blue book published within the last few weeks: “Correspondence with Her Majesty’s Missions Abroad, regarding Industrial Questions and Trades’ Unions.” The representatives of the English Crown in foreign countries there declare in so many words that in Germany, in France, to be brief, in all the civilised states of the European Continent, radical change in the existing relations between capital and labour is as evident and inevitable as in England. At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Mr. Wade, vice-president of the United States, declared in public meetings that, after the abolition of slavery, a radical change of the relations of capital and of property in land is next upon the order of the day. These are signs of the times, not to be hidden by purple mantles or black cassocks. They do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.

The colonial system ripened, like a hot-house, trade and navigation. The “societies Monopolia” of Luther were powerful levers for concentration of capital. The colonies secured a market for the budding manufactures, and, through the monopoly of the market, an increased accumulation. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital. Holland, which first fully developed the colonial system, in 1648 stood already in the acme of its commercial greatness. It was

 “in almost exclusive possession of the East Indian trade and the commerce between the south-east and north-west of Europe. Its fisheries, marine, manufactures, surpassed those of any other country. The total capital of the Republic was probably more important than that of all the rest of Europe put together.” Gülich forgets to add that by 1648, the people of Holland were more over-worked, poorer and more brutally oppressed than those of all the rest of Europe put together.

Today industrial supremacy implies commercial supremacy. In the period of manufacture properly so called, it is, on the other hand, the commercial supremacy that gives industrial predominance. Hence the preponderant rôle that the colonial system plays at that time. It was “the strange God” who perched himself on the altar cheek by jowl with the old Gods of Europe, and one fine day with a shove and a kick chucked them all of a heap. It proclaimed surplus-value making as the sole end and aim of humanity.

Even these examples removed by time have their parallels and echoes today. Now just as then, capitalists refuse to raise wages, claiming it will bankrupt them. Now just as then, capitalists accumulate by rape and pillage the wealth of lesser nations. Now just as then, capitalists one and all make their fortunes through the pitiless exploitation of the working class. You worry about your bank account because it’s been emptied to fill the hoard of the person that owns all you make and for which they’ve never labored themselves.

That’s why you should read Marx and all the rest, because you have a bank account to worry about in the first place—a clock perpetually ticking down towards your ruin, and the only means of escape is joining with your fellow workers and building Communism.