The Socialists Who Want 500,000 More Cops Part 2: Don't Talk About Race

We look at the broader intellectual project behind nominally leftist calls for more cops and the course of the so-called race-class debate

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Podcasting. Oh I love it. I love when we're talking
to microfilms and people listen. Yeah, good for them. It's
gonna outlive microblogging apparently. Yeah, Okay, who could who could
have thought we've won? Guys? We are the last medium standing. Well,

(00:27):
to be fair, I do think the majority of people
on this call got got this job part because of like, yeah,
yeah it's tree. Look at where our posts of bought
us to this moment on the podcast it could happen
here podcast where we don't explain what the podcast is,

(00:52):
that's right, yea, And yeah, the podcast also contains me,
Christopher Wong, contains Garrison Davis, it contains James stout m
and allegedly Robert However, Robert Evans is. I think he's
legitimately actually busy right now. He is. He is like
recording something else. There's that. Yeah, he's doing a marath
and think but if you look at the iHeart page,

(01:13):
it's only Robert. We have. We have a lot of
a lot of podcasts on yeah, anyways, on the Cool
Zone Media. Yeah, on the Cool Zone Media. That's right. So,
speaking of podcasts we've done on the Cool Zone Media,
we did one that came out the one before this one,
and about it was it was about how a bunch

(01:33):
of socialists want more cops. Yeah, so, okay, I asked
myself the question when I read this, why why do
they want this? How did we get here because they're
rich and they're scared? Yes, this is true. It's there's

(01:54):
there's also sort of there's also sort of deeper roots
to what's happening here. And okay, so, like it is
true that there's been a whole wave of people who
were sort of nominally progressive or like socialistity dozens six
ten or two and seventeen who turned right in the
past few years, particularly over ratio issues like Leafing Gain
Greenwald like more recently the t y T people like

(02:15):
Bush Rosakara's been doing crime wave ship like kind of recently,
which was actually really funny. He had this tweet about how, like, oh,
the crime race is not actually down, there's a specific
neighborhoods where the crime where people are poor, where the
crime is up, and then you look at the data
and that's exactly the opposite of what's happening. But okay, so,
but this entire push for sort of more police is
part of a broader political project that Donna used to

(02:38):
me and his sort of allies in Jocobin and etcetera, etcetera,
been pushing for years now. And this sort of like
political project is the class side of what's called the
class versus race or the race versus class debate. So
for people who were either weren't here for this or
have like blissfully forgotten this, the race class debate was

(02:58):
basically an argument about sort of the role of race
in leftist organizing. Um. The argument was basically like, Okay,
should we understand race is like a structural force in
in the US that requires its own specific organizing around
racial justice and like liberation movements, or should we attempt
to put class first and attempt to solve racism by
appealing to the interests of the entire working class and

(03:20):
only doing class based organizing. Um, there are broadly like
three types of class first people. Weirdly, we're gonna see
two of them here. Um, there are a very small
number of very committed and very radical Marxists and like
a small number of anarchists who think that, like well,
race was a product of class anyways. And so if
you end the class system and abolished private property. That's

(03:40):
the sort of like actual central like mechanism of oppression society.
And if you do that, like you know, race will
sort of fall apart, and so you know you should
um whatever consciousness anyway. Yeah, like these people are wrong.
I think they're less dangerous of the other kind of
two people. But we're also going to see one of
these guys later. So there there's the people like called

(04:03):
the like class with like a K people who are
just straight up like racists like they are they are
class with a kkk. Yeah right, like they you know,
the groups of socialists I've compared them to, or like
the socialists who came to the US after etty eight
and we're like, oh, ship who cares like slavery, Like
we don't care about slavery. The actual thing that like

(04:25):
is good for the working classes, stealing more land for
indigenous people, and this is how we're going to solve
the labor question. Or also the sort of like like
the the people who were in the nights of labor,
like the eighteen eighties who were like, all right, we
need to we need to defend labor. Where we're gonna
defend labors by technically cleansing the entire West coast of
Chinese people like these are basically these guys right there,
they're just straight up racists. You want unions and healthcare. Um.

(04:48):
They used to be a real faction in the d
s a UM formed around just like absolutely dogshit subreddit
called stupid pole Um. They used to be a bunch
of them in Philadelphia. And these kind of people like
they were like red Scares initial base, and so by
you know, this is like by now like these people
are almost entirely deranged trade cats who spent literally their

(05:10):
entire time deep throwing Peter Field's boot. So they're kind
of mostly like they're they're just right wingers now, like
that that's what's happened to these people. Um, good riddance
fuck um. I yeah. And then there are people like
ordinary used to be in Bosch carcent Kara who don't
really want to end capitalism and think that socialism is

(05:32):
just sort of like welfare states and some unions. And
also and they also and this is sort of critical,
I tend to think that racial justice organizing is a
distraction from the main goal of achieving socialism. And by
achieving socialism, I mean electoralism, and by electoralism, I mean
getting these people elected to office. I hate these people.
Their politics sucks. I've been fighting them from like since

(05:53):
I became a leftist. I've been at war with these people.
And to get a sense of how we got from,
you know what, what was legitimately in a lot of cases,
what was at least legitimately in arguing about how to
deal with racism to a bunch of socialists going we
need more cops. I want to take a look at
a piece r Adam or Usami wrote in Catalyst with

(06:16):
David Zachariah called the class Path the racial Liberation, And
I want to take a quote from its opening to
give it a sense of people of like how awful
this politics is. This is like like one of the
sort of like opening statements about what what the's why
they're taking the class side in the debate. We argue
that the class race debate should center on one principal domain,

(06:37):
the distribution of material resources. Now, Okay, at first glance,
this seems kind of reasonable enough, but there's another incredibly
important aspect of any attempt to grapple with racing class
that USUM is just ignoring. Entirely, and that's violence, right, race.

(06:57):
Race is not just a measure of economic in a quality,
it's an index of violence. And you know, racialization increases
your risk of interperson interpersonal violence, and increases your risk
of sexual violence, and increases your risk of mass communal
violence on lynching or sort of ethnic cleansing campaigns. And
maybe most importantly for this whole argument, like being racialized
dramatically increases the risk of suffering state violence. And this

(07:21):
is a real problem for the sort of class first people,
because you know, it's something sort of multiple like multi
racial working class electoral project won't do ship to prevent
people from experiencing state violence just because there's welfare programs,
you know, which we talked about this what this looks
like in our Brazil episodes. Right, you actually have like
legitimately a you know, like a sort of united multi
racial working class at election social democratic governments, and they

(07:44):
enact anti poverty before performs and increase the size of
the welfare state. And while this is happening, they also
increase incarceration the incarcerated population by six and created a
rate of police killing that's eleven times higher than it
is in the us, right, And this is the thing
these people really don't want anyone to think about, which
is that race is actually more complicated than economic inequality,

(08:05):
which this entire politics is dedicated to not seeing because
class first politics, like a lot of what it really
is about amounts to a theoretical framework that gives you
a way to argue that race is not an explanatory
framework for literally anything, so you don't have to talk
about it, and anyone who talks about it is dividing
the working class or some ship and it, yeah, it

(08:28):
fucking sucks. And you know, like one of one of
the big sort of political violence things is massacrceration. And
one of sort of donner is like political projects is
arguing that massacrcepiration isn't about race at all, but it's
actually about class, which so we're gonna see somewhere bullshit, um,

(08:51):
he wrote. He wrote an article in Catalyst called the
Economic Origin the mass Incarceration alongside New Chicago professor John Clagg,
and I have like, I have an enormous special contempt
for John Clegg for two reasons here. One because you know,
a daughter is like an irredeemable Jocobin, Like soaked them
hack right. Clegg Is nominally was was part of the
sort of the anglophan Barxist like ultra left right like

(09:14):
he he was one of the contributors to the sort
of to to the ultra left theory journal like ultra
left Barxist Communization Journal end Notes, which you know, like
that influenced me a lot when I was like a
tiny baby leftist. And he I also have an incrediblemount
of contempt here because he's a Harper Schmidt Fellow at
the University of Chicago. And here's the thing. Okay, I
don't know what Harvard is like, right, I've never been there.

(09:35):
I don't know what their campus is like. I don't
know what it's like to be be on campus at Harvard.
I know what you Chicago, the Chicago campus is like.
I know what. There's a cop at every fucking corner.
I know that the surveillance campus is literally everywhere. I
know that they locked down the entire fucking campus. Well,
hundreds of heavily armed cops storm through every building in
every courtyard of the area. Every single time that kids
steal something from a gaming store and runs for it

(09:56):
until they' hunted them the funk down and I know
that you know I I you know that the almost
fucking killed me while I was there during a police chase.
I know that John Clegg was on fucking campus when
the Chicago Police Department shot a kid who was having
a mental health crisis. And to to watch this ship
every single fucking day and to make this kind of
argument is just fucking unforgivable. It is. It is fucking atrocious.

(10:19):
I guess I should I should explain this a little
bit for people who do don't understand this. So, the
University of Chicago is like in the middle of the
South side of Chicago. It's like the neighbor like most
neighborhoods around it are like black, and then there is
just this fucking university they've planted in the middle of it.
And this college has the world's largest private police force.
There's the also the regular cpds around there. There are

(10:40):
like for like blocks and like like through other neighborhoods
there were just Chicago Police officers there. There are fucking
CPD cops everywhere. It is a fucking bilitarized hell hole.
And yeah, and you know, like it is a place
where like the way that race functions in the US
is blindingly fucking obvious. You can you can immediately under
stand it by looking, like you walk outside your fucking dorm,

(11:04):
you look at the cop, and you look at how
the cop treats people depending on what the race is. Right.
It is so unbelievably obvious. However, Comma, in this article
clagg it Is are going to argue that mass incarceration
is actually a product of class policy resulting from a
lack of social democracy and underdevelopment resulting from a transition
from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy in the

(11:26):
twentieth century and the subsequent mass migration of black people north.
Like what kind of a grarian economy? We have to
watch economy, how much we paid? It's like, it's like,
the basic argument that they're going to make is that, like, well,

(11:49):
so there are a bunch of people who had been
slaves and then they became not slaves, and then a
bunch of them started migrating north. But because there was
this mass migration, all these people showed up to the
like showed up to these cities where there was no infrastructure,
and then so there's a bunch of crime and then
because of the crime there is mass incarceration, which is okay,
we're going to get some war into this. But before
we go into the service reactionary part of this article, right,

(12:13):
you have to understand that when these people say that
this is a a like a class based policy, like
class here does not mean the same thing that it
means for like you know, a regular person who thinks
about class, or like you know a Marxist, which again
both these people nominally are. Um here's from the journal Specter,
which a really good sort of critique of of this
whole absolutely dogshit article. Quote Clegg and Usums claim that

(12:37):
class is essential to understanding mass incarceration amounts to a
repackaging of a widely understood fact as revelatory insight. And
while they title their article quote the economic Origins of
mass incarceration, they never delve further into class and a
markist or even critical sense. Instead, they use educational attainment

(12:58):
data as a proxy. They note that a large portrait
of people who are imprisoned have low levels of education entertainment,
and I I'm glad to know that everyone on this
call who does the exact same job as me, we're
all from different classes. Congratulations, James, you are now the
bourgeois the congratulations s Garrison. You're not proletariat, I might
guess the labor aristocracy. I am here to expropriate the

(13:21):
surplus value from your labors. Yeah yeah, and if you
get to prison, it's it's my fault. Yeah, Like I
I just okay, So like what an asshole? What do
we ridiculous fucking claim? Yeah, And it's like these okay,
so like like it was some these like the Jocobin

(13:41):
people do this all the time, right, Like they had
this they made this famous study about the people who
vote for Trump that was like, oh, it's people people
who voted for Trump did it like working class areas,
and again working class was by education data. And then
also they didn't go because it turns out like this
is actually true right there, there are a lot of
people who voted for Trump for working class areas. It
turns out who those people are are the small business

(14:02):
owners and work class areas. They didn't fucking go grand
your leve enough so that you know they do this
ship all the time, right, And this is the kind
of analysis that like like proxy for class. It's like
it's a classic fallacious thing. Yeah, like like what's his name,
Nicholas Christoff, But yeah, he did this too, also like

(14:22):
like this this is this is We're we're getting fucking
Christoff level analysis out of these supposed Marxists and like, okay,
so all right. The curious thing here is that Clegg,
at least on an intellectual level, knows better than this, right,
Like he vote he wrote for end Notes and Notes
has a very sophisticated class analysis. But if you're actually

(14:42):
interested in the sweeping arc of the history of the proletariat,
you can't make the kinds of arguments that Cleg is
making in this thing. And so, you know, because because
he's trying to make this argument, he's just used to
this like like just absolutely like like seventh rate like
fucking New York Times pundit level analysis. Yeah, it's okay,
you know, like they're there. It's it's this is really

(15:03):
sad because for actual Marxists and not sort of like
liberal bourgeois hacks doing like fucking New York Times bullshit.
You know, classes about ownership, right, it's about who owns
the means of production and who's forced to work for them.
And you know, okay, so you have this, you have
the proletariat, or like the working class, where the people
who own nothing and are thus forced to sell their
labor for people who do who do own stuff. Right,

(15:24):
But this also presents a problem for this entire argument,
because if you actually want to do class analysis, you
have to understand that race plays a major roland. Who
even gets to become part of the regular proletariat in
the first place, because most there's a lot of people,
through the development of the course of capitalism who fucking
never even got to become wage labors because they were enslaved,
they were exterminated, they were turned to debt peons. And

(15:46):
oh wait, guess who fucking got that ship? Oh yeah,
it wasn't white people. And you know, if if, if
you're if you're gonna write and if you're gonna be
writing arguments and like explaining the rise of like a
mass system of enslavement, you might want to think about this.
But no, oh okay, So do you know what else

(16:08):
is responsible for a mass serious a mass system of enslavement? Uh?
The advertising and how they affect our brains. Yeah, that one.
I was going to go with Stalin, but well, the
same same day, if honestly, yeah, Stalin first mass Marketer
so true famously, yeah it Stalin, I'll say you're me

(16:28):
okay if you're asking, Okay, we're back, and we're back
to talk about the other arguments of the economic origin
of massive carcederation, which is that the argument that massive
carcederation happened because people were legitimately scared about crime, Like

(16:54):
this is their argument. Their argument is that crime went up,
people demanded less crime, and then the government did it,
Like wait did they did? They give an oalysis of
the class of people. Okay, they make this fun argument
that both black and white people were demanding the end

(17:14):
of crime, which is sort of true. But you know,
if you look at what like like yeah, like obviously,
and this is the thing, right, Like, you can find
people of any race who can who will take basically
any political position, and so if if you go looking
for like black people who are tough on crime, you
can find it. Right, there were black politicians who were
like tough on crime, right, but that's also not the

(17:36):
reason why massacretiation happened, Like I'm sorry, and also like
you know, if if you and you know that there
was there was also there are people who who like
weren't tough on crime, people who were like talking about
who were talking about trying to end like sort of
like like violent spikes. But if you look at what
they were saying, it was stuff like we want the
police to like respect human rights instead of property rights.

(18:00):
And uh, you know, okay, so I yeah, this is
this is just sort of silly, right, yeah, but but
but the point of this is that this is basically
this is their full on broadside against abolitionism as like
a body of work. Right, it's a sort of modern abolitionism. Um,
it's directly criticizing Michelle Alexander's The New dream Crow mass

(18:22):
incarceration in the Age of color blindness. And it's also
like a volley basically against anyone who's trying to explain
mass incarceration through race. And so what they argue is
that crime increase because there wasn't a strong labor movement
to solve the problem that like caused solve the problems
that cause crime with economic like reistribution, so the state

(18:42):
turned like a cheaper option, which is prisons. And is
it a cheap aproprition? Well, okay, so they're they're they're
not wrong in this Like, there is some truth here, right,
which is that there is a reason that mass incarceration
started spiking when capitalism went into christ Us in the
seventies and eighties. And it is actually it is actually

(19:02):
genuinely cheaper for for for the bourgeoisie to run a
prison state that it is to run a welfare state.
But and this is the important part, right, both the
welfare state and the prison complex are different, are just
different forms of kind of insurgency it used to be.
Who is a social democrat is ideologically incapable of understanding this.

(19:23):
His his entire ideology is that like is based on
the fact that the welfare state is the end point
of socialism. But this is completely backwards, right. The welfare
state and and social democracy were first implemented by Bismarck,
like specifically as a way to buy workers off, to
stop them from carrying out a socialist revolution and actually
seizing the problem, like seizing the property of the ruling
class and using the production for the benefit of mankind

(19:44):
and not profit. That is why the ship the welfare
state was invented. Like, that was the practice. If you
go back to Edmund Burke right in the French Revolution
reform to preserve the idea that like we have to
give people these little, these little slices here, and that
I give them a treat and then then then then
then they will never come in and take the cake.
And if you read these people, they're really explicit about this,

(20:07):
Like they will just deputely say we're buying off the
working class. But these absolute clowns have like somehow convinced
themselves that this is what socialism actually is. Social socialism
is when socialism is when you confuse table scraps for treats,
and you know, and and this this comes to sort

(20:27):
of the other thing that that that these people can't understand,
which is that social democracy was a class compromise. Right,
there was a deal that the capitalists of the working
class agree to. And when I when I say they
agree to this, right, like, this isn't just sort of
like an like it kind of is an abstract deal.
But there are also very literal deals. Right. There's this
thing called the Treaty of Detroit, which is this massive
basically set of negotiations. And then are like agreements that

(20:51):
are made between the US government, like like a huge
portion of organized labor in the auto industry and the
auto companies right, which which basically like the substance of
the treat of Detroit was like, if you give us
all of this welfare ship and benefits ship, right, we
won't we will stop constantly going our strike. These are
explicit deals. They're explicitly being negotiated between these massive trade
unions and and like the capitals who owned companies by

(21:14):
the American government, and so they get this deal on
the deal is you get unions and pension and a
vacation and like health care as long as you don't
like seize control of factories and run them for themselves.
And this held from sort of like the fifties through
the seventies. But partially this held because also the US specifically,
which is really really rich as economy was growing really fast.

(21:35):
But you know, but by by the by the suddenly
the rate of prophet is starting to collapse, and suddenly
it does actually become possible to both pay for the
welfare state and have capital turned into war capital at
the same time. And you know what happens is full
on class war over the course of seventies and the eighties,
and you know, the capitalists win the class war. And
the product of this, and this is true not just

(21:56):
in the US, but in in like a lot of
other neoliberal countries too, is that there is a massive
military that this the state is sort of stripped down
to nothing in terms of like providing services, but there's
this massive build up of the military and police and
also prisons, and so you know, this isn't some sense
that like if you if you want a class based
explanation of mass incarceration, like this is part of what

(22:17):
like that's a big part of what's going on. It's
also true that in the US, insofar as there was
sort of a revolutionary force, it was black people doing
like like doing the panthers, doing the like blanking on it,
doing the Black Liberation Army, and this meant that sort
of the sort of kind of revolution to this was
specifically about deploying the sort of like like they're deploying

(22:38):
the state against these people, because yeah, like this movement
is is actively trying to destroy capitalism by destroying the
races like police apparatus, and I guess at the same
time period like aim for instance, Yeah, and you know,
so the ruling class sort of loses their minds and
this is this is also this is also part of
what's happening here. But the problem is the sort of

(22:58):
jocobin cop free like need the police for their like
social democratic hell world that they want to build, and
so they can't have any like it is it is
incredibly structurally dangerous for them for people to be arguing that,
like the police are inherently a force of like systemic
racial oppression because they want them around. Yeah, and so

(23:19):
they do all this. Yeah, And you know, Clegg meanwhile,
especially I can tell, just doesn't want to use race
as like an explanation for ship. Like they literally argue
in this in this thing, like in this in this
article that white flight was actually just capital flight and
wasn't about racism. Good, and they just they're they're doing
this entire thing about right this our political economy of

(23:42):
the city, and they just they never mentioned they're so
ruthlessly committed to their program of not talking about racism,
but don't even mention redlining. It's like like they've managed
to go to the right of like the Libertarian Party
on race. It's like outflank them to the right. So

(24:02):
I'm gonna I'm gonna read more from the Spector article.
That's like yelling at these people considering their investments in
the category of violent crime. Clegg, it used to be
seemed curiously serene about the practices that upheld segregation. They
would have us believe that such tactics are simply quote
cast based remedies of exclusion, and that quote such strategies

(24:24):
were rational, even if suboptimal in the long run, effectively
rationalizing and apologizing for racism. So this is great. And
then they capped this off with this giant, like swelling
crescendo of an argument about how the left can't ignore crime.
And you know, okay, so this is an argument with

(24:47):
political consequences, right, and you can see those consequences in
that in the Cops article we were talking about yesterday.
Um here, here's a quote from that article. This figure
shows the same prisoner and police data as shown it
figure one, but this time denominated by the level of
homicide rather than the population. America's outlying incarceration look rate
looks normal given the level of serious crime. And now

(25:10):
the level of policing in the United States appears exceptionally
low compared to other countries. So okay, you you can
see the line of argument here, right, it goes like
mass incarceration isn't about race, it's actually about class, and
actually it's really about crime. And then it goes from
the crime to oh, well, this is about crime too,
we need to actually do something about crime. And then

(25:32):
that turns into the only thing we can do about
crime is have more cops, you know, and and and
the other part of this, right, it goes back to
the thing about like, okay, the thing about like that,
you know, and this is something that Garrison was talking
about esterday, right, Like the way in which you can
only think the level of policing in the US is

(25:52):
exceptionally low is is if you never interacted with a cop.
And yes, this is a deliberate thing, right, the sort
of Dracobin cadre of like Fox Marxist, like their entire
political project was like originally was driving off the anarchists,
you'd found it occupy, you know, drinking like and driving
the people into the political wilderness. It is placed it
with their sort of beer credit cops socialism. Right, like

(26:14):
what one of one of the first like big Jocobin
articles was a giant thing about why the zapatitis are
to model for the American left because right like this
is that these people have been anti anarchists like to
their core. And again because they need cops, they need
to get rid of the people who hate the cops.
Like again the people who were actually on the streets
dreet occupy, who have seen ship like for example, the

(26:35):
bloody stains on the wall outside of police holding pens
where the cops smashed the heads into of like every
single person they arrested, a thing that happened constantly drink occupy, right,
and these people who you know, have seen the police
shoot their friends eyes out, like are incredibly inconvenient if
you're trying to put yourself on top of a police state.
And you know so of course our abolitionists, which means

(26:56):
you also need a sideline them them and and these
are this you know, this sort of StrEG is an old,
entrenched like position of of of these people. Um In
Jeremy Gong, who was like the one time basically like
the dictator of D. S. A. East Bay, was caught
in in secret documents saying quote, we are not in
by the way in his capital letters not for abolition

(27:18):
of prisons. I would go further of black people want
more police in their neighborhoods. Really, Yeah, Jeremy Gong, by
the way, Asian dude, not black. Fuck you eat ship.
I hope you're having fun, Like, well, I don't have
I don't hope you're having fun. I hope you're having
a bad time losing another election by getting three percent
of the vote or some ship like fuck you eat ship. Um. Yeah,

(27:42):
And I should mention this also, like it's a very
obvious thing to say, but like it should be pointed
out that like everyone who's making this argument like that,
specifically these arguments about cops and about the stuff thing
about crime, these people are all either wider Asian and
and I genuinely think that plays a pretty big role

(28:03):
in why they're doing this. It is just a breathtaking
position to take as a white person, Like I'm looking
at the Anarchist bar article which she wrote for news Week,
great source of unbiased content on the left, about how
where we need to stop gas lighting progressive need to

(28:23):
stop gas lighting people on crime too, as a white person,
take the stand with the platform that has been given
to you, with all the privileges that you have had,
and and gas like black folks about the importance of race.
It's just breathtaking lee lacking in like context of self
awareness or like have you not been fucking paying attention

(28:45):
like at least for the last two years, if not
for the last twenty years, you know, And I mean
like this is the whole thing where like they have
this whole sort of political project that's like like makes
talking about like their goal is to make talking about
this ship sound cringe because you know, they and they
have to write and this is this, this is this
is also sort of class based survival strategy, right because
like they these people couldn't fucking hack it as abolitionist scholars.

(29:08):
They have no fucking idea what they're talking about. Right
If they if they if they have to actually intellectually
like be in the same sphere as like someone like
Ruth Gilmore Wilson, they are going to get fucking blow
Like these people look like this is this is like
a fucking battle cruiser going to war gets a speedboat, right, Like,
they can't fucking hack it, and so they have to
sort of like do all of this ship to convince

(29:30):
people that like no, no no, no, it's actually really not
about race. Uh, it's it's actually about class, this thing
that I can very easily pretend to care about for
academia in a way that I can't with you know,
pretending to care about race, because like I, I I, I
can't even fucking fake it, right, And you know, I
would say, this's like back in right, like Germany, Gong
and his allies are very careful to frame their view
in terms of like, wow, we want to end mass

(29:52):
incarceration in police violence, but we have to be tactical
about how we do it. And the tactical about how
we do it is black people want more cops, right,
But that that was their in sternal documents. Their external
their external statements were like, well some police abolitionism and
stuff looks like more cops anyways. But but you know,
internally they were always saying this. And now with the
you know, these people think that there's a political right

(30:12):
turn coming and they think that, you know, they can
fucking take their mask off and just say what they
really bean, which is fire fucking cops, and you know,
and part of what's going on here, right, It's like
like the reason this is happening is because when the
uprising happened, these people were just caught with their pants
down because their entire political project for like fucking how
how how many years were they doing this? Like seven

(30:32):
years was elect Bernie Sanders and then he lost back
to back successively to like Hillary Clinton, who was maybe
the least popular can the Democrats have ever run ever?
And Joe Biden, who is a fucking senile rapist who
like again was like um, they they lost his election
to a man who couldn't remember who who he had
been vice president under and they couldn't beat him, right, like,

(30:57):
so these people were completely discredited, and then you know,
the uper thing happened is people were caught with their
pants down because they spent their entire fucking time or
like arguing that like there's no path liberation through race,
like race, by any kind of race politics at all,
intersectionalities bullshit, like we just have to focus on class.
You just to focus on class, and they're fucking pure class.
Electoral campaign failed in oh hey, guess what it failed
in the South, Like wow, damn, I wonder why this

(31:20):
politics fucking got swept by Joe Biden. Okay, and then
you know, and then and then the up the uprising starts,
and the uprising is you know, the uprising is about
anti racism. It is about people looking at the at
the violence like of the police against black people and
going fuck this and they have nothing right, like the
whole intellectual leadership here, like all these people are fucking

(31:41):
calling for world crops. Bernie Sanders is arguing for more cops, right,
like Chopo was fucking Trapa was literally making the same
arguments that my fucking mayor made. Well, she was raising
the fucking drawbridges is stop protesters from being able to
get back into the middle of Chicago, which is that actually,
like cops, becoming a cop is actually one of a
few ways that are not white people can join the

(32:02):
middle class. Right. I was like, think, I think Amber
made that argument. Right, Um, so you know they have
nothing right, and you know, okay, and and and you know,
and the uprising eventually get suppressed, which the best thing
that ever happened to these people, because if the uprising
has to see, these people were done right. Like, but
all of this has enormous consequences, right, which is the

(32:22):
failure of the working class to appear at the ballot box.
And like Paul, Bernie Sanders over the line against Joe
Biden revealed something that was like patently obvious to anyone
who've been watching how the working class is moving worldwide
for the past twenty years, which is that the only
thing that can actually unify that if you care about
class politics, the only thing that can unify the working
class and pull it together as a coherent political force
to do a thing is their hatred of the police.

(32:44):
If if you look at if you look at what
the working working class politics in the century, the world
working class finds his historical unity exactly and only on
the barricade. It appears undivided. Literally nowhere else it is impossible.
You can't do it. The only thing that does it
is fighting the police more broadly in like means of

(33:05):
state violence. Right, Like if we look at the popular
friend in Spain, it isn't you even get like cops
who are installed by a socialist republican government joining the
working class to fight the minitary. But yeah, instead we're
going to be like the working class will be united
in this op ed and newsweek dot com. And there's
the smoking electoral thing, right And it's like no, and
I think that like this this is partially about this

(33:26):
people not understanding the sort of broad arc of of
the last decade a decade and a half, which is that, like,
this was the actual meaning behind the people want to
follow the regime. Right, this, this was what was going
on in the last decade of uprising in the street
movements across the world. Right, is that that was the
thing that could unify the working class. But of course,
and and this is the sort of secret of all
of this, right, Like, these people don't want to unify

(33:49):
the working class. They only want to unify it if
it's under their control. The erupt eruption of you know,
like actually the working class standing side by side together
fighting the cops on barricades in twenty was the worst
thing that could possibly happen to them, because you know,
it pointed to another way of doing politics that they
like in the in the street that they thought they'd
you know, crushed after the feet of occupy. And yeah,

(34:10):
and you know, and they were, they were they were
incredibly scared by this. They were piste off by this.
And you know, I I I mentioned last episode, I
was going to talk about the sort of class politics
that's at work here, because you know, these demands for
more cops, like they don't come from the working class. Right, Like,
in so far as there's ever been a referendum on

(34:32):
the police as an institution, it was, and you know,
we know what that looked like, right, it was. It
was a bunch of working class kids went into the
streets and you know and fought like lions against the
fucking cops. And even the sort of liberal like the
liberal middle and professional classes like eventually turned against them,
you know, as as rolled on, right, and you know,

(34:55):
like those people still hung on for months and months
and months, you know, like refusing to leave the streets
even after the fucking federal marshal sort of literally assassinating
people openly in the streets. Right, Like the whole demand
from more cops for like a harsher crackdown on crime,
all of this stuff comes from precisely the opposite direction. Right.
It's entirely generated by the by the by by by

(35:16):
basically the media class. Right. It's it's class based is
a combination of these sort of like faux progressive like
media outlets. And originally the starts with the New York
Times and the Washington Post and then moves left are
nominally left right, and it it hits like the fucking
T I T and all of their like bullshit, right,
and then you know, and and then at that point,
having having having went through the media people, right, it's

(35:38):
it starts running through these pseudo radical academics like Christopher
Lewis and Autinari Sami and then the last group of
people who are backing this is this is a very
weird one. But there's a collection of paid union staffers
who like for their jobs because they're in the big
union's work on police and prison guard contracts. Um, this
this is actually this is this is. This has been

(35:59):
a huge problem that the say in in in one
of the NPC elections, they had um for the for
the National Political Committee, which is like the d s
A is big major body, like governing body. Right. They
they accident people accidentally elected a police union organizer because
he was like they knew he was a union organizer,

(36:19):
they didn't know that he organized police unions. And then
he fucking refeat like nothing, nothing was going to happen.
And then basically what happened is everyone had left the
organization bullied him out and so he resigned. But like, yeah,
there's a lot of those people right, and those people's
classes actims are incredibly obvious. Right, But didn't the a
f l c i O even in like refused to

(36:41):
reject police unions right there, But like, no, people, if
I remember, if I remember, I think I think someone
threw a mall to of like into the headquarters the
because of it, Like yeah, like this this, this is
the whole fucking thing, and you know, like this sucks.
Cops are not fucking workers, Jesus rist. Like they're they're

(37:02):
just not if you if you look at what they
actually do, they are they they're they're like they're basically
minor feudal lords in that they extract rent from everyone
by fucking walking up people and robbing them, and then
they also extract rent directly from us by staking by stealing,
just like enormous increasingly large about the city funds under
basically the threat of extortion and violence. Lill yeah, it's

(37:26):
it's it's ship. I want to come back to a
sort of left PDA albums, right, because what we've been
seeing here is that as as these load of left
media outlets get larger, right, they increasingly adopt like insane

(37:48):
small business tyrant politics. Because that's that's your different coming,
right too. I t notoriously tried to bust its own
union staff. Yeah, because it turns out as journalists become
bosses and capitalists, they have they have their own class
to just look out for, right, Yeah, and they will
continue producing this class discourse which serves as nothing other
than like best like a safety sort of steam valve,

(38:09):
right for people who are frustrated by the class situation.
And they're work in if if not like an outright
sort of disinformation campaign about what class is. Yeah, and
you know, and and and there's I think there's another
thing going on here too, which is that like, okay,
if if you're like a sort of like media outlets
and your things that you hate liberals and that you're
on the left, right, there's there's kind of a cap

(38:31):
to your audience base, and specifically as a cap that
the kind of audience you can have that actually has money,
because you know, you can you can get a broke
base and sort of progressive workers, and you can get
some college students, right, but at some point, like those
those are not people that have a large amount of money. Yeah,
And at some point, the right offers a listener base
that has a bunch of money and this gives you

(38:53):
a revenue base for sort of would be like media
check who is hitting the limits of their original base,
and this is responsible for things like like Max Blue
Mental and X like two reporter Jimmy Door like descending.
It's just full on COVID nihilism and con I mean,
you know it's it's it's not like these people were
like doing good before, but like, you know, full on
right wing, like like Matt Max Blue Menhal going from

(39:14):
being like the most pro CCP guy the world has
ever seen to literally writing articles about how social credit
is coming to the US UH in the form of
COVID restrictions like this kind of ship and you know,
so like that that's part of the class politics going
on here. Like there's another thing, which is like, okay,
there's the Harvard academics. I don't think we need to

(39:35):
say anything complicated about their class loyalties except that like
none of these dipships are ever be beaten half the
death by a cop um. Yeah, I mean we talked
about the union bureaucrats, right, Um, they're more complicated. But again,
like in class terms, you get people who are either
driven by purely by sort of the revenue that copying
is bring in. And then you get people who are

(39:55):
opposed to political organizations like the d s A taking
firm stances against police union or going measers because it
would affect their own ability to win off, like win
elections inside the d s A, A thing that has
happens so many times. It's great. It's it's very funny
that they chose classes, and they chose like education level

(40:16):
as their proxy for class. And we are discussing this
in the same week that we release an episode about
a grad student strike at the largest university in the
country because grad students are unhoused because they can't afford
to pay their rent and feed themselves. It is it
is atrocious. Ship Like, okay, I need people, Um yeah,

(40:39):
So I want to close off by talking about something,
which is that there's also a political angle to all
of this. Right, these people, all of these people doing
this fucking ton crime bullshit, all these people fucking going right.
All of these people calculated that a right turn in
American politics was coming right. That's why t Ye t
endorse a fucking literally a Republican in California who was

(40:59):
also an insane tough on crime guy. This is why
that's why they had uh no, no Caruso. Yeah, who
was a Republican who changed his party affiliations that we
could run the democratic thing. Who fucking sucks asked, that's
why theyre that, that's why they had Matt quote alleged
pedophile Gates on their show on election night, Larry Elder

(41:20):
on this show as well, like election denialist Larry Elder. Yeah,
like this this wasn't just a pure product of these
people going insane watching videos of like people looting grocery
stores and her to get tough on crime reactionaries. This
was the political calculation and stuff. But yeah, but but
but they sucked up, Right, These people fundamentally don't understand

(41:40):
what this country is. They're scared, they've given up. They
saw a single homeless person on the street and turn
into a fascist, and they think that the American people
are just hopelessly reactionary and the only thing that's left
to do was solve the situation by selling out. And
they're smart, they don't think. They don't credit people with
having like compassion or empathy or intelligence either, right, they
think they would go the direction that stupid grift show

(42:01):
points yeah, and and and they're wrong. They're incredibly wrong.
This is a country that, in the name of fighting
racism and the police, in the name of solidarity with
people who are not their fucking sales, people who they
will literally never beat, put on a mass picked up
a brick and waged war against the best funded police
force in human history. And for like a week and
a half, those same fucking Americans who the entire political

(42:22):
spectrum had written office hopelessly beaten down and passive and
right wing and like people people who will take any
amount of abuse and never say anything, back wrecked. The
fucking wrecked the cop shit so hard they lost control
over the centers of made multiple major American cities and
had to call in the fucking National Guard, who in
turn got their ship wrecked so hard that they had
to rely on liberal civil society to call him the

(42:44):
protest down. And even then, the president would have fucking
deployed the army against them if he had actually been
physically able to. And the old reason that these people
weren't fighting the fucking army in the streets was that
was that the fucking American generals refused to go along
with it, right, like that that is who the U
s is that that that is whose generation is. This
generation is forever the generation that burned the Third Precinct,

(43:06):
and the fucking X left is running right. Just don't
fucking get it right. They think the entire clock has
been brown back. They think that like those that, like
the people who did that, I've already been destroyed. They
don't matter. The only thing left, you know, that you
can do is join them right and mitiget the damage.
And they're fucking wrong. They are wrong. They can't see it.
They cannot see that there is no way to turn
the clock back to before the uprising happened. They can't

(43:28):
see that, like this entire country, that the that the
American working class, that parts of the people who are
not part of the American working class have been fundamentally changed.
And yeah, they just they just can't see it. And
because they can't see it, the only thing that they're
ever going to feel is the way that there is
the only thing they can feel is the way of
their ignorance. And the only thing they're going to feel
on top of that is them getting fucking buried by

(43:51):
the way of the history. That has left them behind.
Because fun, these people, fuck the cops. Fun the people
who support the cops. These people will be down, but
will be fucking drowned by the tide of history they
thought didn't fucking exist. Fuck them. Okay this is what Yeah,
you can probably tell I wrote this really really piste
off at five in the fucking morning, because Jesus Christ,

(44:15):
that's good. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. Pick up
a brick, put down the young turks. Yeah, don't. Don't
fucking support more cops. Every every everyone will hate you.
Your coworkers will hate you, your friends will hate you,
your family will hit you. The guy, the guy at
the fucking quarter store will hate you. Yeah. And if

(44:36):
you find your fucking left hero standing the people who
murdered George Floyd or stood around and watch George Floyd
being murdered, then they are not a leftist anymore. It's
okay to tell them to fuck off and die. Yeah,
And I mean like, and we can go back to
this our first episode, right, Like, the reason these people
are calling for five more cops is that they've given
up entirely. Right. They literally do not think it is

(44:57):
possible for anything to ever even the us and then
when they are wrong. Yeah, and I think that they're
okay with the way that our police behave and there
if that makes him feel comfortable and safe, then they
don't mind people die at the hands in the police.
Cops protect rich people. These people have gotten wealthy enough
to have the cops now benefit them. It's it's that simple,

(45:21):
Like that's that, that's it's it's it's I think that
really is the yeah, trying motivator here. And like I
will say this to like if we ever get to
a point where we start sucking doing this, like take
us down to this. This is this isn't just a
sort of like we're trying to build our business whatever.
I don't like, I don't fucking care. I would I

(45:41):
would rather fucking go broke in the streets. I would
rather fucking die than be a person whose job it
is to say we need more cops. Fuck these people. God,
yeah m M. They've blocked me on Twitter, so I
can't say get off to them podcast fans. God, we

(46:06):
are not inciting harassment. Campaign instead, go nowhere other things. Yeah,
don't waste don't Yeah, it was seriousness. Don't waste your
time doing discourse with people who exist to create bullshit
discourse said, just a distraction. Go and help someone needs
your help. It's cold, it's wet, it's winter time, and
their own the house, people who are shivering on the streets.
So don't funk with the young turks. Just ignore them

(46:28):
their pointless go go go, go out there and fucking
build the socialism that these people think is impossible, because
we can do it, and we will, and then we
will laugh at them because we've done it and they
are fucking bullshit. Yeah, that's that's the episode. It Could

(46:51):
Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media. But
more podcasts from cool Zone Media. Visit our website cool
zone media dot com, or check us out on the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here,
updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources.
Thanks for listening.