The Meaning of “Open Borders” ~~ JACOB HORNBERGER

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/25/the-meaning-of-open-borders/

Guests on conservative Fox News are going nuts over what they are calling President Biden’s “open borders” policy. One recent example was Stephen Miller, a former Trump advisor, who appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, where he lamented Biden’s supposed “open-border policies.” Another was Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, who appeared on Fox and Friends, where he complained that Biden is an advocate of “open borders.” 

Needless to say, the hosts of these Fox shows displayed no pushback on these remarkable claims. In fact, quite the opposite. As conservatives, they sympathized with the views of their guests. One of the commentators on Fox and Friends even lamented that Biden isn’t continuing the construction of the Trump Wall along the border.

Meanwhile, Noora Barakat, who works at the Vera Institute of Justice, writes, “This week, the Biden administration will officially launch accelerated deportation proceedings for asylum-seeking families in 11 cities across the country.”

Hmm. Accelerated deportations? Open borders? Something clearly does not compute here.

Let’s be clear: The only people who favor open borders, rightly understood, are libertarians. Democrats and progressives and Republicans and conservatives (and, to be fair, some conservative-oriented libertarians) favor America’s system of immigration controls. 

Oh, sure, Biden might be enforcing America’s system of immigration controls differently from the way that Trump enforced them. Biden’s way of enforcement might well mean that more immigrants are illegally entering the United States. But adopting different immigration enforcement measures does not add up to open borders. 

After all, let’s not forget that Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, a Democrat-progressive whose vice-president was none other than Joe Biden, was labeled America’s Deporter-in-Chief owing to the record number of immigrants his bureaucrats forcibly deported out of the United States.

What would a system of open borders look like? Think the domestic United States. There are state borders that mark out the political jurisdiction of each state. People are free to cross these borders without encountering any government officials. There are no state border guards, state border patrols, state visa requirements, state trade restrictions, or state entry quotas. Anyone is free to cross state borders, no questions asked.

The Potomac River forms a large part of the border between Maryland and Virginia. Every day, countless people cross this border in both directions. 

How many? No one knows because no one keeps count. 

Who are the people crossing into Maryland and Virginia? We don’t know. They could be murderers, rapists, burglars, or terrorists. They could all be infected with Covid. They could be coming to steal jobs away from Virginians. They could be coming to sell products in competition against Virginia businesses. They might be coming to live here. It doesn’t matter. Anyone and everyone are free to cross the border regardless of the reasons they are crossing it. 

That’s what the concept of open borders entails — the free movement of goods, services, and people across borders. 

Sometimes conservatives and progressives (and, yes, conservative-oriented libertarians) want to let more immigrants into the country legally. But the operative word is “let.” As soon as you see or hear that word “let,” you know that they are not talking about open borders but instead an immigration-control system, one in which government politicians and bureaucrats are deciding who is going to enter the country.

There is another important point to consider here: both progressives and conservatives (and conservative-oriented libertarians) favor the police-state measures that are designed to enforce their system of immigration controls. Oh, sure, Biden and his progressive cohorts might not favor the Berlin Immigration Wall that conservatives favor, but, like them, he favors forced deportations, violent raids on American businesses, domestic highway checkpoints, warrantless trespasses onto farms and ranches, and other police-state immigration enforcement measures.

Immediately after the Taliban took control of Kabul, it began establishing highway checkpoints around the city where they ask people for their identification papers. I can’t help but wonder whether they are modeling their highway checkpoint system on America’s immigration highway checkpoint system. But one thing is certain: Whether the highway checkpoints are being run by the Taliban or by progressives or conservatives, they reflect a tyrannical system. 

There is but one solution to America’s ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis: open borders, just like we have here within the domestic United States. It is the only way — repeat: only way — to bring an end to the death, suffering, chaos, crisis, and police state that come with America’s Democratic-Republican, progressive-conservative system of immigration controls.

Things Have Changed ~~ PAUL STREET

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/27/things-have-changed/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

 

Photograph Source: U.S. Secretary of Defense – CC BY 2.0

The near octogenarian Joe Biden may well already be toast. He is on the economy and COVID-19 as the white supremacist Amerikaner Party of Trump (the APoT, formerly known as the Republican Party) moves to cancel and nullify nonwhite votes across much of the nation in the name of Donald “Save America” Trump’s big Hitlerian Stolen Election lie. Biden refuses to use the considerable power of the presidency to cancel student debt, block the right-wing attack on minority voting rights, or pass legislation that would relegalize serious union organizing and boost the pathetically inadequate minimum wage.

Biden prematurely proclaimed victory over the pandemic and holds back from aggressively advancing urgently needed vaccine mandates even though such mandates are supported by a strong majority of Americans. The fourth surge, likely to expand this fall and winter, is slowing the jobs recovery, giving the APoT economic ammunition with voters along with rising inflation. And Biden’s political stock price is falling further in the wake of his transparent bungling of the American exit from Afghanistan. It’s not clear he can even pass an early centrist pork-barrel infrastructure bill.

As the Democrat Biden dithers in the pathetic and despicable name of bipartisan cooperation with a party that crossed over to fascism years ago, the white-supremacist election-nullifiers “across the aisle” are licking their chops. They really expect to take back the U.S. House in 2022, an achievement that will position them to launch revenge impeachments (perhaps including one around “the betrayal of our troops and the people of Afghanistan”) and to pilfer a close presidential election on behalf of Donald “Perfect Call” Trump or the vicious covidiot Ron DeSantis in 2024-25. The APoT’s state-level machinations are likely to produce contested state Electoral College slates in the 2024 election, possibly throwing the outcome into the House, where Republicans will prevail under the Constitution’s rules even without holding a majority of the body’s members (the APoT only has to hold the majority of Representatives in more states than the Dems). It is difficult to imagine a Republican-controlled House agreeing to certify a Biden-re-election in January.

It is equally difficult to imagine the dismal Weimar Dems putting up much of a fight when the APoT takes back full power. Fighting for democracy (even its oxymoronic bourgeois variant) is not what the Democrats are about. Like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama before him, Joe “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” Biden is proof that Sheldon Wolin had it right in early 2008, as the fake-progressive Obama’s stealthily conservative star rose across the land. “Should Democrats somehow be elected,” Wolin wrote, they would not “alter significantly the direction of society” or “substantially revers[e] the drift rightwards. … The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts,” Wolin added, “points to the crucial fact that for the poor, minorities, the working class and anti-corporatists there is no opposition party working on their behalf.” The nominally “in-power” corporatist Democrats would work to “marginalize any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.”

Thirteen plus years later, the Republicans are clearly not just a “populist”-mimicking corporate party but a full-on white nationalist, eco-cidal, pandemicist, and eliminationist outfit. The APoT and its demented, Ashli Babbitt-trumpeting backers see the attempted putsch of January 6, 2021 as a rough draft prologue to a far more sophisticated campaign to stamp out the last embers of democracy. The white-power APoT is not F’ing around. It is engaged in what it considers a last-ditch “Save America” struggle to “take back our country” and preserve Caucasian white political and cultural hegemony in the “homeland.” Going for broke and ready to die on a cross of whiteness, its resolve is only intensified by the latest decennial US Census, which shows that people of color now make up 43% of the US population, up from 34% in 2010 (a significant jump). The Census data reinforce white supremacist Republicans’ determination to practice voter suppression in it various forms and to make the rollback of nonwhite voting rights the first order of business. They must ever more egregiously rig up the (already rigged-up) US elections system as their noxious ideas become more and more marginalized in the face of demographic decline.

Nothing is beyond the pale for this Nazified outfit, not even the partisan politicization and fanning of a deadly pandemic that increasingly targets small children.

And after it takes back full national power there will be no more “normal” bourgeois democratic elections.

“Come on, man,” a jaded, semi-political liberal acquaintance writes, “the Republicans are backed by just a quarter of the electorate. Relax. You’re hysterical.”

Sound familiar? Remember when one was accused of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for suggesting that the 45^th POTUS would refuse to peacefully accept defeat in the 2020 election?

Consistent with the liberal’s comment, the latest Gallup poll shows that 26% of the US electorate identifies politically as Republicans. Yes, but so what? Just 27% identify as Democrats. Biden and the Dems are losing Independents, who make up 43% of the electorate. The nation’s electoral and governing system is tilted starboard even without the white supremacist voter suppression measures currently being advanced and passed at the state level. The system was already fixed rightward even before the latest and ongoing assault on voting rights in the states, the soft underbelly of what’s left of American “democracy.” The all-too constitutional mechanisms of Republican minority rule include the Electoral College, the mass over-representation of the nation’s most reactionary, rural and white states in the absurdly powerful US Senate, the rampant gerrymandering of House districts, the denial of voting rights to millions of Americans with felony records, the free reign given to dark campaign finance money, and the powerful appointed-for-life Supreme Court, whose right-wing super-majority stands far to the right of the citizenry.

To tip likely outcomes further rightward, the Republicans and their base are far more organized, strategic, passionate, zealous, determined, united, and generally ready to fight for what they believe in than are the more divided, flabby, and passive Democrats. They are far more armed and have far more allies in the nation’s giant police and military state, which may well come into play in suppressing popular resistance to the APoT’s theft of coming elections. They are far less squeamish about the use of political violence.

Add in the horrific state-level measures (including the insidious gerrymandering about to be decennially revised) that are being left intact by Biden’s refusal to challenge the arcane and racist Senate filibuster so as to pass major voting rights reform (the “For the People” Act) and it doesn’t look good, to say the least, for the bourgeois Democrats and whatever it is, exactly, that they believe in.

What to do? Telling people to vote defensively against a fascist party in general elections and for more progressive Democrats in primary elections seems to me pretty much on par with telling people to wipe their rear ends with toilet paper after defecation and to wear jackets and coats when the weather turns cold. Go ahead, liberals and progressives, I’ll probably join you (out of my quaint belief that it is easier to organize for socialism when you aren’t being thrown out of helicopters). But do so without the illusion that voting is close to the kind of political activism and human agency required in this moment. You can’t defeat dedicated white-nationalist authoritarianism with a definition of politics that’s about marking polyarchic/bourgeois-democratic ballots once every two or four years and about hoping for withered old national charters and politicians to save us from rising and dedicated American-style fascism. Come on, man: it’s going to take thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and then millions of people organized and ready to fight on multiple levels for a radical vision of democracy that goes far beyond major party politics and well past anything the dismal Democrats ( Wolin’s “inauthentic opposition”) entertain – and well past what’s possible under the nation’s absurdly venerated 18^th Century Constitution (itself crafted by and for slaveowners and merchant capitalists for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare.)

It needs to sink with liberals and progressives that a considerable portion of the American ruling class is quite alright with a shift to full-on authoritarian, white nationalist rule. If it wasn’t, a mass-murderous, truth-obliterating, pandemo-fascist white power monstrosity like Donald “Fight Like Hell” Trump wouldn’t still be free to hold hate rallies. The neo-Confederate RepubliNazis wouldn’t be free to repeal hard-won Black voting rights states across the country. The right-wing has already launched the “cival war” they promised if America didn’t follow the dictates of its declining white majority by giving the orange reptile a second term. This Amerikaner disease is a novel, unprecedentedly virulent strain of a horrible political virus that cannot be cured with the old electoral and reformist medicine. The ground has shifted. Things have changed. We figure out how to fight back in radical ways, dropping our fears of being accused of “alarmism” and “extremism,” and confronting the whole damn system thar birthed this madness, or its game over.

We Lost the War in Afghanistan. We Need to Say So ~~ William Rivers Pitt

 https://truthout.org/articles/we-lost-the-war-in-afghanistan-we-need-to-say-so/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

 Apparent suicide bombers struck at the Abbey Gate of the Kabul airport in Afghanistan just as evening was settling in, followed by a second bombing at a nearby hotel. The gate itself was not in use — other gates had been prioritized for the swift removal of U.S. personnel — but huge crowds of Afghan civilians were still gathered there, hoping for escape. U.S. intelligence had been warning such an attack was “imminent,” and had advised Americans to stay away from the airport for the time being. Multiple civilians and U.S. Marines were killed in the attack.

Reaction from the “news” media was swift: Here was the “nightmare scenario” for the Biden administration, which is of course solely responsible for the mayhem of this withdrawal, so there. While most agree that leaving Afghanistan was the right thing to do, the way President Biden did so has become an ongoing disaster involving bodies raining down from airplanes and now a bombing at the airport.

It has been like this for days now, a relentless drumbeat of finger-pointing by the media, fueled by a parade of generals and politicians who have spent the last 20 years warming up Afghanistan for the calamity it has become.

 

Yet what has been missing from all the conversation on Afghanistan is the simple truth: WE LOST THE WAR. Almost nobody seems willing or able to speak those four words out loud. The coverage has been shrill and angry, like a family trying to discuss an embarrassing secret without actually naming it. To name it is to make it real, and the reality that WE LOST THE WAR appears to be too overwhelming for the motherboards of many. Not enough RAM to encompass the new program; the old one has been running for so long.

The coverage has been furious in its narrowed scope. Look at this! How embarrassing! We can’t leave anyone behind! Biden must be impeached! Much of this is certainly political opportunism on the part of Republicans — as activist journalist Jeff Tiedrich noted on Twitter, all those voices were silent when Donald Trump bailed on the Kurds while handing bases over to Russia — but there is more to it. For all that has been said, what has been left unsaid looms large: WE LOST THE WAR.

The August 31 withdrawal deadline is a stinging example of the phenomenon. Virtually every face on the television, including scores of influential people who had a hand in crafting this long and dismal failure, is demanding that Biden extend that deadline… but he can’t. For one thing, the bombings today underscore the need for as immediate an escape as possible. However, more than that, if we recognize the fact that WE LOST THE WAR, we are confronted with the fact that we do not get to unilaterally dictate the terms of our exit. The victorious Taliban set that deadline, as all triumphant armies do, and we are not in a good position to break it or demand more time, because WE LOST THE WAR.

This withdrawal is so messy because there is nothing on Earth more vulnerable than an army in retreat, which is precisely what we are, Afghan personnel and all, because WE LOST THE WAR. Biden could certainly have prepared better for this exit, with humanitarian efforts and refugee assistance, but he could not have made it easy, any more than he could turn water into wine.

The arrogance is astounding. WE LOST THE WAR, and yet all these people seem to think we still get to dictate terms to the world because we’re Americans, so there. Losers don’t get to dictate terms — if they’re lucky, they’re allowed to leave with the shirt on their back. We are watching the “mighty” U.S. navigate its second lost war in 20 years, and many are unable to process the fact that the world now gets to dictate terms to us.

 

Last Monday, CIA Director William Burns met secretly with Abdul Ghani Baradar, de facto leader of the Taliban, to discuss the terms of the U.S. withdrawal. Baradar spent eight years in prison after getting captured during a CIA-run operation, and there he was, leader of a victorious army, sitting across the table from the director of the CIA and holding all the cards. The fact that Biden sent such a high-ranking official is a bright indicator of this nation’s thoroughly humbled estate.

If you’ve ever wondered what Japanese Foreign Minister Shigemitsu felt while seated across from Douglas MacArthur on board the USS Missouri with the ink of surrender drying on the table before them, Director Burns could probably give you a fairly accurate description of those emotions. Baradar’s version was not nearly as stark or ceremonial, but having him at that table with the reins in his hand is an astonishing turn for this “invincible” nation.

If we are not prepared to say WE LOST THE WAR even with the rank fact of it pouring out of every television in America, perhaps we should not be starting wars in the first place. Perhaps we should not be starting wars in the first place, no matter what we are prepared to say.

That, though, is the rub: The TV people, the corporations who own them and the wars that pump up their ratings cannot openly admit defeat. Doing so might make it harder to start the next war, or the last one all over again. This is simply impermissible, and so rolls the wheel.

WE LOST THE WAR. Nothing gets better until we admit this and accept it.

 

Journalist: Anti-Vaccine, Anti-Mask Protesters in L.A. Attacked Me & Ripped Off My Mask

 https://www.democracynow.org/2021/8/20/reporter_recalls_how_anti_vaccine_anti

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

As U.S. COVID cases top 37 million, we look at a shocking story out of California, where one person was stabbed and two journalists were attacked Saturday while covering an anti-vaccine, anti-mask protest outside Los Angeles City Hall. The protest was attended by members of the Proud Boys and other right-wing groups. A Southern California mortgage broker named Tony Moon was videotaped screaming “Unmask them all!” and attacking the independent journalist Tina-Desiree Berg. Moon was also in Washington on January 6 during the deadly insurrection at the Capitol. “He ripped my mask off,” says Tina-Desiree Berg, who kept filming, and describes in detail the attacks and those involved. She notes no one has been arrested, even though the protest took place near the Los Angeles police headquarters, and says she now takes extra security measures when reporting. “I’m not in a war zone, right? But maybe this is where the United States is heading right now.”

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

As U.S. COVID cases top 37 million, we turn to look at a shocking story out of California. On Saturday, one person was stabbed — at least, perhaps two — two journalists were attacked, while covering an anti-vaccine, anti-mask protest outside Los Angeles City Hall. The protest was attended by members of the Proud Boys and other right-wing groups.

KPCC Radio reporter Frank Stoltze was assaulted while doing an interview. He had his glasses ripped off, was repeatedly kicked. He said nothing like this had ever happened in his 30 years of reporting.

Huffington Post is reporting a Southern California mortgage broker named Tony Moon was videotaped attacking the independent journalist Tina-Desiree Berg. Moon was also seen screaming, “Unmask them all!” The Huffington Post reports Moon was also in Washington on January 6 during the insurrection at the Capitol.

We go now to Los Angeles, where we’re joined by Tina-Desiree Berg, the local Los Angeles reporter at Status Coup News.

Tina, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk about what happened this weekend? Just take us through the protest and then what happened to you.

TINA-DESIREE BERG: Yes, absolutely. It was a wild day. I got there about 45 minutes before the violence actually started, because I had been — I had just released a story that morning, Saturday, where one of our gubernatorial candidates, Sarah Stephens, she had been involved with another press beating in front of the Wi Spa almost three weeks ago. I had filmed that beating. And coincidentally, the folks that did it had posted bodycam footage of themselves inside the vehicle as they were leaving, and they posted it on social media. So, when I saw that, I knew who had been responsible. But one of the persons in the vehicle was Sarah Stephens. She’s running for governor right now. And we were able to identify her not only through her license plate, but also through video surrounding the incident where you see her on the sidewalk. So my intention that morning was to go down, since she was one of the keynote speakers, and maybe try to talk to her about what happened at Wi Spa two weeks before, because I think that’s a newsworthy conversation to have if you’re running for governor.

But we never made it that far. So, initially, on the sidewalk, a group of me and other reporters were standing there. There had been some skateboarders that had been going up and down First Street and Spring Street, and they were preteens, kids. Maybe the oldest was 15, it seemed to me. I didn’t videotape much of them because I generally don’t videotape children. But at one point, one of the Proud Boys — his name is Benjamin Patino — came across the street and started harassing one of the skateboarders and calling them antifa. So, these guys, they have a broad brush with what they state to be antifa. They see antifa where there’s no antifa often, in my experience. So, he started harassing one of these skateboarders, and somebody that is in black bloc came to this kid’s defense and pushed Patino away.

Patino ran back across the street, but then he came back over with Adam Kiefer, who is another Proud Boy, Tony Moon, who is a Capitol insurrectionist, and a group of other folks, and I’m not sure who all of the other ones were. And that’s when you had the incident of one of them came up to me, called me a B-I-T-C-H — I’m not sure if we can say that — and he punched me in the camera. But I kept filming.

Then Tony Moon came over, and he had been hitting another woman with his water bottle, and I tried to intervene a little bit while I was filming, because I could see she had a bloody head. She had been hit in the head. And so, then he started screaming, “Unmask them all!” He ripped my mask off and manhandled me or shoved me a little bit. But then I kept filming.

And right after that, you’ll notice in the background of the video there is a counterprotester, who is pro-vaccine, who was — looks like he’s getting beaten by fists, but it turns out that that individual had a shank of some sort in his hand and was actually trying to stab him. So, that’s the second stabbing. The first stabbing had happened earlier. I didn’t catch it on video, but I did see the gentleman coming by from behind, walking towards the police officers, and you can see there’s blood on his shirt. And then he’s collapsed in the street, and they’re giving him aid. So, as far as I know, there’s definitely two stabbings. There might be more that I didn’t quite catch. But it was a very violent scene.

And it’s interesting to me, because some of these characters, including Tony Moon — he was also, incidentally, at that same Wi Spa event where this other press member was hit on the back of the head with a lead pipe. Tony Moon was there that day also with a water bottle, and he struck a counterprotester with that. So, I think it’s interesting, Amy, that this is a group that has been traveling around Southern California, they’ve also been up in Sacramento, they have also been up in Portland, and they instigate violence wherever they go. And again, these are — they’re right-wingers. They are definitely part of the group that supported Trump, but I don’t think this is solely about Trump anymore, or necessarily anti-vaccine. I think that they are just latching on from one movement to the next, and they’re kind of coalesced around this idea of freedom. And you’ll notice that they all have these gaiters on that are covering their faces. They’re not trying to prevent the spread of COVID; they’re trying to stop themselves from being identified.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us more about the direct attack on you and how you know who Tony Moon is and that he was at the insurrection, January 6, at the Capitol.

TINA-DESIREE BERG: Yeah, so, I know who Tony Moon is because he had been at that Wi Spa event two weeks earlier. After I saw him hit the woman with the water bottle, I got online and started to research who he was, and I saw that he had been at the Capitol January 6th, because he had posted video of himself on his social media showing that he had been. And there was also a clip in the Parler archive, that’s on ProPublica, where you see him in that video. So he was definitely there.

And I think it also bears mentioning that he identifies himself as “Roof Korean,” and that is a very racist trope that goes back to the beating of Rodney King. So, he’s definitely identifying himself as a group that’s already radical right, racist, doing violence. So, yeah, he was there at Wi Spa. We looked into who he was. And then, when I saw him coming up to me, I said, “Oh, there’s Tony Moon. That’s the Roof Korean guy that was at Wi Spa a couple weeks ago.” But I will say this: He seemed much more violent and radicalized Saturday morning.

I think also maybe there’s a double meaning to “unmask them,” because we were all wearing masks for protection, so I had my surgical mask on. I think his idea is that not only are we unmasking you because we’re anti-vaxxers and we’re anti-maskers and we see this as an infringement to freedom, but also they’re very vested in this idea of doxxing and exposing anybody that is against, you know, their beliefs. Now, randomly, of course, I use my real name, so there’s not much to dox there, but I do think that’s why he was screaming, “Unmask them all!” It wasn’t solely because of the mask to prevent COVID transmission.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to throw to a clip of he attack on you, that you yourself filmed.

PROUD BOY: Hey, bitch!

TINA-DESIREE BERG: Hey! Yo! Stop it!

TONY MOON: Unmask them! Unmask them!

TINA-DESIREE BERG: [bleep] you!

TONY MOON: Unmask them! Unmask them!

TINA-DESIREE BERG: Yeah, so, the first guy that came up and punched me was not Tony Moon. It was another gentleman. He came right up to the camera. He called me the B-word and hit me, backed away back where the guys were. So he absolutely targeted me for some reason. I’m not sure why that is.

And then, you know, maybe 20, 30 seconds later, Tony Moon was right there. So, when he came up to me, you could tell his intention was to pull down — and he did pull it down — my mask. And I had put up my goggles at that point, as well, because somebody had been using bear mace. And, in fact, I believe it was the anti-vaxxer that was stabbed that had used bear mace, because I do have video of him earlier using bear mace and spraying people. This is a tactic that the Proud Boys have deployed for many months now. So we’ve seen it at various different protests, where they pull out bear mace and they mace people. So, he did successfully pull my mask down. He was, like I said, hitting that other woman — you’ll see she has a bloody head — and just kind of escalated from there and started screaming, “Unmask them all!”

And I also think it’s interesting that if you look at the video, you see that they all have orange armbands on and that their water bottles are all orange. So, obviously, orange is a significant color for them. I don’t know if they’re coordinating with it, but you will see they have orange armbands. And it sort of is reminiscent of January 6 at the Capitol, because, that day, the Proud Boys had been marking themselves with orange gaffer tape or orange beanies on their heads. And they had, at that point — Enrique Tarrio had told everybody to show up dressed not as they normally would in their Proud Boy attire, but into, you know, sort of antifa in disguise, and they had been marking themselves, ergo, with the orange color, whether it was the tape, the gaffer tape, or the beanies. I don’t know that there’s a crossover here with the group that was with Tony Moon, but I do think it’s interesting that they all had orange armbands on.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you personally feel when this was happening to you? I mean, this was a anti-mask, anti-vax rally. They’re pulling down your mask.

TINA-DESIREE BERG: I was actually very concerned about — in the moment, because you know that these folks aren’t vaccinated. I am absolutely fully vaccinated, but there’s still a chance of transmission. And that’s actually — I’ve been hit before. You know, when you’re in the field covering things, it’s something that sometimes happens, so this is not the first time I’ve been hit doing my job. But I was really concerned that they were willing to get so close to me and get into my face and pulled down my mask. And they — you know, higher chance, obviously, that they’re infected with COVID since they’re not vaccinated. So, that’s actually more scary to me than being punched. I do not want to get COVID, right? So, it was a violation of personal space. But I was just very focused on getting the video and staying focused on what I was filming in that moment.

AMY GOODMAN: Tina-Desiree Berg, where were the police? You were right in front of LAPD headquarters?

TINA-DESIREE BERG: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. So, I think that’s a significant part of the story. So, City Hall is stationed exactly across the street from LAPD headquarters. And where this bully happened is in the sidewalk and the street area right in front of the headquarters. The police had been there all morning. When I got there, there was probably five or six cruisers lined up with officers in them. So they were absolutely present. And I don’t know what the delay was, as far as, you know, not responding to what was going on, but they did not initially respond.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, track the people, some of the people that you saw there at this protest, along the coast, from California to Oregon to Washington.

TINA-DESIREE BERG: Right. So, the main guide that you see coming out — OK, so there’s Patino that came across the street, Benjamin Patino, and messed with the skateboarder kid and then went back.

Then you see another one appear. His name is Adam Kiefer. He is actually part of a more violent group that I’ve seen. And, in fact, related to this, I was covering another anti-vax protest in West Hollywood a couple of weeks ago, and Adam Kiefer came across the street towards me and two other journalists and started threatening us. I have some video of that, and in it, you’ll see him say, “Why are you throwing rocks at me?” — and which nobody was doing. Obviously, none of us were throwing rocks. And I respond to Adam, “I’m not throwing rocks. Nobody here is throwing rocks. We’re just journalists.” And then they ended up getting more aggressive. We ended up running into the Trader Joe’s and seeking refuge in there. They actually had to shut down the store for a few minutes, until they called the sheriff’s department to show up.

But so, I’ve seen him there. I have seen him in Huntington Beach as part of a group that’s been at the Huntington Beach rallies. Those were happening every week during the run-up to the general election. They were pro-Trump. He’s been in Beverly Hills assaulting people. They also had weekly rallies there at the Beverly Garland Park, which is right off of Wilshire Boulevard. So, I also have filmed him in Sacramento being violent, beating up people. So this is somebody that’s definitely traveled around.

So, it’s interesting to me, though, that at this point, Amy, that these guys are very dedicated to what they’re doing. And I don’t know that if you had ask them five or six years ago if they were anti-vaccine, that they would respond with an affirmative. I think this is just one more cause that they’ve picked up because they do see it as a violation of their freedoms.

AMY GOODMAN: Tina, how does this whole protest movement dovetail with the recall Governor Newsom movement?

TINA-DESIREE BERG: Yeah, that’s an excellent question. So, because this was — they called this a “freedom rally,” and that was part of the equation, was that we’re going to also have candidates that are running for governor here that are against Newsom. So, recall Newsom is definitely gaining speed here in California. You know, Sarah Stephens, which is the candidate that I mentioned earlier, she was involved with another Proud Boy, Aaron Simmons, at this Wi Spa assault. She drove the getaway car. So she’s definitely tied with these guys.

I was down in San Diego a couple of weeks ago trying to film a — Mike Pompeo was here, and he was doing a rally for Larry Elder, who is actually tracking number one right now to win if Newsom is recalled. It was an event that was hosted by a Christian Zionist group. Jewish Voice for Peace and the Palestinian Youth Movement joined together to do a counterprotest and rally. So I went down to film that. I covered the speeches and part of the march. But when we got to where Mike Pompeo was speaking, where Larry Elder was speaking, there was a group that had set up some sort of a phony barricade in front of the street, so we couldn’t get further. And as you approached them, they were — in much the same way you saw them menacing on Saturday, they were menacing us and egging people on — “Come here” — you know, very angry way.

I researched some of those guys. There was one named Mike Forzano, who is also a Proud Boy. He is also a member of the American Guard, which is a designated hate group from the Southern Poverty Law Center. He was one of them. He bear-maced me. He hit me, hit my phone out of my hand. And I’m sure that there were others there that I didn’t see that traveled down from Orange County, what have you.

But this is definitely a widespread thing here in California. And I think it’s probably shocking for a lot of folks outside of the state, because they see California as being a, you know, liberal, progressive state. But we do have an element of very hard-right folks here. And they do — they have become much more vocal under the Trump administration.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you also tell us about what happened? I believe it was right at the same time as the insurrectionists were storming the Capitol that there were local protests around the country. And the attack on the Black trans woman in L.A., how this fits into the story? Her name was Berlinda. She was 25 years old.

TINA-DESIREE BERG: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: She said a large group of pro-Trump supporters attacked her.

TINA-DESIREE BERG: That is absolutely correct. So, she had — and I filmed this. I was there for that protest. My co-worker, associate Jon Farina was in the Capitol shooting that day. So, he was actually in the tunnel when the police officer had his head squished, filming that. And I remember, at the end of the day, where I was, I called Jordan, and I said, “I just filmed a hate crime.” And Jordan was like, “You obviously haven’t tuned in to what’s happening in D.C. today.” And I’m like, “No, is it worse?” He said, “Yes” — as an aside.

But Berlinda had just been walking down the street, because she lives in the area. And they came up to her. They held her back. They sprayed her with bear mace. And the worst part of it is a group of them grabbed her weave off of her head, and one of them was holding up the weave and screaming, “This is the first scalping of the new Civil War!” It was one of the most appalling things I’ve ever witnessed. Just appalling. And she was one of two individuals that I saw bear-maced that day. They did bear-mace a second Black individual that was walking through the park.

But here’s where this ties into the LAPD and where they bring their clear bias to the skirmish line. So, she went up to Stabile, who is one of the commanding officers for that division, and wanted to, you know, say, “Look, I was just assaulted. This is what happened.” And Stabile says to her — and I have all of this on video — Stabile says to her, “Well, you can file a citizen’s arrest.”

So, at that point, I interrupted, because I thought that was pretty appalling. I said, “Stabile, that’s what you do if there’s no probable cause. There’s clear probable cause here. We have the whole thing on video. How is this not a hate crime?”

And do you know, to this day, the LAPD has not investigated this particular thing or, at least as far as I know, brought charges in regards to this?

Now, if you go to Stabile’s personal social media, you will see very clearly that he is pro-Trump, that he talks a lot about antifa and how antifa is bad. He’s definitely, you know, making posts in regards to being anti-mask. And he’s not the only one. There’s another one in this division who’s named Sergeant Helper, and he also has a private — or, separate Instagram and Twitter where he posts some of the same similar sentiments.

So I think there’s definitely a problem that’s being crossed over here. When you have police officers that are in command and they want to bring their personal bias to the skirmish line, they’re going to, you know, let these guys get away with a certain level of violence before they step in. And we’ve seen it time and time again. And I can say without equivocation, if the reverse was happening, if this was BLM activists, if this was antifa or black bloc, they would be pulling their weapons and making arrests and beating people. That’s just not a controversial statement. So I think it is really a problem inside the LAPD at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, if you could elaborate on what happened in July, the Korean spa called Wi Spa becoming a center of attacks? What’s its significance? And what happened?

TINA-DESIREE BERG: So, this is a very significant part of the story, because it’s, again, part of the same group of individuals, right? So, there had been a customer that had come into Wi Spa, and she was — you see a video that circulated. I think Tucker Carlson at one point picked it up. But she comes out, and she claims that there’s a pedophile, a trans individual, in the dressing room, and that, you know, she’s worried about children, this kind of a thing. So they staged a counterprotest and protest in front of Wi Spa.

Now, I did talk to the security at Wi Spa. They do have transgender clients that attend Wi Spa. There was no transgender clients present that day when this video was shot, so there’s a general feeling — and this is also coming from the LAPD — that that’s actually not an authentic video. I have not been able to verify that. That’s just what I’m being told by security and what the conclusions have been thus far from the investigation.

But this — you know, we had a group that have now combined with these other guys, and they’re very religious, right? So, they were — I have video of one gal. She’s screaming, “You’re animals! You’re going to burn in hell!” There was another gentleman that had a weapon sort of fashioned. It just — you have to see the audio or the video of this. It looks like a giant rosary, where instead of the beads being very small, they’re very large. They’re like about an inch, inch and a half, two inches in diameter. And he’s hitting people with this thing and screaming, “You’re an abomination! You’re an abomination! You’re animals!” You know, so very violent and religiously motivated bigotry. And, of course, now you have the second layer of these Proud Boys and these other folks, right-wingers, coming in and joining the fray and banding together with these guys.

In fact, at the second protest, we saw Based Spartan was there with them. Based Spartan, as you know, is somebody that’s been a subject even of a Vice article. He was up in Portland wearing kind of a Trojan outfit. He lives down here in Southern California. I’ve seen him at many of these protests, as well, hitting people.

So, yeah. So, the Wi Spa thing is significant, and Tony Moon was there, as well. You know, he was, again, hitting — he hit a woman there with a water bottle, as well. So, the violence — these two violent situations, I think, are conjoined, and also because of the Sarah Stephens element, where she was part of the lead pipe attack against Rocky Romano, who is the press member that was hit on the back of the head. She was driving the getaway car. We’ve confirmed that.

So, it’s just wild to me, Amy, that this is what 2021 is bringing us. If you had told me six months ago, even, you know, three months ago, that this would be the level of escalation of violence we would be seeing, I probably would have thought, “Mm, maybe not.” But I feel now very strongly that at some point somebody is probably going to get shot, because these are turning into full-blown sort of prison-level street brawls in the street.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me, finally, ask you: Do you think that women reporters are being particularly targeted, like yourself?

TINA-DESIREE BERG: Absolutely, I think that’s definitely the case. You know, I think it’s either smaller men or definitely women. And, in fact, I was talking with Adam Rose from the L.A. Press Club about this, because he’s noticed there’s an escalation of violence against female reporters across the board.

So, I do think that’s true, mainly because they — I was hit twice in that period of two minutes, and the male journalists were not, although they did go up and attack Frank later on in the day while he was doing an interview. In that first initial brawl out in the front of LAPD headquarters, they were not necessarily going after the male reporters at the same level. They were, however, punching all of the counterprotesters, male or female.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Tina-Desiree Berg, I want to thank you for being with us. Final question: Does this deter you from going out and covering what’s happening, especially among the Proud Boys?

TINA-DESIREE BERG: No, it doesn’t. And I’ll tell you why, Amy. People need to see what’s going on. And if I let them control what I do, then they kind of win the conversation. That’s the point of what they’re doing, right? To intimidate, to stop. They don’t want the press. They don’t want people filming them. They don’t want to be exposed for their violent actions. And so, the intention of what they’re doing is to try to silence me and other journalists like me from covering what they’re doing. And I absolutely am not deterred from doing it.

I will, however, be much more aware, take more, probably, safety precautions. You know, I go out now with a full set of safety precautions now that I never did before. I never used to wear any — a flak vest. I never used to wear a helmet. This just didn’t seem like necessary. I’m not in a war zone, right? But maybe that’s the case. Maybe this is where the United States is heading right now, because I feel that these groups are becoming more radicalized as time goes by.

And I think the next thing that we’re going to see, at least here in California, is sort of “stop the steal,” California edition, right? Because if Newsom does prevail and he does not get recalled, I think we’re going to see a whole host of these guys coming out and saying that it’s a rigged election, that the election results are false, and it won’t matter whether there’s any underlying evidence to prove that.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Tina, just to be clear, since you have so much of this video, and have shown it, have tweeted it out — and we’ve been showing it throughout this interview — was anyone arrested for attacking you?

TINA-DESIREE BERG: No.

AMY GOODMAN: Was anyone arrested for bloodying the other woman?

TINA-DESIREE BERG: No.

AMY GOODMAN: Was anyone arrested for the knifing?

TINA-DESIREE BERG: No. That’s the thing. Nobody has been arrested. So, I know that the LAPD is now looking for suspects in both stabbings, apparently, which — this is surprising to me. They’re saying yesterday, during the police commissioner’s hearing, that they weren’t aware of the second stabbing, but that they are now, and they’re going to look for the attackers.

But here’s the thing that’s troublesome about this. The attackers were there present that day, and if they had been arrested, detained or dealt with, we’d know who they are. But now it’s going to be very difficult to chase them down, because they were all covered up. You can’t really — it’s hard to decide who these folks are, because they have the gaiters up over their head. They have hats on, goggles, what have you. It’s going to be very hard to identify them. So, waiting to follow up on these acts of violence is very detrimental to the investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: Tina-Desiree Berg, local Los Angeles reporter at Status Coup News. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.

 

What the Sunrise Movement Can Do Better ~~ JOHNATHAN GUY SAM ZACHER

jacobinmag.com/2021/08/sunrise-movement-green-new-deal-left-politics-local-organizing?mc_cid=8a9e8d27da&mc_eid=2206b60e8c

~~ suggested by a guest contributor ~~

The Sunrise Movement deserves enormous credit for putting the Green New Deal on the national political agenda. But the organization seems to have hit a wall as of late. It may be time for Sunrise to pursue a new direction in its tactics

BIDEN YOU COWARD — FIGHT FOR US,” the sign blared. A few hundred members of the Sunrise Movement had gathered near the White House late last month to protest the Biden administration’s proposed compromise with Republicans on infrastructure legislation, jettisoning most of the climate provisions from an already inadequate bill. Speeches were made, songs sung; many Sunrisers sat down in the road before being dragged away by the police.

For long-time observers, these scenes have become a familiar sight. Such tactics are Sunrise’s bread and butter. The organization focuses on direct action and coordinating national media blitzes, most famously their late 2018 sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office. Actions like these use multiday trainings which erupt in carefully calibrated protests meant to “ignite moral conflict” between climate action heroes and fossil fuel villains, move public opinion, and recruit more members into the organization. By tying climate action to economic security and racial justice, Sunrise believes the Green New Deal’s message can call a multiracial, working-class climate coalition into being.

This strategy has yielded dividends. Since 2018, Sunrise has effectively popularized and refocused public discourse around the Green New Deal (GND). While the GND is demonized by conservative media and shunned by centrist Democrats, many of its core policies receive majority support among the public. The other plank of Sunrise’s efforts — mobilizing a small army of volunteers to knock doors and make calls for progressive local and Congressional races — has contributed to a rising crop of new electeds loyal to GND-style messaging and legislation.Yet Sunrise’s tactical repertoire is running up against hard limits. In contrast to the generous and relatively favorable media coverage the group received early on, attention to Sunrise direct actions has waned. Multiday marches through California and the Gulf Coast in May and June, for example, received little to no media coverage. The June 28 action earned some attention, but the reception by journalists, commentators, and on social media was mixed. Many observers criticized the action for targeting Biden instead of Congress, which presents more serious obstacles to significant climate spending.

The blogosphere pounced, accusing Sunrisers of engaging in pageantry that stands no chance of improving, and perhaps could damage, the prospects for meaningful climate action. While some of the criticisms offered ring hollow — contra Matt Yglesias, who argues Sunrise’s only accomplishment is “fooling gullible journalists,” Sunrise has moved latent public opinion and moved climate change onto the political agenda — it is true that despite their best efforts, Sunrise and its allies seem powerless to stop the watering down of climate legislation at the hands of Joe Manchin and company.

A number of warning signs have emerged over the past year that American politics is moving in quite a different direction than the vision of multiracial populism which anchors Sunrise’s long-term strategy. Voters of color shifted away from the Democratic Party in 2020, compounding the issues presented by the long-standing departure of white working-class Democrats. The decline of trade unions, the black church, and other mass organizations means most Americans have no personal experience participating in politics beyond casting an occasional ballot, or even organized social life more generally.

Right-wing attacks on state capacity, police brutality, and mass incarceration have convinced many Americans that the government is necessarily incompetent at best and malevolent at worst, undermining the public faith in the state required for any Green New Deal project. Meanwhile, the relatively affluent, college-educated segment of the Democratic Party base seems wholly uninterested in any but the most modest demands of social movements like Black Lives Matter. While the Bernie campaign showed that there is a significant hunger for social-democratic politics, it wasn’t enough to push Sanders to victory, and workers across the country are not engaged in significant amounts of organizing and class struggle on the job.

This is the moment we find ourselves in. What kind of political shift can Sunrisers and other Green New Dealers actually effect in the next ten years? And how do we navigate the political terrain’s current openings and constraints to accomplish it?

In the case of Sunrise, we offer a simple diagnosis. While Sunrise has significant potential, it stands at a remove from the vast majority of people the organization wishes to mobilize. Sunrise is socially dis-embedded from American society. In order to succeed, Sunrise must develop an ideological analysis that clarifies what the group wants and why its strategy will accomplish it; penetrate a much broader cross section of the population beyond its largely affluent, highly educated, and metropolitan membership; and focus on developing a mass base of support at local levels.

What Is Sunrise’s Ideology?

Our analysis draws from dozens of interviews with Sunrise members across the country over the past six months, as well as our combined twenty years of experience studying and organizing within the American climate movement. Our critique is meant to be constructive and friendly: we hope that it meaningfully contributes to the conversation on the direction of Sunrise and the collective Green New Deal project.

In order to understand why Sunrise has stalled, we first have to ask a basic question: What is Sunrise’s ideology? The organization sends mixed signals.

The guiding principles for Sunrise’s agenda — to ‘stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process’ and ‘fight for the liberation of all people’ — are so broad as to include many incompatible political commitments.

Early on, the organization self-described as “[looking] neither left nor right, but forward.” In the years since, Sunrise has become more comfortable affiliating itself with left-wing ideas and groups, and frequently critiques capitalism on social media. Still, the guiding principles for Sunrise’s agenda — to “stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process” and “fight for the liberation of all people” — are so broad as to include many incompatible political commitments.

For example, a Green New Deal could mean nationalization or buyout of the nation’s energy system, or a series of federal investments that encourage further private sector participation. Collective liberation per one definition could mean grants, contracts, and discounted loans to minority-owned businesses, or the abolition of privately owned corporations and natural resources, prisons, and police. With a stated ideology this broad, it’s difficult to assess what compromises are worth making, or how to measure success.

We don’t believe Sunrise and the GND have to be an explicitly socialist project, but we do believe that a deeper ideology would clarify the direction of the policy battles that Sunrise prioritizes. The organization’s list of legislative priorities this year is nearly two dozen items long, yet it’s not clear how Sunrise assigns these relative weight, or why.

The Civilian Climate Corps might make sense from an organizing perspective, but, from our interviews, this hasn’t been communicated effectively to Sunrise’s members, making buy-in more difficult. And this is just at the national level: there are always strategic dilemmas regarding GND-inspired policies to lead with or support at the state and local levels, which would be easier to navigate if Sunrise’s ideal policy aims were defined.

For example, earlier this year, Sunrise New Haven faced a choice about whether to fight for more local government stimulus-sourced investment in GND projects, higher taxation of carbon-greedy mansions at the state level, a greater contribution by company town overlord Yale University to the city budget (in order to build rapport with local unions and other progressive groups), or to prevent the construction of a new pipeline elsewhere in the state. The local hub put some effort into a few of each of these battles but didn’t have the ideological depth to prioritize a particular goal — and has fallen back on doing whatever people in the room (largely untrained) are most energized about.

The result has been the fragmentation of energy across different projects, decreasing the probability that any will be successful, in addition to taking too much time to decide on every subsequent project.

More generally, Sunrise has been criticized for bringing in a hodgepodge of left causes ranging from Palestinian liberation to policing into its messaging and programming, leading to a sense that the group lacks direction and coherence. While many of these critiques are made in bad faith by those who do not support such causes, they raise a useful question: How should limited time and resources be allocated, given Sunrise’s largely correct but wide-ranging political commitments on a variety of issues? The choice may not be easy without a more clearly defined ideology.

Ideology is useful not just because it articulates a political vision, but because it provides an idea of how the world presently works — and, by extension, how we might successfully intervene in it. The concepts that Sunrise typically deploys to describe this part of its ideology — “people power” and “political power,” for instance — are too abstract to be useful. Why and when are the people powerful?

After all, many social movements with both majority public support and an intense core of activists fall short (like the Arab Spring or recent protests in Hong Kong), while others with minority support succeed (like the Civil Rights Movement). Even those movements which get a taste of political power are often unable to effectively use the state to achieve their goals, as shown by left-populist Syriza’s capitulation to the austerity-minded European Union in 2011, as well as countless socialist governments in the Global South constrained by economic sanctions and capital flight.

For insight into these questions, we can turn to the organizing model behind Sunrise: Momentum.

The Momentum Model

Momentum is a self-described “training institute and movement incubator” influenced by “nonviolent resistance” thinkers and practitioners such as Gene Sharp, Erica Chenoweth, and Mark and Paul Engler. Momentum attempts to use tactics from myriad twentieth- and early twenty-first-century social movements — the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the Indian independence movement, Occupy Wall Street — and synthesize them into a single model.

That model consists of a virtuous cycle of tactics: first, a small group of activists stage a series of (often theatrical) protests, hoping to attract media coverage and thus public attention. The protests will involve a “polarizing” demand that provokes a sense of crisis, forcing onlookers to feel like they have to take a side. Those that favor the protests will then join the movement, replicating its tactics, symbols, and slogans at mass scale with minimum coordination, like Black Lives Matter.

Finally, those who enter the movement are “absorbed” into a preplanned organizational structure which allows for the staging of increasingly large and dramatic protests which recruit even larger numbers, and in turn enable mass acts of “non-cooperation.” The cycle of protest, absorption, and training continues until it results in victory.

What “victory” entails depends on the movement in question — and this is precisely the problem. In its attempt to provide a universal template for left-leaning activists in the twenty-first century, Momentum raises more questions than it answers. Do the social movements they aim to replicate really have anything in common?

Each succeeded or failed under very different historical conditions, with their own ideas and goals. The underlying “theories of change” expressed by these movements often conflict significantly with each other.

For example, while Mahatma Gandhi embraced an absolutist course of nonviolence — going so far as to forbid cursing or insulting political opponents — Nelson Mandela came to embrace tactics such as bombing campaigns and guerrilla warfare, arguing they were indispensable for compelling the apartheid regime to negotiate with the African National Congress (ANC).

What’s more, these men and the tactics they symbolically represent do not exhaust the full repertoire of tactics used by the movements they belonged to: the Indian Independence movement, for instance, involved riots, sabotage, and mass strikes, which Gandhi abhorred but to which many historians attribute the movement’s ultimate success.

Sunrise activists march to the White House in Washington, DC to demand that President Joe Biden work to make the Green New Deal into law on June 28, 2021. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

The differences between movements extend well beyond tactics. For much of its apartheid-era history, many ANC leaders embraced Marxism and maintained warm relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba, a development that leaders of the anti-Soviet color revolutions in Europe (also cited approvingly by Momentum) would surely detest.

While the great campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement were orchestrated by a constellation of groups exercising organizational discipline, a class of publicly known leaders, and a recruitment model deeply rooted in traditional institutions such as the black church, labor unions, and social clubs, Occupy Wall Street eschewed a leadership cadre, embraced participatory democracy, and relied on social media networks for quick mobilization.

These movements attempted to reach different populations at different times for different purposes. Even if it wanted to, Occupy couldn’t draw upon the social base that was available to civil rights organizers in mid-century American South. Nor could the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) use the internet.

Ideology that served some movements well failed others. Mandela’s embrace of guerrilla tactics after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre was motivated in part by a disillusionment with the Gandhian brand of nonviolence, which had seemingly delivered independence from the British thirteen years earlier and inspired ANC partisans to adopt a similar strategy. Revolutionary Marxism-Leninism delivered the Bolsheviks victory in 1910s feudal Russia, but not so much the Weather Underground in mid-to-late century America.

Gilded Age populism and WWII-style Keynesianism with a green twist have both been advanced as ideas that would make climate policy more popular, but polling shows these are among the least compelling pitches for the GND to the American public. Left parties pursuing “Third Way” neoliberal politics saw tremendous electoral success in the 1990s, yet now in many countries are struggling to maintain political relevance.

These instances of variation are understandable: each successful movement, in both its tactics and messaging, astutely captured and articulated the realities of its own time and place in a way that resonated for that moment. Having an ideology outfitted for its unique historical context was critical to each movement’s successes. In its ambition to be objective-neutral and ideologically agnostic, the Momentum model overlooks this critical insight.

Even if twentieth-century social movements did succeed for the same reasons, do they necessarily apply to the contemporary climate movement? Of the myriad movements Momentum draws upon, perhaps the most influential is Otpor, which ended the rule of Slobodan Milošević in Serbia at the turn of the twenty-first century. But deposing a dictator is quite a different task than equitably decarbonizing a national economy — something that, it should be noted, has never been accomplished anywhere — and a theory of change that applies equally to both is unlikely to be useful.

What ideological orientation might resonate for our time and place, retaining the interest and commitment of new members long after the exhilaration of initial success has worn off? What sort of “noncooperation” might be necessary to win a Green New Deal, whenever we decide it might be?

Sunrise has yet to fill in the gaps. For example, a youth strike of some kind to demand climate change action is now frequently entertained in Sunrise circles. Why is this the best tactic for America in 2021, especially when most of our youth have never heard of Sunrise, and most of those who have are not prepared to endure the legal consequences of striking?Reasons Sunrise and adjacent climate movement leaders give for striking evoke abstract concepts such as “disruptiveness” that could or could not apply in any given time and place, and risk conflating a school strike with a labor strike. The Fridays for Future climate strikes of 2019–20, led by school children around the world, were certainly disruptive, yet so far their effort has fallen short of winning ambitious climate policy. This outcome should be enough to cast doubt on any one-size-fits-all axioms plucked from social-scientific literature.

Even as children were exempted from school for “strike” days and encouraged by their parents, only a fraction participated, even in the most active countries — far fewer than would be needed to grind society to a halt. What strike numbers for how long a period of time are necessary to force the government into action? How can Sunrise achieve and sustain this level of strike participation, especially given the sacrifices required?

If these questions are not taken seriously, precious years may be wasted on pursuing tactics which bear little fruit. Yet answering them requires a serious analysis of American society and the specific opportunities it presently offers — and, just as importantly, the ones it does not.

Perhaps Sunrise’s leadership has conducted such an analysis behind the scenes; however, actions like the “Generation on Fire” marches in California and the Gulf South make us worry that the organization is simply copy-and-pasting from the Civil Rights Movement playbook. Over the years, hundreds of left-leaning causes have attempted their own version of the Freedom Marches, or held a rally on the National Mall near the Lincoln Memorial. None have been a tenth as effective as the original.

For this reason, we call on Sunrise to turn away from the idea of a singular “craft” of social movements which can be distilled and applied from the past, and instead be more inventive in its analysis, tactics, messaging, and goals. Additionally, we call on Sunrise’s ideology-as-strategy to be less moralist and more materialist — that is, cognizant of how people’s position in the economy and society affects their worldview and ability to exert power.

Momentum relies on the idea that protests “drive a wedge into the public’s moral conscience.” But whether such protests do drive a wedge depends not only on what language is used, but also whether the audience is in a position to be receptive to any message.

This is not just the work of messaging: it is the work of organization, especially at the local level.

National-Hub Relations: A Story of Contradictions

Sunrise’s organizational structure currently employs a self-defeating mix of centralization and decentralization. Despite Sunrise’s design as a decentralized “mass movement,” in practice, a national core team based in Boston and DC sends out movement directives to the four hundred–plus “hubs” across the country. This process is anything but democratic: the hubs have no institutionalized say in the direction of strategy, which is formulated by the national team before being sent to the local hubs for implementation — usually without their input, often without advance notice, and always without a vote.

The effect is a set of dynamics that work at cross-purposes: decentralized strategy implementation without much decentralized strategy development, and centralized leadership without much centralized power.

The potential benefits of centralized command — such as improved coordination and organizational discipline — are undermined by the fact that hubs are not actually required to follow any directives from the core. One Sunrise local leader told us, “Many hubs simply formulate their own strategies on their own time and resources, because the national strategy won’t work for them.”

The team which produces this strategy and serves as the face of the organization nationally, meanwhile, is hyper-focused on federal politics — in particular, via actions designed to grab national news media attention — putting community organizing in the back seat. This focus put the GND on the national political agenda, but has stalled since. Given the difficulty of winning Congressional majorities that can pass meaningful legislation and get through the courts, keeping state and local politics in main sight is crucial for movement victories. No power can even be exerted at the federal level without local, deep-seated, organized power bases in cities, towns, congressional districts, and states.

Sunrise Movement protest inside Nancy Pelosi’s office at the White House to advocate that Democrats support the Green New Deal, 2018. (Michael Brochstein / Getty Images)

Yet the unidirectional flow of information within Sunrise prevents the national core team from being able to meaningfully assist with local base-building. A frequent complaint in interviews was that directives from above often display a “one-size-fits-all” approach ill-suited to local conditions.

New organizers are left without the tools required to assess their surroundings. What is the basis of the local economy? What are the demographics and local political institutions, the civil associations and social networks? Where are the bases of political power? Sunrise trainings include a “power-mapping” exercise, but — in our experience — it focuses too much on pressuring particular individuals without explaining how to identify these individuals, why influence might flow in a particular direction, and when and how to exert pressure accordingly.

Without an ideology, it’s hard for local organizers to make sense of their surroundings. It also leaves them stranded when events take an unexpected turn — say, an election delivers a surprise result, popular opposition to a campaign materializes out of nowhere, or an opponent (say, an employer, mayor, or presiding police captain) retaliates without warning.

The absence of movement democracy can also lead to disinvestment from a group’s rank-and-file members. This has been demonstrated by “Big Green” groups in the US, whose budgets have grown while mass participation is minimal. Signs such as the ongoing conflict between the Sunrise Black Caucus and national leadership over the organization’s funding and lack of democracy indicate that Sunrise is in danger of following this route.

Without an ideology, it’s hard for local organizers to make sense of their surroundings.

Institutionalizing a more democratic national structure of decision-making — similar to that of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), where elected delegates from each chapter meet to decide on nationwide strategy and goals — would increase the legitimacy of national leadership, open vital channels of deliberation, and allow for hub autonomy when necessary to embed Sunrise more deeply within community life. DSA’s structure isn’t perfect — in fact, the organization would benefit from a more binding strategy decided at the national level — but democratizing Sunrise would make it more likely that local hubs accept and implement a centrally decided national strategy, improving upon coordination and cohesion overall.

The Hub Model: Fast but Shallow Growth

The tensions between the national core and local hubs bring us to the hub model itself — in particular, its pattern of recruitment. College-bound high schoolers, college students, and recent college grads in metro areas with somewhat lefty inclinations and climate anxiety are drawn to meetings by their immediate networks. These recruits are disproportionately affluent, highly educated, and likely to hail from a handful of selective high schools and universities.

Sunrise has taken some strides toward improving the group’s racial diversity, but has still fallen short of substantive multiracial representation, as evidenced by repeated claims that national leadership has not engaged with Sunrise Black Caucus demands about movement strategy, structure, and funding.

While this recruitment pattern can be efficient, it presents two structural obstacles to embedding Sunrise meaningfully and durably within society writ large. First, the predominance of upwardly mobile college and high school students in Sunrise’s ranks means that most of its members are transients. Rather than putting down roots in the given community, they will move to a different part of the country within the next few years.

This compounds the “town-gown” issue endemic to most youth-centered organizing: despite living in close proximity with each other, universities and the communities who host them often maintain hostile relations. College students are among the least socially embedded members of their community, frequently resented by locals for their privileges and afforded little social authority or respect, making them less-than-ideal community organizers. Second, the reliance on peer-to-peer recruitment results in an organizational base that is demographically cloistered along lines of race, class, and education and does not reflect the local youth more broadly.

Adjacent movement groups, YDSA included, also struggle with making their membership more representative of the communities they’re trying to mobilize. A recruiting strategy that explores and maps out the social networks of youth in the local community who are not likely to be reached through traditional Sunrise peer recruitment is essential.

The Sanders presidential campaigns did this successfully in California, tapping into enthusiastic but previously neglected subpopulations such as attendees of community colleges, trade schools, and alternative high schools. We also suggest implementing more rules — or at least guidelines — about who can start Sunrise hubs, such as requirements about planning to stay in the region long-term, as well as recruiting beyond immediate peers.

It’s Crunch Time

Sunrise is unquestionably the most successful political venture the American climate movement has ever produced. The emphasis on media attention-getting stunts — a textbook application of the Momentum model — was perfectly suited for the pre-Biden era.

Yet as the action turns from setting the political agenda to winning and implementing policy over the long term, Sunrise’s existing model has clear limitations. It remains largely dis-embedded from American society, unable to form the mass organization and ideological assent required to structurally transform the economy within ten to fifteen years — which we absolutely need to do to realize a livable future.

We know that activists at the center of Sunrise — and adjacent climate movement orgs — are already rethinking movement strategy. The task ahead is enormous. A new phase of the struggle is here. How will Sunrise — and the rest of us — change to win it?