News on Leviathan

news links and commentary on some recent happenings

The FBI, ATF, and local police are continuing with their repression of the Stop Cop City movement.

This is such an important movement to support right now, because:

• it has a chance of stopping the construction of a major police training academy, which would be an actual victory after the NGOs, churches, and politicians deliberately deflated and sidetracked the popular antiracist uprisings of 2009, 2014, 2020…

• it is increasingly showing its ability to be a radically anticolonial, intersectional movement, highlighting the oppressive interconnections of anti-Blackness, police and prisons, gentrification, ecocide, and colonialism, charting a way past either representational and single-issue politics or the homogeneous, implicitly white middle class politics of mediatic masses or imagined parties.

• it is once again proving the effectiveness of a decentralized movement that favors multiple strategy over unity, and solidarity between all anti-political approaches, from neighborhood outreach to sit-ins to sabotage.

To support this movement and support those facing charges, check out the Atlanta Solidarity Fund and the Southern Center for Human Rights.

Stop Cop City

The media, as they usually do, have been trying their hardest to keep people from making those connections, while helping police to criminalize life-saving, planet-saving actions like setting fire to cop cars and construction equipment.

The media are also fully complicit in the genocide in Palestine. It’s another reminder of how propaganda and thought control work in democratic societies: unlike in autocratic societies, the media encourage debate but only within an artificially narrow range typically protected by an ahistorical framework or false histories.

The Media Aim, the Cops Shoot

CNN writers recently staged a protest about the fact that they weren’t even being allowed to write their own stories or publish their own research: news headlines and narratives were effectively being written and imposed by the owners of the media company (this happens at pretty much every major media outlet, with means that range from subtle to blatant, but what is much less common are journalists with an understanding of the harm they cause and a conscience to do something about it). Incidentally, I couldn’t find any mention of the protests on CNN.

Though in the following days, feeling the heat, they started to allow more of a view of how completely Israel is destroying civilian areas in Gaza. In such articles, though, they still treat the Israeli military as a credible source, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And they still refuse to refer to the genocide as a genocide, despite the mass graves, the bombing of hospitals, explicit genocidal intent voiced by numerous members of the Israeli government, and the forced displacement of 2 million people.

Even the UN has been pressured to accept Israeli allegations against Palestinians without any evidence, as in this campaign by the Israelis to even sabotage humanitarian aid to starving, displaced people with the claim that the aid agencies are full of terrorists.

The double standard is everywhere you look. Many of the most violent Zionists have dual citizenship with the US, a settler two-for-one, and US media won sympathy for the Israeli war on Palestine by featuring all the US citizens who were also taken hostage by Hamas. Zero action, though, for Palestinians who also have US citizenship, killed or kidnapped by Israeli terrorists.

And if all that weren’t bad enough, most people these days get their news on social media, and one of the largest platform conglomerates, Meta, owners of Facebook and Instagram, with a long documented censorship of pro-Palestinian coverage and a protection of racist Zionist hate speech and advocacy of genocide, are looking for more ways to extend their censorship.

With the Supreme Court poised to give another presidential election to the Republican Party, we’re getting a fresh reminder of how often the Democrats sabotaged their own political position, serving up the Republicans golden opportunities on a platter if it served the interests of oppressive systems.

Most people would agree that Clarence Thomas is the most far Right justice on the Court, with the strongest allegations of serious corruption against him. Biden and the Democrats paved the way for Thomas’ appointment in ‘91 when four different women who had worked under Thomas testified about relentless sexual harassment. Back then, Biden led a Senate committee of exclusively white men that attempted to eviscerate the reputation and the dignity of Anita Hill, a Black woman and the only witness who was allowed to testify against Thomas. Biden in particular broke a promise to Hill and failed to protect her from further harassment on the stand, and thirty years later he has still failed to offer an apology. There are numerous scenarios in the upcoming months in which the outcome of the election could turn on a single Supreme Court vote.

In a very different vein, in one of the United States’ most recent direct colonies, judges are using reference to Indigenous Hawaiian values to favor gun control laws. We all love to see US sovereignty being challenged. What do folks think about how the use of state institutions might affect decolonial movements?

Finally, the EPA just reapproved a class of herbicides responsible for Parkinson’s disease. This is terrible news for our health. Also, given that the Democrats are currently in the government, maybe this can be a reminder: anything anyone does against the State and against the wealthy is self-defense.