Reflections on Two Remarkable Events Yesterday

One Inspiring, One Menacing

Two remarkable events, one inspiring and one menacing, happened yesterday.

Let’s start with the inspiring one. Right here in the United States, the belly of the world imperialist beast, activists protesting the US-Israel crucifixion of Gaza blocked highways and bridges in Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, and New York City. They blocked travel “into O’Hare Airport, onto the Golden Gate and Brooklyn bridges and on a busy West Coast highway” (FOX News). Empire and genocide opponents chained themselves to barrels and blocked northbound lanes on I-880 in Oakland.

Consistent with anti-Zionists’ call for an April 15 day of resistance seeking to cause economic disruption for the imperial system that funds and equips Israel’s genocidal apartheid and terror state, which has murdered at least 40,000 Palestinian civilians (mostly women and children) so far, activists faced off with riot police who fired pepper balls at them outside the gates of Tesla plant in Fremont, California. "This Tesla factory is one of the most productive factories in the state. And so in this area, we wanted to target a big center of production and really cause an impact," said one of the young anti-imperialist fighters for Palestinian freedom.

That’s a properly militant statement: “we wanted to target a big center of production.” They did so, compelling the regional militarized gendarmes to demonstrate two basic Marxist realties: the capitalist-imperialist system sits atop a capitalist mode of production and relies — like the underlying production system itself — on armed coercion and physical repression at the end of the day.

The movement beyond protest to resistance rose up down in Texas and up to Philadelphia and Connecticut. According to The New York Times:

“In San Antonio, protesters carrying Palestinian flags blocked both sides of the Valero energy company headquarters, jamming traffic on the city’s northwest side….And in Philadelphia, pro-Palestinian protesters organized a teach-in that blocked rush-hour traffic. Others led a funeral-like procession of cars up Interstate 95, and a third group gathered outside City Hall, calling on local leadership to stop sending millions of dollars to Israel. They also made their way to Day & Zimmermann headquarters, which is a weapons manufacturer that organizers said supplies weapons to Israel, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported…The protests were part of A15 Action, a solidarity agreement to “identify and blockade major choke points” that would cause the most economic impact, according to its website…In Middletown, Conn., for example, pro-Palestinian protesters blocked employees entering and leaving a Pratt & Whitney factory that exports military engines for aircrafts.”

This all marks a welcome move from protest to resistance, with actions targeting the mode of imperialist production. How F’ng cool and necessary is that?

Hundreds of resisters were arrested nationwide.

The choice of April 15th was far from random. April 15 is the day when tens of millions of US citizens are supposed to pay federal taxes that fund the United States giant global imperial war machine, of which racist, Judeo-fascist Israel is a critical outpost and tool — so crucial to American imperial strategic interests that it is by far and away the biggest recipient of US military “assistance” on the planet.

Three cheers for the activists who put their bodies on the line to try to end the ongoing US-Israel crucifixion of Palestine. And for a movement that took a step beyond protest and towards resistance directly targeting parts of aspects of the capitalist economy, the ultimate source of imperialism and other plagues — most notably the climate catastrophe — threatening to cancel all prospects for a decent human future.

For what it’s worth: the “P”BS NewsHour last night failed to make a single mention of yesterday’s pro-Palestinian protests — this in an episode that reported at length on a non-fatal knife attack in Australia.

Now for the menacing story: yet another terrible action by the Christian Fascist US Supreme Court yesterday — its refusal to hear a case in which a police officer sued a Black Lives Matter activist who helped lead a protest in which the gendarme was injured. Here’s some half-decent reporting from the centrist New Republic (TNR):

“The Supreme Court’s inaction has effectively abolished the right to mass protest across three states, allowing a lower court’s ruling to seemingly infringe upon the Constitution’s First Amendment…The nation’s highest court decided Monday not to hear Mckesson v. Doe, leaving in place a decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that punishes protest organizers with extreme financial consequences if even one participant commits an illegal act. The decision, which now stands as law in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, makes it dangerous and practically impossible to organize mass protests. The case questioned whether DeRay Mckesson, the leader of a 2016 Black Lives Matter protest in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, could be held liable for negligence after an unidentified member of the march threw a rock at a police officer’s face, seriously injuring him.”

What’s with “seemingly infringe” on the right to the First Amendment right of mass public assembly? There’s no “seeming” about it: the TNR write up itself says that “the decision, which now stands as law in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, makes it dangerous and practically impossible to organize mass protests.”

Yes. How many of us are going to call people into the streets and public squares to protest, say, the aformentioned US-Israel crucifixion of Gaza, if we know that doing so absurdly puts us at risk of a financially crippling lawsuit from a cop or anyone else potentially injured in the course of the action?!

“If people can sue demonstrators for the unlawful acts of others,” notes the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), “it will deter all but the hardiest Americans from exercising their rights to assemble and demonstrate.”

The Christian fascist Supremes deigned to uphold the precedent of its own 1982 decision in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, which ruled that the First Amendment shields civil rights leaders from liability for a nonviolent boycott to “bring about political, social, and economic change.” As FIRE notes:

“Observing that First Amendment activity and violence often exist at mass protests, the Supreme Court concluded that ‘civil liability may not be imposed merely because an individual belonged to a group, some members of which committed acts of violence.’ Only if a demonstrator (1) authorizes or directs unlawful activity, (2) incites imminent and likely lawless action, (3) or gives specific instructions to carry out violence could they be liable for the resulting consequences, the Supreme Court reasoned.’”

Here’s something that neither TNR nor FIRE doesn’t say that merits stating: the three state laws in question are basically fascist and so is the notoriously far right-wing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. As Rakim Brooks, president of Alliance for Justice, told Democracy Docket earlier this year, “the Fifth Circuit is demolishing the rule of law as we know it…From reproductive rights to gun safety to democracy itself, [t]hese judges are trying to force an extreme agenda not only on the states they serve, but on all of us.”  

“With nearly 75% of the 5th Circuit’s 26-judge bench occupied by Republican-appointed judges — six of whom are Trump appointees — right-wing litigants,” Democracy Docket notes, “are continually experimenting, and often prevailing, in the 5th Circuit’s laboratory of anti-democratic jurisprudence…..For the foreseeable future, the 5th Circuit’s right-wing bench is here to stay. And for as long as it remains, right-wing litigants will continue to engage in judicial gamesmanship, aided by an extremely conservative cohort of judges who will do their partisan bidding.”

Okay, but the 5th Circuit isn’t actually conservative, it’s radical — radically reactionary, regressive, revanchist, and Republi-fascist.

The right to hold public protests — an elementary part of basic previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law — is under assault on many fronts and most especially in right-wing states where activists face draconian penalties for “obstructing traffic” and fascist haters are free to drive into protesters. As the New York Times reported last year:

“Republican legislators in Oklahoma and Iowa have passed bills granting immunity to drivers whose vehicles strike and injure protesters in public streets. A Republican proposal in Indiana would bar anyone convicted of unlawful assembly from holding state employment, including elected office. A Minnesota bill would prohibit those convicted of unlawful protesting from receiving student loans, unemployment benefits or housing assistance. And in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed sweeping legislation this week that toughened existing laws governing public disorder and created a harsh new level of infractions — a bill he’s called ‘the strongest anti-looting, anti-rioting, pro-law-enforcement piece of legislation in the country.’ …while Democrats seized on [George ] Floyd’s death [in May of 2020] to highlight racism in policing and other forms of social injustice, Republicans responded to a summer of protests by proposing a raft of punitive new measures governing the right to lawfully assemble. G.O.P. lawmakers in 34 states…introduced 81 anti-protest bills during the 2021 legislative session…The Florida law imposes harsher penalties for existing public disorder crimes, turning misdemeanor offenses into felonies, creating new felony offenses and preventing defendants from being released on bail until they have appeared before a judge….The law also increases penalties for taking down monuments, including Confederate ones, making the offense a second-degree felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. It makes it easier for anyone who injures a protester, such as by driving into a crowd, to escape civil liability.”

This is radically reactionary neo-fascism, not conservativism.

The Republi-fascists are headed by a cult leader, the Hitler-channeling maniac Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump, who says he wants to clear the nation of “radical left vermin” and will invoke the Insurrection Act on the day of his next inauguration. They have some good reasons to think they will take back the presidency and the US Senate majority in 2024-25. The decrepit corporatist warmonger “Genocide Joe” Biden and his dismal neoliberal Weimar Party are no small part of the explanation for this horrifying fact.

If the Republi-Nazis can keep their majority in the US House, and they may well do so (with no small help from rampant gerrymandering and fascist voter suppression and manipulation), look for them to pass federal Florida-like anti-protest legislation for the whole country, along with a host of other horrific measures certain to spark mass protests the nation’s right-/Reich-most major party will be itching to have put down with live ammunition.

A good portion of the US capitalist-imperialist ruling class will be fine with the nationalization of anti-protest measures and other draconian, neofascist attacks on previously normative bourgeois democracy, including the right of public assembly. They want their sick and parasitic system protected by all means necessary in blue as well as red states! Many of our bourgeois masters certainly know or at least sense that their rotten, cancerous, and ecocidal system of savage inequality, permanent war, police-statism, white supremacy, rampant alienation, crippling atomization, and multiple (class, race, gender, national and more) oppressions is facing a legitimation crisis — that this diseased sociopolitical regime is losing the ability to reliably sell itself to the masses as a legitimate democracy. Why continue to pretend to be a democracy — or that their version of democracy isn’t at core a class dictatorship that depends on multiple forms of overlapping and mutually reinforcing oppression, division, destruction, misery, distraction, depression, disease, and terror? They will be happy to continue to parasitically profit from the destruction of the planet as their political superstructure makes more transparent than ever its underlying reliance on pure repressive state force, vicious racism, ugly patriarchy, and nativist nationalism. They’ll still suck up surplus value and wealth from the ever more poisoned and deadly capitalist world system at home and abroad while ridiculous fascism-denying jerks like Jon Stewart, Samuel Moyn, and (much further down the bourgeois status chain) Cory Robin and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins instruct us not to get all alarmist and “boy who cried wolf” about ascendant Trumpism-fascism since, well…. “life goes on” and It Can’t Really Happen Here even with ecocidal Nazis like the unmitigated arch-malignant asshole Herr Trump — accurately described by Noam Chomsky four plus years ago as “the most dangerous criminal in human history” — at the helm of the most dangerous nation in that history.

Jesus Fascist Christ, people. Revolution, anyone?