Tag: Politics

No Revolution With The Ballot: On The Prospects of Electoral Harm Reduction Following the Biden-Trump Debate

Screengrab courtesy of National Review

Thinker and writer Ijeoma Oluo recently posted a video on Instagram elucidating the differences between harm reduction and revolution in American electoral politics. To be clear, revolution will never be had at the ballot box. Oluo dispensed with that notion before the seed could be planted in followers’ minds. As she unpacked the critical difference between harm reduction and revolution, she emphasized the power of voting to mitigate the threat of self immolation imbued in a second Trump term. The (previously) obvious remedy, which should be apparent to even the most casual followers of politics, would be to stick with the incumbent Biden. However, a deeper examination of current political winds reveals two competing narratives.

With an approval rating sitting pretty at 37%, Biden remains deeply unpopular. Voters are being stretched thin by the pull of inflation. Groceries, gas and housing costs tick ever upward while wages lag behind. 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. The survival math for everyday people continues to spiral into ever more brutal calculations to solve for how to survive another month. A TikTok account called “Dollar Tree Dinners” is emblematic of this economic moment. The account boasts 1 million followers and robust engagement.

Anxiety about these economic headwinds have dovetailed with Americans’s concern about Biden’s age. The administration refuses to acknowledge the reality, but we still have use of our eyes and ears. At 81 years old, Biden often presents as pallid and doddering. His slack jaw and hushed tones when meeting with international leaders such as Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky only enhance the perception of him as a husk of the man he once was. In a culture that is sick with celebrity worship, image is everything. Biden’s image is that of a long in the tooth elder statesman ready to be installed at his ancestral home with a part-time nurse. Certainly not the figurehead of Western power politics.

On the B side are the activists, writers and historians screaming into the void about the existential threat of a second Trump presidency. The Atlantic devoted an entire issue to the apocalyptic specter of President Trump unbound. This is in addition to the gallons of newspaper ink spilled and hours of airtime devoted to illuminating the stakes of this election. For those tempted to dismiss warnings about President Trump redux as “woke mob” hysteria, they only need spend a half hour researching Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation, a right wing think tank, has produced a 900 page plan to radically remake the country in the far right’s image should Trump prevail in November. On Steve Bannon’s “The War Room” podcast, Kevin Roberts, the head of Heritage, threatened a “second American Revolution” should the left dare resist. This is not an academic exercise. There will be blood. And so, we pivot to harm reduction.

At the debate Biden’s mandate was to convince Americans to allow him to continue to stand in the breach and protect us from a man who ominously promised to be a dictator on Day 1. CNN hosted the event in accordance with Team Biden’s terms. There would be no energy exchange with a live audience. To preempt outbursts from Trump, the mics would be muted when his opponent was speaking. Perhaps most inexplicable was CNN’s decision to eschew live fact-checking in favor of allowing the candidates to answer questions without guardrails.

The debate opened with Biden shuffling onto the stage looking waxen and vaguely fatigued. Over the course of 90 minutes, Biden frequently mumbled, lost the thread of his argument mid-sentence and stared into space with his mouth agape. This all while his felonious challenger spewed ever more fantastical lies. Arguably the most devastating moment came for Biden when he struggled to respond to a softball query about the national debt under his administration. He issued forth a garbled series of half statements and visibly attempted to gather himself with eyes closed and lips moving in silent recitation. In an incoherent and ultimately jaw dropping response, Biden asserted that we “beat Medicare”:

… Either one of those numbers made raised $500 million billion dollars, I should say in a ten year period we’d be able to wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do child care, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our health care system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the with the Covid, excuse me, with, um, dealing with everything we have to do with, uh, look, if. We finally beat Medicare.

I could feel the collective horror (and my X feed confirmed) of democrats and anti-Trump republicans everywhere. We were scattered like stars in living rooms and dive bar watch parties across the country watching the President of the United States appear to sundown on national television. Biden aides attempted to salvage his reputation by seeding the allegation that Biden had a cold. The debate continued in much the same terrible fashion. Trump smirking and tossing out bold falsehoods such as Nancy Pelosi taking responsibility for the coup attempt on January 6th , as Biden looked around aimlessly and repeatedly failed to offer a fact check. When the debate devolved into smug insults about golf handicaps it seemed as if viewers had been suddenly dropped into The Upside Down. And so it went until the clock ran out and Jill Biden appeared to orient the President to his surroundings and carefully guide him offstage.

Following the travesty of his performance, no serious person can argue that Biden offers the most potent form of harm reduction. He very obviously lacks the mental acuity to counter a GOP juggernaut that has the congressional, judicial and civil society infrastructure to anoint Trump. Violently if that’s what’s required. Conversely, democratic donors are poised to scatter like so many roaches fleeing the glare of a kitchen light. Left leaning independents and grassroots democrats have had their worst fears validated in prime time. Proceeding with Biden as the nominee against Trump would delegitimize the Democratic Party’s claim as the guardian of the democratic experiment. Unlike Trump supporters, there is no collective mass movement willing to take to the streets to defend Biden’s position. Instead, Biden relies on a coterie of loyal advisors and tight knit family to inflame his delusions, instead of pouring cold water on his pride and pushing him to step aside.

Now is the moment for a younger, bolder progressive to intercede and present a credible alternative to Biden. The bar is in hell, but the Democratic bench is stacked. If Democrats are truly eager to avoid the ignominy of nominating a feeble octogenarian that can only deliver lines with a teleprompter, then the party needs to summon the courage to clear the field. Power players such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Senators Corey Booker and Raphael Warnock, and Colorado Governor Jared Polis all represent plausible alternatives to Biden. Each person named has broad-enough appeal to mount a national campaign in a condensed timeframe.

During this election season, the uniquely American ritual of years-long presidential campaigns must be dispensed with. A coordinated push by major donors and the party apparatus can result in a compelling argument for fresh leadership by the Democrats’ August convention. In the likely event the party doesn’t coalesce around one alternative, then a dog fight for delegates on the convention floor should be encouraged to unfold. As Oluo so eloquently pointed out, there can be no revolution within the moribund confines of party politics. In casting our ballots, the best we can hope for is harm reduction. If Democrats retain any vestige of their claim to serve as a sword in the darkness for the average citizen, then they must immediately replace Biden at the top of the ticket.

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Chant Down Babylon: On The Campus Movement for a Free Palestine.

Credit: AP Photo/Stefan Jeremia

Colorful sprays of ripstop nylon tents are arrayed across verdant university quads the country over. These “liberated zones” are buttressed by Palestinian flags and handwritten signs calling for the end to genocide, while others bear a grim count of the war dead. Anywhere between 36 to 40 thousand* Palestinians, the vast majority women and children, decompose under chalky rubble or have been blown apart in targeted strikes against mass tent camps. Included in this count are those that were zip tied, summarily executed and then casually tossed into mass graves after the latest Israeli assault on Al Shifa Medical Complex. Medical workers, pre-pubescent youth and immobilized patients all served as machine-gun fodder.

At a time when 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, those same paltry earnings are captured and bled for taxes before being released to workers. A large portion of those taxes are then routed to Israel, a foreign ethnostate engaged in perpetual aggression against its indigenous neighbors. While Americans anxiously scrutinize spiraling grocery prices, billions of greenbacks are funneled toward the purchase of weapons systems to be deployed in the restive streets of Gaza. Why? Because Israel has the right, nay the obligation, to defend itself against the savage natives. The Zionists are the good guys in a decrepit barrio. They are the sword in the darkness. These are the lies that form the connective tissue of America’s diseased fealty to the Zionist project.

Exhausted and disgusted by the United States’ complicity in the world’s first live-streamed genocide, university students have rejected the political legerdemain engulfing Capitol Hill. Politicos are snatching the scalps of university presidents in a series of bizarre public hearings on antisemitism in academia. The hearings are a way to police speech and smother college liberation movement behind the smokescreen of “protecting Jewish students.” Never mind that many Jewish students stand in solidarity with the call for a Free Palestine. Nationally televised inquests on specious allegations of campus antisemitism and the resulting high-level resignations are evocative of medieval public executions. Representative Elise Stefanik and her Republican wolf pack use the hearings to create a public spectacle about the consequences of politically inconvenient campus speech. The obvious intent is to discourage Americans from questioning the moral legitimacy of a state that murders the native civilian population by the tens of thousands.

The hoi polloi, primed by Fox News to demand a sacrifice amongst the elites, are temporarily sated with each resignation letter released to the press. The hearings are designed to make slogans like “Free Palestine” badspeak. Americans like to delude ourselves into believing that we’re for free speech. But who actually gets to speak without a price? As children we are drilled in the mythology of the common man and his soap box. We are reminded in our entry-level history courses of the American ethos of free inquiry. In the land of the free, even the lowliest man may stand upon his splintered soap box and beseech the public to his cause. Post-October 7th, such juvenile notions have been obliterated at institutions as disparate as UCLA, Ohio State, and Columbia.

Student activists, facing pro-Israel attackers, snipers and a militarized police force, continue to be brutally dragged into the very adult reality that speech and action for the cause of freedom is a treacherous battlefield. The criminalization of student-led dissent, and it’s violent suppression, runs like a radioactive throughline in American history. Our social media-bred micro attention spans have handicapped our sense of the past as prologue. Let it not be forgotten that in the ’60s Black youth in the South faced down powerful fire hoses and frenetic police dogs when peacefully agitating for civil rights. A decade later in 1970, four students at Kent State were massacred for calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. Another theme present in the history and culture of campus resistance is students’ willingness to reject the facade of safety and put their bodies on the line to illuminate the stakes of remaining silent in the face of bald injustice.

This is not a thesis or tense debate in oak paneled lecture halls. Instead, these protestors have offered their bodies up to radically transform spaces designed for inquiry into the arena of action. Lush courtyards endowed by millionaires have been seized and transformed into a theater for grassroots activism. The protests for a free Palestine have been a study in collective organizing, small d democratic mores and mutual aid. The absence of a charismatic (typically male) leader seems to have broken with a historical pattern weaved into the history of 20th century American protest politics. This current wave of activism with decentralized leadership is an outgrowth of a more recent organizing logic observed during the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter. This decentralization has obviated the ability of Israel’s allies to target a putative figurehead for co-optation and/or suppression.

Did you know there are no universities left in Gaza? Israel is continuing to enact a systematic scholasticide to cripple the prospects of those Gazans that remain after IOF withdraws from the strip. We must always remain cognizant of the international linkages often found in systems of oppression. Israel responds to Palestinian resistance by destroying centers of education and advancement. American university administrations respond to campus resistance by banning students and cancelling commencement services. The outcomes, in both Palestine and America, are largely the same. Access to the socioeconomic benefits of higher education is revoked for those that dare to put their bodies on the line and resist. Although American universities still stand, disciplinary actions, arrests, and revocation of access has obvious deleterious effects on students’ future. Their prospects are arbitrarily constrained because they dared hold institutions to the challenge of freedom.

Another linkage can be witnessed in the overwhelming police response to activists populating campus lawns. Keffiyehs and Palestinian flags have apparently presented such a threat that militarized local police outfits swarm encampments and inject thunderheads of violence into clusters of restive liberal arts majors. Unarmed professors that dared stand guard in an effort to protect their charges were singled out for particularly brutal assaults. In one example, a 65 year old professor based in St. Louis was attacked so brutally by officers that he was hospitalized with 9 broken ribs. Similarly, in Gaza and the West Bank, the IOF routinely carries out violent raids, random stops and assaults against unarmed Palestinians as a prelude to mass arrests. Men and women are spirited to secret facilities where they are tortured, denied legal representation and held without charge. Israel says the objective is to root out those with terrorist ties. Although the pretext doesn’t really matter. The state uses its monopoly on violence to snuff out the embers of resistance.

The ideal outcome of a world-class American education would be for alumni to expeditiously move from theory to praxis. The quad is the symbolic forum for those toddler-like steps into a self-actualized movement. A place to refine one’s politics, clash against divergent stances and fortify the will to stand ten toes down against the inevitable backlash politics and attempts at retrenchment. At least that’s the dream. The reality is more abstract. The reality is that an undercurrent of hysteria about real and imagined instances of antisemitism has been stoked into a fever pitch.

Thoughtful, historically informed critique of Israel’s history of settler colonialism and it’s natural outgrowth, Zionism, has been deemed a third-rail in our campus political discourse. Students highlighting the atrocities in Gaza have been doxxed and otherwise tarred as “terrorist sympathizers”. In service of cynical political expediency, organizations aligned with the Israeli lobby have thrust Jewish students into the foreground as victims of woke university administrations that remain obstinate in their unwillingness to protect the feelings of Jewish and Israeli students on campus. In this uniquely American moment, the speech of students and faculty are constantly calibrated against a standard that equates impassioned critique of Israel with antisemitism. The intent is to cast a weighty pall on collective movement to support Palestinians. The message: shut the fuck up or we’ll come for your degree and if you already have it, kiss your career goodbye asshole!

One final linkage. The Gazans buried alive under the rubble can’t breathe and can’t speak. Students standing in radical solidarity with Palestine across the United States are in a dog fight against states’ and college administrators’ attempt at silencing their chants for liberation. Institutions may achieve pyrrhic victories here and there, but the word will continue to be passed.

Stakes is high.

Track List

  • American Requiem (Beyonce)
  • Levels (BigXTha Plug)
  • Backseat Freestyle (Kendrick Lamar)
  • No Love Dubplate (Queen Omega & Little Lion Sound)
  • Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst (Kendrick Lamar)
  • Killa Mode (Westside Boogie)
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On Fatigue (or We Tired/The Struggle Continues)

Sometimes I just want to lay in a dark room with sleep music emanating from my iPhone speakers. Indulge in a facsimile of peace. A facsimile because there is no peace. Bombs don’t get fatigued. Quadcopters don’t need to rest and recharge. Warmongers are relentless in their march toward destruction. A starving child in a flooded tent in Rafah can’t turn off her increasingly aggressive hunger pangs. Her mother, electric with stress, attempts to tame her daughter’s ravenous urges with bread made of animal feed and a generous sprinkle of coarse salt. There is no peace.

I am so exhausted. Shall we all just lay down and die? Ok, on my order… 3, 2 annnd 1. 

I had a stray thought this morning. What if the genocide continues for another 100 days? What if? Do I keep writing? Posting? Sharing? When will we look away from the struggle? The obvious answer is that we must continue to bear witness. Our minds have become conditioned to process 60-second clips of information. And so, in the midst of this genocide of the Palestinians, hundreds of men and women traverse the muddy, devastated ruins of Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah to broadcast 60 seconds of bodies helter-skelter across blood stained hospital floors, or corpses partially trapped under the rubble. 

They upload reels of toddlers covered in ash and bleeding from the head. They post TikToks of bodies recovered from rubble and wrapped in those ubiquitous fuzzy blankets everyone seems to own. These are the milder images. The ones that give you a sense of keeping up with current events. Enough to confirm that war is hell and to satisfy the image that you’re a paragon of liberal middle-class respectability. Just enough consumption to trigger mild horror, but not too much that it kills your desire to sip a glass of cab over today’s Wordle. 

The content that really triggers the bone weary fatigue—images and live video that the New York Times and MSNBC preemptively sanitize and lock away in private archives—are images of the father carrying his son’s body parts through the streets in dirty, plastic grocery store bags, the dead premature infants rotting in incubators of the raided and then abandoned Al-Nasr hospital. Instead, Western audiences are cossetted with Israeli propaganda and soft-focus images of hostages taken from a Kibbutz. Interviews with aggrieved Israeli families lead the nightly news segment. In Palestine, everyone is suspect. Collective punishment is rained down to obliterate collective remembrance. 

There is power in the remembering. The retelling. The word must be passed and seeded into Palestinian soil. We must struggle mightily against the urge to capitulate to exhaustion. For those that survive the bombings, the massacres and the sniper attempts, a space must be created to pass the word. To name the thing (Genocide) and to drag the perpetrators (IOF) into the disinfecting sunlight. 32,000* Palestinians have been killed by the Israelis.

What do we owe each other as humans? In the absence of political power, do we mitigate our moral debt by paying attention? Each time I open Instagram lately I’m confronted by an image of a starving child. Jaundice and peeling lips and sharp rib cages are a grim stand-in for some mother’s beloved. The overwhelm is insidious in it’s seduction. How easy to simply look away. Close the app and watch an episode of Real Housewives of Wherever. Let the scripted, petty conflagrations weave a gauzy shroud of escape over my memory. Who does fatigue, and it’s cousin, forgetting, serve? Does it pave the way for the Israeli body politic to draft new frontiers, new myths, and new cultural narratives unchallenged?

One of the greatest accelerants of fatigue is hunger. Sustained hunger gnaws at focused resistance and replaces it with delirium. Israel has weaponized food access in it’s ongoing assault on anyone that would dare dream of a free Palestine. Those Palestinians that still draw breath move through Gaza’s destroyed coastal strip in a state of utter famine. Air drops packed with expired, non-Halal food have killed desperate Gazans. Those that don’t drown or get crushed to death seeking aid serve as Israeli machine gun fodder as they desperately swarm the trickle of aid trucks allowed in. The lucky ones escape with blood-soaked bags of flour. 

NPR

There have been at least 3 flour massacres in Gaza. The first in North Gaza at Al-Rashid Street (112 killed), the second occurred as starving Gazans waited for humanitarian aid in Kuwait Square (20 killed). The third was an IOF attack on an UNWRA food distribution warehouse (1 staffer killed and 22 wounded). In each scenario Palestinians shook off the fog of despair, if only momentarily, and rallied their will to live another day. They gathered at preauthorized distribution sites, only to be rounded like cattle and slaughtered by guns and hellfire missiles.

On April 1st, the West learned that even the umbrella of celebrity philanthropy can’t shield good samaritans from liquidation. 7 aid workers with the World Central Kitchen (WCK), traveling in a 3 vehicle caravan on a route approved by the IOF were struck and killed by precision guided Israeli missiles. Their vehicles were clearly marked, their movements coordinated and their bodies swathed in WCK badges and logos. No matter. They were agents of Palestinian survival. As such their lives were forfeit. The Instagram reels of their bloodied bodies laid in the dirt with a first responder shoving their passports into the camera lenses played on a loop until my eyes got dry.  My exhaustion was only narrowly defeated by horror and disgust that day. 

And yet, I remain a slave to conditioning. I click, swipe, scroll, falling deeper into a macabre highlight reel. It’s a form of self-flagellation. Each post shared is like a whip to my consciousness. A sharp intake of pain to jolt me out of the stupor of defeat. I cannot halt the funding of Israeli weapons. I haven’t stormed the halls of Congress to confront the Zionist sympathizers in Ralph Lauren suits. But I can keep watch. I can sit and let the horror of what’s happening in Palestine constrict me. I can write and contribute to the record.

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On Bisan

There were twelve thousand viewers glued to the livestream as I clicked into Bisan’s video. Wrapped in a baby blue PRESS vest and matching helmet, she huddled in a dark room at Nasser Hospital with 3 to 4 other Gazans speaking rapid-fire Arabic as drones buzzed in the background. Her tired dark eyes were grim and threaded with terror as she read the flood of comments across her screen. She plead with followers to educate themselves on Zionist aggression against Palestine and to demand a ceasefire. Automatic gunfire rang out as people placed virtual flower crowns and chintzy cowboy hats on her head. This genocide is being live-streamed. 

As I sat in my humid bathroom glued to the screen I had to remind myself to blink. To breathe. To pray. When would the moment come when a bomb struck her building or an IOF solider fired through the door? Would her connection drop upon impact or would we see her flesh blown apart in real time? Every 30 seconds or so, Bisan would wince or silently gasp as the artillery noise inched ever closer. As if to confirm she wasn’t trapped in a dream, she’d ask the viewers if they heard it too. Viewing the livestream was like floating in a sea of thousands of death doulas holding her virtual hands. We came to bear witness. If this be the bitter end, damnit she won’t be alone. 

The buzzing of the armed drones crawled deeper and deeper into my brain. I struggled to tamp down panic. The sort of panic that comes when you are body slammed by the sudden realization that you are utterly helpless in this moment. Chants for a ceasefire and protests in the street and social media shares cannot remove Bisan from the dark warrens of a hospital under bombardment. I can only watch…and wait.

25 thousand* Gazans have been killed since Israel began its campaign in Palestine. Thousands more have been wounded/orphaned/starved to death. To say nothing of the untold number of bodies buried under the rubble. The numbers are staggering. The sheer volume of killing lends itself to abstraction. Statistics about the deaths per hour and exponentially larger casualty counts mask the very human lives so cruelly being snuffed out. And so I clutch at Instagram Stories and TikToks and X feeds about the reality on the ground. I zoom in on photos. I learn their names. Motaz has hung up his journalist hat to turn inward and embrace his family as bombs continue to fall. Plestia, although she’s made it to Australia, continues to use her platform to foreground images of Palestinian joy amidst scenes of devastation. Al-Jazeera journalist Wael buried his son Hamza before dashing back to the ruined and bloody halls of a local hospital to report on the unfolding catastrophe on babies and other civilians. He was recently evacuated to Egypt (then Qatar) after narrowly surviving an IOF drone assault. 

Following the initial assault on Nasser Hospital the Israelis dropped Gaza into yet another communications blackout. I’d refresh my Instagram every hour praying for an update from Bisan. As I moved through the next 24 hours, time seemed to thicken and slow down. I struggled through what felt like an absurd work routine. Virtual meetings, Outlook notifications and production metrics provided a soundtrack to my dreadful anticipation of her death. And then there it was. An Instagram story from Bisan calling for a Global Strike from January 21st to January 23rd. She admonished us (me) to not despair, to keep up the fight against this second Nakba. Same baby blue PRESS vest, same matching helmet. Standing in front of a dirty mirror, Bisan spits in death’s face and affirms that after 107* days of genocide she’s still alive. 

Free Palestine. 

*The casualty count increases daily.

*109 days at the time of this writing. The assault on Gaza continues.

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We Are All Donald Trump

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Donald Trump is the manifestation of our most ginned up nightmares. His relentless march to the fore of the post-Tea Party GOP should’ve been entirely predictable to anyone paying attention during the age of Obama. White Americans that have been losing economic (although the certainly not social) power through the inexorable destruction of the middle class have formed an increasingly paranoid contingent of voters fueled by anxiety and racism.

Trump’s blinding ginger halo of celebrity, combined with his slimy assertions of his penis size, and grade school attacks on women, has lowered the level of political discourse to that of a rundown Applebee’s bar in Nowhere, Idaho. Nakedly racist commitments to build a wall on the border and ban all Muslims serve to bolster the grievances of a population betrayed by the capitalist system it voted for. A shrinking population that is also entering its demographic sunset. The Bud Light crowd cheers Trump for giving a loud voice to their deepest fears and desires. As factories, mills, and coal mines shutter, legions of men and women have become displaced vagabonds in their own land.

Things just don’t make sense anymore. There’s a black president, Mexicans beset them on all sides, and the Islamists are determined to see them dead. Any way you slice it, good ol’ America has lost her way. But Trump is gonna put her back on course.  He’s a billionaire, after all. Just the type of man needed in the White House.

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