COVID-19 Lab Leak Hypothesis Coverage Is Still Riddled With Conspiracy Thinking

While there is still no conclusive evidence pointing to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is still conspiracy thinking in proponents of the lab leak hypothesis.

Arguments surrounding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic have surged recently. This comes after a Department of Energy report said, with “low confidence,” that the virus “likely” originated from a laboratory leak. Although the document is classified, meaning the content or evidence cannot be reviewed, the Department does say that the research was not part of a bioweapons project.

The Department of Energy report is now the second Government agency to support the Lab Leak hypothesis, along with the FBI. It is important to note, though, that eight Government agencies were tasked with investigating the origin of the virus as a result of a Biden Administration directive. Of the eight agencies, four still point toward a natural origin which is a zoonotic spillover from animal to human in the Wuhan wet market. Two agencies have not taken a stance on the matter.

Despite this, many proponents of the Lab Leak hypothesis have expressed a sense of vindication in response to this new report. One popular YouTube channel, Breaking Points, released a video titled, “US Government ADMITS Lab Leak COVID Origin,” to argue that the evidence is now too overwhelming in favor of this hypothesis to believe anything else regarding the origins of the pandemic.

In the video, the co-host Saagar Enjeti argues that Dr. Fauci, former Head of the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NAID) division, and the scientific community broadly, covered up evidence that pointed to the lab leak hypothesis. Furthermore, Dr. Fauci illegally “circumvented” Government regulations in 2014 to give EcoHealth Alliance, a global nonprofit that studies human, animal, and environmental health, grant funding to engage in Gain of Function (GOF) research with bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

Saagar then says that despite the Obama Administration discontinuing Gain of Function research after the scientific community found it “too risky,” Fauci “reversed” these “guidelines” to give millions in grants to the EcoHealth Alliance to continue the same research in China. Saagar concludes that this research “plausibly” led to the COVID-19 pandemic and that there is “almost no evidence” to support a natural origin at this point.

This argument is riddled with conspiracy thinking, incoherent timelines, and blatant falsehoods. And surprisingly, there was still no evidence presented to support the idea that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab, accidentally or otherwise. Saagar makes sloppy leaps of logic assigning malicious motives to public health officials and conflates all forms of coronavirus research to create the impression that any work done now, in the past, or in the future to understand coronaviruses is a direct contribution to the dangerous pandemic risk that led to the spread of COVID-19.

But let’s examine the claim: Did Dr. Fauci illegally circumvent existing Government regulation to fund Gain of Function research in Wuhan?

Well, to examine this, we need to understand what the Government regulation was, what Gain of Function research is, and how, if true, Fauci circumvented it.

Gain of Function research is “research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease, help define the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, thereby enabling assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents, informing public health and preparedness efforts, and furthering medical countermeasure development.” In other words, this research is the deliberate enhancement of the transmissibility of a pathogen, especially in humans, and can increase pandemic potential. Thus, the risks and benefits of Gain of Function research must be weighed carefully.

Indeed, it is true that in 2014 the U.S. Government issued a pause on new funding of GOF to assess the risks and benefits of GOF studies regarding select research on influenza, MERS, and SARS. However, in 2017, the U.S. Government ended the pause in which the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) developed a framework for funding and oversight for “enhanced potential pandemic pathogens” or enhanced PPPs.

According to the guidance, “An enhanced PPP is defined as a PPP resulting from the enhancement of the transmissibility and/or virulence of a pathogen. Enhanced PPPs do not include naturally occurring pathogens that are circulating in or have been recovered from nature, regardless of their pandemic potential.” The NIH lifted the pause alongside this framework. The director of the NIH at the time, Francis Collins, announced the decision, not Dr. Fauci.

So already we can see the conspiracy thinking and some falsehoods in Saagar’s framing. Saagar claimed that Fauci “reversed” the regulation to allow GOF research in Wuhan. But Fauci did not do this. The U.S. Government, along with the Department of HHS, lifted the pause after providing a framework for GOF research funding with enhanced PPPs. Saagar positions Dr. Fauci as the singular source of the blame with malicious motives. This is typical of conspiracy thinking.

Moreover, this timeline does not make sense. We know the truth now that Fauci did not lift the pause on GOF. But let’s suppose he did. Why would he choose to illegally ignore existing regulations in 2014 to fund GOF in China three years prior to the lift of the ban. If Fauci had the desire and decision-making power to fund this research, why would he not just reverse the pause immediately in 2014 to continue the funding legally?

The truth is that whether EcoHealth Alliance used the funding for GOF is debated by the scientific community and all depends on how one defines ‘Gain of Function’ and how one assesses “reasonable” judgment as far as research potential to enhance transmissibility. Many experts believe, such as molecular biologist Alina Chan, that the research did not meet the definition outlined by the Department of HHS as the researchers in Wuhan were studying “naturally occurring SARS viruses” which fell outside the definition of enhanced PPPs requiring further review.

But an important point is that even this debate surrounding classifications of GOF studies does not get us closer to proving the claim that SARS-CoV-2 in particular originated from a lab. In other words, even if it happens to be true that the NIH funded GOF in Wuhan, this does not automatically connect that specific research to SARS-CoV-2. Saagar is invoking skepticism of public health institutions to ignite an emotion that the lab leak hypothesis is true without actual evidence.

Another example of this is the supposed evidence Saagar provides for how Fauci circumvented this pause on GOF. Saagar cites a New York Times report highlighting the NIH making “significant errors in its oversight” of funds to EcoHealth Alliance over the course of years. The report comes from the HHS Department’s Inspector General. Interestingly, if we read past the headline, we find that not only does this report fail to prove the lab leak hypothesis, but that the journalists who reported on this make the explicit point that the Inspector General did not address whether EcoHealth’s experiments were risky or even classified as GOF research.

Crucially, too, the reporters in the same Times article note that “there is no evidence linking the Wuhan laboratory or its work with EcoHealth to the start of the pandemic. Federal health officials have shown that viruses in EcoHealth’s experiments were not closely related to the one behind the pandemic, and researchers have identified several naturally occurring bat viruses that are much more similar to the one that has killed millions of people globally.”

In an attempt to prove a lab leak claim, Saagar cites a New York Times article that not only fails to provide evidence for it but actually undermines it if the article is read in full. Again, the idea here is to evoke the proper emotion in the audience that these institutions should not be trusted whatsoever since they allegedly covered up information that hurt us.

The evidence provided for the lab leak theory is virtually nonexistent. It is also not possible to evaluate the evidence offered by the Department of Energy right now. But also remember, Saagar claimed that there is “almost no evidence” to support the natural origin hypothesis. I think it is only fair that we examine how the evidence stacks up with the alternate hypothesis.

Well, there is significant evidence to support the natural origin theory. For instance, a 2022 peer-reviewed study in the Journal Nature Science found that “all of the circumstantial evidence so far points to more than one zoonotic event occurring in the Huanan market in Wuhan, China, likely during November–December 2019.”

Additionally, two of the study’s authors published an opinion piece that highlighted the key details. When they “extracted the geographical from the earliest known cases from December 2019, and plotted them on a map of Wuhan, [the cases] clearly formed a clear cluster with the market at the dead centre. This was true regardless of whether an early case had a known link to the market or note at all. This is precisely the pattern that would be expected around the site where community transmission was initially established.”

Furthermore, during the onset of the pandemic, the researchers found two distinct genetic variants (lineage A and B) that spread across the human population. Both were linked to the wet market geographically. In order for a lab leak to have been the cause, two different individuals, in a time span of a week, would need to have gone from the lab to the market with each individual infected with one of the two different variants. This is highly unlikely, especially when compared to the much simpler explanation of zoonotic spillover according to the authors of the study.

The natural origin hypothesis is also supported by the fact that zoonotic spillover is quite common, even in areas far away from a Virology lab. For example, SARS-CoV-1 emerged in 2001 in China as a result of human-wildlife interaction and the sale of live animals at wet markets. This conclusion is further supported by the fact that NIH-funded research at the Wuhan Insitute of Virology studied viruses that “were so far distant from an evolutionary standpoint from SARS-CoV-2 that they could not have possibly been the source of SARS-CoV-2 or the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The evidence supporting a natural origin is overwhelming, although, it should be noted that there is still no conclusive evidence either way. To be fair, COVID-19 could still be the result of a lab leak. However, it is interesting that the same cynicism, skepticism, and vitriol Saagar has for Dr. Fauci, the NIH, and the Wuhan lab does not seem to extend to other government agencies when they confirm his biases. There is an important irony at play here. David Pakman, Host of The David Pakman Show, makes an insightful point:

It's really something that the same people who for 3 years said we can't trust anything the government says about COVID now trust an admittedly low confidence report from a government agency about the origins of COVID

— David Pakman (@dpakman) February 28, 2023

Indeed, the irony of Saagar making claims that the mainstream media simply “fell in line” with the natural origin hypothesis as he falls completely in line with one government report that cannot even be reviewed. It is a damning indictment of anti-establishment politics. This shows how the attempt to challenge the unaccountable powerful institutions can foment conspiracy thinking with social motivations. In other words, Saagar positions an in-group and an out-group.

The in-group is what he perceives to be the anti-establishment populist who is skeptical of power. The out-group is what he perceives as the unaccountable “elites.” In this instance, “power” represents the dominant explanation of the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. So it becomes irrelevant whether the alternate lab leak hypothesis comes from another government agency we would expect Saagar to be skeptical of as a representative of the “elite.” Rather, it only matters if the in-group cognitive biases are reinforced regardless of where it comes from.

The out-group represents anybody that does not support his biases with respect to the origin of the virus. For instance, it can’t be that the lab leak theory was not promoted because the evidence did not support the hypothesis. Instead, it has to be that proponents of the theory are being “suppressed” by the out-group, which includes the mainstream media, the researchers, and public health agencies. This feeling of distrust toward public health institutions impugns the motives of these public health officials. It can’t be that virologists, evolutionary biologists, and public health officials are convinced by the natural origin evidence and are defensive against an effort to cut funding for infectious disease research because they genuinely believe this will harm our ability to protect public health. It has to be that they are merely covering up the truth to protect their future research funding and avoid liability. This is behavior that is perhaps worse than the pandemic itself, which is an abandonment of scientific reasoning for conspiracy.

While there is still no conclusive evidence pointing to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is still conspiracy thinking in proponents of the lab leak hypothesis. It is incredibly important to discover the origins so that corrective actions can be taken to avoid another pandemic and protect public health. Regardless of the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, sowing distrust in institutions based on an in-group bias without evidence will do nothing to help. It will only degrade future public health efforts and diminish critical thinking under the guise of anti-establishment politics.

Backing Republican Calls to Defund the FBI Legitimizes the Far Right

Disregarding one’s political goals in favor of political statements in a vacuum is bad political advocacy

On August 12, 2022, the FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort retrieving 11 sets of documents with classifications ranging from Top Secret (TS) to Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI). The warrant is a part of an ongoing Department of Justice (DoJ) investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents that he took with him when he left office in January of 2021. The investigation includes potential Espionage Act violations, criminal mishandling of classified documents, and obstruction of justice.

Conservative Politicians, supporters, and allies of Trump have lambasted the unprecedented search, and investigation broadly, as a political “witch hunt” and a last-ditch effort to make Trump incapable of running for office in 2024. Others, such as Republican Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene, have even proclaimed that the FBI be defunded in response.

Some leftists have responded to Majorie Taylor Greene’s declaration with, to put it lightly, an unusual approach. Rising co-host and Bernie Sanders’ Former Press Secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, argued in a recent Rising segment that leftists, who have historically been on the receiving end of FBI abuses, should acknowledge that Greene is right in this instance. Moreover, leftists should “exploit” this moment by proposing legislation to disempower the FBI and essentially call Greene’s bluff on the issue.

This approach struck me as misguided, at best, and at worst logically fallacious. For example, Gray notes that Green is an obvious bad faith actor when she claims the FBI should be defunded. Presumably, this is because Greene is a conspiracy-mongering, far-right Christian nationalist whose political goal is to foster right-wing authoritarianism in the United States. Thus, Greene’s opposition to the FBI, in this case, has nothing to do with justice, rule of law, or holding power to account. It is the exact opposite. The FBI is thwarting Greene’s authoritarian political goal by investigating Donald Trump and potentially harming his ability to hold office in the future.

But if Gray acknowledges this about Greene, what would be the point of proposing legislation to call Greene’s bluff on this? Why would we waste time exposing something that is already in plain view? It seems counterproductive to point toward a supposed alliance that Gray has implicitly admitted isn’t there, to begin with.

Indeed, when Gray made this point in her debate with Cenk Uygur on the Young Turks, Cenk responded with a compelling point ― aligning with Republican calls to defund now given that it is a response to the ongoing investigation cedes to the Right by allowing them to champion the narrative that any investigation of Trump is fraudulent.

Furthermore, an acknowledgment of the authoritarian sentiment that underlies Greene’s statement about the FBI means that Greene is, in fact, not right about this. Quite the contrary. Greene is wrong when she calls for defunding, precisely because the political goals that emanate from her version of that proposal would harm the left. Gray makes a grave political miscalculation to claim Greene is correct merely because she agrees with Greene’s statement when the relevant part is whether the context surrounding that statement supports a shared goal.

Perhaps the reason Gray sought this narrow alliance with Greene on this issue is not primarily to call Greene’s bluff but to persuade a conservative audience that might be a “good faith” skeptic of the FBI to come and join the left. While it seems like an effort to build political power by forming coalitions, Gray’s Rising segment makes the case in a way that does not foster advocacy for leftist policy but instead validates conservative conspiracy surrounding the Trump investigation.

In the segment, Gray begins by highlighting what the current critiques of the FBI search are. Namely, that the unprecedented nature of the search is not consistent with what Trump is accused of taking, especially given that Hillary Clinton was never prosecuted, much less convicted, for mishandling classified information from a private email server as Secretary of State. Gray then draws an equivalence between Trump and Clinton by reminding liberals who opposed calls to “lock her up” that Clinton indeed never faced prosecution. The implication here is that the liberals who see conservatives as hypocritical on this issue have, themselves, engaged in hypocrisy since many want to see Donald Trump investigated and, if found guilty of crimes, convicted.

Both of these points omit important information that, in my estimation, only serves the far right. Firstly, Gray refers to the FBI search as unprecedented in a way that implies that conservative criticisms that a two-tier justice system has come for Donald Trump are warranted. But, a much more plausible explanation here is the unprecedented nature is a consequence of Trump’s unprecedented recklessness. While there is much that is still sealed, and therefore unknown about this search, there is some evidence to this effect that is far more severe than what Clinton was accused of doing.

For instance, Gray uses a clip from Fox News where former FBI director, James Comey is grilled for failing to prosecute Clinton for mishandling of classified information. The clip, interestingly, does not show Comey’s response.

When James Comey addressed this question, however, he mentioned that while there was evidence that Clinton handled classified information in a way that potentially violated statutes, the FBI could not “find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice.”

As Jacob Sullum reports, in the case of Trump, the warrant used in Mar-a-Lago search determined probable cause that three statutes were violated. The most damning evidence points to the obstruction of justice charge. After The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) retrieved 15 boxes of “improperly removed” documents covered by the Presidential Records Act in January, NARA sought out the DoJ over concerns that there was remaining material marked classified at the resort and retrieved additional documents in June.

After this visit, a Trump lawyer informed the Justice Department in writing that “all the material marked classified in the boxes had been turned over.” However, evidence has revealed from this search that not all classified documents were turned over. Sullum notes that this could meet Comey’s bar of “intentional and willful” mishandling and thus obstruction of justice could be proven.

The other crucial difference is the vast amount of classified documents exposed. In Clinton’s case, Comey reported 110 messages in 52 unsecured email chains that included classified information, eight of which included Top Secret classified information. For Trump, the volume is continuing to grow by the day. According to the New York Times, the Justice Department has retrieved more than 300 classified documents from Trump just from the Mar-a-Lago search alone. This is by no means a defense of Clinton and her mishandlings. Rather, this is to say that there are verifiable reasons why Clinton was likely not indicted and why Trump is facing investigation that may end up in an indictment.

Now, why would Gray, an espoused leftist, hand wave any possibility that these two circumstances may be different? Or to ask a more important question ― Is it really that inconceivable that Trump is uniquely damaging and reckless? If she believes this is possible, I cannot understand why she relied on an equivalence here if not to placate Republican unfounded predilections about Liberal hypocrisy.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this in Gray’s segment is her inclusion of a Fox news clip that showcases Trump supporters who were asked their thoughts about the FBI search. Gray then legitimizes their protest at Mar-a-Lago, and their beliefs, by asserting that the FBI is in a “credibility crisis.” But nothing in the conservative critique of this search, and especially in the FOX news clip, refers to concerns about credibility. Rather, it is merely a reflexive, and importantly, conspiratorial defense of Donald Trump. That’s it. No underlying critique of power or the Justice Department or the FBI. This charitableness Gray has for conservatives is especially bizarre given that the remainder of the segment is spent chastising liberals for essentially failing to affirm this due to their “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Again, I do not know how this is supposed to pull anybody left. This just seems like political work for the right.

Good political activism should be grounded in goals and outcomes, not slogans and statements. The left and right may both refer to public schools as indoctrination centers, for example. But what is going to matter there is why they are saying it. I actually do not think Republicans are hypocritical in this case regarding the search. They are acting in their predictable political interests in selectively opposing the FBI. If the left falls for the trap of endorsing statements like these on their face, we may end up tacitly tolerating right-wing authoritarian goals in favor of these statements. And it should be obvious to anyone who belongs to progressive circles why this would be bad for almost everyone.

For Defenders of Stop and Frisk, Racial Hierarchy Trumps Good Policing

Many conservatives tend to defend aggressive policing tactics, such as the controversial practice of Stop, Question, and Frisk, against the accusation that the policy amounts to racial profiling. Instead, they posit that the policy is effective and, in fact, some argue that it did not target young minority males enough. I think it is important to reveal what this defense means and what it supports within a political framework.

Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro lauded former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stop and frisk policy, arguing that minority males were actually “underrepresented” in stops compared to their corresponding crime rates. Shapiro then urges that in order to lower crime rates, that the City desperately needs more policing, and the implication being more aggressive policing which engages in tactics like stop and frisk.

That suggestion — more policing, deserves to be interrogated here. More specifically, the connection that Shapiro makes between stop and frisk and crime reduction. Research suggests that under Mike Bloomberg’s tenure, stop and frisk did not have a strong causal impact on crime. Before a Federal Court ruled the policy unconstitutional in 2013, stops peaked in 2011, resulting in over 680,000 stops. Interestingly, this correlated with an uptick in major crime after years of decline, according to a Washington Post analysis. Furthermore, the analysis found between 2011 and 2018, the murder rate in NYC decreased 38%. This is a three-fold
decrease in murders when compared to the decline that occurred between 2002 and 2011, when the program swelled substantially every year.

The program Stop and Frisk was originally designed as a response to surging violent crime in the 1990s in NYC and involved officers routinely stopping and searching pedestrians, on “reasonable suspicion” alone, in an effort to find guns and deter crime. Once it became clear that the vast majority of stops uncovered no wrongdoing, the deterrent effect became the dominant defense of the program. It also contained an explicit form of racial profiling — disproportionately targeting young Black and Hispanic males. At its peak, about 90% of stops and searches that occurred were Black and Hispanic males, and 88% of those stops found no evidence of crime or wrongdoing.

It should be noted that stop and frisk did coincide with a precipitous drop in crime in NYC throughout the 1990s. However, there is no existing consensus regarding how much this can be attributed to the program itself. The UK-based Police Foundation notes that stops in NYC between 2006 to 2011 produced only “a modest deterrent effect on crime” that cannot alone account for city wide crime drops. Furthermore, Jeffrey Bellin in the Boston University Law Review argues that any level of effectiveness regarding stop and frisk is a product of “the very aspects that render it unconstitutional.” In other words, aggressively encroaching upon young minority males without cause, that which uncovered no evidence of crime, may produce a deterrence effect against carrying guns within some who would have otherwise committed this crime, but is ultimately an obvious violation of a constitutional right to equal protection.

Which is another direct point against stop and frisk. The program is simply not good policing. Resources tend to be necessarily targeted so microgeographically such that it always amounts to racial profiling. This leads to harmful psychological effects on the largely minority population that the program is inflicted upon. Jesse Singal highlights these impacts from an article in The Cut  — “It affected how people lived their lives, the extent to which they felt comfortable simply hanging out in their own neighborhoods, and — perhaps most important, from a policy perspective — their trust in and willingness to help the police.”

Indeed, the Police Foundation finds that the program diminishes trust in law enforcement in communities where trust is most fragile. And as someone who would like to see police abolished, as it currently exists, I do defend the idealized principles in policing — public safety, community trust, and citizen engagement. Stop and frisk violates all these principles.

Overall, stop and frisk should be pretty easy to condemn. So how can Ben Shapiro defend a policy that doesn’t have a clear causal relationship with crime reduction, is racially discriminatory, is unconstitutional, promotes disorder rather than order, and one that is harmful to the legitimacy of policing as an institution?

This requires a reference back to Shapiro’s use of the words more policing when defending stop and frisk. See, where law and order seems to be the phrase sung by the program’s defenders, the policy leads to the opposite result. So when Shapiro uses the words more policing, he means a specific form of policing — one that reinforces racial and social hierarchies.

Let’s take the deterrent defense of stop and frisk. A common rebuttal to the critique that the policy is ineffective because it results in virtually no arrests is that the goal is to deter young minority males from carrying guns in the first place, so a low “hit-rate” is a good thing. Now, the deterrence effect is intuitively believable such that it must have some truth to it. Much the same way that living in a third-world police state that beats citizens with blunt objects for minor offenses like littering may deter littering.

The problem is the assumption made regarding stops here. The implication is that within the entire proportion of young Black and Hispanic males who are frisked and do not turn up guns would have otherwise been carrying a firearm. But this is not true. A large portion of these males were certainly non-criminals and were never intent on committing any crime. As a consequence, young males of color were forced to exist in a society where they could always be targeted based on their race alone, reinforcing dangerous racial stereotypes. And no matter how many minority males turned out to have nothing, conservatives always defend the policy on the grounds that any of them could have been carrying guns if not for stop and frisk.

See, this social harm objection would not likely register to Shapiro because the conservative logic is manifestly hierarchical. To conservatives, the proliferation of racial hierarchy through stereotype is not an accepted trade off for a reduction in crime, but rather a goal in and of itself. Presumption of guilt is the historical norm here. Therefore, constitutional foundations do not apply to communities of color. Social deviance ought to be met with unchecked dominance, thereby disrupting the lives of large groups of males of color who exist on the low end of societal stratification as a justifiable action.

I think it’s important to always identify this type of rhetoric for what it consistently entails. Incidentally, this is reflective in virtually all tough-on-crime rhetoric. From cocaine-crack sentencing disparities to welfare queen imagery, conservatives forego all stated principles in pursuit of a relationship that maintains poor, black, minority people as subservient in the power structure, or what Noam Chomsky refers to as isolating the “superfluous population.” The policy, therefore, merely becomes a way to express this relationship without directly saying it.

In this case specifically, the expression comes at the expense of the very institutions conservatives presumably support  —  Policing itself.

Vaccine Mandates As A Defense Of Freedom

A recent article in the New York Times highlighted that COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations have surged in the United States in the past two weeks. Michigan is among the worst upticks seen with the highest infection rate in the country. The Michigan Health Watch reports that this surge is driven largely by the unvaccinated as 90% of new cases reported are in the unvaccinated population. Similar trends can be seen throughout the country.

This surge speaks to an undeniable need for communities to get vaccinated. The most effective way to accomplish this would be a nation-wide vaccine mandate. An example is President Biden’s mandate for employers with more than 100 employees to receive the vaccine or submit themselves to weekly testing. This is a good start and should be expanded to school, business, and travel. Put simply, the goal of a mandate would be to compel anyone eligible to get vaccinated by essentially isolating them from society if they fail to do so.

While this is hardly an unprecedented move as vaccine mandates already exist for all of these activities and have for decades, many people have expressed staunch opposition to any notion of mandating vaccines for COVID-19. One example I recently read and discussed is from a think piece written by Fray, a New Zealand Blogger.

What is interesting about his piece is that it offers a philosophical basis for opposing mandating vaccines. The piece argues that one’s freedom to choose to vaccinate themselves outweighs the risk posed by the novel coronavirus. The argument goes that COVID-19 is not as deadly or dangerous as once thought. The risk of dying from COVID-19 would be like “getting in a car crash while driving to the store,” yet we do not ban people from driving. Likewise, barring people from certain activities without vaccination would be equally absurd. Therefore, forcing one to get vaccinated is a grave violation of their freedoms which cannot be accepted

Admittedly, I have always found this freedom-risk dichotomy bizarre. The idea is that one either supports freedom through defending one’s choice to get vaccinated, or one attacks freedom through support for mandating vaccines as the proven, most effective approach in mitigating the risks posed by infection. The problem is this assessment is completely backwards: mitigating the risks posed to communities by COVID-19 is a defense of freedom. Failure to vaccinate harms it.

This case can be made in a few ways. Firstly, failure to vaccinate yourself is to perpetuate a deadly, raging global pandemic. I do not know what threshold Fray is using to determine that COVID-19 is not particularly dangerous, but a virus which has claimed 777,000 American lives, making it one of the deadliest events in American history, and when a thousand Americans have died from the virus daily for much of this past week, does not make an obvious case to hand-wave this pandemic away as an insignificant threat to human life. Fray certainly failed to do this in the piece.

The interesting part that Fray leaves out is that the extent to which death has been mitigated, especially before vaccines, has been through non-pharmaceutical interventions by Governments around the world, such as lockdowns and travel restrictions. Researchers in the Nature Journal, for example, estimated that these interventions during the onset of the pandemic averted 3.1 million deaths across 11 European countries. The point is that vis a vis vaccines, these restrictive interventions hurt one’s freedom in discernible ways, namely, to travel, to go to work, or to put your kids in school.

At this point, Fray’s opposition to vaccine mandates seems to be in a bind because presumably the lockdowns would be a violation of freedom to him as well. This means that his ideal course of action would not only be to give people the choice to vaccinate, but also to lift restrictions that would lead to an increase in death to the tune of millions. Wait, but death was the primary metric in determining whether a vaccine mandate would be justified in the piece. So it seems Fray would have to admit that the alternative to vaccinate would be to maintain freedom-harming interventions by governments, or to do away with them and admit that death would spike such that vaccines mandates would be justified according to Fray’s own standards.

More than this, death is not the only metric through which danger is perceived surrounding coronavirus infections. For instance, around 25% of patients who have had COVID-19 experience long-term side effects. Time reports that these can include “pain, breathing trouble, high cholesterol, malaise and/or fatigue and high blood pressure.” Also, that “post-COVID symptoms were quite varied, running the gamut from depression and anxiety to skin conditions to heart issues and gastrointestinal distress.” I would argue that living in a world knowing I could simply stand next to someone and unnecessarily get painful breathing issues long-term from a breakthrough case does not enhance freedom.

This brings me to the second point which is that vaccine mandates are ultimately about protecting communities. And the way this is often done is by telling people that they do not have a right to impose a serious health risk to others. “Think about smoking,” retired Immunology Professor, Dr. Tracy analogizes. People have a right to smoke and impose a health risk to themselves, but most people believe that they do not have a right to smoke in public places and expose others to hazardous second-hand smoke.

Likewise, one does not have a right to force others to exist in a country with a raging respiratory illness and all the risks that come with it, from restrictive public health measures to the threat of dangerous, more contagious mutations that can undermine the progress that vaccines have been responsible for thus far. Both of these are being driven by the unvaccinated population. People also do not have the right to unnecessarily expose immunocompromised individuals, or children who are too young to get vaccinated to this risk. Furthermore, failure to vaccinate contributes to the breakdown of systems in society that are unrelated to COVID-19. People who selfishly refuse to get vaccinated are much more likely to have a case that requires hospitalization. As a result, these people will contribute to the overflow of ICUs across the country which takes away care from people with other health issues when those people could have easily gotten vaccinated.

While Fray and others who oppose vaccine mandates do not deny the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine, a counterargument often given at this point is that the aforementioned risks to an immunocompromised individual can be just as high if exposed to a fully vaccinated person. While it is true that it is unclear how effective the COVID vaccine is at preventing transmission, this does not mean that the risk posed here is the same. Even when fully vaccinated people are just as infectious as an unvaccinated person, the fully vaccinated person is infected for a much shorter amount of time. Importantly too, a fully vaccinated person is much less likely to become infected with COVID-19 in the first place. Overall, this means that getting vaccinated is the proven best way to protect people and mitigate this pandemic.

The final point here is that Fray’s idea of risk versus freedom when it comes to vaccine mandates does not track on to what most people are arguing. No one argues that the vaccine is 100% effective at preventing infection, hospitalization, and death. What people do argue is that getting vaccinated makes all these things less likely. In other words, vaccines do not completely make the world risk-free of COVID-19, but it makes it much less risky.

In fact, the analogy Fray uses about the risk of dying associated with driving to the store unwittingly supports vaccine mandates. Fray argues that there is always a risk of dying when you get into a car and drive, yet we do not ban people from driving. This is true, but irrelevant. The fact is there are numerous mandates for driving: licensing, registration, seat belt laws, speed limits, traffic laws, mandates against cell phone use, or requiring drivers be sober when behind the wheel, to name a few. All of these mandates do not make driving risk-free when it comes to death or injury, but they significantly reduce these risks and protect other drivers on the road. Fray assumed all of these laws when he got in his car that protect him and others, and understood that there is still a risk. This is exactly what supporters of vaccine mandates argue.

I think the philosophical case against vaccine mandates is quite weak. It is clearly a much greater violation of freedom to force others to remain around people who willingly do not vaccinate themselves and their family, posing a risk to our communities. And the only way shown thus far to get the pandemic under control is to do what has been done for deadly outbreaks before and continue to do for infectious diseases. That is, require others be vaccinated or begin to take measures to isolate other people to protect our communities.

Never Let A Libertarian Accuse You Of Putting A Gun To Someone’s Head

I think Libertarianism, as a political ideology, is nonsensical for many reasons. But one of the worst things libertarians do is try to morally condemn others for violating some value that they themselves need to violate just to get their own philosophy off the ground.     

For instance, Libertarians claim to oppose coercion and government interference in private businesses. So if someone were to support a social democratic reform, such as raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, libertarians will often accuse them of “putting a gun to the employer’s head” because that would require forcing the employer to pay that wage.

The problem is libertarians do not oppose coercion, violence, or government interference in private businesses. I would argue they are quite fond of those things. In fact, an ideal libertarian society would have guns pointed at your head at all times. A recent conversation I had with a libertarian can perfectly illustrate what I mean.

In a conversation about how to raise the income of the working poor, I argued one way could be strengthening collective bargaining rights or unions. The line of reasoning is simple: Given that a decrease in the share of income going to the middle-class and income inequality rising over the decades strongly correlates with the decline in union membership, and since union jobs generally pay more than non-union jobs, an implementation of policies that make it harder, or even illegal, for employers to disrupt unions would raise the wages of working people. I see this as a good thing because I think income inequality is bad and that people should have democratic rights where they work.

They obviously disagreed, but for bizarre reasons. Their first response was:

“I’m all for collective bargaining [as long as] there is no coercion involved through violence or governmental intervention.”

Now this is a strange objection. Coercion and governmental intervention already play an essential role in maintaining present day employer-employee relations. Indeed, they would play an essential role even in their ideal system. And this is true in a practical sense and in a theoretical sense. In the practical sense, at-will employment, or an agreement that allows an employer to fire someone for any reason, is enforced by employment law. It’s not backed by some God-given right of employers. The government grants the employer with that right and protects it through threat of force against workers who do not like that idea. Workers are coerced to accept this property relation.

In the theoretical sense, granting particular rights to anyone entail “restrictions on behavior” which are coercive. Christopher Schimke lays this out in his  critique of Libertarianism. Schimke refers to rights as being “correlative with duty.” In other words, if you have a right to do something, then others have a duty not interfere with you as to violate that right.

This means that in a laissez faire capitalist system where employers are granted a private property right to exclude people at-will from their property, others have a duty not to interfere with that right. If I were to walk in a place of business and sit down to simply use WiFi, the owner would have the right to violently remove me for not buying anything. In fact, I can be removed for almost any reason. This would happen even if I never initiated force against anybody. In the case of using WiFi, I would only be sitting there.

The fact is all property relations that involve owners and users require force and violence to maintain. So the question is not whether there is going to be coercion or violence applied in a employer-employee relationship. Rather, what employer-employee relationship do we desire such that we would be willing to justify the coercion necessary to maintain it. A libertarian opposing forced collective bargaining rights on an employer on the grounds that its coercive doesn’t cut it. They need to argue why at-will employment is desirable to more workplace democracy.

After delivering a simplified version of these arguments, they did not engage with them. Instead, they ignored them and went for the memorized NPC libertarian kill shot:

“The difference between my values and yours is I don’t want violence or coercion applied to anyone. Whereas you are completely willing to point a gun to the head of the people you disagree with if they don’t comply with your values.”

This would only make sense if they were opposed to violence and coercion in all instances. However, as I have shown, libertarians are fine with using force and violence to uphold an employer’s right to remove anyone for any reason from their property. They are also fine with employers having vastly more power than workers which is enforced by violence too.

So when a libertarian says a gun is pointed at the head of the boss, all they are saying is that they support the existing private property relationship. In other words, libertarians do not oppose these proposals because they involve coercion. They oppose them because it violates a system they like.

Incidentally, when libertarians defend stronger private property rights for employers instead of workers’ right to organize, they are implicitly arguing for governmental intervention themselves. As Nathan J. Robinson points out in an article in Current Affairs,

They pretend that all they want is freedom from the state’s meddling, but actually they just want the state to defend those who have property (much of which may have been accumulated illegitimately through conquest and terror, though apparently this has no effect on the legitimacy of property rights).

Libertarians could conceivably make a case for why employers having the right to run workplaces like dictatorships is better than people having democratic rights where they work. But instead, they oppose social democracy by trying to appeal to a principled opposition to coercion when they clearly don’t oppose it at all. I think this is beyond cowardly.

You should never let a libertarian get away with arguing against progressive policies by telling you that you are pointing a gun to someone’s head. Just make them defend the gun they already have pointed at yours.

How Should We Think About Inequality?

The two obvious things you can be certain of in life are death and taxes. But, if you could add one thing to that list, it should be dealing with people who downplay systemic inequality. One of those people we are going to be dealing with right now is Coleman Hughes. Hughes is a columnist for Quillette who appeared before Congress to oppose reparations for African Americans last year. 

When Hughes did this, he received expected backlash from the black community. Most notably, comedian and HBO writer, Rae Sanni called Hughes a “coon” for this. Now, denouncing him by calling him pejoratives is a tempting response. But I think there is a more effective one. Another response could be to analyze what his arguments actually are and show why they’re wrong or irrelevant. 

This might seem beneath some of us. But, resorting to just using demoralizing names can make us look quite bad to people who wish to see our conditions remain the way they are. To those people, the reason we dismiss black people with names like “coon” or “uncle tom” is because they are speaking truth we are incapable of refuting. As a result, all we can do deploy words like “racist” and “coon” as a way of covering our ears from truth we are too brainwashed to accept. 

Even if you could care less about this perception, there can be value in showing why arguments are wrong that serve your own interests. Poking holes in Hughes’ reasoning, for instance, can sharpen your own reasoning and improve your advocacy for anti-racist policies. This is what I have tried to do a few times before. And with Hughes’ specifically, we will find that it is not particularly hard to do this. 

Instead of focusing on the reparations debate which is an incredibly complex topic, I want to show that, in other contexts, Hughes’ reasoning leaves a lot to be desired in simple ways. Let’s take an extremely basic question most of us know the answer to. In a recent interview, Hughes was asked if he thinks America has a systematic racism problem. The meat of his answer boiled down to this:

“It’s morphed at this point to become this kind of lazily indicting our society without having to prove your point. Another thing I will say is that if America is systemically racist, then that racism is not very powerful because black people have still managed to make enormous progress just in the past two decades. Incarceration is nearly cut in half for black men in their 20s and below. If the prison system is designed to put black men in it and keep them there, its doing a terrible job at it in recent decades.”

His conclusion seems to be that since there has been progress for black people in many areas, therefore systemic racism is not that significant an issue. First, to demonstrate how specious this argument is, I could just show a disparity that supports my position that systemic racism is a significant issue and frame it the same way. I could say that America is designed to kill Black men faster than White men and women given that life expectancy continues to be years lower for black men. Or I could say that America is doing a great job of keeping black people from owning homes at similar rates than white people given that home ownership gaps are wider than they were in the Jim Crow Era. This would be meant to show that Hughes’ underlying reasoning is suspect as a hasty generalization. 

Now, Hughes could have a counterargument to both of those examples that supports his main point. For instance, life expectancy is lower for black men than white men, but black men still live longer than they did two decades ago. But this would only demonstrate that he didn’t understand the question. The question was whether there is a systemic racism problem in the U.S. The question was not about whether there has been an increase or decrease in certain metrics that we would constitute as progress for black people. These are two entirely separate issues. 

To see why, we can look at his incarceration example. It happens to be true that incarceration rates for black men have fallen in the past few decades. However, this is wholly irrelevant to the issue of systemic racism within incarceration rates. Incarceration rates have fallen for everyone. The issue would be if incarceration disproportionately falls on black people (which it clearly does). 

If one were serious about addressing systemic racism, then looking at these percentages should give one great concern. It might prompt you to ask the question — why are black people so overrepresented among the prison population versus their population in the country? Then, you may investigate and find many systemic reasons why this is the case from disproportionate sentencing and just  racial bias in our justice system. Then (again, if you’re serious), you would seek to eradicate those policies and biases that produce these disparities. Or, like Coleman, you can ignore it because the rates for everyone fell. But this has nothing to do with any serious analysis of systemic racism. 

When it comes to racial inequality, the relevant focus is about black people hurting significantly more than other racial groups even if there is still improvement. Moreover, the aforementioned inequality is enormous and that matters because this means there are exogenous reasons for it which need to be analyzed.  For example, it is not relevant to say that black poverty has decreased since the 60s when black poverty is still vastly higher than white poverty. It is not enough to say that the median income for black families has risen among the family income distribution scale in the last few decades. The important part is that rising income inequality means that these gains in income represents a smaller percentage of the national mean then that same percentile did a few decades ago. This has incidentally led to an increase in the income gap between black and white families. To turn a blind eye to this exposes an inability, conscious or not, to effectively tackle this topic.   

I do suspect Coleman is unable to do this and is rather confused about the topic of racism. And I find it fascinating that someone who lacks a basic understanding of race relations can assert themselves as a pundit and receive a mainstream platform. I do think, albeit cynically, that this is due to a hunger that reactionaries have to cling to a black person that can echo their beliefs about racism. To them, racism is not something that should be addressed but instead hand-waved away. And reactionaries who believe this tend to have power and reach. Consider the way Hughes talks about the election of Barack Obama and the way black people felt about it in an argument against reparations. 

“If you had asked any Black person before Obama was elected: Will there be a black president in your lifetime? Most people said no. Why did they say no? Because America was too racist we weren’t ready for it yet. We got a two-term black president named Barack Hussein Obama who had a black wife, black kids etc. In retrospect, we don’t even view it as important anymore. Indeed, if you suggest Obama was a watershed moment in American history in terms of getting past racism nationally, you get something close to an eye roll from the left at this point. 

So something that seemed important before you got it, gets redefined — the goal post gets shifted after you get it. And I think the same thing would happen if all black people got a check with reparations in the memo line” 

I legitimately had trouble trying to understand the point he was trying to make here. So, there were black people who thought that America was too racist to ever elect a black president. Then, a black president was elected and black people roll their eyes at the idea that his presidency symbolized a moment that points toward a post-racial society. I have yet to see what the problem is with this position. Where is the contradiction? These views make total sense to me. 

If I were to lend some charitability to Coleman, he might be trying to argue that many black people felt a black president would be an important, even monumental, step to solving America’s race problem. Then, after Obama left office, black people no longer saw the election of a black president as a monumental step. In fact, black people may have seen the reverse — that systemic racial inequality is rampant and worsening. 

I see nothing wrong with this view either for a few reasons. One, its entirely valid that black people could have been wrong about the impact Barack Obama would have on the continued existence of racism and changed their minds. I understand Coleman may concede this since he was using this example with Obama to draw a comparison with how black people would feel about reparations after we receive them, meaning we would find ourselves mistaken to have advocated for reparations. 

However, that would bring me to my second point which is that even if we overestimate the influence of something, that doesn’t, in and of itself, mean it shouldn’t be done. Almost any policy or milestone will fail to solve systemic inequality by itself. But failing to solve is a different claim than failing to help, which would most certainly be the case. You can believe that Barack Obama served some utility as symbolic representation for black people and discover that so much more needs to be done by way of uprooting institutional practices. Likewise, you can also believe reparations, as a direct cash payment, would most certainly help the social reality of black Americans by way of paying a debt that is owed while addressing the ways we need to progress further systemically. 

My last point is that Barack Obama, in many ways, highlighted racism in a America. It should be no great controversy to point out that the first black president, and his family, received a slew of racist attacks from many people, to include the current president. These attacks demonstrated the vitriol we are so familiar with and to see them directed at a black person who holds the highest office in the land only solidified our belief that racism is alive and well. Not to mention that Obama did little to address, or even speak about, racial inequality in any substantial way. 

A child holding a racist sign directed at Obama — plausibly a racist adult walking around today… 

Coleman Hughes is someone who does not seem to be interested in closing racial gaps or tackling inequality in general. He simply makes bad arguments that do not follow to support the idea that racism does not exist on a large scale. Even in instances where Hughes will admit there is a considerable gap between black people and white people, he will attempt to chalk it up to “black culture.” But what I hope to have shown is that these arguments tend to be weak and do not stand. So, instead of calling people out of their names to dismiss them (and they should be dismissed!!), we should just simply dismiss them after we effortlessly crush their conclusions.

If Coleman Hughes is supposed to be the representative that critiques anti-racist thought, then anti-racist activists remain substantially unchallenged. 

 

Angela Davis Taught Me What Freedom Means

Fearless, Passionate, revolutionary activism makes Angela Davis a particularly inspiring figure in my life

For many people, there are people they have met or discovered who have made a significant impact on them. They might have been one of your college professors, a family member, or even a famous person. Angela Davis has been that person for me. In short, Angela has been particularly influential in the way I view the world in my coming of age. About 5 years ago is when I first encountered Angela Davis from the documentary The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 and was just captivated by her story. She was a fearless revolutionary despite harsh repression from the State. Given the continued attempts to erase her activism, I think it is important to always uplift her work.

Born in 1944, Angela grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, which was often called Bombingham, due to many African-American homes getting bombed by the Klu Klux Klan. In fact, Angela was close to some of the young black girls who were killed in the Birmingham church bombings of 1963. Needless to say, Davis was introduced to the brutal reality of white supremacy early on. Davis went on to become an educator and devoted her life to activism. She was associated with the Black Panthers and apart of the Che-Lumumba Club, which was an all-black sect of the Communist Party.

When she was hired a teaching position at UCLA, her affiliation with Communism caused a rift with the administrators who ended up firing her for it. When she fought the decision in court and got her job back, she ended up leaving after her contract was up in 1970. Perhaps the most egregious attempts to repress Angela by the State was the accusation that connected her to a murder case. George Jackson, who was accused of killing a prison guard, attempted to escape custody during his trial in 1970. Several people in the courtroom that day were killed and Angela was charged with murder. The supposed evidence was that the gun used was registered to her and that she had a romantic relationship with Jackson. She was arrested and spent 18 months in jail before she was acquitted in 1972. The famous picture when Angela walks in the courtroom that day, representing herself, with her Afro and fist raised always inspires me.

On top of her passionate activism on the ground, what permeates me the most is Angela’s writing. In her work, there are lessons I’ve learned that I use everyday when I think about how to change the way the world is. Specifically when it comes to freedom fighting and gaining liberation. This is not an exhaustive list, but here are 3 lessons that I have taken from Angela’s work that have changed the way I see the world.

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You have to consider dismantling repressive institutions, not just point out the injustices within that institution.

One of Angela’s quotes I always live by is that to be a “radical simply means grasping things at the root.” In other words, pointing out that something may be unjust or unfair is one thing, but its another thing to want to understand how that unfair thing became that way in the first place. It’s also another thing to boldly seek out alternative practices to the unfair one. Nothing embodies this more than her book Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003). In the introduction, Angela argues that the modern-day prison is something that people “take for granted.” People see prisons as a natural fact of life and while it may be in many ways evil — it is a necessary evil. Angela argues that prison is something that is “present in our lives and, at the same time, it is absent from our lives.” In other words, people see a necessity of prison but do not want to confront the inhumanity that happens inside of them.

This is what Angela and other prison abolitionists are concerned with. The concern is about whether prisons should even exist. The conversation surrounding prisons is often relegated to “reforms.” For instance, we can talk about scaling back private prisons or eliminating cash bail. But if someone talks about abolishing prison itself, then what follows tends to be incomprehensible to the other person. The interesting part about that is the “construction boom of prisons” took place recently and the justifications for it were unfounded. For example, many thought that more prisons were needed because of crime but official crime rates were already falling. And as Angela notes, “mass imprisonment…devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.” Given that mass imprisonment does not seem to correlate with crime nor does it effectively rehabilitate people, one might question the efficacy of prison itself.

This means asking “radical” questions — What should be the response to crime? What utility does retribution even provide for society? If we really want to prioritize rehabilitation for those who commit crime, what would that look like? These questions seek to get to the “root” of the institution itself and figuring out if it is even desirable. This is something I apply to anything now. For instance, instead of talking just about affordable healthcare, I wonder why healthcare is a service where money is involved at all. Or when we talk about the injustice of at-will employment, I want to talk about the injustice of having an employment hierarchy that has the power to do that in the first place.

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The importance of intersectional analyses.

Furthermore, a serious analysis of the modern day prison demonstrates perfectly why any involvement in a freedom struggle must be intersectional. This means that in order to effectively eliminate any system that produces injustice, every aspect of that system has to be addressed. In the case of prisons, it is not simply a case of abuse and mistreatment by a retributive punishment system. It is also a manifestation of every oppressive system in society. Racism, gender oppression, and capitalist exploitation all pervade the prison system in pretty obvious ways. It would be a mistake to advocate the abolition of prisons while failing to link them to these social and economic phenomena.

Indeed, prisons could easily be argued as being racist institutions. From a legacy of the end of slavery which then racialized criminality through the “Black Codes” in the south. Black Codes were laws instituted to target newly freed African slaves and put them back in bondage under conditions worse than slavery. And recent history shows instances of racial profiling, disproportionate representation of black people in prison and on death row, and “vast numbers of people of Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage [who] were arrested and detained by the police agency known as Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) after September 11th.”

Angela also makes the important connections between the penitentiary and Capitalism. There are many people, corporations, who stand to make great profit from the prison system. Given that capitalists are constantly trying to find pools of cheap labor, when communities are devastated by outsourcing, for instance, not only are some people in this community more susceptible to become prisoners but other corporations can profit from this prison labor. For instance, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) “is paid per prisoner” so the profit-motive here means that there is a demand for more prisoners and longer prison time. While private prisons are relatively new, the economic incentivization of prison labor is not (see: Convict Leasing).

If we want to talk seriously about prison abolition, we cannot ignore the systems, such as capitalism and racism, that uphold prison. And hence, their abolition too. Failing to use an intersectional approach can lead some down strange paths. Angela notes a “feminist” author who responded to the repressive conditions that men faced by arguing that women prisoners should be treated “equally.” Apparently, equality would be making prison equally inhumane for men and women. Instead intersectional forms of feminism would see the lack of humane treatment for men and women prisoners as a signal that prison itself should be abolished.

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We must actively resist those who attempt to draw false equivalencies between people doing the oppressing and people who resist that oppression

On my first deployment back in 2017, I vividly remember this lunch break with all my co-workers. One conversation was about the backlash a military member was getting from a few neighbors for flying a confederate flag outside his house on base yet was permitted to keep it up. I remember pointing out how peculiar it was that flying that flag was allowed but if you were to fly, say, a black panther flag that would be unauthorized. One of my co-workers rationalized this by asking, “but weren’t the black panthers a hate group!?” I calmly responded with, “No. They were an organization of self-defense against a racist government.” My co-worker then doubled down on his original question with, “but weren’t they a terrorist group like the KKK!??”

Now, I could have chalked this up to his sheer ignorance. But I saw that there was something more fundamental going on. Namely, there is a tendency to draw a false equivalence between those who want to exclude and oppress others and those who react to those oppressive people. I remember saying to him something like, “No. Those two are not equivalent. The KKK sought to exterminate and exclude groups of people they thought were inferior. The Black Panthers stood up in self-defense against a racist State, including the KKK, who were trying to exterminate them. You see the difference?”

To put these two groups on the same level, for whatever reason, is infuriating. If someone is seeking to violently shot-put you out of existence, defending yourself against that is not wrong. And it damn sure doesn’t make you two akin to each other. This truly baffles me. What gave me the confidence to feel outraged when this happens was an interview Angela did when she was detained in a courthouse outside of San Francisco. The interviewer asked Angela if she supported violence as a means to achieve her revolutionary goals.

Angela rightly points out that revolution is not about violence and that should not be the focal point of discussion. Rather, the discussion should be about the goals a revolutionary is striving for. However, if you are subjected to an oppressively violent system, then violent resistance should not only be expected, but is probably justified. Everything that prompts me to engage in revolution is a direct violent threat towards me and others. So to then pose a question of concern about an instance where I might engage in violence should be unconscionable. What’s more, I apply this to conflicts around the world, from workers’ struggles with capitalists to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories. Angela’s forceful reaction to this always inspires me.

To call Angela Davis a national treasure would be an understatement. While there are a few others who I can say influences me a great deal, Angela Davis is always at the forefront of my consciousness. Angela has the consistency and principled nature that freedom fighting requires. She also has an unmatched ambition when imagining a better world for all. Another quote of Angela’s I always live by is: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” If change doesn’t even seem like it is on the horizon, we still advocate. We still organize. And Angela Davis always deserves the utmost for inspiring people like me to keep going.

We Just Have To Organize

The importance of building mass movements…

The fascinating thing about Bernie Sanders’ campaign is how little it has to do with him. The slogan “Not Me. Us” is not an empty series of words with no substance. It is a testament to an undeniable mass movement that Bernie speaks to. One thing that Bernie has successfully accomplished is bringing class-consciousness and language which empowers working-class organization to a national platform. Think back to 2016– when Sanders ran and lost to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primary election. Bernie boldly proposed a single-payer health-care system, affectionately called “Medicare-For-All.” At the time, he was criticized by Clinton who said single-payer “would never, ever come to pass.” Vox’s Ezra Klein called Sanders proposal in 2016 “vague and unrealistic.” 

Fast-forward to 2020, and Sanders is now the most trusted candidate on healthcare and virtually every democratic candidate has attempted to propose one version or another of “Medicare-For-All.” Of course none of these plans actually mirrored Bernie’s single-payer proposal but postured as such by attempting to mirror the language.  Pete Buttigieg’s plan was just a version of a public option but included “Medicare For All” in the title, Kamala Harris published an article in 2019 called “My Plan for Medicare For All,” and the democratic primary debates centered around how to get universal healthcare instead of just affordable healthcare. The candidates were all forced to defend their opposition to Bernie’s plan. 

This shift comes as a product of grassroots organizing. Bernie might have sounded like a “broken record” when calling healthcare a human right, but he was galvanizing ordinary people to imagine what is possible. There was a demand to envision a better world. As a result, these ideas are household discussions and are forcing establishment representatives to pay attention to working-class interests which have been ignored for so long. The essential part here is that this movement achieved mainstream appeal without any concessions to powerful special interests.

The reason its important to build a mass working-class movement is quite simple: if you want to create a better world for working people, there is literally no other option. Power will concede nothing without demand. So talking about policy within the prism of a political system that does not have the will of the people in mind will only lead to concessions to existing power structures. The only way is to look beyond the establishment. Bernie Sanders embodied this approach in a 2016 interview with Chris Matthews. Matthews challenged Bernie on his ability to present his ambitious policies to Senate Majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who would most certainly oppose them. Bernie responded, 

You know what I say? I say, ‘Hey Mitch.’ Look out that window. There are a million young people out there who don’t want to be in debt for half their life for the crime of going to college. If you want to antagonize those million people and lose your job, Mitch…. If you don’t want to lose your job you better start listening to what we have to say. That’s the point. That’s how change takes place. 

The interesting thing about this is a basic interpretation of American history would reveal that Bernie is clearly correct. Take any landmark legislation that has transformed the nature of the United States and you will find an organized coalition that would not rest until those in power conceded demands. From the Civil Right’s Movement to the Gay Right’s Movement, any step toward human liberation has never been voluntarily passed by elected officials. Rather, these important moments were fought for tirelessly on behalf of millions of organized people. 

So passing Medicare For All, for instance, shouldn’t merely be a conversation about how we need a majority Democratic Senate, or how we convince Mitch McConnell to accept it. We need to talk about how we schedule a million person march on Capitol Hill. We need to talk about how many of us are needed when we raid the Senate office buildings (unarmed of course) every other week. We do not stop until they put Medicare For All on the table and pass it. What makes Bernie’s campaign unprecedented is he represents the same interests and would have the bully pulpit of the Presidency. For example, Sanders has said he will not just be commander-in-chief, but also, the organizer-in-chief who will rally the constituents of Politicians who are failing to represent them. This is a quality no other candidate has (or any president has had for that matter) yet is exactly what is needed right now for any significant change. 

Organizing is important because it seems to be the only way that people can achieve a true liberatory politics that transcends the tendency for competing interests. In other words, if there is a mass movement with a goal of obtaining justice for all, then all the ways injustice manifests itself will be equally pertinent to all. Cooperation Jackson, for instance, is a collective of working class organizers building a network of worker cooperatives, worker-owned, and democratically self-managed enterprises in Jackson, Mississippi. If you look at the welcome page on their website, it is filled with events, announcements, community meeting ads addressing economic, racial, environmental justice, and solidarity with working-class people around the world. This is organizing.

The ultimate goal of organizing is to unite working-class people all over the world to finally rid systems of gross domination. Building movements can start small, such as repeating slogans like “we are the 99%” with underlying messages about economic inequality. We can also awaken class consciousness in people in casual conversation. We can even elect an organizer-in-chief. But the point is in order to build a world that we all would love to live in, we just have to organize. 

 

 

 

What Are Social Facts?

In Emile Durkheim’s classical reading, “The Rules of Sociological Method,” sociology is framed as a science involving human occurrence which deserves its own investigation that is distinct from natural sciences such as biology.

This is because there are phenomena that exist in society that are only understood as something that manifest outside of any individual consciousness. As a result, this leads to individual thoughts and actions that can be separated from any individual circumstance.

This reaffirms the “puzzle of the social order” which tells us that while institutions that make up this order require individuals to participate in the roles for its function, these institutions simultaneously have functions external to any one person.

Moreover, this tells us that society is the product of roles, beliefs, and customs that are passed down generationally and that we are coerced to conform to. Incidentally, one of the interesting points of Durkheim’s account of society is the aspect of coercion. According to Durkheim “not only are these types of behavior and thinking external to the individual, but they are endued with a compelling and coercive power by virtue of which, whether he wishes it or not, they impose themselves upon him.”

In other words, these behaviors are force upon you regardless if you are act in accordance with them out your own free will. Additionally, the coercive powers imposed upon you to conform comes in many forms. For instance, they can come in the extreme form of a threat of force from the state through laws, from parents and schooling from birth, or just from collective backlash from society.

Finally, this coercion is usually made apparent when one attempts to resist norms.Another interesting point Durkheim lays out is the relationship between generality and collectivity about social phenomenon. Durkheim responds to an objection that a phenomenon can only be collective if it is a trend that generally exists in at least most people in society.

He responds that if the trend is general, it is because it is collective, or imposed upon them. Durkheim says, “it is in each part because it is in the whole, but far from being in the whole because it is in the parts.” For instance, in the United States, monogamous relationships are a social norm. It is illegal to marry more than one person and monogamy is taught as something to respect from the earliest days of education.

To Durkheim, the generality of monogamous relationships in the United States would be the result of generations of collective pressure than that of a general preference for monogamy. This could also be evidenced by the commonality of polygamous relationships in West Africa.

In my own experience living in society, I can relate to these points when I participate in resistance of social facts. The coercion usually comes in the form of backlash from people who oppose any challenge to existing norms. For example, the children’s television series “Arthur” featured an episode where Arthur’s teacher was revealed as gay at his wedding.

The show received backlash from the Secretary of Education and from viewers and, as a result, the episode was removed. One internet viewer accused the network of brainwashing children and referred to the existence of a “Gay Mafia.”

Attempting to reason that Arthur’s teacher’s same-sex marriage is legally sanctioned by the United States government and that there is nothing inherently sexual in the depiction of a same-sex couple in the same way that there is not in the depiction of a heterosexual couple does not work.

This backlash is an example of a penalty for failure to conform to a collective custom that exists outside of my consciousness. Previously, my perspective on resisting social facts was that it was the product of free thought. In other words, if I challenge a cultural norm, this means I exist separate from social facts and can therefore think clearly for myself.

Durkheim, however, convincingly argues that even if one is given complete freedom of thought to challenge norms, this “can only be the personal expression of a desideratum and not a fact which can be established in contradiction to the other facts.”

This means that resistance to social facts are derived from the social facts themselves, not from something internal to one’s own mind. Sociology, as a distinct science, should be understood as examining general trends in society that appear regardless of “individual manifestations”.

6 suppressed events in Black history I should have learned about

In a system dependent on control of the mind, miseducation becomes one of its greatest tools

Today, Americans will commemorate one of the most unusual Federal holidays, Columbus day. Many people and municipalities, however, have rejected Christopher Columbus as someone to honor and have instead changed the title to “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” to recognize the native inhabitants and victims of White Supremacy’s early actions. While there has been a positive shift in consciousness, a mere rejection is only part of an awakening. More specifically, to understand why people like Columbus are celebrated as heroes can also help understand why your own history is censored. History is often used as a foundation for self-worth, tradition, and for lessons learned. Therefore, the suppression or revision of certain historical events in direct conflict with the group in power should be expected. I argue these omissions in history are tools of miseducation and is up to us to constantly search for truth. Additionally, we should not rely on American institutions to suddenly “wake-up” and teach real history we can use. These public/private institutions were designed to fail us. Moreover, I would argue that the sheer knowledge of our own history can provide us with the foundation mentioned above (self-worth, tradition, and lessons learned) that can drastically alter the way we currently see ourselves in the world.

This is a list of 6 events or people that are either suppressed, rewritten, or completely left out of American institutions. This list is by no means exhaustive, as there are countless events we can learn from (Tuskegee experiment, Ida B Wells, Socialist history, Minstrel Shows etc). But these were the moments I felt we could best use as foundations. The description of these events will be brief, as the intention is to provide a basis for further research. These events and/or men and women I choose to honor instead of the Eurocentric narrative of world history force-fed to everyone, regardless of whether you are of visible European descent, or if you are the visible descendant of the Indigenous/African victims of this conquest. Even the federal holiday in commemoration of one of our great Black leaders, Dr. Martin Luther King, is done so through this Eurocentric lens. Martin Luther King Day is bombarded with the famous “I Have A Dream” speech, but Dr. King’s noble condemnation of the Vietnam war and American imperialism, or the organization of the Poor peoples’ march in Washington D.C. are systematically censored. In sum, Martin Luther King was great for northern whites as long as he faced racist southerns in Alabama. But when Dr. King started to raise issues of class, namely wealth inequality, and critiques of American foreign policy, he was too threatening. Cases like this are universal. But imagine the value of our history that is completely omitted.

History of The Electoral College/Three-fifths Compromise

We all might be familiar with the argument that people of color should vote because our parents and grandparents died for this right. What is slightly ironic about this argument is that the way the U.S. president is selected, the electoral college, is one of the longest lasting legacies of slavery and should have been abolished. In fact, during the Constitutional Convention, James Madison said the people at large were “the fittest” to choose the president, meaning a popular vote.

Madison went on to address the problem with a popular vote recognizing the south would have no influence in the election “on the score of the Negroes.” To be specific, Madison was talking about slaves who could not vote. Now, the response to this was the electoral college, a winner-take-all system based on representation of the state apportioned by population of that same state. The convention already agreed at this point to the “three-fifths clause,” which meant that slaves who could not vote would count as three-fifths of a free person when determining the state’s voting population. This would lead to southern states with large representation in the House and among the electors, due to slaves making up to 40 percent of the state population in southern states like Virginia, that would have otherwise been much smaller.

As a result, southern slave holders benefited from owning slaves as four of the first five presidents were slave holders from Virginia and their interests in expanding slavery were served. For example, the election of 1800 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would have turned out quite differently if only the popular vote counted. Adams owned no slaves and Jefferson owned about 200 at the time and only won by eight electoral votes. The fact that that there is technical universal voting among Americans today should mean there is no need for an electoral college with these captured “red and blue states,” which reinforces the idea that our vote simply does not matter in terms of the president.

Source: Finkelman, Paul. The Pro Slavery Origins of The Electoral College. Cordozo Law Review, 2002

Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)

Haiti’s independence is just one of those great moments in history that is almost abominable to leave out of textbooks. Beginning in 1791, enslaved Africans on the French colony of Saint Domingue erupted into revolt unprecedented in human history. The island Saint Domingue was France’s premier colony as Saint Domingue was the chief producer of sugar, the most profitable commodity at the time. However, one August night in 1791, Africans brought all that to a halt. They ran through the mansions, slaughtered enslavers, set torches to cane fields, and marched on to Cap-Francais, the seat of colonial rule. An ex-slave, Toussaint Louverture, guided the rampaging rebels into an army that would not only defeat France, but annihilate anti-revolutionary British redcoats between 1794-1799. By 1800, Saint Domingue was an independent country.

The revolution shocked Europeans. The ones who adored the French Revolution were anxious thinking about Saint Domingue. The “First of Blacks,” Toussaint Louverture styled himself. Napoleon Bonaparte was rated the First of France after rising to power, and set his sights on recapturing the lost colony of Saint Domingue. In 1801, Napoleon sent the largest invasion fleet ever across the Atlantic to the island, while sending another army to Louisiana to plant the French flag. In Saint Domingue during this invasion, the French army captured Toussaint Louverture and was shipped off to France where he was jailed. By 1802, the army Louverture left behind and built was so fierce that they overthrew the French again. After this defeat, Napoleon reluctantly move the troops in Louisiana to Saint Domingue. These French troops were also destroyed. This stunning defeat ultimately deterred Napoleon from any further conquests. On April 7, 1803, The “First of Blacks,” the great Toussaint Louverture’s jailer found him sitting upright, dead in his chair.

On January 1, 1804, Saint Domingue claimed independence of the new country. They called this country Haiti (a name they believed the aboriginal Taino peoples used before Spaniards killed them all). Haiti’s new constitution was an new ingenious, radical conception of citizenship. The people of Haiti restricted citizenship to blacks. To be clear, this did not mean that only black people could live there. You could indeed be a white person and be a citizen of Haiti. But a white person knew they had to denounce white supremacy, reject France and slavery, and accept that Blacks ruled Haiti. In Edward Baptist’s, “The Half Has Never Been Told,” he points out the clear irony in Haiti’s independence. Slaves who revolted in Saint Domingue forced Napoleon’s withdraw from the Western Hemisphere, which led to the U.S finally able to purchase all of French Louisiana. The Louisiana Purchase mainly served to expand slavery more than ever after 1803. Finally, we can see the way history is distorted or completely left out as you will learn about the Louisiana Purchase in most history textbooks, but never mention how the greatest slave revolt in history made it possible.

Baptist, Edward. The Half Has Never Been Told. 2014

Booker T. Washington Vs. W.E.B. DuBois

The post-civil war years were a pivotal time in the emergence of black leadership. The Reconstruction era essentially pushed black people in the south back in the same, if not worse, conditions than before. The federal government turn their back on the newly freed blacks and ex-slaveholders’ white supremacist control was restored, which included the “Black Codes,” a set of laws which reduced black people in all areas of life to a subhuman, inferior second-class role. By 1895, the problem of how to obtain first-class citizenship was clear. The majority of blacks agreed that the most realistic way was peaceful, democratic means.

Booker T. Washington emerged during this time of worsening conditions, and developed a philosophy of “accommodation” to white oppression while “earning” first-class citizenship by becoming economically independent. Born a slave in Virginia in 1856, Washington was the founder and principle of Tuskegee Institute, an industrial school in Alabama. Washington is remembered famously for his “Atlanta Compromise” address in 1895 before an integrated audience at the opening of the Cotton States and International Exposition. In this speech, Washington called on white american to provide jobs and industrial training for Negroes. Then, blacks would give up demands for social equality by working their way up through industrial education and becoming economically useful to whites. Booker T. Washington’s philosophy was still aimed at eventual first-class citizenship, but many blacks began to oppose Washington’s methods.

The most prominent black leader in opposition was W.E.B. DuBois. DuBois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868. After Washington’s Atlanta address, DuBois actually agreed as there were many areas where their philosophies crossed. They both tended to blame blacks for their situation and placed emphasis on self-help instead of rights. However, by 1901, DuBois transitioned to stern opposition against Washington’s policy of accommodation by turning to a focus on political activism. DuBois felt that Washington’s policies asked blacks to give up their political power and created a feeling of acceptance of inferiority, and that blacks should not have to wait for their constitutional rights. DuBois went on to become a founding member of the NAACP and the founding editor of the association’s official publication, The Crisis. From 1910 to 1915, DuBois laid out his racial and political policies in The Crisis, which threatened Booker T. Washington. The ideological battle between them continued until Washington’s death in 1915.

It is quite easy to read the philosophies of Booker T. Washington and find them intolerable. After publication of Up From Slavery, Washington’s famous autobiography, the boost in his career came largely from the fact he was saying what white people wanted to hear. Whites did not catch on that Washington eventually wanted full citizenship whites equal to them. On the other hand, DuBois philosophy of the “talented tenth,” the idea that urban scholars and PhD s should ultimately lead blacks to first-class citizenship and economic independence could be challenged. The point is that they were both right in terms of the ends, but the means differed. This disunity was part of the problem as there did not have to be a sole black leader, but rather an organization that included even opposing views that could unify against a common enemy.

Source: http://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/1978/2/78.02.02.x.html

Black Wall Street (1921)

We can draw good lessons from one of the most economically prosperous, organized, black districts in U.S history. Greenwood Avenue, or “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma was home to a black population of 11,000 in 1921 when the district was essentially burned down, looted and destroyed by white mobs in one of the bloodiest acts of domestic terrorism in this country’s history. Black wall street flourished beginning in 1905 when blacks began to buy land in Greenwood avenue. By 1907, Oklahoma became a U.S state and the white power structure immediately moved to turn Oklahoma into a white-dominated state and undermine any Black or Native American ownership. More specifically, Oklahoma was the leading producer of oil in the United States in 1907, producing 300,000 barrels a day which whites obviously wanted to control. By this time, however, prosperity was already underway in Black wall street, with a black newspaper, the Tulsa Guide, two doctors, a barbershop, and three grocers.

Segregation was more complete in Tulsa, OK which led to an actual benefit to black people who resided there. They were forced out of necessity to create their own institutions. What followed was an example of great organization among blacks, with 2 newspaper with editors that constantly called to prevent lynching, called for equal funding in schools, and equal treatment in the workplace even if segregated. Black Wall Street at it’s height, had two successful public schools which had the lowest illiteracy rate of every county in Oklahoma. Black Tulsa had 15 physicians/dentists/surgeons, 6 estate agents/loan companies/insurance companies, 5 builders/contractors, and many tradesmen. At least three blacks had a fortune of $1 million each, some with a private plane. In total, Black Tulsa was home to 600 (legal and illegal) flourishing businesses that was about to be burned to the ground.

That day came Tuesday 31 May 1921, when a group of two thousands whites gathered around the courthouse on Black Wall Street in response to Dick Rowling’s alleged attack on a white woman in an elevator. The police and courts found the accusation completely false and I suspect this was just a pretense for invasion. As the crowd grew, 75 armed black men returned and shots began to ring out. Whites then organized and stormed the black business looting black hardware shops and seized $43,000 worth of ammunition. Then, surrounded the black district with 60-80 cars with rifles, machine guns, pistols, and petrol bombs in them. The white mobs proceeded to burn 40 square blocks of 1,265 homes, hospitals, churches, and schools to the ground, leaving 300 blacks dead and 9,000 homeless. The Governor of Oklahoma declared Martial law and the National Guard threw remaining blacks who were left fighting into detention camps. Black Wall Street was even bombed from the sky by white State and National law enforcement. The lesson should be when we decide to rise up and prosper with success that equals, and in some cases, surpasses, whites on our own, we should remember what happened to Black Wall Street: The result of white envy and use of political power.

Source: Walker, Robin. The Rise and Fall of Black Wall Street. Reklaw Education, 2010

Dorothy Counts & Brown Vs. Board of Education (1954- 1957)

This landmark Supreme court case is one that I would argue is more generally known than the other events I have chosen. But again, through this Eurocentric lens, the case is presented as a great triumph and milestone for racial progress. As a result, people of color have not been able to truly analyze this case within the larger context of our place in this society. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision prohibited southern states from segregating schools by race, striking down the “separate but equal” rule from Plessy vs. Ferguson. (To be accurate, this really meant separate and unequal). This led to so-called “integration,” an idea that deserves scrutiny. Chancellor Williams describes integration as a “scatter-site” of blacks among separatist whites who have never wanted to coexist, let alone see an equal distribution of resources. Whites fled en masse from integrated schools and neighborhoods to avoid this scatter site. Since Federal agencies already sanctioned segregated neighborhoods through unscrupulous lenders and programs that kept blacks in substandard neighborhoods, the disappointing results of the landmark decision should not be surprising. Education policy is housing policy.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, the initial improvements in education ultimately stalled, and black children are more racially and socioeconomically isolated today than at any time since data have been available (1970). While academic achievements for people of color has greatly increased throughout the decades, whites’ has as well, perpetuating the racial achievement gaps. Disparities in education are problems that have to be grasped at the root in order to even come close to solving. Housing, wealth distribution, and economic opportunity have to be addressed as well.

Dorothy counts deserves to be honored for the bravery in facing mobs in 1957 as the black woman who desegregated Harry Harding High School, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Unlike Ruby Bridges and the Little Rock Nine, Dorothy received no federal protection when entering the school and was surrounded by white mobs. The wife of John Z. Warlick, who was the leader of the White Citizens Council, told boys to block Dorothy from entering the school. The girls spat on Dorothy’s dress that her Grandmother made for her. The girls hissed, threw trash and rocks at her feet. Dorothy kept her head held high as she walked through the crowd. In fact, the harassment was so bad that Dorothy’s parents withdrew her from the school after just four days. Dorothy moved to Pennsylvania and attended an integrated school there in Philadelphia. She eventually returned to Charlotte and earned her degree from Johnson C. Smith University in 1965. Thereafter in 2008, Dorothy was awarded an honorary diploma from Harding High School. The library at Harding High School was renamed in her honor, Counts-Scoggins.

Source: http://www.epi.org/publication/brown-at-60-why-have-we-been-so-disappointed-what-have-we-learned/

Cointelpro & The Assassination of Fred Hampton (1956-1971)

The fact that we learn about the Watergate scandal and almost nothing of Cointelpro, as they were uncovered around the same time, reinforces my thesis. Launched in 1956 in response to anticommunist hysteria, FBI’s COINTELPRO or Counterintelligence program was designed to disrupt, destroy, and neutralize any movement, usually on the left, the FBI felt threatened the status quo. By the 1960s and 1970s, the war on dissidence only intensified with opposition to the Vietnam War, and Black folks’ denial of basic rights. Ran by J. Edgar Hoover, FBI attacked the Communist party USA first, along with the Socialist Workers’ Party. Moreover, they targeted The Puerto Rican independence movement, the American Indian Movement, and what the FBI called “militant black nationalist groups.” These groups included the Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and even Martin Luther King, who the FBI called a “dangerous radical” who needed to be “taken out.” One of the most egregious ways the FBI would achieve this neutralization was through anonymous letters to these different groups. The letters were meant to appear as though they were from allied groups, and with misleading information, were designed to create conflict between them. They even used these letters to incite murder.

The most instructive case was Chicago’s twenty-one year old Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. In 1969, the Bureau sent an anonymous letter to the leader of the Blackstone Rangers, a Chicago gang allied with the Panthers. The letter tried to convince the leader that Fred Hampton had taken a hit out on him, with hopes the Gang would assassinate Hampton for them. When this didn’t work the FBI took over the operation directly. On December 4th, 1969, the Chicago police raided Hampton’s apartment and murdered him at four in the morning, firing ninety bullets mostly at Hampton’s bed. The police claimed that the Panthers fired first, but that proved to be false. Now, Fred Hampton was not a criminal. He was just an effective organizer who deserves to be honored which is why the FBI targeted him. Actually, the FBI’s most atrocious actions were against law-abiding citizens, namely the Black Panthers.

COINTELPRO’s Racial Intelligence Program harshly targeted the Black Panthers. 233 operations out of the 295 total Cointelpro operations against Black Nationalist groups were directed at the Panthers. One of the most disgraceful examples is the FBI’s destruction of the Black Panther’s Free Breakfast program, which provided free breakfast for school children. The FBI created vile racist coloring books for children and claimed they were made by the Black Panthers and sent them to businesses donating food, to influence termination of support. Thereafter, by the early 1970s, the Black Panther Party was pretty much destroyed. While COINTELPRO was successful in these ways, we can use this history as lessons learned. More specifically, the most barbaric political power of this country was always used against Black liberation and in defense of the status quo.

Source: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/fbi-cointelpro-new-left-panthers-muslim-surveillance