Ep 381 WCF Win Intercommunalism, Scams, Sad Chris Hedges Plus Ridiculous Sixties Story

Episode 381 of RevolutionZ starts with my email inbox. “Oprah wants your book, No Bosses.” It sounds like a dumb joke until you realize how convincing modern AI scams have become. A flood of smart, personalized emails targets authors with flattering outreach, credible details pulled from your work and your life, plus plausible offers of aid. Then comes relentless follow-up, and only later, once snared--I wasn't, but almost--the ask for money. The point of recounting this isn’t just to urge avoiding  author marketing scams. It’s to see what these tricks reveal about a rapidly growing misinformation ecosystem of clickbait, deepfakes, fabricated videos, and synthetic “proofs” that can make truth feel unreachable and even irrelevant.

From there, this episode continues presenting The Wind Cries Freedom oral history with a chapter that describes Revolutionary Participatory Society organizing around race after Black Lives Matter and beyond. This time the interviewees dig into successes and failures of anti racist organizing, describing what it takes to win rather than just be right: speaking clearly, building majorities, reducing needless antagonisms, and holding a vision where community differences remain real but racial hierarchy disappears. The conversation also addresses issues of movement leadership, the hard “who organizes whom” question, and how some “privilege” framing can undermine solidarity even when it starts from a real injustice.

The episode then turns to policing, fear, incarceration, and the conditions that make violence feel inevitable, It reports a striking tactic: athletes using labor power to force all-day police-community safety negotiations city by city. There is more, and then the episode closes with some direct pushback on doomerist defeatism by way of addressing a recent Chris Hedges essay including a reminder that we can’t know outcomes for sure in advance, but we can and must choose how we fight. Finally, and not unrelated, we close with an odd humorous but also quite disturbing Sixties story that highlights one kind of nonsense that too often invades left practice.

Transcript

elcome And Book Excerpt Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I'm the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This episode continues our presentation of chapters from the forthcoming book The Wind Cries Freedom, an oral history of the next American Revolution. It's titled verbosely Scams on Me WCF Win Intercommunalism and Sad Chris Hedges plus a ridiculous sixty story. The excerpt that I relay in this episode is chapter twenty five out of thirty in total. So it looks like I will finish orally conveying the contents of the oral history to the Revolution Z audience right about the time that the book itself becomes available to read. This episode also continues our pattern of adding to the book excerpts a commentary on events in our time in our world. But this time, the events from our time that I first comment on are entirely anecdotal and all about scams on me, and what I think is a larger, very disturbing lesson that they embody, plus the ills of Dumerism at the end of the episode. So first comes first. Starting not too long ago, I began receiving emails offering to increase the audience for books I had earlier published, indeed years ago, mostly the book No Bosses, about economic vision and a political memoir I did that was entitled Remembering Tomorrow. These invitations to me were vastly smarter than the old scams you might remember about Nigerian millionaires or people needing help to get out of foreign jails or to deliver inheritances and the like. Scammers now have AI, after all. They work like this. A scammer writes to you, having found your or in this case, my book on Amazon. They rightly take for granted that the author they found wants readers, and in the case of a book like mine, discussion. For me, like other targets, that's quite true. They then use AI, I believe, to research the author and the book's contents, and to create letters which refer to the book, its contents, its intentions, even the author's history, and so on. The first and each subsequent letter is well written, knowledgeable, and conveys how they love the work and want to help create audience for it, and more provoke serious discussion about it, and so on. So you reply and then they reply and more. Indeed, they are incredibly persistent and attentive. They expect and say that they even appreciate doubt, and then they address it. So if you keep writing to them about doubting that they're real, they'll keep replying about how real they are. If you keep up with them, whether from curiosity or hope, at some point they will offer you more help but for a fee. A few do that at the outset even, you get the idea. One such offer had me convinced almost, but then I asked for the names and emails of some author the inviter had successfully helped who would vouch for her. She sent one, and it was a real author, and so I thought, okay, I was right. This is a legit invitation, even if so many are obvious scams. But the email for the author was Gmail, and anyone can get one of those with any name they wish, as long as it isn't already taken on Gmail. So I got the author's actual email address, wrote him, and lo and behold, I learned it was indeed a scam. Or that's what the author replied at any rate. I was getting about two such offers a week. Note, having written twenty five books, this phenomenon was quite recent, apparently made a virtual cottage industry, I think, due to AI help. Just a few minutes ago I got another one. I won't be surprised if soon these invites come via video calls with AI created versions of famous folks online. At any rate, the most outrageous invite I have gotten so far is from the Oprah Winfrey Book Club. The letters all ostensibly come from Oprah, who ostensibly read No Bosses, and who, apparently, wants to make it her next book club suggestion. The emails are again very well done, including showing knowledge of the book and so on. So I read this, laughing at the idea, but nagging me with the thought what if however inconceivable this was real? And also curious that someone, whoever it might be, from wherever they might be located, could get away with doing this. Check on Google Oprah Winfrey Scams, quote, to get a sense of the scope. So I went back and forth with Oprah five or six emails worth. Oprah stuck with it. So doing so must sometimes yield returns or it would stop. So I deduce some published authors are getting scammed successfully. Not too surprising given their our desires. For that matter, some freelance agents are likely losing what could have been real clients because of skepticism, a kind of inf invitation to inflation. So why do I report this anecdotal news? Well, some of you may get letters like I have gotten, so on the one hand, it is a heads up to be careful. But beyond that, my point is that from clickbait titles to scam invitations to entirely fabricated videos and texts reporting non existent events, which are now, by my estimate, a large percentage of all videos online, we have well and truly entered a very weird, incredibly duplicitous world. Of course there have always been scam artists and always also fake news, as our fake leader calls it. But this is different. We are entering a hellscaped twilight existence where truth is rendered unknowable or alternatively is whatever anyone wants it to be. And where lies are common currency not just of rogues, but all over the damn place. The destination of all this change? No one trusts, everyone lies. I know that our time's bigger stories are, well, genocide, fascism and the like. But part of me thinks it has become a seamless whole with the small and large elements each feeding the other. Deception ubiquitous is very serviceable to elites in power. All of it taken together, disgusting and despicable, daunting and deadly, provides all the more reason for revolution. And so we come to the next chapter of Miguel Guivera's Oral History of the Next American Revolution, in which Cynthia Parks, Karim Malie, and Peter Cabral discuss race complexities and RPS, their organization, revolutionary participatory society's practices. So Miguel starts off by asking Cynthia, when RPS started to emerge in some people's thoughts, the Black Lives Matter movement was still active. Did RPS just take up their approaches or were there some changes? When Black Lives Matter first began, it made no demands and confined its attention to protesting the precipitating instances of police violence against community members. Time passed and various members of BLM put together a very impressive document listing demands and issues. The program they proposed not only addressed police violence but all sides of life, approached from the angle of impact on black and other non white communities. However, since it wasn't a finished formulation, but a work always in process, I think it is fair to say RPS, not long thereafter, became part of that work in process. Where RPS innovations entered, it was regarding how to propose and seek changes in policing, income distribution, and cultural relations. RPS emphasized that victory didn't depend on winning a debate, but on assembling a massive majority. When debating issues, however, we had to not only put forth honest and uncompromised claims and desires, but also to sincerely address the views of opponents so as to create growing unity. We came to realize that we each had to live our lives not only for ourselves, but as a model for others. It may seem obvious, but it really wasn't. For decades around race and really around every focus of serious oppression, dissidents were too often trying to validate their own agendas and justify or even celebrate their own actions than trying to actually win their agendas. Be accurate, be true, be strong, work hard, yes. But also pay close attention to growing your support and not just to being accurate true storm strong and working hard. So what would winning around race mean? For RPS it meant that when the dust settled, not only would the structural basis for racial hierarchy be gone, but all those involved, which was really everyone, would see themselves not as a member of a competing community or tribe, but rather as members of humanity. The differentiations by community would remain important, but the human connection would become primary. Community differentiations, including different racial, ethnic, national, or religious allegiances, would no longer be a matter of superior and inferior, or even of better and worse, but simply a valid happenstance of birth and preference. The key was for everyone to see themselves as part of a larger whole, and to see their community differences as reflecting different valid contingent choices, each of which deserved respect and room to persist. We didn't want to eliminate conflicts by eliminating differences, but neither did we want to exaggerate the differences. When an oppress community battled against conditions of oppression, it was crucial to have long run success in mind. Our stance wasn't about catering to the tastes of those in more dominant positions, nor was it about avoiding annoying them. It was about trying to communicate in a way that could lead to lasting solutions rather than to momentary feelings of success that were later wiped out by unaddressed or even needlessly provoked antagonisms. Miguel asks, Karima Lee, this is from his interview at his home in Detroit, Michigan. You were active in media and public speaking, and your writing has long focused on popular culture and broad social trends, especially around political participation and race. Within RPS, you've emphasized raising consciousness, launching organizing projects, building media, and strengthening internal relations. To begin, do you remember when and how you first became radical? In two thousand one, with my parents' help, I was just old enough to get a vague sense of the change in my situation due to my name and appearance. And indeed, I think I was politicized in significant part by later trying to understand Islamophobia and to survive and oppose it. I don't think there was one incident that radicalized me. Still, I do think there was one that had a lot to do with what kind of radical and later revolutionary I became. When I got to college, my roommate took one look at me and you could see him blanch, feel his fear, and see his rising anger. For about two weeks we worked through that fear and anger, and then became very close friends, even to this day. I would have to guess, and I think he would agree, that had I not been his roommate, and had we not dealt with the tensions I aroused in him, he would likely have voted for Trump later instead of backing Sanders, and then doing a lesser evil vote for Clinton, Biden, and Harris, having himself moved well left of all of them. And however anecdotal and personal that experience was, I took a lesson from that. We didn't navigate ourselves to a good place by becoming enemies. We did it by listening to one another and working through confusion, biases, ignorance and worse. If you don't talk with, much less if you dismiss and denigrate your potential enemies, they will become your actual enemies. If you don't talk with your actual enemies, they will become steadily worse enemies. Miguel asks I have been asking folks if they could remember a particularly inspiring or otherwise personally important event or campaign that they experienced during the rise of RPS. Could you do for that for us, please? During the early period, I had the opportunity to reach to teach a number of times in RPS schools for organizers. These schools had broadly two aspects. They focused on skills and techniques of movement building, organizing, outreach, etc. And they focused on the substance behind and fueling activism. They were about understanding the roots of society's ills, but even more so, they were about developing visions of what society could and should be, and insights into how to get from our current situation to our desired future one. There were many such schools, sometimes on a campus, sometimes in workplace, sometimes for people in some industry, like the Hollywood schools that began a bit earlier, and in some ways birthed the whole extended project. Sometimes in an apartment complex, sometimes a particular school was for RPS members themselves. At any rate, most of these efforts included intense classes, discussions, and time to socialize, as they typically ran for at least a week and sometimes ten days or even more. Well along in each, after there was a remarkable level of trust and very positive energy, there would be a night session where those attending were welcome to answer the question What in your life do you think is responsible for your being here to learn about revolutionizing society? Those events were nearly unbearable, and at the same time indescribably inspiring. Part of the stories told were somewhat cerebral or movement rooted. For example, people would tell of first reading a new author and the eye opening effect it had on them. Chomsky's name would come up so often and it was surreal, but other writers got mentioned too. People would also tell of a first rally or march, launching them into activism. But the other part of people's stories was more visceral. Tears and trauma were palpably present. I was abused as a child, I was raped, I saw a friend gunned down in the streets. I lost a parent or a friend or a friend's parent to drugs or to suicide. I lost my home and lived threadbare for years. I became addicted and escaped addiction. I was abused as a child, repeatedly raped. I endured it for a long time. I finally ran away. I lived hand to mouth. Luckily I found activism. Sometimes it was less extreme, such as being bullied in school or even being a bully, and the ensuing guilt, being cheated on or cheating. The stories were relayed in depth, it was wrenching. The overall impact was an incredibly intimate mosaic of America, not the America of reflexive adoration or the America of sunny days and wondrous ways, but the America of peoples rarely discussed and rarely even mentioned real lives. Part of what made it so compelling was the overall scale. People who no one present would have expected to have lived such stories told them. They often noted that even their friends had never heard what they were saying in this group setting, inspired by stories from others that sometimes also no one had ever heard before. My brother raped me, my uncle, my dad, I saw a close friend gunned down. These are his initials tattooed on my arm. I hated everyone. In time I focused my hatred on the system around me. I lost my dad to drugs, my best friend to suicide. What caused it? Them or society? A radical social worker showed me the right answer. I lost my home and lived threadbare, I became addicted, but eventually got straight. I cut myself over and over, and on and on. I realized the solution for me was within, but the fault for it all was not within. The mood was quiet, sincere, and so cathartic that people chose to speak who hadn't even dreamed of speaking in such ways. People said publicly what had earlier been private. The suffering they reported so devastating, so widespread, so persistent, pernicious, and most often deeply hidden, cemented my radical commitments. Their stories made me more of a listener than I had ever been before. I learned that what went unsaid even among family and friends was often profoundly important. The hidden injuries of oppression often outweighed even what was visible. Sometimes the perpetrator hid it, sometimes the victim hid it. Often neither knew that hiding the problems only made things worse. Miguel asks What was your view of the implications of race for issues of leadership inside RPS? The direct implication had been well known for a long time. An activist organization had to welcome and benefit from diverse racial communities. We had to elevate diverse communities to general leadership and to predominant say over their own affairs. Minority communities typically suffered low income, little influence, and great danger. But we also knew that focusing exclusively on race would overlook other matters. We had to add to race a gender, class, and authority focus, and vice versa. After the Black Lives Matter uprising, these ideas became unavoidable. Miguel asks, was that hard? Well, it is like what Cynthia talked about. Do you accomplish the necessary step in a way that creates ever greater antagonisms? Or you do it in a way that reduces antagonisms? These two possibilities were in competition in a sense. Did you get a momentary better look, so to speak? They used to call it the optics of the situation, while you chured new fissures beneath the appearance? Or did you not only get the better look and better reality regarding present results, but also reduce and eliminate the fissures? Basically RPS always had its eyes on winning a new society rather than only on being right about some short term issue, whether internal or external. And then there was another hard problem we had to address. The major cultural issue on the left and in society was the relegation of minority communities to subservient roles, lower income, less influence, and more danger. But even while tackling that problem, it was possible to focus so centrally on it as to become blind to other matters or downplay them. We should not use a short term view about race to trump other concerns that also needed attention. So a second need was to be sure to add to a race focus, agenda, class, and authority focus. For the most part, though, overcoming latent and even very active racist attitudes, and even more so overcoming racist structures was high on the agenda. Black Lives Matter was wise to this, and so was RPS, even from those early days. Miguel asks, there was still another issue, a controversial one in which you played a role. It was about who should organize whom, right? Yes, I was at an RPS sponsored meeting. It was in the early days. It was about working on an anti racist campaign. It was a diverse meeting, and there was the seeming understanding, I guess, among the experienced African Americans present, and more widely too, that this held among women too about sexism. They each felt, and they aggressively enunciated whenever the point somehow arose, that it was not their responsibility to organize among white people, or in the case of women among men. It was not their task, but instead only another burden placed on them to expect them to explain racism or otherwise combat racism among white folks by talking with them, or to explain or combat sexism among men by talking with them. White folks and men had to do the talking to other white folks and men. This formulation, at least in the abstract, Was accepted as being above argument. It had been repeated so often, so forcefully, so emotively, that it was kind of like an axiom. It was a given, and to doubt it when it was offered was itself often taken as racist or sexist. Which is probably why so few did challenge the view, at least out loud. Well, I doubted the view, and I was forthright about challenging it out loud. I remember the time the controversy specifically erupted for RPS. A prominent black activist at a big meeting conveyed this view to some young white kid just getting going on RPS with a tone that said Newby, you are backward. Newbie, you have to clean up your thinking that I have some responsibility for telling you about racism as compared to your educating yourself and other whites. It burdens us for you to expect African Americans to combat racism among white folks by educating white folks, or to expect women to combat sexism among men by educating men. White folks and men have to address other white folks and men. And a white guy then replied, but what if I don't feel I understand racism or sexism enough to be as convincing as someone who directly experiences the issues? He was told get smarter, stop thinking I should educate you, educate yourself, and then other whites and men. This upset me. I guess it just brought my doubts to a head. So I said, also aggressively, wait a minute, I'm an activist, I am anti racist, I am black, and I am experienced. I get that in a wonderful world I wouldn't have to worry about educating anyone about racism, much less spend time educating racist white folks. I also get that doing so is time consuming and demeaning. But I don't see how my agreeing on all that implies that I should never organize whites about racism. Why does that follow? If it follows because I shouldn't do anything that compared to being burden free in a better world burdens me, then compared to not having racism, organizing African Americans or burdens me too. But I do it not every minute, but when I think it can contribute to overcoming racism. Will my sometimes educating whites help the anti racist cause? If so, then when I am in a better position to organize rights whites than our other whites, shouldn't I do it? I got shouted down, but I didn't fade away. I knew that a great many of folks agreed with what I had said, not least because they told me so after the meeting, but were intimidated from saying so by fear of being ostracized, called racist, and so on. So I kept at it, and it got written up. Discussions began. Before long the old viewpoint started dissipating. The more I thought about it, the more I felt the main issue was did we believe we could win or were we just hammering out a stance that felt comfortable and made modest gains without seeking long term goals? I wasn't saying that African Americans or women in the parallel case should spend all their time talking with intractable white racists or male sexists. Of course not. But I was saying that often African Americans and women know more and can better motivate what they know about race and gender than can whites or men. Whites and men could and should try to walk in our shoes, feel what we feel, but of course they can't, at least not fully, and so sometimes only we can fully convey our experience and best motivate trying to overcome racism and sexism. I mean really, as all can see now, this should have been trivial to see, but it wasn't for reasons of identity, for reasons of habit, for reasons of people protecting prior assumptions, for reasons of people attaching this stance to being anti racist and opposition to this stance to being racist. When in fact, if you wanted to pose things remotely like that, arguably the reverse could be said. But it was not hard due to real evidence or logic. The point was that there were many situations in which African Americans and women knew more and could better convey and motivate what they knew to whites and men than could other whites or men, and in which a white audience or a male audience could have its consciousness raised by the effort to do so. So in such cases we should do it, among other valuable pursuits. Miguel asks, so the right calculus wasn't how much of a burden was it to do, but how necessary was doing it. Exactly. And efforts are always as necessary as circumstances make them, case by case to actually make progress. Miguel asks, RPS also jettisoned attacking white skin privilege as a label for its actions, and you pursued that battle too, right? Yes. There was a similarly vexing and polarizing situation that arose about what was called privilege. Should we make identifying white, male or class privilege a priority, and then call it out and demand that people reject their privilege? It was certainly a way to see, label, and then try to address oppressions, but was it a good way? Did it point those confronted toward the institutions at fault? Did it convey knowledge to those called out? Did it make it more or less likely we would raise consciousness of oppression and solidarity about fighting it? Or was it a way for an oppressed group to lash out but without taking responsibility for institutions for organizing, etc? Privilege implies having something you should renounce. But when folks called out white privilege as the actual privileges, they often mentioned safety from abuse, enjoying access and influence, and getting fair treatment. But those aren't things anyone should give up. Talking about renouncing white privilege made many whites think our aim was to take basic things away from them, rather than to guarantee to everyone those things and much more. These were real and important differences that RPS advocated in order to promote solidarity rather than only opposition. As time went on, RPS played a role in seeing what works toward winning and doing it. See what is nominally right but impedes winning and reject it. Miguel asks, What about communication issues? There were changes there too, yes? Preceding RPS, academic leftists often felt activists were missing nearly incomprehensible ideas that needed to be communicated by way of nearly unreadable text. So the academics dutifully wrote nearly incomprehensible ideas and nearly unreadable texts. Even if some of their views had merit, which I have to admit I often doubted, as presented, they were virtually useless. Migu asked, in such cases, are you saying they wrote merely to make themselves seem worthy with pompous language? Perhaps, but whatever their reason, the real problem wasn't that we had too few obscure ideas. It was that already known, clear ideas were not reaching large audiences. So RPS sought better ways to spread existing insights and vision. We involved ever more people in refining, employing, and implementing thoughts in their own words. We didn't compromise content, we clarified it. We went from activism made obscure by academia to academia renovated by activism. Miguel asks Peter, this is from his session at home in Miami. Do you remember an event or campaign or whatever else, actually, during the period of RPS's growth that was particularly personally meaningful to you? Man, there were a lot, the Olympic campaigns, the boycotts for community safety, the fights for community control of the police, and the Legal Workers Conference, all close to the heart. But if I'm reaching back, way back, college days, over ten years before RPS, there was a moment that hit me particularly hard. I was an athlete and a fan, and I heard this talk Noam Chomsky gave. He was talking about sports, about what it meant, about why we throw so much emotion into teams we don't even know. It shook something loose in me. Chomsky described viewing people rooting incredibly passionately for a sports team and his inability to understand their attachment and passion. They don't know anyone involved, he thought. They have no close connections with any of the players on either team. Yet they seem invested as if their lives are at stake. How could that happen? Why did that happen? That was me. All the way, I'd scream and cry for my team. I'd hate the guys on the other side, and if one of those bad guys got traded to my side, suddenly he was a hero. It made no damn sense, but it felt real. I thought about it a lot. It was true for me I could be at a college sports event or watching a pro sports event, and know no one on the field, and even know nothing about anyone on the field beyond their talent level, and I could have very little discernibly and common in common with any of them, and many other firms would have virtually nothing in common, and yet be incredibly vested in my team's fortunes and my favorite players' fortunes. I, like so many others, would even say we, as in we did this, we got such and such a new player, or we looked good, or the ref screwed us, never them, despite my having zero connection to it. And perhaps even more incredible, I could be hostile to or even hate some player on some other team, and then when that player wound up on my team, traded, I would celebrate the person I previously denigrated. It was really weird. Yeah, it was weird, but it made me think, what else in life do we do that way? What else do we follow blindly just 'cause we want to belong? Want to feel something? That talk planted a seed. Years later it bloomed into a whole new way of seeing things. Was there a healthy aspect? What were the unhealthy aspects? It got me thinking, and I believe it had a major long term effect on my relations to sports and my understanding of how people formed and defended stances based on logic and evidence, sometimes or to some extent. But it also showed me that sometimes people just wanted to be part of something, or to just go along. It taught me that hearts don't always follow heads, but once you know that, you can start to bring them together. That was the real beginning of my path to change. Miguel asks to get back on the current topic, can you talk about the situation around the initial race focus, police repression of African Americans and other minorities? You can imagine how volatile that was. People were being killed in the streets, often for no offense at all, sometimes for minor violations. It kept happening, it escalated with ice. You know about it. It felt like, and in its social implications, it was in fact a new kind of lynching. After all, lynching was a way to discipline the entire black community. Similarly, police action sought to induce fear in us and to simultaneously induce a kind of bloodlust in the public, which was also, ironically, rooted in fear. So how different was the lynching than the police execution of young African Americans in the streets? Neither happened all the time, but their influence was always present. Yeah, it was hot out there, raw and mean, cops shooting kids for nothing or next to it. Wrong place, wrong look, wrong color, and sure it wasn't every day, but it didn't have to be. Just the threat, the chance, it hung over the neighborhoods like thunderclouds, like lynching used to. You didn't have to see it with your own eyes to feel it in your bones. Fear ruled, not just a little anxiety, but full on survival mode every time a patrol car rolled by. And it wasn't just the shootings, it was the stops, the stairs, the hands on the wall, the cuffs clicking shut just for being there. It was knowing your life could spin out in a flash for walking home, for reaching for a wallet. You lived like a ghost in your own block. Fear put residents in black neighborhoods constantly on guard to avoid annoying police. Drones flying over communities had a similar impact. Life was conducted by navigating even your own streets to avoid persecution. And it wasn't just killings that induced fear, so did getting stopped, frisked, and arrested for being black. U. S. incarceration rates were unique in the developed world, and they were worse for minorities. That was the weight. Drones buzzing overhead like mechanical hornets, always being watched, always being hunted. And yeah, if you were black or brown, the odds said you were more likely to end up behind bars than in college. That isn't freedom, that's a war zone. How do you deal with a local community that has a quarter of its male population and sometimes more in jail, on parole or probation? It is not easy, especially once you take into account more of the situation. Such communities were incredibly impoverished, unemployment was almost at great depression level, yet everyone knew about a way to get by reasonably well, albeit with incredible risk, gun running and drug dealing. The neighborhood was beat down, no jobs, no future, but if you had guts or desperation, you could hustle. Guns and drugs, that was the way. It was poison, but it paid. And it wasn't just chance, it was designed. You flood a starving community with narcotics and automatic weapons. What the hell do you think will happen? For decades drugs flowed into poor communities, particularly black communities, and with drugs came guns. So when police expressed fear, that too wasn't entirely make believe. There was real danger, and of course society fed it, not only with stereotypes, but with gun policies that armed drug dealers and anyone who wanted to fire away. It got so that every little dispute held the danger of a gun emerging, and laws, incredibly, began to allow guns in public spaces and even in schools. So that fear the cops carried, it was real. But it didn't start with the streets, it started higher up, with laws that put fear in every kid's backpack, with decades of neglect, abandonment, and then brute force. You can't light a match and act surprised when the fire spreads. And every beef, over respect, over turf, over nothing, came with a barrel in someone's face. That was the madness. So the only solution, ultimately, was to raise incomes and opportunities, and to eliminate all the guns and drug dealing by eliminating their sources. But that wasn't going to happen overnight. And meanwhile, the constant tension and fear and the violence from the police and all the incarcerations created an environment that to many looked like a hellish spiral of no return. We knew the fix wouldn't come in a day. You had to build from the ground up jobs, education, trust, and disarm the damn country. And while we worked for that, the present was still burning. Folks felt trapped in a loop, violence, prisons, silence, repeat, like a Springsteen stong stuck on the darkest verse. And then something happened. First, lots of notable African Americans, particularly athletes of resign of renown, got really upset and decided they had to act. So they started to speak out, to bemoan the situation, and even to protest it. Remember the sit downs during the national anthem? But of course, loan acts weren't going to achieve enough unless there followed a huge growth in participation. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, but actually of course due to the whole flow of activism and especially the organizers in the trenches, the tide began to shift. Ball players started to rise up, not in some half hearted PR way, but full throated, fists up, sitting down during the anthem, risking their careers. They were mad, and they were ready to do something. And then suddenly there was a press conference of various athletes, not revolutionaries, very rich people. But their relatives were getting shot, becoming addicted, living in fear of police patrols, and getting sick as well at what some of their brothers in arms were doing. They weren't activists, hell, they were millionaires, but they weren't blind. They saw their cousins catching bullets, their nephews were going to jail. They heard the stories back home and couldn't stomach staying quiet. So they stood up loud. So the athletes said we will not play in any city until there is an all day meeting organized by us in that city between police and community residents and leaders with ourselves chairing to discuss new norms and procedures for community safety. And until that kind of negotiation defines a program which is implemented, and then we will only play in the city when the community says it is safe for them, and they want us to do so. And then came the line in the sand. They said no more games, no more business as usual, not till every city has a sit down, cops, community players, face to face all day, not a show, a real talk, and will only suit up when the people say it's safe to do so. Well, it was absolutely incredible. It wasn't just about temporary media visibility, raising a little more consciousness. It was about results. But it wasn't going to go away. Either there was a solution for the city, or that city was going to suffer huge losses in public bedlam and as well become a public prior. The owners and media tried to squelch the athletes, but to no avail. Man, that hit like thunder. This wasn't some real feel good moment for the cameras. This was money on the line. Cities that didn't move suffered. Fans got mad, owners panicked, but the athletes held firm, couldn't be bought off, couldn't be silenced. Impressively, the demand was delivered without anger or recrimination, as both a plea and a plan to solve a bad situation for all concerned. The athletes not only delivered their call, which was rapidly supported by steadily more players in diverse sports, they also went to the cities and in the absence of meetings and plans literally marched on city hall with huge numbers of people, first mostly black, but then more and more diverse. And they did it with grace, not rage, not blame, just resolve. Let's fix this for all of us, they said. And when the cities dragged their feet, the players showed up, not in jerseys, in the streets, and the people came with them, black, brown, white, marching for justice. Of course, at first there was a giant outcry against these athletes. They are rich jocks. Who are they to dictate dictate to us? Who are they to withhold their labor? Who are they to protest injustice? Calls for cooperation and discussion to lead to a plan good for communities and for police safety too? The athletes were so prominent, their visibility was so high, and the price of ignoring them was so great that the real agendas became visible and hysteria was muted. Yeah, the haters came quick, shut up and play, they yelled, stay in your lane, but the truth broke through the noise. These players were done being puppets. They were done being safe bets, and when you're that visible and that unified, even the media storm can't drown you out. Miguel asks, How do you think it started? Why did it happen? After all, this could have been done any time for decades. I think that is a pivotal question, but often we don't understand how hard it is to think outside the box, to even have an idea like what those actes started. And then we also don't understand just how hard it is to march to the beat of a different drum while enduring that kind of hostility and isolation. For people like these, the family, neighbor, and workmate pressures and the potential loss of jobs and income is immense. But as to how it got going, I have to say, looking back, I think the key cause was quite ironic. That's the truth. We like to think standing up is easy. But most times it isn't the fire that's missing, it's the spark. And it sure as hell isn't simple to be the first one moving to a different rhythm. Especially when everything around you is pulling the other way, your paycheck, your neighborhood, your own damn people. So when something like that happens, when a movement really kicks off, it's worth asking why then? When the quarterback of the San Francisco football team refused to stand for the national anthem, two very important things happened. First, though he was initially excoriated, it was only a few days before his calm reasoning and obvious passion began to win support, including from other athletes. It wasn't Armageddon for him, and while significant, he wasn't a really major star. At the time he wasn't essential to the team, and therefore he could be cut at a modest loss. But he wasn't cut then. Sometimes people's fear exceeds real risk, and athletes noticed, I think. The quarterback, Kaepernick, he knelt down and the world lit up. At first, yeah, folks came at him with all they had. Media, fans, even his own league, even his own mates. But something funny happened. He held steady, quiet, sharp, undeterred, and people started to listen. Other players too, and maybe more importantly, the world didn't end for him. He wasn't cared right off, and that stuck with people. Maybe the price wouldn't always be so high after all. But the even bigger thing, the ironic thing, was that the local police department threatened to not send cops to games as security if the quarterback, his name was Colin Kaepernick, kept up with not standing for the anthem. Set aside how ludicrous the attacks on him were. After all, the NFL was routinely employing people who had violently abused spouses among other horrible actions. The organization itself had policies that were literally treating players like expendable cogs, causing them to have brain injuries that shortened and impoverished their post football lives. But it was outraged about an athlete admirably taking a stand against injustice. The hypocrisy was so evident no one could miss it. And then there was a real twist. The cops themselves said they might walk away, wouldn't show up for duty at the stadium. Now let that sink in. They weren't threatening because of crime or danger. They were mad about being criticized, and suddenly people started thinking if the cops can withhold their labor to make a point, why the hell can't we? And yet I suspect that wasn't the key to the later emergence of athletes for community safety. No, that honor probably goes to the police threatening to not do their jobs. Hold on, people thought. If the police can refuse to protect events because they don't like being criticized, why can't we refuse to play at the events because we don't like our families, friends, and ourselves having to live and sometimes die in fear? You think that thought deep down for a few years, slowly playing riffs on it, and you get angry enough, and well, you take a big step. That's the moment the fuse got lit. Folks carried that thought around, sat with it, let it grow, and when the anger and the clarity finally met up inside enough people, they said no more. And just like a song building to its chorus, it hit all at once. Miguel asks, so what did they win? They won four big ones. First, real gun control, not just talk, laws that shut down suppliers and slowed the river of guns. Second, drug arrests started being getting treated like what they were, for people getting needing help, not jail time. Third, there were meetups, whole day gatherings between cops, players, and communities. They built sports leagues, shared meals, and yeah, when the musicians joined in, even benefit concerts. Ground up stuff, no politicians stealing the spotlight, just folks making it happen. And the fourth, a shift in power. Cops started getting trained differently. Communities began having real say. Police started rejecting the bad scenes seeds in their own squads, and the ripple didn't stop there. The fight widened into questions of pay, job structure, and what sports should look like. It lit up the whole field. Miguel asked, but what about capitalism itself? And so ended chapter twenty four, with a question that of course meant chapter twenty five would return to economic matters. And who knows, when the book becomes available, maybe Oprah will get in touch to let people know about it. Or if not Oprah, maybe you will let people know about it. But now, before I sign off, one last topic. You're probably aware that I was much saddened and even angered by Chris Hedge's recently disavowing Noad Chomsky. Well, Chris's newest piece bothered me even more. I don't know Chris, but as I read his new piece, spurred to do so by a friend, and hopefully I didn't get a distorted picture, and I apologize if I did, I thought it basically said to its readers, whatever Chris's intent may have been, that we have lost. To resist is dignified, but it is hopeless. The fascists are triumphant. Chris quotes Orwell If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. Was Chris in this essay trying to spur resistance? Did he think his litany of defeat would do so? Maybe. There was a time when I contemplated what I would do if I felt that better outcomes, much less a fundamental revolution, was a total impossibility. What if some all knowing God came to me and literally proved to me the future would be boots continually stomping heads? And I told myself, sort of like Hedges, that I would fight on anyhow. To resist is to live, whatever. Somewhat later I decided that even if one could know one's response, and if that was what it was, this was a nonsense stance to actively take. Hedges, of course, can't know the future, is going to be stomped heads forever, and even if he thought it was, why say so? I prefer Chomsky's alternative stance, more or less this. I don't know what will be the result of my efforts against monstrous climbs, but I do know that to do nothing, without any doubt at all, won't reduce deterrent finally eliminate those monstrous climbs. My own alternative formulation is offered in the Wind Cries Freedom in different hues and tones by each of the eighteen interviewees. Fight to win. One hot summer day in nineteen sixty nine, it may have been sixty eight or seventy, I came out of Nini's Corner, a news store that I would frequent in Cambridge, just outside what Dylan called the green pastures of Harvard University, and I encountered a fellow about my age, maybe a couple of years older, hawking his particular Marxist Leninist organization's weekly newspaper. The lead article, and this is true, my memory is horribly bad, but some things just stick with you, was announcing imminent nuclear war to start in just a few days. I looked at this guy and I thought, why aren't you at the beach? If you believe your headline, what are you doing here? Do you think that that kind of news will organize people? And if you don't believe your headline, why the hell are you hawking the paper? So Chris and whoever else, I get that these are incredibly scary days. I get that worse could be coming. Even much worse. I understand people feeling fear, frustration, confusion, and yes, even depression. But I don't understand wallowing in it. I don't understand giving up. I especially don't understand counseling defeat. Get a drip, cut it out, fight to win. And that said, this is Michael Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.