This is a little Celebrity Left thing I call distributed co-opting:
Fearless and adversarial critic of Eric Holder and state power says:
Great passionate coverer of police abuse & race says:
Here are some other things King has said:
I respect vets. My brother served 3 tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. I also respect capitalism and profit.
and
In a free market economy, when something is BROKEN, entrepreneurs create new products and services to replace the broken ones. #NewPolice
Signal boosting people to the right of his reputation is something Greenwald does a lot.
In addition to stumping for militarism, capitalism, privatization, and top cop Eric Holder, King is a prolific contributor at the Democratic partisan blog, DailyKos. So a boost for King is a boost for Kos, and a boost for the popular Kos is indisputably a boost for the Democratic Party.
No doubt this order of things greatly pleases the brass at ubiquitous astroturf firm Fitzgibbon Media, since The Intercept, DailyKos and a shit-ton of Democratic astroturf organizations are clients. Fitzgibbon also has its hand in Black Lives Matter via Andy Stepanian, a Senior Media Relations Director, who volunteers for BLM group, Hands Up United.
There are synergies galore!
Greenwald and King make a nice match. Both respect capitalism and profit. Both are quite open to private sector solutions for abusive state power. So it’s fitting that in addition to promoting King on Twitter, Greenwald has joined him on the board of Justice Together, a new organization whose self-proclaimed mission is “ending police brutality in America.” DeRay McKesson, another highly popular advocacy journalist closely tied to Black Lives Matter, is also on the board.
Over the past year, King and McKesson have become two of the predominate online conduits for the BLM movement, each with a Twitter following exceeding 100k. They stand out from the rest for the usual reasons: ample time for tweeting, writing and appearing; deftness with the politics of social networks; and most crucially, signal boosting by mainstream media and their high status representatives on Twitter. Their somewhat mysterious funding sources also play a decisive role, since funding enables them to broadcast more than people who do it for free.
As you might expect from a winnowing process ultimately adjudicated by funding sources and mainstream media, these men have all the qualities that process invariably rewards: indeterminate politics that, when they reveal themselves at all, look like a pastiche of liberal and libertarian; a rhetorical emphasis on description vs. prescription; and a reluctance to grapple seriously with root causes.
McKesson is the more militant of the two, and is an impressively able and quick-witted spokesperson, particularly on television. He even hazards the occasional poke at capitalism, insisting that it is a by-product of white supremacy, mostly when interlocutors insist it is the other way around. This is fairly typical:
racism is deeper than capitalism, though capitalism is the clearest manifestation.
But lest anyone get any ideas about seriously integrating the two concerns in Black Lives Matter, McKesson offers the same reassurances as King:
nobody said anything about taking away capitalism…
Before he became a voice for Black Lives Matter, McKesson was a school administrator in Minneapolis, having entered education through Teach For America, a model of neoliberal progressivism. TFA is the bête noire of teacher’s unions for its program of placing new graduates with little training in low-paying, non-union jobs alongside, or even as replacements for, senior staff. DeRay also enjoys Glenn Greenwald’s patronage.
The rest of the Justice Together board is interesting mostly for what it lacks. There are seemingly no Black scholars or activists who had dedicated their lives to racial justice before BLM. Equally absent — somewhat unsurprisingly — is any representation from young, ground-level, militant Black Lives Matter activists like Tef Poe, Ashley Yates and Tory Russell. Representation from victims of police brutality or their families seems equally nonexistent. The only board member that seems like a natural fit is Benjamin Crump, a lawyer known for high visibility pro bono cases with civil rights implications. Apart from celebrities Anika Noni Rose, Regina King and Gabrielle Union, the rest of the board’s orientation is toward Silicon Valley and neoliberal volunteerism. To wit:
Keisha Senter, a senior Associate Director at the Rockefeller Foundation and an alum of the Clinton Global Initiative and Democratic think tank The Center for American Progress;
Jay Cranman, VP of Corporate Partnerships for Points of Light, an organization named for G. H. W. Bush’s famous speech touting volunteerism as the solution to the country’s great problems;
Alida Garcia, Coalitions and Policy Director for fwd.us, an organization founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sean Parker and other technology leaders to “give [their] values a voice in American politics.” Garcia was a Deputy Director for Obama’s 2012 campaign. Her boss at fwd.us is Todd Schulte, former chief of staff for Priorities, a SuperPac for Obama’s reelection.
David Heinemeier Hansson, multimillionaire partner at tech company 37 Signals and race car driver.
Lane Wood, tech management specialist with experience in socially conscious business. Currently CMO of app company Humint.
Rashad Drakeford, Director, Brand & Integrated Marketing at REVOLT Media & TV. REVOLT is a music-oriented cable network founded by Sean “Diddy” Colmes.
Clint Smith, a poet and Teach For America recruit.
It doesn’t exactly evoke I Have a Dream, does it, unless by Dream you mean corporate sponsorship. From a brief perusal of the new organization’s web site, it appears to follow the topdown organizing model used by peerless astroturfer and Fitzgibbon client MoveOn and its many imitators: interested parties make themselves available to take instructions from impersonal, largely unaccountable leadership.
There isn’t even the pretense of democracy. Justice Together launched with its board in place and it’s unlikely there will be elections when and if any members leave. Considering the liberal/libertarian hash that has come to dominate the high-profile face of Black Lives Matter and the makeup of its board it’s quite possible JusticeTogether won’t be as traditionally partisan as Move On, but it will doubtlessly be equally adroit at keeping any ideas that don’t sit too comfortably with mainstream politics out. Clinton is obviously making a play for BLM, so it can’t hurt that the board is is well-seasoned with alums from the Obama campaign and her husband’s Global Initiative.
By the group’s account, it has two objectives, setting up “deeply focused policy coalitions in all fifty states + Washington DC” and to “tell better, deeper, richer, more nuanced stories about victims of police brutality/violence, their families, and the brave women and men fighting for a better America.”
In keeping with the astroturf topdown organizing model, the website decrees that on August 28th they will “announce the first actions of our coalitions.” The extent to which these local coalitions will determine what these local actions are is an open question, but if they are sticking to the MoveOn model, local decision-making won’t count for a lot.
No doubt every action will be resplendent with the same slick logos, slogans, talking points and demands, if any. There will doubtlessly be no risk of embarrassment for any pol taking part, and radicals foolish enough to get involved , will no doubt endure the same libels and ridicule “community leaders” and professional opinion havers have heaped on them since the early days in Ferguson.
Despite the heavy-hitters on its board, Justice Together, by virtue of its bland, corporate quality, has the makings of a flop. There is nonetheless some useful instruction as to who wants to shape Black Lives Matter and how. It’s as lacking in promise as it is predictably banal.
The Rancid Honeytrap 
“Revolt, by Diddy”… 😂
Anyway, I recall finding out awhile ago that some advertising companies hire psychologists (for obvious reasons). I do wonder if some shrinks are involved in some of the high profile, organized political stuff like this, perhaps helping tailor messages to generate plenty of heat but avoid the fire that this whole damn system deserves…
Well the PR industry is fed by social science research. It’s basically Psy Ops. This shit is not separate from advertising. Politics is sold the exact same way and by the same people.
On top of that, the system obviously selects for non-analytical handwringers. Greenwald is not going to signal boost Shaun King if he’s railing against capitalism, and no one with deep pockets is going to pay him to do that all day. This is one case where Chomsky’s insistence that everything bad is out in the open seems mostly true, though I would like to know who’s footing the bill for these out-of-nowhere BLM celebrities.
I started off a comment wondering whether BLM and other similar situations are more often straight astroturf from the get go, or if they start out grass that’s gradually covered in astroturf –
Then I realized it’s largely irrelevant. Co-opting vs manufacturing, they end up with the same result.
While I’ve never wholly put faith that a protest movement alone could do much beyond mild reform, I’m more and more convinced that minus any kind of militant and/or direct action, protest movements alone may actually be *harmful* simply BECAUSE they are so open to being co-opted.
I realize that’s an overly broad statement, but even in the good purposes they serve (such as waking people up politically), the co-optation runs a real risk because it’s ALSO accompanied by so much thought policing. If I’m generally non-political, but pissed off at the cops because of Freddie Gray, I’m in a position to be radicalized. But when that anger is first channeled by Deray or King in a specific direction, and at the same time people like Zahira Kelly are doing godawful hatchet job smears on radicalism like this (http://thenewinquiry.com/features/dear-marooned-alien-princess-6/), you’ve got a one two punch that takes any anger at the system and turns it into neoliberal future-vote fodder, or at best helps to bolster a controlled and curated class of ‘radicals’ (like Zahira Kelly herself).
In other words you can simultaneously co-opt a movement and redefine radicalism. Slick goddamn marketing, that.
Yeah. Everything gets shaped into a psy op. The system works really efficiently that way. I think there is some value though in knowing for sure how it started, because the ruling class improvising its way around a movement tells you something different than knowledge that the ruling class *started* the movement. If BLM was astroturf from the beginning, it raises the question of why. Whatever the case, it feels like they are less interested in containing it at the moment than directing it.
“I think there is some value though in knowing for sure how it started, because the ruling class improvising its way around a movement tells you something different than knowledge that the ruling class *started* the movement. If BLM was astroturf from the beginning, it raises the question of why. To me it feels like they are less interested in containing it than directing it.”
This is a fair point, if for no other reason than to hopefully understand where they’re headed next if they are in fact manufacturing- although in a case like BLM I’d say a good reason to manufacture it would be to avoid a more militant response. I’d argue though that containment can be effective through manufacturing something like BLM – if you’ve got 5,000 people in the streets (or 10k or 20k), and you can quickly manufacture a message at the ground level, you can potentially contain it before it gains too much momentum (similarly, co-opting can take the least threatening message and do the same).
I’d be interested to see the tax returns for these organizations… probably our putatively radical BLM stalwarts are funded by the Ford Foundation or some sort…
The embrace of the liberal establishment is always a smothering one. (And that statement perhaps gives too much benefit of the doubt to the BLM “leaders” whose goal is/was always to rocket up the NGO hierarchy in the first place.)
Yeah, McKesson insists he and everyone else that’s cranking this stuff out fulltime are receiving small, individual donations and dipping into their savings. I find this extremely hard to believe. One day we blinked, and there they all were. The constant rooting out of radicals and the drumbeat insistence from people like DeRay that it is about Blackness only are highly suspect. This movement has been in an ideological straitjacket from Day One. It rings false. The makeup of the JusticeTogether board hardly inspires trust.
Indeed. I recall how a future multiple Marketing of the Year award winning presidential campaign successfully captivated its fervent followers with the notion that it was funded exclusively by college students and their grandmothers each giving four quarters from their piggy banks.
Thanks for this breakdown, and I *love* “distributed co-opting”. I have a feeling I’ll be using that one a lot.
Representation from victims of police brutality or their families seems equally nonexistent.
This surprises me (or maybe it doesn’t?). You’d think an org basically purpose-built by a PR firm would have a better grasp of what they call “optics”.
Yeah, maybe I’m missing something in the various histories but nothing jumped out at me. Shaun King was the victim of a racist assault but not police brutality.
They’re clearly coming from an elitist, serious people place — both King and Greenwald are big ones for seeing job one as convincing elites — so maybe they don’t want any of the proles dicking up the works. They might want to be something other than optics and then what? Also, who’s optics are they? Does Mark Zuckerberg care about whether or not Tamir Rice’s family has representation on the board? It’s probably enough for the impending corporate sponsors and most of the volunteers that Crump, who’s counsel for a lot of the most high-profile cases, is their proxy.
Vote or Die. Death threats for Democracy.
This has all the markings of a soft imperialist NGO – stealth and not so stealth liberalism, unnamed or underground sponsors, divide and conquer techniques, media blitzes, vague, dilute, and inconcrete benchmarks for “success.” BLM was obviously enough of a threat to warrant a “color” revolution.
What if BLM *is* the Color Revolution? It started getting Foundation funding really early. Astroturfing outfit Fitzgibbon Media is involved in Hands Up United, which was the organization that got everything running in Ferguson. Read between the lines here.
Fitzgibbon Media? Code Pink? Soros? If it quacks like a duck…
Then there’s this: http://www.fergusontogeneva.org, also foundation funded.
There’s a lotta shifty white people drivin’ here.
Yes and Yes. Distraction and funneled outrage. Greece, Spain, and Italy seem to have been brought to heel in the same way. SilVal wants to inform the others that without them on board, they won’t be going far.
On the other hand, given that SilVal wouldn’t be SilVal without all the past freebies and current patronage from USG, maybe it’s all come down to a pissing match in the diminishing snow of the Arctic.
I get the point you’re making but I think it highlights more the insidious nature of these soft imp NGOs and delegitmizing tactics. At this point it’s probably chicken and egg, since radical activists are using BLM for organizing and messaging.
We could go around and around about whether BLM was initially or was not legit, but right now activists are using BLM for their actions. What I think COULD happen is that as actions continue around the country around racism and killer cops, the NGOs could actually begin a DIFFERENT movement to try to deep-six BLM entirely. Because if we activists keep up the push-back, it means the cappies need a new diversion.
But here’s what the ruling class learned from Occupy: don’t sit back and let shit expand. Get in early and co-opt, repress, and shut it down. Everybody knows the federales and the cappies were cooling their heels on Occupy. They were thrown off guard and didn’t know how to respond initially. (“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you,” etc. etc.) They were off their game as Occupy went from park to park from city to city before the organized Homeland crackdown got started.
They know better now. They were ready for BLM. (if BLM was actually something radical in the beginning–if it wasn’t, they moved in very early as you said and started it.): Impose the curfews, get the bourgeois groups and messaging out quickly, make resisting arrest a felony not a fine or a misdemeanor – they are picking up where they left off Occupy. So if BLM was real in the beginning, they moved in fast because they learned their lessons from Occupy.
Greenwald’s group is an attempt to change the messaging. Justice Up or whatever. Much more palatable to the bourgies and MSM. BLM could be deep-sixed altogether by the NGOS if activists keep up the actions.
I tend to go more with what material conditions are dictating on the ground since I’m actively involved in organizing. We use BLM as messaging. The ruling class and their imp stooges sooner rather than later could put the entire BLM messaging on ice if we keep it up. They’ll have to try something new. And I think these more vanilla sounding groups are going there – Justice Up. Hands Down, whatever they are called.
I think I disagree with you on how this is working. I don’t think the same elements in the ruling class that are supporting BLM are necessarily attempting to contain it, at least not entirely. I also think those elements are separate from the outright fascist elements imposing curfews and changing laws and the like. You’re seeing a monolith of elites. I see elites jockeying with each other. I think it’s quite possible that the Soros crowd or whomever, are using it like a color revolution, to create tension and upheaval pursuant to some goal beyond improving conditions for Black people. I think it has more elite support than Occupy ever did. So the question is why?
I’m not sure that the messaging has to be changed. BLM was anti-radical practically from day one and its become very in-grained. I don’t see all this radical messaging you’re talking about unless you see the near exclusive focus on Blackness and within that, on police brutality, mostly isolated from root causes, as radical. I sure don’t. Anti-racism isolated from everything else is liberal, especially since not being killed by police is such a low bar. If this is a radical movement, it’s not obvious.
Mind if I barge in for a second?
I’ve been following this movement for a while. It’s very psyop-ish at times, but the problem comes down to the very thing that the movement really wants; justice. It was never designed as a movement against capitalism or class inequality or the elite controlling governments the way Occupy was. The problem for the neo-liberals is that in order for them to ignore the larger economic conversations, the system has to provide justice for victims of police brutality. That means punishing the very paid armies that keep their economic hegemony in place. They aren’t willing to do that because they’ve seen their police forces under siege and threatening to revolt against them as a result. So now you’re seeing governments placating to them, at the cost of not providing victims of brutality any justice at all.
The system would like to play it both ways, but unfortunately they’ve had to make a choice. They’ve chosen more police repression and hope that they can confiscate enough guns in order to keep a grip hod on their power. That’s why the media has elevated the Charleston shooting so aggressively. It’s designed, as many other tragedies have in the past, to play off people’s emotions so they’l bel willing to see guns confiscated by those with the potential to revolt. The problem is the supreme court will likely strike down those rulings enforcing gun confiscation and the lack of justice from those assaulted and murdered by police will inspire more people to arm themselves and resist attempts to unarm themselves by government force than anything else. That’s why the government is in such a tricky situation. The elite realize the masses are on the verge of revolt, but their poorly made choices they made may be the end of their reign for a lifetime or more.
The movement cannot continue on its neoliberal path for much longer. If the victims of brutality aren’t getting any justice, then their anger will fester and evolve into other forms of resistance to oppression. Very soon, the conversation is going to shift to the economic alignment of the oppressive media and the militant government that enforces white supremacy. That means you will begin to see challenges to neoliberal thought in mass media conversation. Such has already happened in New York during the No New NYPD rally that was brutally repressed on Wednesday. The conversation will inevitably shift to the economic systems that make people poor and it will be to the elite’s own self inflicted demise. Shaun King and his cronies are being exposed and they are squirming in fear as a result. They won’t be able to argue it away any longer if the police continue to kill without reprieve or enforcement of ordered commands of justice. The hammer is coming down on injustice and revolution is soon upon us. You may say I’m delusional to suggest this, but you can read my psychic blog for yourself. I’ve been prescient about much up until this point and I’m right about this as well. As a consequence of not eliminating the fear of arrest and death for the masses, the end of an elite empire is coming to a nation near you. 😉
I think that’s a really thoughtful analysis and I hope you’re right. I agree, that something has to change. This narrow focus on police brutality isn’t going to work if there is no relief. But I guess I’m less optimistic than you about the effect of that.
I enjoyed your comment and I’ll check out your blog. Thanks for speaking up.
What is your blog? It’s not linked to your handle.
Hmm, that’s odd. Here. https://knowitnextpsychicpredictions.wordpress.com/
I confess this al makes me a bit sad, Tarzie, even though the information is good to know. I’d seen links to Justice Together, as well as the imprecations to join, but I never peeked in. No, most BLM folks aren’t radical or anticapitalist, save for the BlackoutCollective queers and trans, and they rock, as well as teach direct action. BaySolidarity may be as well.
http://www.alternet.org/activism/meet-badass-activist-collective-bringing-direct-action-back-black-communities
I’d been taken aback when ‘miss packnet’ (Brittany Packnet) had joined forces with Deray and Nettaaa on the Ferguson Commission, as she is a big deal in Teach for America. I remember a Twitterpic of young black folks in the Oval Office: was that the Ferguson Commission? Maybe so.
But yesterday before I came and read your post, I’d been blown away at the constant cheerleading of Obama’s eulogy for Clementa Pickney, as though he weren’t the *author* of so much of what is causing black suffering, incarceration, black school closings, and constant undermining of black employment, social safety net, and police brutality.
I’d recently posted on current Indigenous news, the new iteration of ‘Free Leonard Peltier’ and when I got on the #NativeLivesMatter hashtag, it was disturbing to see some #BLM folks telling them not to steal their brand. Some solidarity, eh?
Glen Ford suggested that ‘No Justice, No Peace’ might be a better slogan for a longer, deeper, wider, and sustained militant movement. I like it, not that I get a vote, or should.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/tamir_rice_no_justice_no_peace
Thanks for these comments. It is sad but also somewhat predictable. They can co-opt things with such speed now. Between that and the cops, there’s no air to breathe. The way BLM fights over their slogan — the suggestion being that these struggles have nothing in common — is really awful. Where did this come from? This opposition to unifying? To recognizing a common enemy. It just reproduces the old conflicts in a more modern way. I’m sure the ruling class finds it absolutely delightful.
Will read the Glen Ford piece. He’s always good.
To be fair, the objections weren’t ubiquitous on the hashtag; not nearly as wildly so as the Catron fellow’s solidarity tweeters. ‘Our suffering is worse than yours’, in that case, another great example of non-solidarity, which is why I loved the #SayHerName days, and yesterday Queer/Trans Day, or close to that, and that black women are taking the lead now, as many First Americans and youth are.
I really loved this; it made Mr. wendydavis understandably tear up numerous times.
p.s. I’d been wondering how Deray McKesson could criss-cross the nation to attend so many events; maybe now it makes some sense, *and* why there is a #GoHomeDeray hashtag, and that the MSM have noted it.
I’m not sure but what he does as well, to say the truth. Nor am I sure that it wasn’t…er…a construct, like a Red Badge of Courage, on the order of (basso profundo): “I’m so radicule that I was banned from these websites….”
https://twitter.com/hashtag/GoHomeDeray?src=hash
But self-kettling, or *knowingly* (if only unconsciously) being coopted by money or inclusion (very heady) so mirrors the greater body politik…that again, it makes me sad, rather than angry. I’ve been bothered by the meme that the victims’ famiies of the Cracker Terrorist in Charleston publicly forgave him, and what it actually means in the long run. There are so many divergent opinions over it out yonder, but I haven’t thought it through long enough to even write about it. Plus, of course, I’m neither black, nor a Christian, so…there’s that.
Wow! I had no idea.
I did, however, find it interesting how a number of people went from being unknowns to political celebrities after 2-3 weeks of Ferguson protests. I interview people on a community radio station out here in California, and after a week or so of trying to line up some of them, I realized that they had rocketed far out of my league. They were already doing CNN and the BBC. There can be natural reasons for this, but there can be other more troubling ones, too.
But there are always people outside of this nexus. The Baltimore Algebra Project and the Baltimore Bloc have done great work in Baltimore for a long time. Oakland has a lot of great groups, too.
Yes, of course there are, else there’d be no need to co-opt. I emphatically disagree that there are “natural reasons” for the prominence of some voices, though. If it were true, there would be more political variety, but invariably, the louder the signal the more conventional the politics. It’s as reliable as gravity. I think Open Society and Fitzgibbon Media are obviously pulling strings here and to very potent effect.
This seems to me like a difference of semantics. Something that could be said to be as reliable as gravity, even if only metaphorically, might itself fit a reasonable description of being natural.
When you zoom out to observe that power does indeed corrupt, for example: Power corrupts actively, that is, it seeks out that which it might corrupt. And the to-be corrupted are drawn to power, as well. There is a symbiosis involved, and a natural tension.
Having said that, however, I suddenly find myself wondering where the incorruptible are in this scenario.
Yeah, I get what you’re saying and I agree, the process by which King and McKesson become prominent does work pretty much naturally. But I think Richard was positing “natural” as opposed to subsidized by Soros or whomever. The “natural” process you are speaking of is in the same family as “subsidized by Soros.” Despite this mechanism working almost automatically, sometimes it needs additional grease. I think the sudden emergence of both Black Lives Matter and its star voices has a greased quality to it.
Initially I’d wondered how Shaun King figured into you distributed coopting calculations, perhaps mainly because he’s done some great reporting. But the other day on a break from my attention on Greece, I looked at his account. He’d gone on a vacation with his family, and announced that his ‘admin team’ would be handling his account for a week. Whoah, Nellie.
When I got emails that there were more comment on this thread this morning, I looked in again. He’s retweeting Obama rubbish, and is now following Oprah Magazine because she/they did a feature on Nettaaaaa. It’s also very dispiriting that so many of the BLM folks and allies are still so focused on the blasted Confederate flag all these days since the Cracker Terrorist’s mass murder in Charleston.
Heh; it just occurred to me if there might be some mathematical formula for the number of Selfies on a person’s account and their power-seeking behaviors. I’m thinking of ‘The Blue Vest;, for instance.
I’ve heard stuff like this before and am genuinely curious how it works. The point I made was fairly straightforward: Greenwald gives his lofty, anti-authoritarian stamp of approval to Shaun King, whose politics are demonstrably to the right of where Greenwald’s reputation situates him. I demonstrated King’s dubious politics with quotes. I then described a board of an organization he sits on that gives no evidence of being anything but a co-opting method. I don’t expect people to take my word for everything, but I don’t understand this “he does great reporting, ergo..” Curious why his delegating tweeting to administrators who tweet exactly as he tweets make you more suspicious than anything you’ve already learned.
I really don’t understand this way of approaching things.
I’d indeed forgotten the quotes by now, for one thing, including Greenwald’s heavy praise of him. But the reason that his having an admin team indicated a ‘mysterious funding source’ possibility, and caused me to think that as you’d mentioned for Chelsea Manning, that Fitzgibbon Media might be his team. He’s got three kids, and before our two left the nest, neither of us had the extra time he seems to have.
Most of the identified leaders of the BLM movement seem to be getting more tame to me as time goes by, which fits your theory well. O, for instance, had excoriated the movement for *not* having a charismatic leader or leaders ‘like in the old days’, then: bingo: an O article on Netttaaaa, and they’re following her.
Obama’s Pinkney eulogy wowed them all, never mind that he glorified the Confederate soldiers and his answers to police brutality and racism have been more of his market-tested pretty words. Do they really not understand how much of all this is by his policy authorship or failures to make their lives better since 2008 in terms of: education, black home foreclosures, incarceration for cannabis, his stupid ACA, grand bargains and the rest?
One of the voices I believe they wanted silenced in Ferguson was Bassem Masri. He went righteously ballistic on CNN a couple times, and my guess is that the tamer ones found his polemics…distressing, and bad for the movement. And Bassem was one of the main targets of the police: frequent snatch and grabs, smashed phones he was live-streaming with, multiple high fines, etc. He’s trying his luck selling life insurance these days, bless his heart, and is focused on Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.
But sorry that I’d forgotten some of what you’d written; it’s just how it goes for me these days. It feels as though there may have been something else I’d meant to add, but I can’t remember what.
Ah, yes. I just peeked into his account, and this seems to be his answer; I stand corrected:
@ShaunKing
“I’ve started and sold three motherfucking businesses. I have a book published by a national publishing house. I have three jobs.”
I wanted to come back to this because even though I deactivated I went and took a look at Michael “No I swear there’s not a lucrative career in this after I burnt my police bridges” A Wood Jr’s page and he’s swelled to nearly 12k followers and is not only aggressively retweeting Deray and Shaun King they’re tweeting back and forth.
God bless America and God bless the Good Cops
You recidivist you.
Fuck all these people.
I’ve discovered I really like not tweeting or having to read these shitlords get RT’d by people who genuinely don’t like reading but sure like typing/slamming touchscreens with fingers.
Now I find myself checking to see if you’ve posted anything new and reading shit like http://fables-of-faubus.com/
I don’t know anyone who regretted quitting Twitter. Sassy talks about it like a mental illness he got through. He’s so much lighter now. It’s almost inspiring.
I love that fables of faubus blogger. He stops by here from time to time. He left quite a lot of good stuff in some of the Graeber threads. He’s on Twitter, too, but I think infrequently and that shouldn’t matter to you anyway.
In fact Facebook is probably going to fucking get it now too
I did that one ages ago. I just hated it.
Forgive the quoting of my own aphorism (but): The good cop is the one who offers you a cigarette after the other’s electrocuted your genitals.
That is an interesting observation, that that’s essentially the role Wood is playing here.
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I don’t like it, I haven’t liked it since I first saw the hashtag. The worst of the worst perpetrators of abysmal bigotry, so violent and the depths of racist ugliness, have been flaunting the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter like they care, they DO NOT.
I would like also to ask you about what you think about this Encryption craze, something so fishy is up with that, the latest: https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/627656990752313345
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