U.S. Fascism – Chapter Five

Summer Protest

U.S. fascism used its many tools to subdue the widespread civil unrest of summer 2020.

Defund

The ruling classes of the United Kingdom and the nascent United States had a serious problem on their hands in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Facing hundreds of diverse protestors uniting against the economic system, the ruling classes came up with a solution: Elevate working-class whites over blacks.

Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin explains that when “European indentured servants joined with Blacks to rebel against their lot in the late 1600s, the propertied class decided to ‘free’ them by giving them a special status as ‘whites’ and thus a stake in the system of oppression.” The new social status and material incentives kept these lower classes in line. “Even poor whites had aspirations of doing better, since their social mobility was ensured by the new system. This social mobility, however, was on the backs of the African slaves, who were super-exploited.”

Ervin continues:

“When they sought to organize unions or for higher wages in the North or South, white laborers were slapped down by the rich, who used enslaved Black labor as their primary mode of production. The so-called ‘free’ labor of the white worker did not stand a chance. Although the Capitalists used the system of white skin privilege to great effect to divide the working class, the truth is that the Capitalists only favored white workers to use them against their own interests, not because there was true ‘white’ class unity.”

This implementation of racism prevented the working class from uniting.

In the 1790s, the white population of Charleston, South Carolina, established the first formal police unit. This unit, the Watch and Guard, monitored and controlled slave movement in the majority black city. Policing expanded and evolved during Reconstruction and into the Jim Crow era, monitoring and controlling the black population. Though anti-racism struggles altered the layout of U.S. society over time, the role of law enforcement remained the same: In enforcing capitalist law and the inequality inherent to capitalism, law enforcement protects the property of corporations and the wealthy and suppresses popular protests that want to change the economic system.

Law enforcement professionals often display racist behavior. For years, members of law enforcement in Torrance, California, sent one another racist and homophobic text messages and images. Training materials used by the Kentucky State Police featured quotes from Adolf Hitler and Robert E. Lee and advocated for a “ruthless” warrior mindset in policing. The Minneapolis Police Department, former employer of the Derek Chauvin who murdered George Floyd about two months into the pandemic (25 May 2020), carried out discriminatory, race-based policing. Local and state law enforcement across the country regularly posted violent and racist messages and imagery online.

The summer 2020 civil rights protests didn’t spring up out of nowhere. They rose against the backdrop of dismal living conditions that U.S. fascism creates when funneling tax dollars away from programs of public need (e.g., education, nutrition, housing, infrastructure) and into war, espionage, and policing. Policies that had hit families of color particularly hard included housing demolition, housing privatization, and the subprime mortgage crisis, which wiped out most black wealth.

Defunding the police is about putting resources toward helping the poor and working class (food, shelter, clean water, education, job opportunities) instead of militarized policing. As one protestor put it, defunding the police is about creating “systems that actually protect and serve, not just some but all… Abolish the police in favor of whatever that new service will be, whatever that new service is that resembles justice that the people decide on.” Less money for law enforcement does not correspond to an increase in crime.¹

Many viewed the federal government’s response to the 2020 protests as uniquely Trumpian. This was not accurate. The fascist response to the uprising was part of a deep tradition, one which included operating against anarchists, socialists, and communists, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, the Occupy movement, the Ferguson protests, and more. U.S. fascism responds with the same intent no matter who is in the White House. The blowhard in the White House during summer 2020 did, however, make handling the popular uprisings more difficult. A sophisticated Executive would have wielded the state’s tools subtly, with an eye for the long-term.

Media Focus

Activity is criminal in the United States if capitalist politicians make it so via legislation. Capitalist crime (embezzlement, financial fraud, price fixing, price gouging, union busting, wage theft, industrial pollution, war profiteering, commodification of all life) is far bigger than working-class crime (burglary, larceny, robbery, vehicle theft), but the state does not consider much of the former to be criminal or prosecute it as such.

The U.S. government hurts the public in a variety of ways also not considered criminal. For example, it does not assertively regulate big business. It also refuses to implement universal healthcare, leading to tens of thousands of deaths each year.² Washington’s priority is spending tax dollars on optional wars that kill civilians overseas and the U.S. public. (The wars kill U.S. troops directly. The wars kill U.S. citizens and residents indirectly, as tax dollars that could go toward programs that save lives, such as healthcare, housing, and nutrition, instead go toward war and espionage. The pollution from the military and the war industry kills U.S. citizens and residents, too.) Washington also wages a “war on drugs” that disproportionally polices and imprisons people of color.

Though law enforcement treated the public brutally during the summer 2020 protests,³ corporate media often presented this violence in gentler terms. Euphemisms included aggressive tactics, clashes, forceful arrests, heavy presence, rough treatment, and strong response.

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting analyzed how corporate media covered police brutality.

The protests were largely peaceful,⁴ but looting took place at a relatively small number of locations. As the Hampton Institute pointed out, “You can't commodify every single aspect of living and then not understand looting as a legitimate form of protest. Looting is the ultimate strike against a system that deems mass-produced objects to be far more precious than life itself.”

The Secretary of Defense addressed looting:

“Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here… And for suddenly the biggest problem in the world to be looting is really notable.”

Of course, this was Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talking years prior—on Friday, 11 April 2003—about Iraqis looting in Baghdad during the early days of the U.S. military occupation.

“While no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who have had members of their family killed by that regime, for them to be taking their feelings out on that regime,” Rumsfeld concluded.

Economist Richard Wolff contextualized looting within the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic:

“When you throw 40 million people out of work in nine weeks, you are looting lives. You are depriving people of the most precious things they have: their security, their jobs, their incomes, their mental and physical health, their savings, if they have any.”

Compared to such looting of the U.S. public, “taking a television from a broken window in a storefront is nothing. It’s tiny.”

In the Ranks

“It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin,” President Harry Truman ordered in July 1948. “This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.”

President Truman’s Executive Order 9981 thereby directed the U.S. military to integrate. The U.S. officer corps took its time implementing this order. Only when the Korean War heated up and the ruling class needed more fighters did U.S. military leadership fully commit to ending segregation.

Racism remained.

Heading into the summer 2020 protests, racism reportedly pervaded the institutions of higher military learning, like the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where future officers study and train.⁵ Even the nomination process to get into the military academies seemed to favor white applicants over applicants of other ethnic backgrounds.⁶ The troops were regularly racist toward their peers, polling indicated.⁷ People of color in the military even turned down assignments due to concerns over racism. The military judicial system was a barrier to fixing this terrible situation.⁸

On a personal note, some relevant moments I experienced in the military included the time a field-grade military officer told our table during transition assistance class, “As a Christian, I say we kill them all and take the oil,” and the time a military linguist said of the 2008-2009 Israeli massacre of Gaza, “That’s how you do it. No mercy.”

Different genders and skin colors are permitted in the top ranks of the military, intelligence agencies, and the war industry. Representation does not change the structural necessity: nonstop war. (The Pentagon with a black leader still used drones to kill Africans; the CIA with a female director still pursued regime change abroad; and a massive corporation with a female CEO still made record profits in the business of war.) Diverse ideology—i.e. anti-capitalist and/or acknowledging that the business of war must end in order for the species to have a chance at survival—is not permitted in the top ranks.

Nevertheless, leaders of the military-industrial complex did not reflect the country’s racial diversity in 2020.

• The highest officer ranks were mostly white. Of the military’s 42 most senior commanders, the New York Times reported in August 2020, two were black and one—General Paul Nakasone, leading the agency eavesdropping on the world’s electronic communications—was second-generation Japanese American.⁹

• The war industry’s top executives were mostly white, I determined when studying the leadership of the ten most profitable U.S. war corporations in July 2023.

And 67 of the 72 judges ever appointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves federal requests for domestic surveillance warrants, were white.¹⁰

Some of the RTX board of directors.

Reform (to enhance recruitment)

During summer 2020, U.S. military leadership rewarded people of color who had previously demonstrated adherence to institutional violence. After Lieutenant Madeline Swegle completed her final tactical training flight on 7 July 2020, commander of Naval Air Forces, Vice Admiral DeWolfe “Bullet” Miller, called her “a courageous trailblazer” who “answered the call to defend our nation from the air.” Diversity in naval aviation “makes us a stronger fighting force.” In August 2020, General Charles Brown Jr. became the first black chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force. His previous commands had included multiple leadership positions in Central Command, helping to lead the massive air war killing thousands of brown people across the greater Middle East.¹¹ In the same month, JoAnne Bass rose to the rank of Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, the first ever of Asian-American lineage. Bass had deployed multiple times in support of military operations in southwest Asia, including those harming Iraqis. Chief Master Sergeant Bass and General Brown would be good stewards of military-industrial hostility against China and Russia, the Air Force indicated in standard euphemism.¹² The Army closed out the year by putting a black woman in charge of the 7th Mission Support Command in Germany to coordinate U.S. military logistics across dozens of countries, from the Baltic Sea through North Africa.

Military leadership’s priority was implementing bureaucratic reforms abetting recruitment and retention. On Tuesday, 14 July, Secretary Mark Esper, formerly a Raytheon executive, issued new policies against discrimination and bias in the Armed Forces (pdf). Steps included removing photographs from the promotion process, upgrading equal opportunity policy, reviewing hairstyle regulations, and expanding awareness training. “Diversity and inclusivity in the ranks… are fundamental necessities to our readiness and our mission success,” Esper’s memorandum explained.

The Air Force in August mandated that all new gear and weaponry be designed to better fit the body size of most potential U.S. recruits, making aircrew career fields more accessible to people of color and women. Will Roper, in charge of Air Force acquisition at the time, affirmed that this design change was a strategic imperative to improve recruitment during military buildup against China. The head of Air Force Recruiting soon stressed how important diversity was for improved warfighting.¹³

The highest-ranking Marine officer confirmed in autumn 2020 that diversity in the military’s ranks was about effective military operations.

On Wednesday, 23 September 2020, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger explained why the Marines were embracing diversity.

Moral High Ground

The fascist state must demonize and spread fear about the foreigner—Vietnamese, Nicaraguan, Iraqi, Somali, Russian, whomever—in order to build support for the wars against that foreigner. The U.S. working class cannot rally against or fight a foreigner they understand, empathize with, or love. This building block of permanent warfare is fairly well known.

An underreported aspect of permanent warfare is how the U.S. government has kicked diverse peoples off their land in order to establish military installations. It stole land in Guam, compensating locals a paltry sum or nothing at all. It took the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. It stole Vieques, Puerto Rico, turning it into a bombing range, which the locals eventually succeeded in closing, but not before the exploded ordnance had poisoned the soil and water. It teamed up with the Danish government to remove the Inughuit to make way for Thule Air Base in northwest Greenland. And with the U.K. it removed Chagossians from an archipelago in the Indian Ocean in order to set up what is now called Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia.

Today, nothing has changed. For example, the militarization of space, part of the fascist state’s elective Cold War against Beijing and Moscow, has harmed people of color when building up Earth-based infrastructure. City government in cooperation with federal designs used eminent domain to confiscate land in a predominantly black neighborhood of North St. Louis for the construction of a massive new NGA headquarters.¹⁴ The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is in charge of mapping the world from space and distributing this information for military and intelligence objectives, including locating and killing people in Africa and Asia. According to the U.S. census, residents of wealthy (mostly white) western St. Louis County typically lived into their mid-80s, while life expectancy in portions of (mostly black) northern St. Louis County was only 60-some years of age.¹⁵

Though racism was rife in the U.S. military and foundational to the wars, officials at the top of the fascist structure claimed the moral high ground during the summer 2020 protests. U.S. military leadership—including Secretary Mark Esper (former Raytheon executive) and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy (former Lockheed Martin executive) and four-star officers about to join the war industry in retirement—issued letters, tweets, and video recordings.

Hypocrisy clouded the gestures of the few leaders who might have meant well. On 1 June, the top enlisted leader of the branch of the U.S. military that had been bombing the Middle East for decades, tweeted:

“Who am I? I am a Black man who happens to be the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force. I am George Floyd... I am Philando Castile, I am Michael Brown, I am Alton Sterling, I am Tamir Rice… Just like most of the Black Airmen and so many others in our ranks ... I am outraged at watching another Black man die on television before our very eyes.”

This Chief Master Sergeant, Kaleth Wright, then expressed his “greatest fear,” that young black airmen might too be shot by police. The white Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General David Goldfein, quickly sent a memo in support of Chief Master Sergeant Wright to Air Force commanders in which he called George Floyd’s death a “national tragedy.” General Goldfein would soon retire and join the massive financial firm Blackstone, which profits from many industries, including war. Known for throwing its weight around in order to defeat democratic initiatives, Blackstone reportedly allocated millions of dollars to help defeat Proposition 10, which would have let California cities enact greater rent control laws—laws that would’ve helped people of color and the working class more broadly.

Retired black generals spoke up in favor of U.S. civil rights, but their career contributions to the killing of black and brown foreigners showed duplicity.¹⁶

Militants-turned-profiteers condemned President Donald Trump’s support for violence against the protestors, though each—including former Secretary of Defense retired General James Mattis (on the board of General Dynamics), former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs retired Admiral Mike Mullen (on GM, Sprint, and Afiniti boards), former chief of Special Operations Command retired Admiral William McRaven (on the board of ConocoPhillips and later Palantir), former Supreme Allied Commander Europe retired Admiral James Stavridis (Carlyle Group executive), and former Secretary of Homeland Security retired General John Kelly (on the board of the private equity firm DC Capital Partners)—had overseen elective military and intelligence operations against countries filled with black or brown people. Stavridis and Kelly had even run U.S. Southern Command, a primary instrument of U.S. military hegemony in Latin America.

CIA played the role of the benevolent uncle, counseling, concerned. On 2 June 2020, Greg Miller in a Washington Post piece titled “CIA veterans who monitored crackdowns abroad see troubling parallels in Trump’s handling of protests,” led off:

“In interviews and posts on social media in recent days, current and former U.S. intelligence officials have expressed dismay at the similarity between events at home and the signs of decline or democratic regression they were trained to detect in other nations.”

A former CIA analyst in charge of monitoring China: “This is what autocrats do. This is what happens in countries before a collapse. It really does unnerve me.” A former CIA official who had led operations in Asia said of the government violently clearing protestors so President Trump could hold a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, “It reminded me of what I reported on for years in the third world… Saddam. Bashar. Qaddafi. They all did this.”

Former members of an organization at the core of U.S. fascism—not to mention, the organization is arguably the most successful terrorist organization in human history in terms of people killed and political violence carried out—position themselves as a benevolent force concerned about “democracy.”

Three days later, in a Washington Post opinion piece titled “89 former defense officials: The military must never be used to violate constitutional rights,” giants of the fascist state condemned President Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and rumored plans to use active-duty military against the protestors. The authors included former secretaries of defense, former high-ranking Pentagon civilians and four-star officers, former heads of intelligence agencies, and former top military lawyers. Prominent among them were former Pentagon and CIA chief Leon Panetta, former director of CIA and NSA Michael Hayden, and revolving door virtuosi Michèle Flournoy and Robert Work. Many of the 89 signatories were working in corporations profiting from ongoing war. It was unclear how many held stock in war corporations.

On that same day, hundreds of former government officials, including many top diplomats and military figures, took a stand in the online forum Just Security against the use of active-duty military to quell the protests. These 612 officials cited their pride in the “Strength of America’s Apolitical Military,” omitting the fact that the military was indeed a political instrument used to foil other countries’ self-determination while profiting Corporate America. On Tuesday, 9 June, a group of 38 retired U.S. admirals and generals published a separate open letter via the interventionist nonprofit Human Rights First, stating, “Like the deployment of troops abroad, their deployment at home should only be a last resort.”

Such posturing was part of the larger effort to employ platitude and superficial diversity as a means of steering the fascist ship while isolating the disruptive presence of an uncouth authoritarian in the White House.

Pretending to Care

Big business benefits from selling to law enforcement and from the essential job of law enforcement (protecting corporate property, crushing a restive working class, and enforcing the capitalist status quo). Big business even funds police foundations. Foundations purchase products—weaponry, gear, surveillance equipment—outside of municipal and state oversight and then route these products to law enforcement. This corporate funding of police foundations is in addition to already massive U.S. law enforcement budgets.

Within profitable boundaries (e.g., statements of unity, financial pledges, establishing committees), massive corporations tried to capitalize on the protests. Nike social media altered its Just Do It slogan to say, “For once, don't do it. Don't pretend there's not a problem in America.” YouTube suddenly displayed, “We stand in solidarity against racism and violence.” The CEO of Uber tweeted her corporation’s stance “in solidarity with the Black community and with peaceful protests against the injustice and racism that have plagued our nation for too long.” Apple pledged $100 million to create a racial equality and justice initiative. The CEO of Walmart pledged $100 million to create a center for racial equity. And on and on.

The adoption of slogans and wording of racial progress in ways that do not threaten capitalist exploitation is called blackwashing. It is about “firms trying to expand their market share through expressions of care and concern,” political science professor Dr. Cedric Johnson explained. Blackwashing distracts from the many ways that big business harms the poor and working class: exploitation of workers (including black workers), union busting, pollution, buying up real estate and then jacking up the price in order to profit from housing, distribution of processed foods causing obesity, lobbying (e.g., to block implementation of universal healthcare), food waste, and the gutting of the social safety net.

Not a single large vocal corporation—from Amazon to Walmart—changed its capitalist business model during or after the protests.

Top war-industry executives played the game quite well. Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes: “Although authorities are taking action to ensure justice, the national response and global dialogue related to Mr. [George] Floyd’s death point to a serious issue ― and we must not look away… We have to respond clearly that racism, discrimination and hatred will not be tolerated. We must take this moment to embrace the fundamental values that unite us.” Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden: “I am deeply saddened and concerned about the acts of senseless violence against Black men and women in our society. I know many of you are struggling right now, and I want you to know that on behalf of our company and as an individual, I stand with you. Now is the time for unity.” Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson was “shocked and deeply saddened watching the recent events surrounding the tragic death of George Floyd and the ensuing protests and unrest across the United States.” She affirmed, “The reaction of anger, shock, and frustration in communities across the nation has created a moment for each of us to assess how we engage, interact, respect and value each other as human beings.”¹⁷

The Chief Executive of Raytheon Technologies issued a statement on 10 June 2020. The corporation is now known as RTX. It’s the #2 corporation in the business.

L3Harris CEO Bill Brown wrote:

“We stand resolutely against racism in all its forms. We denounce senseless deaths and affirm unequivocally that acts of discrimination, hatred or violence will not be tolerated at L3Harris. We commit to living our values of integrity, excellence and respect. We do what is right. Always.”

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, which was one of the primary institutional holders of war industry stock, wrote:

“The past few weeks have been deeply painful for the black community. I am appalled – as is anyone who cares about diversity, fairness and justice – by the events of the last few weeks involving racial injustice in the U.S.”

None mentioned that technology from the war industry helped monitor the 2020 protests in the U.S. and killed black and brown people overseas.

Journalists as Adversaries

Corporate media function more as stenographers of U.S. authority than as investigative bodies. Commonplace is the practice of writing entire stories based on the assertions of high-level military and/or intelligence officials. Veteran journalist Robert Fisk explained this phenomenon in 2013 from the perspective of an on-the-ground reporter far removed from Washington:

“It’s like Americans are living in this kind of fantasy world that bears no relation to planet Earth where I’m trying to report. This is getting steadily worse, and I think one of the problems is, as I say, this parasitic, osmotic relationship between journalists and power: our ever-growing ability, our wish… to rely on these utterly bankrupt comments from various unnamed anonymous intelligence sources.”

Fisk highlighted this problem by mocking a prominent piece published in one western daily: “U.S. intelligence officials said, a senior U.S. intelligence official said, U.S. officials said, the intelligence officials said…” He concluded, “We might as well name our newspapers ‘Officials Say.’ This is the cancer at the bottom of modern journalism, that we do not challenge power anymore.” More broadly, large corporate media networks help the fascist state when creating and inflating threats and spreading fear as part of their quest to attract viewers and clicks.

The U.S. government is a threat to the few dogged investigative journalists who remain. The primary inward manifestation of the fascist state (typically referred to as the surveillance state), in which U.S. government agencies utilizing goods and services from the war industry spy electronically on the public, chills the press. Sources are afraid to leak important information or speak up and journalists are afraid to dig. Bye-bye goes the journalism that relies on dissent to expose government deceit and the destructive behavior of big business.

A clear example of fascism harming journalism is the U.S. government’s treatment of Julian Assange, the journalist who established the anti-secrecy publisher WikiLeaks. Wikileaks publishes information, some of which incriminates the U.S. ruling class. The U.S. government uses the Espionage Act of 1917 (originally passed during the First World War to stifle antiwar, working-class organizing) to persecute whistleblowers, such as Chelsea Manning, and courageous journalists, such as Julian Assange. The act does not allow defendants to point out that it is in the public’s interest to learn of the information released. The fact that Assange isn’t a U.S. citizen, and therefore the Espionage Act doesn’t apply to him, is irrelevant to a fascist structure.

CIA spied on Assange (and senior CIA officials reportedly discussed killing him) when he was sheltering in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.¹⁸ He was later ripped from the embassy and imprisoned in Prison Belmarsh.

Harming Assange sent a message to all journalists: Think twice before engaging in hard-nosed journalism about permanent warfare or publishing candid information about the way U.S. authority functions. After years of persecution, Assange was allowed to return to his home country of Australia in June 2024. The precedents had been set: 1) years of persecution and 2) a requirement that he plead guilty to conspiracy to obtain and disclose “national defense information.”

Another dogged journalist who reported honestly about the nature of the permanent warfare state, Mumia Abu-Jamal, has spent over four decades behind bars. In prison for allegedly murdering a police officer, Abu-Jamal received what is widely considered an unfair trial—one riddled with prosecutorial misconduct.

Painting by Caitlin Johnstone.

Superficial adjustments convince members of the public that the government responds to public need and is capable of reform. A training course on operational security (steps to protect information), mandatory for all military personnel, referred to protesters and journalists as “adversaries.” The Pentagon later changed the language in the mandatory course from “adversaries” to “unauthorized recipients.” Elsewhere, DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis produced intel reports on journalists who were covering the 2020 protests in Portland, Oregon. DHS later replaced the official in charge of the Office. The 45th President of the United States employed four press secretaries whose inconstant, often abrasive, dispositions displeased many in the press pool who were used to polished liberal comportment. The 46th President then employed public relations masters, comfortable with establishment media, who helped pitch and spin all-time record military funding and more war abroad. Neither changing language nor replacing personnel alters the underlying fascist structure.

Monitoring journalists is commonplace.¹⁹

Killing journalists is not taboo. The U.S military killed Al Jazeera journalist Tariq Ayoub and cameramen Taras Protsyuk of Reuters and José Couso of Telecinco during the early stages of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Independent journalists like Terry Lloyd died in crossfire. A U.S. gunship murdered Namir Noor Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh in Iraq on 12 July 2007, the video of which Wikileaks later released. Journalists who went along with (“embedded with”) the U.S. military were safer.

Law enforcement arrested and attacked journalists during the 2020 protests. In the final two days of May alone, police harassed, attacked, or arrested journalists in over 60 separate incidents, according to the Radio Television Digital News Association. It didn’t matter if journalists identified themselves as press or not. Law enforcement even slashed journalists’ tires in Minneapolis, Minnesota.²⁰

Other notable incidents included police arresting a CNN reporter and crew in Minneapolis and pepper-spraying a reporter from Louisville’s NBC WAVE-3 in the face. Joe Concha of The Hill tallied that in the six days following George Floyd’s murder eight Associated Press journalists were hurt, including those shot by rubber bullets, punched, or knocked to the ground. Law enforcement also practiced catch and release, wherein they rounded up and detained journalists, preventing them from documenting the protests and police brutality, only to release them later, sometimes with their media equipment and sometimes without. Uncompromising antifascist groups covering the protests on the ground, such as ItsGoingDown and CrimeThinc, were kicked off social media.

The following summer, Attorney General Merrick Garland banned federal prosecutors who conduct leak investigations from seizing journalists’ records. Several press freedom groups celebrated this ban, missing the fine print. Garland’s ban gave the fascist structure plenty of leeway. Federal prosecutors could still seize a journalist’s records if the federal government asserted that the reporter had obtained information in an illegal way, if the federal government deemed or suspected a reporter was working for a terrorist organization or a foreign power, if the federal government was investigating the reporter for unrelated activities, or if the situation involved imminent risk. This “ban” was a textbook example of the Democratic faction’s valuable legal sustenance of U.S. fascism.

Outside Enemy

The dumbing down of political discourse is prevalent in fascist societies, from Italy in the 1920s to the United States one hundred years later.²¹

The dumbing down of political discourse in the U.S. took many forms: massive misinformation regarding the coronavirus and the relative efficacy of various drugs combatting it; unsubstantiated allegations from senior U.S. intelligence officials and the Democratic faction that Moscow had been key to President Donald Trump’s 2016 election; unsubstantiated allegations from the Republican faction that President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election; and capitalist media polluting large swaths of the working class with lies regarding the goals and intentions of Left forces, including but not limited to the summer 2020 civil rights protests. Adherents to both capitalist political factions dismissed inconvenient facts as “fake news,” while genuine fake news—the superrich using media to steer the masses away from systemic change—ran wild.

Fascism requires an outside enemy against which to rally the public. In the case of U.S. fascism, the ruling class made the working class ignorant through dismal public education, bread and circus (innutritious food + Hollywood), and media-induced enmity (FoxNews v. CNN). Since World War II, the outside enemy had variously been communists, socialists, Muslims, Arabs, Cuba, Iran, China, Russia, and more. People who viewed such groups as enemies did not necessarily know what those groups stood for. Socialism, many in the U.S. believed, was equivalent to totalitarianism or the government providing public services. Anarchism, many in the U.S. believed, was chaos and looting. Cultivated ignorance was fascist success.

As the mass movement for civil rights took off in late spring 2020, officials invoked familiar baddies, which had the effect of demonizing the movement and justifying the ongoing crackdown against black-led protest.

• Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice spoke to CNN: “We have peaceful protesters focused on the very real pain and disparities that we are all wrestling with that have to be addressed and then we have extremists who have come to try to hijack those protests and turn them into something very different. And they probably also, I would bet based on my experience—I’m not reading the intelligence today, or these days—but based on my experience, this is right out of the Russian playbook as well. But we can't allow the extremists, the foreign actors, to distract from the real problems we have in this country that are longstanding, centuries-old and need to be addressed responsibly by new leadership.”

• John Cohen, senior DHS official turned ABC News contributor, avowed, “This is yet another indicator that Russia is using the combination of overt propaganda and covertly disseminated disinformation to sow discord across our populace, expand the cracks in our society, and undermine the credibility of the U.S. government.”

• Chair of the Intelligence Committee in the House of Representatives, Adam Schiff (D-CA), closed out the summer by informing CNN viewers that the “Russians four years ago exploited Black Lives Matter. They set up their own false flags online to try to divide people along racial lines… They are once again doing their best on social media, in their overt media, and other means to grow these divisions again.”

These assertions insulted the intelligence of African Americans and/or downplayed the country’s institutionalized racism.

The bloated system lacked coordinated messaging. A DHS memorandum dated 1 June 2020 framed claims of police brutality as largely “foreign influence activity,” including the work of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state media. DHS officials tried to tie antifascists to a foreign power, an internal DHS intel report indicated.²² Designating a U.S. person or group “sponsored by a foreign power” activates substantial legal authorities regarding greater monitoring and detention. The Mayor of Minneapolis (@MayorFrey) tweeted without evidence, “We are now confronting white supremacists, members of organized crime, out of state instigators, and possibly even foreign actors to destroy and destabilize our city and our region.” An internal CBP document invoked the ever-present demon of drug traffickers: “[D]ue to nefarious actors and drug trafficking organizations using these protests as façades, there have been incidents where law enforcement (LE) officials have needed to respond with nonlethal and escalated force…” The CBP document also asked, “What is the level of state-sponsored influence? To what extent are domestic terrorist organizations involved with the protests?” Without evidence, the White House and Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) pointed fingers at a perennial bogeyman, the Venezuelan government.

The first casualty of war is truth, and a nation at war 24/7/365 since World War II had no truth remaining.

Criminalizing Protest

The Democratic faction offered verbal support to the protestors while stifling the protestors legislatively. Curfews were a favorite tactic at the local level. Novel tactics included the use of “influencers” and social media campaigns. Democratic performances included kneeling while wearing traditional African garb in the Capitol Visitor Center, spinning police brutality as a uniquely Trump phenomenon, and taking photographs with street murals—all while increasing federal law enforcement funding and deflecting attention away from capitalism and the role that law enforcement played in sustaining that economic system.

“Watch them,” the political analyst Caitlin Johnstone advised early on.

“Watch Democrats and their allied media and corporate institutions try to sell the public a bunch of words and a smattering of feeble, impotent legislation to mollify the masses, without ever giving the people the real changes that they actually need… It’s much easier to control a populace with false promises and empty words than with brute force…”

And that’s exactly what happened. A faction within the fascist structure funneled fury into belief in the political establishment.

Law enforcement personnel, meanwhile, were quick to view community organizing, protestors’ defensive precautions, and political speech as threatening, official documents made available in the release known as BlueLeaks revealed. Law enforcement communications (e.g., activity alerts, intel notes, memoranda, situational reports) circulated partisan news accounts and social media that hyped unsubstantiated threats to police and/or completely misrepresented the nature of protest activity. (The documents also tabulated, collated, and disseminated information regarding police officers’ minor injuries, but offered no attempts to do the same regarding the great and widespread harm done to protestors.) This created an environment in which law enforcement believed themselves to be threatened and even under armed attack, justifying even greater warlike mentality and presence.

Civilians in charge of armed bureaucracies stoked fear. In June, Acting CBP commissioner Mark Morgan (@CBPMarkMorgan) tweeted a picture of law enforcement personnel inside a federal building in D.C. alongside the caption, “These ‘protests’ have devolved into chaos & acts of domestic terrorism by groups of radicals & agitators. @CBP is answering the call and will work to keep DC safe.” In July, DHS’ Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli (@HomelandKen) shared images via social media of items confiscated from Portland demonstrators: “Here is a shield and a couple of gas masks from a rioter arrested in Portland. Not a sign with a slogan that someone expressing their first amendment rights might carry, but preparations for violence. Peaceful protester? I don’t think so.”²³

As the federal government is comprised of bureaucrats and personnel of varying aptitude and intelligence, some who invoke the threat of terrorism are likely genuinely ignorant. The ruling class and political appointees atop these bureaucracies, however, do understand the nature of antifascism. Their invocation of the threat of terrorism is not due to ignorance. It is a tried and true trick: Conflate dissent with terrorism in order to crack down on portions of the working class who are mobilized and advocating for systemic change.

Domestic terrorism is “any act of violence that is dangerous to human life or potentially destructive of critical infrastructure or key resources” and that aims to intimidate or coerce the public or a government body, according to DHS.²⁴

The FBI monitors nonviolent anti-pollution protestors as part of tracking of domestic terrorism. Government and industry mobilize law enforcement to repel humans who peacefully protest against fossil fuel infrastructure or try to change the polluting status quo.²⁵

The judicial system even applies “terrorism enhancements” against people protesting polluting projects. A terrorism enhancement greatly increases the possible length of a prison sentence. After protesting peacefully for a number of years, Jessica Reznicek, a member of the Catholic Worker Movement, damaged fossil fuel infrastructure in 2016. Judges applied a terrorism enhancement against Reznicek after 84 members of U.S. Congress (having together received a combined $36 million in campaign funding from the fossil fuel industry) wrote to the U.S. Attorney General in 2017 requesting that people who tamper with fossil fuel infrastructure be prosecuted as domestic terrorists.²⁶

The fascist state, we see, defines terrorism in terms favorable to big business and then pursues the terrorists.

From coast to coast, crying wolf (“extremism!”, “terrorism!”) when cracking down on the popular 2020 protests was the norm. A fusion center in the state of Maine monitored citizens and residents going about their daily lives. The commissioner of the Maine Public Safety Department defended this surveillance, asserting that sharing intelligence about “domestic violent extremism” was a crucial part of fusion-center activity.²⁷ An “intelligence bulletin” issued by law enforcement in Pierce County, Washington, and reportedly prepared using information from FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces, listed antifascists alongside the likes of white supremacist groups and the so-called Islamic State. (Antifascists had not been linked to a single murder in the U.S.) Similarly, a U.S. military counterterrorism training document conflated socialists and anarchists with neo-Nazis—all lumped in the category of “political terrorists.”

The state’s criminalization of the summer 2020 protests involved handing down lengthy sentences and terrorism charges.²⁸

One masked woman—who neither threatened nor harmed anyone—was seen setting a police vehicle on fire during protests in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. But how to find the masked menace? The FBI reviewed helicopter footage from local news, which showed a woman a throwing debris, aflame, through the shattered window of a police cruiser. FBI officials then searched for more video and images of the protests, which had been uploaded to social media, and spotted a tattoo on the woman’s right forearm, a peace sign. In other images, law enforcement found clearer depictions of the woman with the peace-sign tattoo. Her unique t-shirt featured anti-racist messages. The custom shirt, sold by an Etsy store, led to a customer’s five-star review. The customer’s username when entered into a search engine revealed comparable usernames on other online marketplaces and led to a LinkedIn profile. The woman soon arrested was Lore-Elisabeth Blumenthal. Her lawyer described the prosecution as “political” after she was charged at the federal level instead of locally. Blumenthal was sentenced to thirty months in prison, two years of probation, and restitution payments of over $96,000. Blumenthal’s experience is a warning to anyone considering violence in the age of ubiquitous cameras and social media.²⁹

Photo by Cullan Smith on Unsplash

Charging protestors with violations of federal law was one of the many tools used to target people who had protested in support of civil rights. After examining the 326 criminal cases that U.S. federal prosecutors filed over alleged conduct related to the protests, 31 May to 25 October 2020, the Movement for Black Lives and Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility determined that the federal government had “spread anti-BLM propaganda and cast protestors as ‘violent radicals’ in order to seize power in local communities and charge protestors with inflated federal indictments that carry significantly harsher penalties than local charges.” Most charges were for non-violent offenses or for property destruction that never threatened a single human. In 92.6% of the cases examined there were equivalent charges at the state level that could have been brought against defendants. And among those 92.6% of cases, 88% of the federal charges carried harsher potential sentences than equivalent state criminal charges. Known data indicated that black people were dramatically overrepresented in the people charged.

Government prosecution of “domestic terrorism” rose dramatically after summer 2020.

Physical Crackdown

Expanded legal authorities formed the foundation of the federal response to the summer 2020 protests. Normally restricted to implementing federal drug law, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was granted authority, which the government assured was temporary, to “conduct covert surveillance,” gather intelligence, intervene in protests, and “enforce any federal crime committed as a result of protests over the death of George Floyd,” a DEA memorandum indicated.³⁰

DHS leadership authorized personnel to gather information about protesters it assessed to be threatening to statues or memorials, whether or not the commemoratives were located on federal property. The Washington Post noted that this was a massive expansion of legal authorities that had been initially legislated in order to protect landmarks from international terrorism. DHS was reportedly not authorized to engage in signals intelligence (the use of war industry technology to snoop on foes’ electronic communications), though it was able to ask other federal units and corporate contractors to do so. In asserting the Executive Branch’s right to deploy federal agents into U.S. cities, the White House press secretary invoked capitalist legal code: “40 U.S. Code 1315 gives DHS the ability to deputize officers in any department or agency, like ICE, Custom and Border Patrol and Secret Service.”

The fascist state’s secret police covered the country. The New York Police Department (NYPD) arrested people for misdemeanors and petty violations at protests, including charges that people were violating city curfew, after which the FBI and plainclothes NYPD intelligence personnel interrogated the arrestees about their political beliefs, particularly their views of antifascism. Aside from beating protestors, NYPD, captured on video, tricked people into entering vehicles that looked like taxis at which point NYPD arrested them for breaking curfew. FBI officials, after determining that a North Carolina resident who had tweeted jokingly to FBI Twitter accounts was just tweeting in solidarity with the protests, inquired if he’d be willing to be an informant.³¹

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz indicated that NSA was providing “intelligence support,” including communications intercepts. A federal task force, which included DHS Intelligence and Analysis, reportedly intercepted protestors’ phone calls in Portland, Oregon. Regarding a cloning procedure that facilitates interception of cellphone communications, one former intel officer stated, “You’re getting an inside view into your targets, who they are, who they’re talking to—the hierarchy.”

Government snipers were authorized to open fire on the public at George Floyd’s funeral on 9 June 2020, as an FBI surveillance aircraft circled the skies. The FBI assisted Seattle police in clearing out the main protest encampment in the city, according to the Seattle Police Chief. The FBI infiltrated the protest movements in Portland, Oregon, as early as July 2020. The FBI agents, originally deployed under legal authorities to protect federal property, widened the scope of their activities to participate in demonstrations, surreptitiously film demonstrators, and tail vandalism suspects until local police were able to pounce. The FBI also reportedly infiltrated protest movements in Colorado.³²

Photo by Anthony Shane on Unsplash

At least sixteen different types of federal tactical teams deployed nationwide in May and June 2020, according to the Government Accountability Office (pp. 53-56). A DHS spokesperson explained that federal use of unmarked vehicles helped the armed authorities avoid “potential attacks by lawless criminals.” Units making arrests included the Border Patrol Tactical Unit and the U.S. Marshals’ Special Operations Group. The Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security made no secret of his desire to take harsh tactics nationwide. “I believe all options continue to be on the table, specifically as we talk about Portland,” acting DHS chief Chad Wolf later confirmed. “All options on the table” is a common refrain within fascist U.S. circles, particularly when bullying noncompliant governments.³³

A few National Guard members refused to deploy against the protestors. Other members of the National Guard did deploy but disapproved of how law enforcement treated the protestors. The protestors themselves included some U.S. military veterans. Veteran groups that organized in favor of civil rights included About Face, Common Defense, and Veterans for Peace. A Marine with two Purple Hearts to his name stood outside the Salt Lake City Capitol in the scorching heat, black tape covering his mouth, which read, “I can’t breathe.” In Portland, Oregon, a police officer dressed in camouflage pepper-sprayed a former Army medic in the face. “I instantly knew the cop pepper sprayed me because I was bearing witness… He did not like what I was saying. I have come to accept that. I did not feel rage at him.” The 75-year-old veteran, Mike Hastie, emphasized, “You have to bear witness. If you don’t bear witness, then history repeats itself.” Army veteran Aubrey Rose commented in Colorado Springs, “The way that these police have been behaving—any military service member that would behave like this would be in Leavenworth right now.” Around the country, military spouses joining the protests were dismayed, to say the least, at the level of police violence.

Not all military personnel were so peaceable. Airman Larry Williams Jr., 22, a military policeman stationed in Utah, was charged in August 2020 with destroying government property. Images had circulated of someone wearing a government-issued gas mask setting a Salt Lake City patrol car on fire at a May protest. Federal investigators used these images to identify the lot number written on the gas canister, which they traced back to Williams. An FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested him at his home. In January 2022, Williams, since dismissed from the military, was sentenced to two years of supervised release and ordered to pay $2,500 in restitution.

Armed bureaucracies excused some state violence as the result of inadequate training. Internal DHS documents indicated that DHS personnel who deployed to Portland lacked proper training regarding how to confront large demonstrations. A report from New York City’s own Department of Investigation concluded that New York police violence during the summer protests was due in part to a lack of “relevant training” in dealing with protesters. After an Army National Guard medical evacuation helicopter flew very low over D.C. protestors, an Army official stated, “There was a very general lack of understanding of how to use—how to employ—helicopters in civil disturbance support operations.”³⁴

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, a revolving-door habitué, acknowledged that he had given the order sending helicopters to the protests. (The Times did not mention that Secretary Ryan McCarthy had come from Lockheed Martin. He later returned to industry, sitting on boards of Tomahawk Robotics, the venture capital firm Scout Ventures, the artificial-intelligence business Striveworks, and CACI.)

Contextualizing the protests within the crisis of capitalism, former Delta Force soldier Stan Goff warned in a 19 July 2020 post on Medium.com:

The “abuse and kidnappings in Portland by federal militarized cops and their hired mercenary thugs ought to be a tripwire… The legal justifications employed by the Trump administration for this fascistic brutality and overreach were co-signed by Democrats, who likely will succeed Trump. Security state Democrats who can barely be differentiated from Bush II neocons… Vichy Democrats. They are coming. We cannot stand down when Trump goes.”

Airborne Reconnaissance

Drones (a.k.a. unmanned aerial vehicles or remotely piloted vehicles) circled the skies above. Developed in wars of aggression during the 1990s (e.g., Palestine, the Balkans), this business sector of war, drones, took off after 9-11. Gorging at the gusher of federal funds, the war industry refined the relevant drone technology, particularly the sensors, payload, and bandwidth, while Offices of General Counsel at CIA and DOD and the White House Office of Legal Counsel arranged the legal opinions and classified directives and memoranda for monitoring and/or killing overseas.

Like most weapons of war, drones were soon deployed at home. DHS first used large drones, an unarmed General Atomics drone, in 2012, flying one over a North Dakota ranch at the request of the Grand Forks special weapons and tactics team, which was dealing with a property dispute. Facing no solid, organized pushback from the working class, the fascist state expanded its domestic use of large drones. Federal use of unarmed General Atomics drones was nationwide by 2020, reportedly flying over major cities from Maryland to California and minor (e.g., Fargo, North Dakota, and Laredo, Texas) that summer. Even the U.S. Marshals Service got in on the summer action, flying unmanned aircraft over such cities as D.C. and Portland, Oregon.

CBP’s drones generally stay within 100 miles of land and sea borders, though 6 U.S. Code § 211 authorizes CBP units “to conduct aviation and maritime operations in support of federal, state, local, tribal, and international law enforcement agencies without any geographic limitation for such operations.” The Department of Defense, meanwhile, has the legal authority to use drones in U.S. airspace for about a dozen types of operations, including counterintelligence.

A string of digits unique to each smartphone is known as an international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI). The war industry sells devices known as IMSI catchers, which scan the airwaves to obtain and analyze signals that lead to an IMSI. A different espionage device, known as a cell-site simulator, pretends to be a cell-phone tower by broadcasting a strong signal, thereby tricking nearby cellphones into connecting to it. Domestic law enforcement positions IMSI catchers and cell-site simulators on stationary objects, land vehicles, and aircraft, gathering information on people not accused or suspect of a crime. Cell-site simulators on the bottom of drones have reportedly been key to the locating and killing of civilians and suspected militants overseas.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains IMSI catchers and cell-site simulators.

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that in most cases law enforcement needs a search warrant to monitor a suspect’s movement via cellphone information. True to fascist form, the ruling gave law enforcement significant wiggle room. 1) The ruling did not affect other business records, including banking records. As seen in Chapter Two, the fascist state has had no problem defining “business records” so broadly as to include a telecom corporation’s entire database of calls. 2) The ruling allowed law enforcement to cite emergency situations to obtain records without a warrant. These two massive loopholes, business records and emergency situations, let law enforcement continue to monitor the location of mobile devices without a warrant.

The federal government meanwhile gradually expanded and normalized its use of piloted reconnaissance aircraft—planes packed with advanced espionage technology—over U.S. cities. These harmless looking aircraft got extensive worldwide use and upgrades in the war on drugs and the post-9-11 wars and were deployed within the United States against relatively trivial threats. In 2002, the FBI under Director Robert Mueller reportedly requested, and the U.S. military came through with, such reconnaissance aircraft to help search for a sniper who was shooting people in and around the nation’s capital. The New York Times reported, “Lawyers ultimately decided that the military could offer equipment in the manhunt without violating the law.” A Pentagon spokesperson assured, “Every step in this process is taken so that we remain within the limits of all laws including Posse Comitatus,” the act passed in 1878 nominally preventing the federal government from deploying the U.S. military in a domestic law enforcement role. In 2010, investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill elaborated upon reports of the federal government using piloted reconnaissance aircraft to locate a man suspected of trying to set off a makeshift explosive device in a car in New York City: Leaning on highly classified programs and post-9-11 legal authorities, the government had utilized cell-site simulators aboard these aircraft.³⁵

Armed bureaucracies soon solidified airborne coverage. In 2015, the Associated Press summarized, “The FBI is operating a small air force with scores of low-flying planes across the country using video and sometimes cellphone surveillance technology — all hidden behind fictitious companies that are fronts” for the federal government.

Ten months later, journalists Peter Aldhous and Charles Seife added: FBI and DHS, often using front companies, fly military-intelligence aircraft over U.S. cities, including Oakland, California, and Baltimore, Maryland, citing such pretexts as the need to combat drug trafficking, defeat violent crime, secure borders, and fight terrorism. “We have an obligation to follow those people who want to hurt our country and its citizens, and we will continue to do so,” affirmed FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano, who later left government and ascended to the top of an investment firm. FBI reconnaissance aircraft could be used in conjunction with informants, human snitching on humans. The FBI alone had more than 15,000 informants, and it paid them roughly $42 million per year collectively. While FBI agents need probable cause to try to infiltrate a protest group or the civil rights movement, FBI informants do not.

One type of aircraft flown over U.S. cities during the 2020 protests was the RC-26B. According to members of Congress, it was “the only fixed-winged aircraft to have Title 32 authority to conduct domestic surveillance while maintaining the ability to conduct Title 10 missions abroad.”³⁶

One way to sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act is for state governors to invite in another state’s National Guard, which they did when using RC-26 aircraft. For example, West Virginia’s Air National Guard flew RC-26 aircraft over the nation’s capital, and Wisconsin’s Air National Guard flew such aircraft over Minneapolis, Minnesota.³⁷

The Air Force Times reports on the RC-26 aircraft.

Some aircraft sent live video to control centers managed by a unit within Customs and Border Protection, the New York Times reported. The footage was then fed into DHS’ Big Pipe computer network, which could be accessed by other federal agencies and local law enforcement for use in future investigations, according to senior officials. (DHS’ own privacy impact assessment indicated that data in Big Pipe could be stored up to five years. Air and Marine Operations was the CBP unit managing control centers receiving video footage from reconnaissance aircraft.)

The U.S. Air Force was quick to say that reconnaissance aircraft (Dornier Do-328 turboprop planes, a kind that had previously operated overseas in support of U.S. special operations forces) circling near Portland, Oregon, and Denver, Colorado, were not snooping on protesters. They were conducting tests, which had been planned months in advance.

A couple months later, the Air Force Inspector General, Lieutenant General Sami Said, determined that the military’s domestic use of RC-26 reconnaissance aircraft during the summer 2020 protests was legal and not aimed at protestors. Over one year later, Said held no one responsible for the U.S. military’s August 2021 drone strike in Afghanistan that killed 10 civilians, including an aid worker and his children. In retirement, Sami Said was quick to join Raytheon Technologies’ Intelligence & Space business as vice president of global security.

The Air Force said that the Air Force hadn’t using spy planes to spy on the public.

Conclusion

The federal response to the summer 2020 protests was not just the ruling class deploying law enforcement (who are traitors to the working class) to use shocking brutality to enforce the system that benefits the ruling class. It was decades of militarization of law enforcement and lies circulating on corporate and social media (about the intent and nature of the protestors) combining to create an environment in which traitors to the working class used stunning brutality to enforce the system that benefits the ruling class.

The U.S. fascist state deploys military and intelligence forces overseas to install compliant regimes and prevent worker and other Left movements from arising, to keep natural resources flowing into the hands of multinational corporations, and because war itself is profitable activity. Similarly, it deploys law enforcement and intelligence forces at home in order to prevent the growth of movements that would redirect government resources to public need, to make sure natural resources flow and labor stays obedient, and because war is profitable. U.S. fascism tackles the far enemy and the near enemy.

1. For comparison of city law enforcement budgets with city crime rates, see Joe Mayall’s Substack post, “The Cops are Overfunded. Here are the Charts to Prove it.” Philip Bump of the Washington Post reported on 7 June 2020 that a review of spending on state and local law enforcement over the previous 60 years showed “no correlation nationally between spending and crime rates.”

2. Death from lack of healthcare prior to the COVID-19 pandemic covered in Michael Sainato, “The Americans dying because they can't afford medical care” (Guardian, 7 Jan 2020) and David Cecere, “New study finds 45,000 deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage” (Cambridge Health Alliance, 17 Sep 2009). Death from lack of healthcare during the pandemic covered in Rachel Nuwer, “Universal Health Care Could Have Saved More Than 330,000 U.S. Lives during COVID” (Scientific American, 13 Jun 2022).

3. Daniel Politi, “Activists Create Public Online Spreadsheet of Police Violence Videos” (Slate, 6 Jun 2020).

For a comprehensive study of fatal police violence and its underreporting in U.S. government-run vital registration data, see: GBD 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborations, “Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019: a network meta-regression” (The Lancet, 2 Oct 2021), pp. 1239-55.

For undercounting of people of color killed by law enforcement, see: “Deaths of People of Color by Law Enforcement Are Severely Under-Counted” (Latino Education & Advocacy Days, May 2021): <www.csusb.edu>.

For written analyses of summer 2020 police brutality, see Olivia Messer, “Medical Workers Fighting COVID Say Cops Are Attacking Them” (Daily Beast, 2 Jun 2020); “NYPD officer assaults British photojournalist, breaks camera” (Press Freedom Tracker, 2 Jun 2020); Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Lazaro Gamio, “Minneapolis Police Use Force Against Black People at 7 Times the Rate of Whites” (NYT, 3 Jun 2020); Megan Cassidy, “SF resident was kneeling when fatally shot by Vallejo police during civil unrest” (San Francisco Chronicle, 3 Jun 2020); Lindsay DeDario, “Buffalo police arraigned for felony assault, elderly protestor still critical” (Reuters, 6 Jun 2020); Jordan Smith, “Police Attacks on Protesters With ‘Less Than Lethal’ Weapons Result in Life-Threatening Injuries” (Intercept, 11 Jun 2020); Zipporah Osei, et al., “We Tracked What Happens to Police After They Use Force on Protesters” (ProPublica, 29 Jul 2020); Lois Beckett, “US police three times as likely to use force against leftwing protesters, data finds” (Guardian, 14 Jan 2021); Stephen Gandel, “At least 40 lawsuits claim police brutality at George Floyd protests across U.S.” (CBS News, 23 Jun 2020); and “Police forces across the United States have committed widespread and egregious human rights violations in response to largely peaceful assemblies protesting systemic racism and police violence, including the killing of Black people” (Amnesty International, Jun 2020).

4. During 24 May-22 Aug 2020, over 10,600 demonstrations were held across the U.S. Roughly 5% involved some form of protestor violence. See “US Crisis Monitor Releases Full Data for Summer 2020” (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, 31 Aug 2020).

5. Racism detailed in David Choi, “Black West Point cadets say they were called the N-word and ‘shunned’ for reporting discrimination” (Business Insider, 7 Jul 2020) and Morrison, et al., “‘We just feel it’: Racism plagues US military academies” (AP, 3 Dec 2021). After the Washington Post reported in October 2020 about racism at Virginia Military Institute, the state of Virginia hired a law firm, Barnes & Thornburg, to investigate. The VMI superintendent resigned at the end of October 2020. The firm’s final report (pdf) indicated that “institutional racism and sexism are present, tolerated, and left unaddressed at VMI” (p. 8).

6. If a high school student wants to attend a U.S. military academy for higher education, the student needs a formal nomination. People who can nominate potential students include secretaries of the military branches, leaders of the military academies, the U.S. president or vice president, and members of U.S. Congress. Most high schoolers are nominated by their congressional representative or senator, who typically delegates the paperwork to staff and volunteers. Once the lawmaker’s delegates are done with the evaluation process, the lawmaker formally submits their nominees, from which the military academies then pick. The Connecticut Veterans Legal Center's Veterans Inclusion Project studied this nomination process. In 2021, the Project issued its report, “Racial Disparities in Congressional Nominations to the Military Service Academies,” concluding that members of Congress are far more likely to recommend white applicants than applicants who come from Black, Hispanic, Asian or Pacific Islander backgrounds. As academy graduates are on the fast track for coveted military leadership positions, leadership then suffers from a lack of diversity. Ongoing changes in demographics in the U.S. mean that the nomination system gives “disproportionate influence to rural congressional districts that tend to be whiter,” the AP found.

7. A 2017 Pentagon survey found that roughly one-third of black military members experienced racial discrimination or harassment. Military leadership had worked to keep the poll’s results away from the public. The poll only covered a brief 12-month period, so racist incidents outside of that timeframe went unconsidered. In confidential polling conducted by Military Times and Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans & Military Families, the non-white respondents who reported witnessing racist incidents in the military increased from 42 percent in 2017 to over 50 percent in 2018. That percentage hit 53 the following year, with more than a third of all activity-duty troops reporting witnessing such racism.

8. The military judicial system was analyzed by Reuters and Task & Purpose. The military judicial system had no explicit category for hate crimes and DOD had not tracked the number of troops discharged for extremist views, the AP reported. New rules and regulations did not tackle many racial disparities in enforcement of military discipline, nor did they explicitly ban members of the military from being members of extremist organizations, such as the KKK. And, by sticking with existing policy that gave unit commanders full discretion to enforce discipline on a case-by-case basis, DOD continued with haphazard/ununiform enforcement of the rules. The AP also found that the U.S. military had not created funding to specifically focus on addressing extremism in the ranks.

9. Lack of diversity also covered by CNN in June 2020.

Twenty percent of enlisted sailors were African American, but African Americans comprised only 8-9 percent of Navy officers, USNI News reported.

10. Cabranes, Walton, Davis, Higginbotham Jr., and Pierce. See Kenan Davis, “Judges of the Fisa court” (Guardian, 1 Nov 2013). FISC judge data spanned 1978-2013.

11. U.S. airstrikes killed 22,679-48,308 innocents in the Middle East over twenty years. See Imogen Piper and Joe Dyke, “Tens of thousands of civilians likely killed by US in ‘Forever Wars.’” Drone coverage in particular is at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. General Brown’s Central Command tenure was June 2015 – July 2018.

12. Bass “and Brown will concentrate on continuing the Air Force’s shift away from fighting terrorism to preparing for an era of ‘great power competition,’ countering major adversaries such as China and Russia, the Air Force said,” reported Stephen Losey.

13. Major General Ed Thomas wrote in October 2020, “… as a war-fighting organization we cannot afford to squander this moment, because our future — and national security — depends on it… This fighting force should be highly capable while reflecting the diversity of the country we serve.” Inflating threats and the supposed technological prowess of official enemies, Thomas, whose background was in public affairs, noted that Chief of Staff General Charles Brown had “called on us to accelerate change or risk losing ground to Russia and China… We need both the best technologies and the best people to win.”

14. Omali Yeshitela described eminent domain on Black Agenda Radio (9:15) on 27 January 2020. For a look at how government assertions do not match residents’ descriptions of eviction and relocation, see Chris Naffziger’s March 2017 reporting in St. Louis Magazine.

15. Life expectancy statistics cited by the Associated Press on 17 March 2019.

16. On 7 June, former U.S. Secretary of State, Gen. Colin Powell, the first ever African American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke out on CNN against President Donald Trump’s rhetoric and militarized protest response. Powell, who had helped cover up the 1968 My Lai massacre and who had lied to the United Nations on 5 February 2003 when selling the U.S. invasion of Iraq, told CNN, “We have a constitution. And we have to follow that constitution. And the president has drifted away from it.” Retired Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart wrote 10 June in the military periodical Task & Purpose, “Please, take your knee of our necks, so we can breathe.” Stewart had recently commanded the Defense Intelligence Agency, a massive organization focused on gathering, analyzing, and distributing battlefield-oriented intelligence. As of the 10 June publication, Stewart was CEO of the consulting firm Stewart Global Solutions.

17. Industry executives quoted in Marcus Weisgerber, “CEOs of Major Defense Companies Speak Out About Racism, Call for Unity” (Government Executive, 5 Jun 2020.

18. In September 2019, the Spanish newspaper El País reported that a business incorporated in Spain, Undercover Global, had spied on Assange when he was living at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The corporation, providing security for the Embassy, reportedly delivered audio and video to CIA.

19. The federal government created CBP’s National Targeting Center (CBP NTC) in the aftermath of 9-11 to pursue cargo and travelers deemed to be threats to the U.S. A unit within CBP NTC known as the Counter Network Division routinely accessed databases from across government to obtain highly classified information (travel records, financial reports, private data) about journalists, members of Congress, and the broader public. With little guidance or oversight, personnel were able to investigate (“vet”) journalists, Jana Winter revealed in 2021. Corporations, including Deloitte, ran much of CND. The Associated Press’ Executive Editor wrote to the DHS Secretary, “This is a flagrant example of a federal agency using its power to examine the contacts of journalists.” The AP journalist, Fox, noted that under the Obama administration, the federal government had seized phone records of some AP editors and journalists.

Dr. Marisol LeBrón, a scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, explained previously: Journalists are “being positioned both by law enforcement and the larger political establishment as actually a threat to democracy…”

Elsewhere, a top DOD spokesperson acknowledged that her team monitored the content of the Pentagon press corps’ coverage. Journalists who published critical or tough reporting of DOD tended to then get snubbed and shunned.

For local law enforcement surveilling a reporter, see Wendi C. Thomas, “The Police Have Been Spying on Black Reporters and Activists for Years. I Know Because I’m One of Them” (ProPublica, 9 Jun 2020). For federal, see James Risen, “The FBI Tried to Ambush My Source. Now I’m Telling the Whole Story” (Intercept, 3 Jun 2022).

20. Government pretext for slashing tires available at Bruce Gordon, “Multi-Agency Command Center Report on Civil Unrest: Evidence of Outside Threats to Minneapolis-Saint Paul Identified” (Minneapolis Department of Public Safety, 31 May 2020).

21. The late Leo Panitch explained the dumbing down of political discourse in “The Significance of the ‘Shit Show’ Debate – Panitch, Day, Horne & Jay” on 30 September 2020.

22. The DHS report defined antifa so broadly as to muddle it with other left-wing ideologies and institutions. The 2019 Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence is available here.

23. While this high-ranking federal official cited defensive gear (that the public used to protect itself from federal assault) as evidence of nefarious behavior, video showed medical supplies destroyed by federal personnel. Article 19 of the 1949 Geneva Convention: “Fixed establishments and mobile medical units of the Medical Service may in no circumstances be attacked, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.” ICC Statute of 1998: Deliberately “directing attacks against ... hospitals and places where the sick and the wounded are collected, provided they are not military objectives” is a war crime.

24. DHS lists nonviolent people—who are concerned about the natural world and who were engaging in peaceful civil disobedience against fossil fuel corporations—as “extremists,” tallying some alongside the likes of mass killers and white nationalists. Five people who closed valves on tar-sands oil pipelines were so peaceful as to notify the relevant corporations ahead of time about the imminent disruption in fuel distribution.

25. Big Oil and the federal government have hired private mercenaries to monitor people who didn’t want fossil fuel pipelines on their land.

See Alleen Brown’s “In the Mercenaries’ Own Words: Documents Detail TigerSwan Infiltration of Standing Rock” and Alleen Brown and Naveena Sadasivam’s “Pipeline Company Spent Big on Police Gear to Use Against Standing Rock Protesters”.

Capitalists even purchased a sheriff team.

The Public Accountability Initiative explains how large fossil fuel corporations and financial institutions fund police foundations across the U.S.

For anti-protest legislation state legislatures, see Naveena Sadasivam’s “Welcome to Utah, where pipeline protests could now get you at least five years in prison”.

26. The “terrorism enhancement” took the recommended sentencing range in Reznicek’s case from 37-46 months to 210-240 months, as the judge argued that her sabotage of corporate property was “calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government.” See also “Court upholds 'terrorism' sentencing of pipeline saboteur.”

Right-wing violence—Dylann Roof (shot up a church, killing nine black worshipers) and James Fields (drove a car into a crowd that was peacefully protesting a Unite the Right rally)—did not receive terrorism enhancements.

27. Michael Sauschuck spread fear: “To think that there would be 80 fusion centers spread across the country that are geared to share information back and forth in a fluid and timely manner, and have the state of Maine be a gaping black hole for the lack of information sharing, is scary… To lose that information sharing and the opportunity to vet information as it comes in, I think it would be a major, major detriment to all of our communities.”

A Maine State Trooper asserted that he was retaliated against and demoted after he blew the whistle on the Maine Information and Analysis Center’s illegal surveillance activities.

28. Samantha Storey, “2 Lawyers Of Color Face 45-Year Sentences — For Vandalism” (Huffington Post, 22 Jun 2020); Akela Lacy, “Protesters in Multiple States Are Facing Felony Charges, Including Terrorism” (Intercept, 27 Aug 2020); Brown & Lacy, “State Legislatures Make ‘Unprecedented’ Push on Anti-Protest Bills” (Intercept, 21 Jan 2021); and “Man fined $12m for police station arson during George Floyd protests” (BBC News, 29 Apr 2021). Regarding the $12-million fine and 4-year prison sentence for Dylan Shakespeare Robinson, the FBI official Michael Paul of the Minneapolis field office stated, according to the BBC, the sentence “‘sends a clear message’ that when someone conducts a violent act that breaks federal law, they will be held accountable.”

For a comprehensive tally of state and local legislation criminalizing protest, see the US Protest Law Tracker, which is made by the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law.

29. Accounts of FBI’s online search at James Vincent, “FBI used Instagram, an Etsy review, and LinkedIn to identify a protestor accused of arson” and Jeremy Roebuck, “The Philly protester tracked down through Etsy and accused of setting cop cars on fire was ordered jailed until trial.”

30. A DHS unit known as the Protecting American Communities Task Force (PACT) was tasked with protecting buildings and property and appraising and surging against civil unrest, the Nation reported. A former senior DHS intel officer noted that DHS wasn’t required to wear identifying insignia or nametapes when arresting the public: “Such operations happen all the time and at the discretion of supervisors.”

31. 24-year-old Chandler Wirostek, of Charlotte, NC, tweeted to the FBI’s primary Twitter account and the Charlotte FBI field office: “Hi, I am the leader of Charlotte, NC Antifa. DM me for my address, or I can turn myself in. I’d be happy to let you test your bullshit terrorism statute in a U.S. court. Anyone who thinks antifascists are the bad guys are fascists.”

32. Investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson chronicled FBI infiltration and disruption of civil rights organizing in Colorado in “The Snitch in the Silver Hearse” (Intercept, 7 Feb 2023), “The Honey Trap” (Intercept, 21 Mar 2023), and “Lawsuit Targets FBI Probe of Racial Justice Activists” (Intercept, 1 Aug 2023).

33. Iran is regularly on the receiving end of “all options” threats. See “Bennett ‘happy’ as Biden touts ‘other options’ against Iran” (Al Jazeera, 27 Aug 2021); Thomas O Falk, “Israel’s ‘alarmist claims’ raise the stakes against Iran” (Al Jazeera, 5 Sep 2021); Matthew Lee, “US, Israel Say They Are Exploring a 'Plan B' for Iran” (AP, 14 Oct 2021); “Washington will not delist Iran's IRGC, US ambassador to Israel says” (Middle East Monitor, 16 Jun 2022); and Berg and Bateman, “Biden: US prepared to use force to stop Iran from getting nuclear arms” (BBC News, 14 Jul 2022). DOD chief Lloyd Austin (former Raytheon board member): “… if Iran isn’t willing to engage seriously, then we will look at all of the options necessary to keep the United States secure” (Gambrell, AP, 20 Nov 2021). See also McCurry, “Donald Trump on North Korea: ‘All options are on the table’” (Guardian, 29 Aug 2017); Shepardson and Shalizi, “U.S. says all options on table for a decision on Afghanistan” (Reuters, 7 Mar 2021); Pamuk and Lewis, “U.S. Says ‘All Options’ on the Table Over Russian Troop Buildup Near Ukraine” (Reuters, 26 Nov 2021).

34. The Army investigation determined that the general use of the helicopters in such an “emergency” was authorized and “reasonable,” though it did administratively discipline unnamed crew (for “performance issues”) and tightened the process approving use of National Guard helicopters for crowd control. The Army investigation stated that there was “no evidence” that “the low hover that is the subject of this investigation was intended to take immediate action to save life, mitigate property damage, or alleviate human suffering.” The UH-72 “Lakota” flew over the crowd on 1 June 2020.

35. The aircraft used in 2002 in the search for the sniper was reportedly a four-engine de Havilland Canada “Dash 7.” The aircraft used in locating the NYC makeshift explosive device suspect was probably an RC-12. The framework for dodging the Posse Comitatus Act was likely contained in the Presidential Decision Directive 25, which President Bill Clinton had signed into law in May 1994, reportedly permitting Joint Special Operations Command to operate on U.S. soil.

36. Support Systems Associates (Melbourne, FL) had upgraded avionics on various RC-26 aircraft for the National Guard, contracting announcements issued 17 and 19 September 2018 indicated. Reporting during summer 2020 indicated that RC-26 planes were equipped with electro-optical infrared cameras.

37. Aircraft and locations cited in the reporting of Joseph Cox (A, B), Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory, William Roberts, and Schmitt and Gibbons-Neff.