Transcript: S2E2 Pandemic, Karens, and Systemic Fascism with Candice part 1

Katherine: Hello and welcome to Friendly Anarchism. This is Katherine, would you like to introduce yourself?

Candice: Yeah, I’m Candice.

K: Hi Candice! Welcome back, I’m so glad to have you here. Your episode in the last season was one of my favorite episodes, and it’s a privilege and honor to have you back on the show with me. How are you doing? How is the pandemic treating you?

C: It’s really boring. [laughter] No, so let’s see…how are things going? Well, it’s a privilege and an honor to have you as a friend, kato. I’m working from home, home schooling the teenagers and a four-year-old now, and just try to stay… Not too bored, try to stay sane and un-bored and healthy. My partner is working in a local grocery market, so we do have some risk factor. He’s an essential worker, and as you can hear, I always have children around.

K: I love your kids, I miss your kids.

C: You know how to draw circles. She’s really good at it.

K: I’m sure, she’s brilliant. Yeah, I just had a run in with having a… There was a covid outbreak at the job I had in a warehouse. It’s terrifying.

C: So are you not working there now…?

K: No, I quit, I quit. I was like, I’m just not getting paid enough to deal with this because they were not taking it seriously, and even the supervisors weren’t masking properly, and it’s just a whole horrible… I just did not feel safe. And at the moment I’m okay, so I can find another job with the same company in a different place, so I’m not totally hard up or anything, so…

C: Yeah, they have a responsibility to make sure that they keep a safe environment for you, and there’s no shade on you for quitting. In fact, I encourage anybody who’s working in an environment that’s not protecting their safety with regards to covid or other pandemics or anything related to work place safety, to just go ahead and part ways with that company.

K: Yeah, it’s so hard when it feels like there’s a scarcity of work, it’s pretty a scary thing to do.

C: True.

K: So I understand why people can’t… And once you have a structural analysis of our society and you see just how bad it is, it’s hard to not feel like just so bitter and angry about having anybody forced to work right now, like nobody should have to be working right now.

K (voice-over): Or in fact that we should ever have to work… To quote from David Graeber’s piece, ‘To Save The World, We’re Going To Have To Stop Working’… “The system makes no sense. It’s also destroying the planet. If we don’t break ourselves of this addiction quickly, we will leave our children and grandchildren to face catastrophes on a scale which will make the current pandemic seem trivial. If this isn’t obvious, the main reason is we’re constantly encouraged to look at social problems as if they were questions of personal morality … All this work, all the carbon we’re pouring into the atmosphere must somehow be the result of our consumerism, but this is just wrong… it’s not our pleasures that are destroying the world, it’s our Puritanism, our feeling that we have to suffer in order to deserve those pleasures. If we want to save the world, we’re going to have to stop working.”

C: I’ve been tele-working since day one, so I’m one of the privileged few. I guess they say I have a white collar job, but I work on social services, so… I don’t know what you call that. You call that a red collar? I don’t know. But that said, it’s been really just… Even that is really challenging because the nature of the work really does lean on me being able to work with people directly, and the phone is just not a sufficient way to do that, and so… and why should anybody have to work under these circumstances? We figured out, I guess I would say that there’s… Like we established that there’s an essential labor force, right? And that the definition of that has been morphing since day one, to the extent that now essential labor includes retail workers and stores, to the extent that it includes… What was the one that I heard the other day? I was like, Yeah, that’s essential [sarcasm]. I can’t remember what it was, but it was… It was just pretty far off from what I would consider like hospital workers, food production distribution network workers, I think that people can’t live without…

K: Yeah. It’s like the system has decided that capitalism itself is essential, it’s tied to the economy, that there’s no other way to have an economy, so therefore that’s why malls are open, ’cause malls are somehow essential… It’s like do people really need to be in malls? But by our current systems logic apparently, that’s … like malls are still open in Los Angeles when the morgues are full.

C: It’s good because we have to keep those malls active, we wanna make sure that the buildings stay maintained so that they can serve as secondary morgues.. No, I’m joking, but really, you know it’s like… Yeah, you’ve said it very succinctly, and I’d just like to add on to that is just like capitalism itself has embedded Essentialism and it’s importance to the extent that we believe that there’s a such thing called ‘the economy’, and we believe that it will crash if consumer goods aren’t being distributed and purchased and sold. And that may very well be the case, but if anybody transparently and without bias looks at the question of essentiality, what is essential and what isn’t, any thinking person would have to question the value of needing more… I don’t know, I bought this silk robe. Needing more silk robes. So I myself am of course guilty of participating in that consumer model, I just don’t know that there’s any risk of that ever changing any time soon.

K: At the beginning of the pandemic, it was taken very seriously. For a second, there was a moment of panic where everyone was shutting everything down and freaking out when the pandemic had come over and was affecting rich people the most because that’s who had it, the people who were flying around internationally.The business class folks were the ones who had it and everyone freaked out, and at some point it settled a little bit, and the numbers came back and realized the people who were dying the most commonly were black and brown folks, were poor folks. And when those numbers came in, all of a sudden, a lot of the system itself seem to relax. It seemed a pretty direct correlation, it was pretty disturbing, and that sort of happened I think right before George Floyd got killed and all of that popped off. Do you think that the pandemic itself and the connection between the burgeoning deaths of Black community are related to the uprising over the summer?

C: I mean, I hadn’t looked at it through that lens, I definitely looked at the way… Or the fact that black and brown folks were dying at a higher rate and contracting covid at a higher rate, and I just sort of looked at it like, well we tend to live in more concentrated households and more concentrated areas, rely more on public transportation, rely more on jobs that are less individualized and more team-oriented, that we tend to be exposed to, have always been exposed to the worst chemicals or pathogens or whatever that the public has to offer, just by the nature of the kinds of jobs that we are offered and accept. And yes, there was a moment of time when the US recognized covid was here… I say it that way because I think it was here. I know it was here before it was actually identified in China, and just ’cause if I didn’t have covid in 2019 in November, in December, I don’t know what that was, but y’all ever watch out ’cause I was sick for two months and everybody in my family and everybody in my office and everybody in my husband’s work place, and we all got sick with respiratory viruses that could not be diagnosed, so…

K: Oh wow.

C: Yeah, and there’s people who still have long-term effects from it, and that’s here on the West Coast, and the reason I say that I think that it happened here on the west coast back then is because we have this lovely phenomenon of things called tent cities, which are essentially shanty towns of people who have been pushed out of housing by landlords and ownership and the overburden cost, and then the barriers, like the hurdles of societal perfection that you have to like secure in order to be able to rent a place to live. Even the worst place. And then I work directly on the front lines of that, of that, so my interaction with folks who are sick was just really common, and I was always kind of willing to put myself in that position, not knowing that there was something that was coming that was this serious.

K: Right.

C: And I was always sick, and so it was never a question of like when I was working with people in the office, it was never a question of when I would be exposed to something that could be potentially deadly, I was just always sick, and so I was careful to wash my hands a lot. And people just thought I always calling it a lot until everybody in my office got sick. And I come to this point because even myself as a well-educated high-skilled worker, but who is also a Black woman here in the United States… My job is supposed to be pretty creative and autonomous, and I’m supposed to be able to do some project development, but essentially they just want me to be like the mammy of people who can’t find housing here in one of the worst housing markets in the country, and… So even my highly educated, high-skilled labor position puts me at the front lines of pathogens that other people don’t want to be exposed to, so… Yeah, I correlate that with this beautiful memory that I have pretty much on a weekly basis of the rich bitches who I fucking work with, excuse my French [laughter] who are like executives who are fucking d*mb as fuck [laughter]. Or maybe they’re not d*mb, they’re smart in a professional way, but that means that people die because of that. So they’re compliant and they’re smart and they’re professional, and they have all the social cues, and they might even be classically pretty by a white male gaze standard, so all of those factors that put them in a position to earn two and sometimes three times more annually than I do with a very different skill set, and sometimes terrible grave outcomes for the people who we serve. Those folks, the fear in their eyes when having to be, when encountering, interacting with even me, you know? Somebody who makes a middle class income. Somebody who is clean, who has a beautiful, or had a beautiful office that smelled nice. [laughter] And just the, the cognitive dissonance in their brain, which is like they’re talking to each other very closely, and I can see and observe that from a distance, but the second one of us gets close to each other, the second one of us gets close to them, you know the fear that washes over their faces was a fucking glorious, beautiful thing. [laughter] I was like, Yes, come get my poor people germs all over you. I’ve already gotten you sick. [laughter]. So it’s something that I reflect on pretty much weekly, and it’s not that I would want to give somebody covid, ’cause it’s a horrible thing and it could kill somebody, but it’s just a reality that even then they were worried that their white middle-aged security was gonna be threatened by the presence of my Black perceived un-healthiest and filth, and I just felt the punk rocker in me really just really, really embraced that moment.

K: The idea of being feared or having people be afraid of you, I’ve run into that sometimes, and it’s such a weird… I remember one time I was a little weird kid, I remember this one time I was at a dance thing and this little girl, this little blonde girl was trying to be nice to me. I was like eight years old, and she was like, ‘Oh, what’s that in your hair, it looks so nice…’ and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s natural..’, it’s like I just didn’t have washed hair… I just had greasy hair, and she took a second and she looked to me and then she went like, ‘Aaaa!’ and just ran away.

C: Meanwhile she stripped her scalp of all of its natural oils. You have to pay for that in thousands of dollars of hair treatments, probably starting right about now. [laughter]

K: Yeah, probably. I don’t know what’s happened to her. She’s probably doing just fine. I just remember distinctly the look on her face when it changed from like, ‘I’m gonna be such a good person and be so nice to this weird girl’, to stoop down and be kind, and just me just being… Not into it. And her realization that I was more than she could handle, and just ran away screaming.

C: You didn’t want her charitable kindness, you didn’t want her kind around you in the first place.

K: And I wasn’t going to pretend, I wasn’t gonna be like, Oh, it’s some gel from the store, it’s mousse, blah, blah, blah, blah, it’s just like I’m just dirty and gross. That’s why you’re over here talking down to me. Let’s just admit that that’s what’s happening, you know? [laughter]

C: Well, I think that there’s a lot to be said about people probably like her, who were probably powerful and like you said, doing just fine in a lot of ways, now embracing this diversity and equity stuff and inclusion that everybody is touting as the next wave in professional America. First of all, why is this just now the wave? It’s those same bitches that make that the game, I’m sorry, those same people that make that the game. It’s a passion that I have for this, I’m just expressing my passion. But then it’s also… It’s also like, we’re going to pay you lip service, we’re going to pay for prior sins and errors to the extent that we have to demonstrate for the most part in order to not be called racist, to not be called… Classism isn’t even a thing that they’re thinking about right now.

K: How is that possible? Like you work with un-housed people… How are they not thinking about that?

C: They’re not thinking about classism or ableism, man… And those are big ones. And me saying ableism has gotten me in hot water, I mean, it just… It’s a factor of they’re so far behind the curve on so many things, but that doesn’t really matter to the bottom line, and so kinda start going back around to your very first question about, did you notice that the concern and fear of covid and the way that our various sectors of the economy shut down around the time that we thought that, Oh my gosh, this is just a fast global pandemic, and it’s threatening like the uber rich and Tom Hanks has it, and oh my God… Next month, a month later, when we know that it’s mostly Black and brown folks who are contracting and natives as well, which is on reservations, which I haven’t had a chance to look at the data, but I just wonder what the correlation with that between that and casinos is because I’m trying to figure out how something… I guess it just takes one person and a pathogen like that can go on to a reservation and be so devastating. The devastating part is easy to understand. How it got there in the first place is a little bit more difficult, right? In my experience being from the Midwest and experiencing Midwestern reservations, like maybe it’s a little different elsewhere, but the transference of people is just not as fluid as I would expect. To me, it needs to need to be so damaging. But once again, we’re talking about people who are living in concentrated environments, people who don’t have the resources to solve quarantine within their house away from their family, people who will be doing the physical labor that is required to make sure that essential things are taken care of, are then hopping on a subway, hopping on a train, hoppin’… wherever, into some sort of public transit going to an apartment complex, how often are the doors knobs … how often are the hallways cleaned… And so I could see in my mind that why it would spread so quickly in those environments, but I had not considered your question, which is, did you notice that as soon as we knew that it was mostly killing Black and brown folks, that society seemed to ease up on the standards a little? I didn’t think about it that way.

K: I noticed it, it was pretty disturbing. And it is just continued colonialism, isn’t it?

K (voice-over): From BYU about the covid epidemic and how it’s affecting native and indigenous peoples: “While older people are more likely to die from covid-19 than younger generations, native and indigenous people of all ages have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19. American Indian and Alaska Native people are four times more likely than Caucasian people to be hospitalized due to Covid-19. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, to quote from Bleu Adams, co-founder of ‘Protect Native Elders” and member of the Navajo nation, “they were telling people to wash your hands, try to sanitize, etcetera, and we knew that the Navajo Nation was going to struggle because around 40% of households don’t even have running water” she said. “We’re the size of West Virginia, and we have 13 grocery stores, so that means the first of the month, when a lot of families get their money, they go to the stores, which creates huge crowds.”

K: It’s so ironic when you’re talking about them being afraid of you being dirty and contagious and scary, when it’s like, well, again, it’s like…

C: I wash my booty.

K: … it was the rich white people flying around that are the ones that are bringing it to all these places, it’s probably some rich white person that went to a casino and the people who are literally, they’re spreading it are then turning around being like, we’re so scared of you.

C: Yeah, you poor people stay away from us.

K: But you’re the ones…[laughter]

C: Oh no, I mean, my husband and I, my partner, I were both cooks, we were both sous-chefs and cooks, and we did catering work for a lot of years, so we know how not to cross-contaminate. I’ve always watched my hands after the bathroom, I can’t tell you how many of these richer people I’ve seen go out of the bathroom without washing their hands. My four-year-old just said ‘Me too, I always wash my hands.’

K: [Laughter] She’s smarter than a lot of these folks.

C: [Laughter] Yeah, we had to re-teach people to wash their hands and people are still refusing to do it. That’s the shitty thing. My partner works on the front lines, and he’s always having to teach, to tell people that they need to wear a mask into the very small, very neighborhood-centric store and that they should watch their hands, and people want to fight him about it.

K: Whyyy?

C: I know, it’s a point of frustration and that he lives with on a regular basis.

K: That is super frustrating: I just wonder about our survival instinct sometimes, or our ability to survive and our resilience, cultural resilience. What haven’t we …. I don’t know I’m going with this … Let’s talk about resilience and white people.

C: Well, it’s a community thing.

K: Yeah, let’s talk about Karens, ’cause we’re talking about resilience, we’re talking about people being able to manage difficult situations with grace, so the opposite of that is of your quintessential Karen type.

C: Right.

K: Like something difficult happens, like you can’t get your hamburger made right or whatever, something that’s not perfect happens, and there’s just this epic meltdown of massive proportions that seems super disconnected from the reality. We talked about that the last time we talked, and I’ve just been thinking a lot about that. Like, what on earth is going on there? Because you had mentioned trauma, and I think that’s part of it, but I don’t… I think that’s a very forgiving…

C: I was more forgiving before, and I’ve had this long-held theory that a lot of it is actually childhood lead exposure.

K (voice-over): A research team from Duke University has “determined that participants exposed to higher levels of lead as children were described as having more difficult adult personalities by family members and friends. Specifically, they found that study members with greater lead exposure were rated as more neurotic, less agreeable, less conscientious, than they’re less exposed peers.”

C: If we look at the generation who currently inhabits that Karen model; that attitude of self-righteous, self-entitlement, and anger and an inability to cope in those scenarios, they also seem to correlate with a group of people who didn’t benefit from the lead paint and the lead mitigation laws that weren’t enforced until the late 70s.

K: I think that’s part of it, but I have come up with a new theory that I wanted to run past you. See what you thought. Because the Karens are not just the boomers too, though, it gets younger. I’ve had my own Karen-y type feelings and moments at times, which I’m conscious of, but I can feel the Karen in me, and I’m like, where is this coming from… And I have this theory that specifically white women, our power derives from proximity to white men, not from specifically our power and the proximity to white men is about what can we do for white men and how are we useful to white men? And so when you see Karens, it’s often women of an age who are leaving their ability to birth children, you’re getting older and you’re losing your value to white men.

C: Oh sure.

K: I listened to somebody talking about how misogyny affects white women and Black women differently, and the way that misogyny affects white women is that white women are infantilized.

C: Totally. And children too, it’s the same thing with adultism and children. Yeah.

K: So I have this theory that these women are literally acting like children to try and regain some of that power of male protection of white male violence and protection, which is only meant for children, ’cause the focus is actually on children, so that’s a theory… I’m just throwing that out there. Because it’s like, Oh, you’re acting like you’re during the literal tantrum, like a child, you’re literally infantilizing yourself, because your only sense of safety and self-protection comes from getting a white man to care about you and to protect you.

C: I would say that that’s a workable theory, I mean, and I wouldn’t would even classify as your only sense of self-protection, there’s a lot to be said about the different various waves of white feminism and ways that they have changed that dialogue and that dynamic for the better among white women. I do not like white feminism, for instance, but I don’t throw it out wholesale, because there are some things that have impacted… I will even say whiter-skinned women in general across the board, that has been beneficial to the plight of women at large. That said… Yeah, I mean, there’s the proximity to white maleness that empowers white women, there’s just like I mentioned earlier, like the value of women under white male gaze, so it’s something you were touching on there, which is like, what can they do for them? It’s like, how can they be appreciated for them. If we think about everybody as a commodified individual, which is a lot of the ways I think about it, we all have a different value. As a Black woman, the white feminist labor movement of women, that movement that was like, ‘Let’s go into the workforce’… We were all… I just imagine my Elders and ancestors being like, ‘Where were y’all at? We’ve been working this whole time. We were doing your work, okay?’ [laughter] Like did you forget about us?

K: You want to take over the laundry and the child-care? Go for it.

C: And the cooking, and the nursing. We talk about the power dynamics and the hierarchies of humanity, and the way our society breaks down and the imposed hierarchy of white maleness over everybody else, the proximity to that gives us power. And I would say that white women have been shrieking like banshees since they became white women, quite frankly. If we really think about it, or since even before that, since they were fucking monarchy back in Europe. And probably women with proximity to the power, the higher levels of the power dynamics in hierarchies have always been kind of shitty and… So we think about suburban white women, we think about everybody with their little fiefdoms, you know landlords and they’re in the suburbs and they’ve got a picket fence or they’ve got a McMansion or whatever, so they believe that they are somehow part of the capitalist power structure, and some of them are! But very many, the vast majority of them are not. And pulling that curtain off as you age, as you experience the world, your fucking cognitive dissonance is being challenged and people tend to freak out when their cognitive dissonances are challenged.

K: That’s right.

C: And I just also look at it like a sense of entitlement. I look at it very much like I’m rubber and you’re glue [laughter]. Being a leftist, being vocal, being young, being Black, being all of those things… a lot of the public discourse in the previous decade has been like, ‘Oh, these entitled socialists… Oh, these entitled millennials’, and it’s just like, we’re the furthest thing from actually being entitled or having this opinion of self-entitlement. We don’t think that we’re gonna get shit from the world. We don’t think that anything is happening for us, but they do believe, and it’s almost in a dualistic sense, like if you do the right things, you’ll get everything. And then when you get to that point, you realize that it’s not quite so simple, and that can be really devastating for folks not to say that they get a pass for acting like jerks when they get there, the rest of us have been out here living in this shit this whole time, we’ve been telling you. You didn’t wanna listen until you got there. So, sorry, Karen, but I wish they would. I think that in a lot of ways the public discourse about Karens has really helped significantly because it is now totally frowned upon to frivolously call the cops on people of color, and that is a huge deal. I’ve gone through my whole life worrying about that shit. Like, I’m not doing anything wrong, but you never know what somebody is gonna think I’m doing, or maybe I’m dirty and will give them covid or whatever. [laughter]

K: Yeah, what has changed over the last year? So you’ve noticed some tangible changes in your life?

C: First of all, nobody expects us to go anywhere, so it’s kind of been shitty. I’ve never had social anxiety, but now when I think about going to the grocery store, I’m just like, Oh no!

K: Because it literally could kill you… Yep, it’s terrifying.

C: Yeah, that and I’ve been enclaved in my house, so it’s just very hard to break out of that norm.

K: Let’s talk about how there’s different laws for different people in this society. I was a little bit naive coming into this project. Coming into activism in general, my thought was, ‘Well, it’s really interesting to have a show that’s about somebody who is actually an active activist, and can talk about what’s really going on on the ground. I think that’s worthwhile.

C: It is.

K: And I still believe that’s why the show is still up there, but there is… I do have a lot of fear cause it’s like my feeling was like, ‘Okay, well, I just won’t do anything illegal and it’ll be fine’, but now I’ve been out there. It’s like, Oh, that’s not how it works. Like illegal is an extremely mutable category that actually… Everything is kind of illegal… There’s laws all over the place that you’re just in a web all the time, and they just get to choose when to pull the strings on who. It’s not about what is illegal, what actions are illegal, it’s about who is being criminalized.

C: It’s about who you aggravate.

K: Right. It’s about being part of a criminalized population.

C: Yeah, it is, and I’m definitely familiar with being part of a criminalized population. I’m also familiar with being able to be on the other end of things, and I know what the laws are and where the line lies, at least to the extent that I’ve generally been able to argue myself out of trouble. But not everybody has that background legal education that I have, not everybody has a desire to argue as much as I do [laughter] I have this amazingly polite approach to it though, I just ask a lot of questions until somebody is really essentially trapped in their own lies, but not everybody knows to do that. And if you don’t know to do that, and if you don’t know what the laws are, and if you don’t… And if you’re going into things naively just thinking you’re doing the right things, you’re very, very likely to get caught up and get in trouble and even killed, and that’s the scary thing. It’s like the laws don’t protect you from getting killed, they do protect you from… Well, I’m trying to think of something, they protect you from… The laws are created supposedly to protect us from ourselves and to protect other members of society from damages created by us or other people, but what it really is is about is who has the financial or monetary or economic power to subvert the laws. So that’s the biggest thing, is just about money, and then who has the identity-based position to get the benefit of the doubt given the legal framework that we have. So there’s laws about everything, right? And one of the biggest ones that we’re taught in school is In America, you’re innocent until proven guilty. And I just say, prove that. Show me an instance…

K: Yeah, that’s not true at all.

C: … when that’s true, and they almost can never… ‘they’… whoever… ‘the powers that be’… I haven’t really had anybody be able to show me an instance where that was true for a person of color.

K (voice-over): Legally this is known as the presumption of innocence, but the Equal Justice Initiative talks about how for Black Americans, there is instead, a presumption of guilt. “The presumption that people of color are dangerous and guilty is so deeply entrenched that studies have found that support for harsh criminal justice policies correlated with how many African-Americans they believe were in prison. The more Black people they believed were incarcerated, the more they supported aggressive policing tactics and excessively punitive sentencing laws.

C: Or for a poor person.

K: What is it, 95% of people take plea deals? That’s like… if 95% of people are taking a plea deal with saying, which means that they’re saying that they’re guilty about whatever it was that they got pulled in for in order to avoid jail time, you really think that that’s… that our police force is doing that good of a job, that every single one of those people is guilty for everything they’re being pulled in for, that 95% of people are legitimately guilty, if they’re taking a plea to get out of it, I just don’t think that’s true.

C: Have you personally ever been through the plea deal experience?

K: Yeah, I had to take a plea deal.

C: Yeah, so I’ve taken one for traffic violations or whatever, and I honestly did that tongue-in-cheek was just like, Yeah, you guys I’ll plead to whatever is least expensive, ’cause that’s less on my credit later on when you go to collect the money that I’m never gonna give you. But I’m an asshole. [laughter] but most people aren’t assholes like me, most people aren’t going around like ‘I’m just gonna subvert the system and say Fuck it, and if I have to I’ll move’ [laughter]… Most people aren’t doing that. I have been through that scenario and basically the lingo, the jargon, the intimidation that they use… they stick you in a room with a prosecutor if you’re not represented by a lawyer, which I really haven’t been, and that prosecutor operates in the space of duality where they’re like Hey, it’s this or this. And I’m like, But what about the truth? And they’re like, Doesn’t matter, the truth is really hard for you to prove, but it’s really easy for me to make this really painful for you while you’re trying to get to the truth, so… Trials are expensive. Getting a lawyer, if you get a public defender, which they’ll offer you if it’s a jail-able offense, like that person is overworked, and a lot of them… I know a lot of public defenders. They are really people who actually give a shit about their defendants, but they do resent people who frivolously go to trial for things that are kind of minor because they have people who are going to potentially go to jail for a long time, life or have some other super negative consequence, then they’re trying to represent well, and every time they have to represent somebody who “frivolously” goes to trial and requests a public defender, that takes away time from that. So there’s all of these moving parts and mechanisms, and essentially, from the very first time I ever went to court, understood wholeheartedly that like, Oh okay, this is a mill for poor people, and it is a mill to create… And it creates this constant downward pressure on working class and poor people to essentially just comply with whatever seems to be the most minimally harmful thing, and a lot of times that’s a plea bargain, and they’ll say, Oh, fines and it’ll blow over… People who aren’t doing the calculation of how this is gonna impact their future “job prospects” or whatever, or like how this is gonna impact their housing prospects. Which it shouldn’t, by the way. Or how this is gonna impact just their legitimacy over time. What if you fall in love with somebody whose family really cares about them and gets a private investigator and finds out you plead to a minor offense and then you lose the love of your life? I mean that’s how serious this shit is… I think that that’s more serious to me than a fuckin’ job.

K (voice-over): From an article by Emily Yaffe for The Atlantic Magazine in September 2017 titled ‘Innocence Is Irrelevant’: “Ideally, plea bargains work like this, defendants for whom there is clear evidence of guilt, accept responsibility for their actions. In exchange they get leniency, a time-consuming and costly trial is avoided in everyone benefits, but in recent decades, American legislators have criminalized so many behaviors that police are arresting millions of people annually, almost 11 million in 2015, the most recent year for which figures are available. Taking to trial even a significant proportion of those who are charged would grind proceedings to a halt. According to Stefanos Bibas, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Pennsylvania law school, the criminal justice system has become a capacious onerous machinery that sweeps everyone in, and plea bargains with their swift finality are what keep that machinery running smoothly. Because of plea bargains the system can quickly handle the criminal cases of millions of Americans each year involving everything from petty violations to violent crimes, but plea bargains make it easy for prosecutors to convict defendants who may not be guilty, who don’t present a danger to society, or who’s crime may primarily be a matter of suffering from poverty, mental illness, or addiction. And plea bargains are intrinsically tied up with race, of course, especially in our era of mass incarceration.

K: I did lose a job because of my… I was on probation. I got a year of probation and I lost the job after they did the background check and I… What’s the word I’m looking for? I countered it?

C: Oh, you appealed.

K: That’s it. Yeah, thank you. I appealed and they eventually did give me my job back and then I quit. [laughter]

C: Like Ha Ha Ha Ha I win, fuck you.

K: Well, I didn’t want to work for them, and the appeal process took a long time, I had had to find a new job in the meantime anyway, so by the time I got my job back through the appeal process, I’d already… It wasn’t working in my life anymore. But it’s like it was a whole draining thing, and then you have to go through your life with people and be like… Okay.. it’s just really…

C: Yeah, I was arrested for something I never thought I could be arrested for… I was literally like, this is your story. I was literally arrested for something that I was doing the right thing.

K: Yeah, but that doesn’t matter. The right thing is not the point.

C: No, it’s the legal thing.

K: It’s the legal thing. Yeah, and right now we’re looking at a point… I got arrested for anti-fascism, and now we’re looking at a point right now where we just started a democratic… We have a New Democrat as a president, and the legal system is maneuvering to take over anti-fascism, kind of, like they’re talking about… There was cops that had to actually fight white supremacists at the capital on the 6th, and that one cop got a huge amount of praise from liberal spheres for fighting back fascists and whatever. So it’s like the state legitimacy sort of relies on their ability to counter this particular type of problem, which is the white extremists, like white supremacist extremism. But in order for the state to regain it’s legitimacy, that means it needs to take that back from the people who were doing it, so everyone… I think a lot of people are expecting an FBI pivot and crack down on the anti-fascist left who was doing that, and so I’m sort of right in this moment right now and being like, Okay, so what’s gonna happen if laws are not real or like if people are scared of the word ‘anarchist’, are scared of the word ‘anti-fascist’ and…I don’t know, I’m just wondering if they’re gonna… A lot of people are wondering if that’s gonna… I put my name on this and I’m proud of that.

C: If there’s going to be a legal crackdown? Well, I think that this Democratic administration is gonna have a whole lot of unraveling to do in terms of the weird web of draconian and also state-based draconian laws that were allowed to take hold during that last administration, which is a confusing web, right? And also so many of the people who were criminalized during that administration for anti-fascism stuff, a lot of it was federal, but most of it, the vast majority would have been under local and state jurisdictions, and so navigating how to provide guidance in those scenarios when for basically the last two and a half years, or especially in the last year, the guidance was, throw the book at them. And a lot of people did take… I know people who took plea bargains under those circumstances to things like misdemeanor rioting, all they did was walk with a group of people. But it was like, Well, okay, we’ll give you this plea bargain, but there won’t any fine and there won’t be any jail time it’ll just be on your record, and it’s like, Yeah, but certain employers or schools or whatever are gonna look at that and take that more seriously than others, you know? How does a landlord look at rioting on your criminal record? That’s really important to me. From my lens, in the world that I live in, it’s like it’s really hard to get a place to live if you have anything recent on your criminal record.

K: Yeah.

C: I don’t know, I didn’t have a driver’s license for 10 years. I lost an entire career for fucking with the state basically. Just refusing to pay them any money. I could have paid them the money, but I just didn’t want to. [laughter] Because legitimately, I didn’t cost them anything… That was my argument every time I went to court. What has this cost you? Why are you saying I have to pay 500? I haven’t harmed anyone. I haven’t done anything wrong. All I’ve done is being poor and Black in my neighborhood, when for whatever reason, y’all seem to think that you can take and extract fines for profit out of the poor part of town, when I happen to work on the rich part of town, and those mother fuckers do cocaine in their cars and drive 80 miles an hour. Pull those people over, they can afford to pay the fines! We can’t, so you’re just creating more and more destitution, more and more desperate poverty in those scenarios, creating… essentially ghettoizing people who are working hard to get out of the ghetto.

K: Right. But the people with the nice cars doing the cocaine, the rich folks, they have lawyers and they’ll cause a fuss and then it’ll be a whole pain in the ass, and so it’s like if you’re just like a cop and it’s something you wanna deal with that’s easy, it’s just like, let’s take the easy way out. So how do you make it hard and also not make it worth it? I have been struggling with the idea… I have a whole lot of impostor syndrome about being an anarchist, about being anti-fascist. I’m kind of the generic almost, like the cheap off-brand anti-fascist.

C: I like that. You’re Private Label. [laughter]

K: I’m like the Kroger version.

C: You’re Great Value, bitch. [laughter]

K: I just don’t know if the FBI cares about my impostor syndrome. I don’t think I’ve done anything illegal, but you get so paranoid when it’s like there’s just so many laws out there once you start realizing. I saw a cop went to talk before Congress about the fact that it’s like you can’t even drive a block without breaking laws, it’s impossible, there’s literally so many laws on the books, but you can’t even drive a block without doing illegal stuff. It’s like wild, we live in such a highly tightly controlled society, so litigious.

C: I’m confused, so what do you mean you can’t even drive a block without breaking a law? I’m confused by that.

K: I should find that article. But he went to speak before Congress saying there’s so many laws on the books that you’re always doing something illegal basically.

K (voice-over): I cannot right now find the article talking about the cop who spoke before Congress about it being impossible to drive a block without breaking a law. I did find an article from the Chicago Tribune right after Eric Garner was killed, written December 4th, 2014 by Steven Carter. In it he says, “The legal scholar Douglas Husak, in his excellent 2009 book, “Over Criminalization, the limits of the criminal law”, points out that federal law alone includes more than 3000 crimes, fewer than half of which found in the federal criminal code. The rest are scattered through other statutes. A citizen who wants to abide by the law has no quick and easy way to find out what the law actually is, a violation of the traditional principle that the state cannot punish without fair notice. In addition to these statutes, he writes an astonishing 300,000 or more federal regulations may be enforceable through criminal punishment in the discretion of an administrative agency. Nobody knows the number for sure. Husak cites estimates that more than 70% of American adults have committed a crime that could lead to imprisonment. He quotes the legal scholar William Stands to the effect that we are moving towards a world in which the law on the books makes everyone a felon. Does this seem too dramatic? Husak points to study suggesting that more than half of young people download music illegally from the internet. That’s been a federal crime for almost 20 years, these kids in theory could all go to prison.”

C: Oh yeah, I’ve made that argument and I was like, and who writes the fucking laws? You know what I mean? Especially municipal ones that are just really, really hard to follow. So getting back to that, so driving a block and you can’t even avoid breaking a law, that was an argument I made once in court.

K: Really? Did it work?

C: No. [laughter] But it was fun. [laughter] Basically, I was just like, who writes the laws? You guys. Who enforces them? You guys. Who sets the schedule of fines? You guys. Who do they ask? Not us.

K: I think more people are starting to be aware of it. It’s just been so blatant lately, just with the… Especially with police is the most obvious is like all police are completely above the law apparently? it’s just like… Even average white people are being like, Oh man, that’s pretty… That was really blatant.

C: Yeah, no, and it had to be on CNN before white people would believe us. And the whole time we’re sitting here… I like to think back to that Dave Chappelle comedy special where he’s just like, ‘Pleease believe me!!’ [laughter] I was just like, no, it really is happening. We’ve been saying this for a long time. I was in a meeting, I was in a Zoom meeting the other day with some folks who were like all butt hurt about the siege on the capital on January 6th, which I have a favorite meme moment I wanna share at the end of this…Like they were all sad about it, and at the end of that meeting I put in the chat, I was like… So I just wanna let you all know that I’ve been talking about this for 12 years. I’ve been talking about fascism as a problem that is burgeoning in America for 12 years, I’ve been admonished by Harvard political scientists. I’ve been admonished by people left and right who said, Oh, that is hyperbole. Oh, that is just reaching. And I’m like, No, this started with the Tea Party, prototypical textbook beginning of a fascist movement. I was in Kansas, I saw it, I confronted it in person, I was there, okay? And I’ve been saying it, and people have been saying, I’m stupid about that for a really long time. Now mother fuckers. Now, what do you think? Can I just say, Look, it is important to listen to marginalized people. It’s important. So we’ve been saying this for the whole time, policing for-profit is a fucking problem. And it’s been a problem since the reconstruction of the United States. We’ve been saying this for a long time. Over policing of Black and brown and indigenous bodies has been a problem in the United States ever since police became a thing in the United States. And until it’s on CNN or until Rachel Maddow talks about it on MSNBC, the vast majority of white people don’t believe us about this shit, and I’m telling you it here. It’s real. So stop fucking waiting for Rachel Maddow to get the story. It’s too late once it makes it to the news, okay? Listen to Black and brown people, listen to indigenous folks, which requires you to step out of your comfort zone, it requires you… Which I don’t even know why just being surrounded by white people is your comfort zone anyways, that seems fucking ridiculous to me.

But it requires people to look at other people, people who look like me, people who have hair that is textured like mine and bodies that are shaped like mine, and not just look at us in ways that we could be more like you. It requires you to look at us in ways that we are another human being walking on this earth, having experiences, and by all fucking means having more colorful experiences, getting at the deeper raw-er aspects of the fucking issues that we actually face, and then hearing us and not admonishing us and assuming that we just need to do a little more assimilation in order to get past that. It’s never gonna fucking work. Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the most celebrated and well-respected professors of history in this country, was arrested trying to break into his own house that he had lived in for 15 years or something like that, because he was locked out of his house. This man can tell you what seven generations prior of your family, where they’re from, and the story of their life and the context of the history around that story of their life, and fucking his neighbors called the cops on him because he was a Black man breaking into his own house. If y’all can’t listen to us, y’all white people, can’t listen to us and can’t hear us and can’t bare witness to that, then I don’t give a fuck if you’re a hardcore anarchist versus the Katherine model, the private label generic anarchist. Like, Fuck ya, quite frankly. And also you’re gonna miss out… You’re gonna miss out on these opportunities, and I think the reason that you have this impostor syndrome feeling in a lot of ways is because so much about whiteness, even white leftism is about social cues, and it’s about the stylistic-ness of it, and it’s about being special, it’s about being famous, it’s about being notable, and having somebody quote you and have it, and it’s like, Dude, that is cool and all, but your fucking status doesn’t help me not die. It doesn’t help me face fucking police brutality or just… And I think about the spectrum of police brutality as just over-policing of Black communities, to the extent that they’re stealing hundreds of dollars from Black households every month for just petty bullshit that we didn’t even… you know? So yeah, so I’ve been a really adamant abolitionist for a really long time, like policing abolitionist, and I’ve had recently white people who claimed to speak for the Black Lives Matter movement who claim to represent and support us admonish me and tell me that they have a better plan for police accountability, than the lingo that I’m using, and the approach that I take, which is, Fuck the police. [laughter]

K: I think your approach pretty much sums it up and is a very… I can’t believe… I mean I can believe that people are… Ugh. That makes me mad, I’m sorry.

C: Yeah, like rich fucking 20-year-old white girls being like, ‘No, I have a really important political voice, and it’s really important that you change the language around, so it’s not so confrontational’, like bitch get the fuck out of my face! You know? Shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell. [laughter]

K: You can yell all you want, that is fine. [laughter]

C: Yeah get the fuck out of my face with that bullshit. [laughter]

K: We’re in a really dangerous moment right now with anti-fascism, in the fact that there is becoming a liberal version of anti-fascism. For me what it meant to be anti-fascist…

C: Everyday.

K: …was to understand the whole structure, like that’s why I’m an anarchist too, it’s like to understand is that fascism is coming out of a broken system, the whole structure is really violent, really fucked up, right?

C: Yaasss.

K: But there’s this other thing that’s happening where anti-fascist can also be seen as just the bare minimum or like ‘I’m against just literal Nazis, just don’t be a literal Nazi, and then everything else is fine’, and so there are people that are pivoting towards with a Democratic President, now they’re now pivoting towards liberal anti-fascism that aligns itself with the police state.

C: Yep. There’s a reason why the left is why we on the left, communists in particular, and I’m not saying we’re all perfect ’cause we’re not, but have had litmus tests for people who we organize with, have had bare minimum fucking like interviews and surveys and vetting and just all of those parts that come into it, ’cause we’re not… I’m not here to organize with you, if the only thing you fucking care about is not having Nazis siege the capital, like fuck the capital too. The state, the whole systems, all of these hierarchies, they are completely devoid of value to me. We need a revolution, we need a fundamental change in the status quo, the systems and the powers that be and the structures within the status quo have perpetuated colonialism, violence, fucking … pandemics, just completely subverting the whole purpose of what it is to be a biological human. In every way that they could commodify us, they have, and they have stolen from us our fucking… our generic capacity and essence of life! They’ve taken us and stripped us, alienated us so to the extent from our labor, they’ve alienated us from nature! They have alienated us so far that they have people living in shanty towns, tent cities on the street, and they’re telling them they can’t live there. Where the fuck are they supposed to go?? So the whole system that we have that is creating all of these social ills is the problem, and if people don’t understand that that is a function of fascism, that Hitler based his entire fucking Third Reich off of the US model of slavery, and for wage slavery as well, then they don’t have the right to wear the banner of anti-fascism.

K (voice-over): Okay, so we’re gonna need to stop there. There will be a part two which I will be releasing shortly. Thank you so much for listening. Candice is amazing. I’m really excited about the next part as well. if you like what you’re hearing and would like to support my work, I have a Ko-Fi for one time donations, I also have a Patreon, both under the name Friendly Anarchism, you can look me up there. I do need some help covering costs for hosting and for the transcripts. I know it’s a tough time for everybody right now, but every little bit helps! Opening and closing music by Kylo Ren from Eugene, Oregon off their album ‘Decadence’, their track ‘Towards a Creative Nothing’. Thank you to my current patrons, I really appreciate it!