The Fire This Time

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, cancel culture, migrant defense

Scenes from Delaney Hall (5)
It’s a serious mistake to rely exclusively on the mainstream media for news of what’s happening at Delaney Hall. If you’re doing this, you’re being misled by omission: you’re systematically depriving yourself of information that’s relevant to getting a balanced picture of what’s happening there, or for passing a verdict on it.

To illustrate this, I want to work through a representative example of mainstream journalism, a June 4 article on Delaney Hall in The New York Times. My aim here is not to find fault with the author, or to condemn the article, but simply to point out as a matter of objective fact that whether fault is involved or not, the article systematically misleads the reader to the detriment of the protesters. It fails to supply necessary background context, fails to ask the right questions, fails to answer them, and misses salient points of detail. Again, my point is not primarily that the author should have included this or that, but simply that given what he excludes, he misleads, full stop. Why this is the case is a separate question. How it’s to be remedied, or whether it can be remedied within mainstream media at all, is also a separate question.

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Graham Platner and the Merchants of Mass Death

Posted on by under character based voting, Electoral Ethics and Politics, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement

The Graham Platner controversy is an instructively stupid one. It’s a little bit like the Katie Hill controversy of yesteryear, but even dumber.

Platner is accused of saying and doing some problematic things, mostly many years ago. The accusations fall into two categories. Either the facts are contested, or not. In the most serious cases, the facts are not only contested but essentially unknowable, which raises the suspicion that many of the allegations are either exaggerations, false memories, or lies. In the uncontested cases, what is alleged is simply not serious enough to be disqualfying. Much of the “scandal” turns on the widespread inability to grasp or acknowledge the fact that people often say things in anger or through thoughtlessness that they don’t really mean. These claims often don’t tell us very much in the first instance except that the person lacks a certain kind of self-control. Once the problematic claim comes out, it’s out, but if sincerely apologized for, much of the problem is, often enough, resolved. 

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Holly Schepisi and the Mechanics of Misinformation

Posted on by under activism, Fatwas, migrant defense

Holly Schepisi is a Republican member of the New Jersey State Senate from Montvale, an attorney, and previously, the President of the Holy Name Medical Center Foundation. She’s also a loud defender of ICE, and a loud critic of migrant defense efforts. About a week ago, she posted the following on Facebook. I challenged her to produce evidence for her claims, which she blithely ignored. So let me try again.

Here are some issues with her claims:

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Ian Austin, Outside Agitator

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, libertarianism, liberty and the left, migrant defense, moralism

Scenes from Delaney Hall (4)
Just a postscript to my June 3 post, “Nowhere to Hide,” featuring Ian Austin. I heard last night through the activist grapevine that Austin had been arrested. The arrest is obviously a case of targeting one of the most charismatic ground-level leaders of the migrant defense movement. He’s repeatedly been arrested in just this way across the country, most often to have the charges dropped. The point is not to sustain the charges in court but to intimidate and harass him with the intention of undermining the migrant defense movement.

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Outside Agitation

Posted on by under activism, migrant defense, Neutrality and Complicity

Scenes from Delaney Hall (3)
In 1963, an outsider named Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled from Atlanta, Georgia to Birmingham, Alabama to protest injustice there by deliberately intensifying “tension” in that, to him, foreign city. His presence, as well as that of his followers, was questioned by locals:

However, we are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens, directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.

King unapologetically doubled down on being an outsider:

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Another Night of Military Exercises Using Civilians as Human Shields

Posted on by under Health Care Series, Human Shields, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, War with Iran

Not a joke headline. It happened the other day in Pasadena, California. It almost sounds like a comedy skit intended to unmask the hypocrisy of “Western” claims that Hamas uses “civilians as human shields.” We can’t, of course, be entirely sure of the military’s intentions here. The residents might not have been human shields; they might be simulated targets, after all. But that doesn’t really improve things.

PASADENA, Calif. (KABC) — A late-night military training exercise in Pasadena startled residents as helicopters flew overhead and landed at a long-closed medical facility.

The exercise began around 8:30 p.m.Wednesday, with helicopters landing on the former St. Luke’s Medical Center building, which has been closed for more than 20 years. Residents said the noise continued into the early morning hours.

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“Another Night of Violent Protests”

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, migrant defense

Scenes from Delaney Hall (2)
The next time you see a headline talking about “another night of violent protests,” consider what it does: it primes you to think, in the absence of any evidence or argument, that the protesters were responsible for whatever violence took place, even if law enforcement happened to be responsible for all of it. The phrase “violent protest” implies not that the protests involved violence by unspecified parties, but that the protesters themselves were the main source of the violence.

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Nowhere to Hide

Posted on by under activism, migrant defense

Scenes from Delaney Hall (1)
It’s been widely reported that the curfew at Delaney Hall was issued on Sunday night, and was to run nightly from 9 pm to 6 am. This photo was taken at 7:10 pm on Monday, June 1st. The State Police have stopped us at the corner of Wilson and Doremus Avenues, about half a mile from Delaney Hall, and ordered us not to proceed. Delaney Hall we’re told, is off-limits until further notice. That’s not the version of events in the media. It’s the version on the ground.

Here a protester, Ian Austin, asks a Newark police officer for the legal basis for the order. “If the curfew runs 9 pm to 6 am, why are we stopped here at 7:10 pm? And if there’s no curfew right now, why is there no freedom of movement?” The officer goes silent and looks down. How would he know what the law says? He’s just following orders.

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Would Mikie Sherrill Cover Up Someone’s Wrongdoing?

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, Electoral Ethics and Politics, migrant defense

Our judgments of current happenings always depend on background knowledge of the past. What’s been happening at Delaney Hall these past twelve days or so is specifically a function of Governor Mikie Sherrill’s policies. So her past matters.

One contested question is the extent to which Mikie Sherrill would be willing to accept complicity in someone else’s wrongdoing in the name of, say, misplaced loyalty to someone or something. Would she knowingly cover up someone else’s wrongdoing? Would she tolerate someone’s dishonesty in a morally consequential matter? Would she play dumb if she thought that doing so was somehow justified? Would she, on being called on it, double down?

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