U.S authoritarianism also means a police state | Will Bunch Newsletter

Like so many of us, this newsletter had put on weight since those first lean lockdown days of April 2020, when it was launched. My editors and I have agreed on a word diet to make what you are reading today leaner, punchier, and better built for the long haul. Tell me what you think! I could say more, but....

📮 Folks had a lot of thoughts about Oliver Anthony’s No. 1 hit, “Rich Men North of Richmond” — most of them negative. ”He knows an economic truck has hit him, but doesn’t know who was driving and so turns his anger to people of color eating cookies instead,” wrote David Rakowski. Kristina Tuck called it “a pre-planned and entirely manufactured conflict, designed to fuel the online rage machine.” But there was also agreement that Billy Bragg’s pro-union answer record is indeed awesome!

This week’s question: Philadelphia’s presumptive next mayor Cherelle Parker supports stop-and-frisk policing. Is it an effective way to curb crime, or racial profiling? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

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If you remember the late John Singleton’s classic 1991 film Boyz n the Hood, you can’t forget the constant, buzzing presence of police helicopters over South Central L.A., reminding the youthful protagonists they are always under watch in a modern police state. Three decades have passed, and for all the talk about changing the police, the only real change is that cops have gone high tech.

New Yorkers were stunned going into Labor Day weekend to learn climate change isn’t the only heat some of them will be experiencing. At a news conference concerning a massive Caribbean street festival, J’ouvert, police brass announced that revelers enjoying a large backyard barbecue might have an uninvited guest: a New York Police Department surveillance drone.

“If a caller states there’s a large crowd, a large party in a backyard, we’re going to be utilizing our assets to go up and go check on the party,” Kaz Daughtry, assistant NYPD Commissioner, told reporters. Even dropping the irony that J’ouvert is a carnival to celebrate the end of slavery, the news shocked civil libertarians who questioned the legality of the city’s privacy-invading drones. Daniel Schwarz, privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, called the backyard barbecue spying “a sci-fi inspired scenario.”

But file this threat under non-fiction.

It would be deeply troubling if this was just one bad idea, or if it solely represented the rot of Mayor Eric Adams’ New York, which has prioritized cop overtime over libraries, turned its Rikers Island jail into a deathtrap, and brought back racial profiling with a gusto that might make Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye run again.

But cops watching you grill jerk chicken increasingly feels like the new normal in an America that saw millions protest George Floyd’s police murder in 2020 and decided to double down on repressive law enforcement instead of cleaning up its act.

Increasingly, cops are enforcing right-wing politics. In Telford, a Philadelphia exurb, an online activist was stunned to get a letter from the local police chief threatening to arrest her for “maliciously harassing” the right-wing extremist group Moms for Liberty. This comes on the heels of a widely publicized raid of a small-town Kansas newspaper that had investigated prominent locals, including the new police chief, and an incident in St. Louis in which a member of a jail monitoring board raced to the facility after an inmate died ― only to be arrested by the cops.

Police violence is flourishing. “Police strategy for the mentally ill should not involve shooting them,” was the recent headline over an editorial in the Star-Ledger of Newark, after police in Jersey City shot and killed a schizophrenic man with a knife. Nationally, you’ve seen the shocking footage of suburban Ohio cops shooting and killing an unarmed pregnant woman accused of shoplifting when her car lurched a few inches toward an officer. Here in Philadelphia, locals are still sorting through the police lies in the aftermath of the police killing of motorist Eddie Irizarry. Police killings in 2022 set a recent record high, although the pace has diminished slightly this year.

It feels important to see out-of-control, violent or politicized policing in the proper context — not as a random story that occasionally intrudes on the non-stop news of Donald Trump’s 50-50 chance of becoming 47th president despite his indictments, but as a subplot of the same narrative. The powerful, ultra-conservative police unions mostly endorsed Trump in 2016 and 2020, and that ridiculous phalanx of motorcycle cops at his Atlanta arrest was a visual reminder that the police support him more than ever — despite his growing rap sheet.

The ideas propelling Trump into a 2024 tie with President Joe Biden — shock at the liberal tolerance-embrace of those 2020 protests, fear of shrinking white supremacy and patriarchy — are also deeply embedded in today’s cop culture. If you are engaged in the battle to save U.S. democracy from rising authoritarianism, it’s important to see reactionary policing as the vanguard of that movement. It’s past time to renew our vows to change the police, starting with preventing the return of racist stop-and-frisk policing. More on that topic from me, very soon.

Question: Re: Article 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bans insurrectionists from federal office: “Is it realistic to think any secretary of state would strike Trump off the ballot when he hasn’t been specifically charged with sedition or seditious conspiracy and will probably not be convicted of the charges he’s facing by primary season?” — Via Karmageddon (@TinaMcGugan) on Twitter/X

Answer: OK, I cheated and more or less solicited this question on Twitter, because I’m fascinated by this topic. Personally, I believe Trump incited the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection and should be barred from running. The ideal forum — his February 2021 second impeachment trial — was lost to the cowardice of Mitch McConnell, etc. There are two problems with the 14th Amendment. Legally, Special Counsel Jack Smith declined, for strategic reasons, to charge Trump with insurrection, giving the ex-president’s lawyers a real argument for once. Politically, various Democratic secretaries of state or state legislatures banning Trump would be a field day for Republicans to convince low-information voters that Dems are “the anti-democracy party.” Trumpism must be defeated — at the ballot box.

A lot of TV talking heads have framed the problem facing American democracy as largely “a Donald Trump problem” — as if the United States is just a Big Mac-addled heartbeat away from again operating just the way James Madison and Alexander Hamilton wrote it up. To think that, however, is to ignore not only the beliefs of many of the 74 million who voted for Trump in 2020, but also the GOP-led statehouses that author David Pepper calls Laboratories of Autocracy. For your consideration: Wisconsin.

Political scientists routinely rate Wisconsin as one of the two or three worst states for partisan gerrymandering; the GOP has racked up huge legislative majorities in elections where Democrats got the most votes statewide. Winning Wisconsin Supreme Court 2023 candidate Janet Protasiewicz, a Democrat, was merely speaking truth when she called it “a rigged map.” But Republican lawmakers call that bias, and — desperate to preserve the anti-democratic secret sauce of their power — are working to impeach Protasiewicz before she has any opportunity to vote on pending gerrymandering lawsuits. This is a stunning abuse of legislative power, aiming at undoing the results of a democratic election that was held in April.

And it’s not just happening in Wisconsin. In Ohio, GOP state officials arbitrarily changed the wording of the abortion-rights amendment that liberals placed on the November ballot, hoping to make it sound less palatable to voters. These are happening on top of myriad statehouse efforts to reduce the self-rule powers of cities, which tend to vote Democratic and enact progressive policies. It all points to the reality that the GOP is no longer a political party but an anti-democratic movement that will do anything to retain power, and use that retained power to preserve ancient hierarchies around gender and race. Even if Trump disappears tomorrow, these desires will still remain.

“Follow the money,” Woodward and Bernstein were told. On this date seven years ago, I was consumed and outraged by the plan to desecrate Native American lands in South Dakota with a useless fossil-fuel conduit, the Dakota Access Pipeline, but I was even more infuriated that Pennsylvania dollars were supporting this, through a sizable investment by the Pennsylvania Public Schools Retirement System, or PSERS. Share my anger when you read, “Your Pa. tax dollars at work, siccing dogs on Native American protesters.”

I honored Labor Day by not laboring this week, but my Inquirer colleagues remained at work. Two of them, William Bender and Ryan W. Briggs, had a remarkable story to tell. For 30 years, folks in the suburban community of Elkins Park — home to some of the Philadelphia area’s most prominent synagogues — have been living with something shocking in their midst: a monument to soldiers who collaborated with the Nazis’ notorious SS units during World War II. Pro-Ukrainian war veterans and religious leaders insist the monument at St. Mary’s Ukrainian Catholic Cemetery is a complicated story — that these soldiers sought Ukrainian independence from the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. But a trail of atrocities tells a different tale. How many more decades would the monument have sat unnoticed if not for local journalism? Subscribe to The Inquirer today to support our work.