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It injected fear and the weaponry that goes with it into a country where relatively prosperous, connected communities like mine would have had the potential to expand and offer other Americans far more robust support.
Blame Donald Trump and all too many of his followers, but don’t just blame him or them. Yes, he was indeed responsible for the nightmare of January 6, 2021, and, in his own fashion, for the incitement of right-wing militia (terror!) groups like the Proud Boys. (“Stand back and stand by!”) But in this country, in this century, violence has become as all-American as apple pie. In these years, it’s been violence and more violence all the way, literally in the case of the Pentagon. But let me start a little more personally.
Having lived several years in rural Maryland along the Virginia border, I’ve watched the local political landscape gain ever-deepening fault lines (as is true in the United States at large).
In election season 2020, in my enclave of largely well-educated political liberals, many with at least one public servant in the family (like my military spouse), you saw a sea of blue “Biden/Harris” signs as you drove among fields of corn and grazing cattle. However, as you approached the Virginia border, a smattering of black, white, and blue pro-police flags—like so many photographic negatives of the American flag—began popping up in response to growing protests elsewhere in the country against police brutality and violence toward communities of color. And the farther you traveled into Virginia, the more likely you were to see former President Donald Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” signs, as well as occasional Confederate flags, on houses and lawns. After President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, those Biden/Harris signs disappeared or were occasionally replaced by American flags, but the pro-police flags and MAGA signs remained, signaling an increasingly split nation.
In 2020, another parent of young children I know saw a large pro-police flag hanging from the entrance of a nearby farm and told me he suddenly thought: This is the first time I feel afraid in my own country.
Such changes in the landscape are still all too visible. A newcomer to our region might even assume that such a split between those still dreaming of a country reminiscent of the Old South, or perhaps a future Trumpland, and American democrats like me (who would generally rather ignore the existence of the first group than grasp why they came into being) was how it had always been.
These days, it’s anything but surprising to note that this country has become remarkably polarized. According to a recent Pew survey, 63% of Democrats view Republicans as immoral (up from 35% in 2016), while 72% of Republicans feel the same way about Democrats (up from 47% seven years ago).
In truth, there’s nothing that new about an American tendency to reduce our fellow countrymen to their political leanings. According to a 2014 Voxarticle citing sociological research, in 1960, just 5% of Republican parents said they would be against their children marrying someone who supported a different political party. By 2010, nearly half of such respondents reported that they would be displeased.
Such an atmosphere of increasing division is reflected in recent trends in gun purchases. In 2020, more firearms were sold than in any previous year on record and, in the years that followed, those sales would only increase. By now, almost 1 in 5 American households have a weapon, nearly 400 million of them, and that weaponry is only growing more deadly. In 2020, another parent of young children I know saw a large pro-police flag hanging from the entrance of a nearby farm and told me he suddenly thought: This is the first time I feel afraid in my own country. And indeed, he responded (as he never thought he would) by purchasing a gun, fearing a future militarized coup the likes of which almost arrived on January 6, 2021.
While we’ve been spending ever greater sums to hurt others, in the process we’ve hurt ourselves, in part by spending far too little to make ourselves healthier, smarter, connected by stronger roads and bridges, and climate-resilient.
Even some of our youngest citizens have caught this fever of fear and violence. At a recent neighborhood party, a young child reported that if Donald Trump were ever to go to jail, she would bake a giant orange Trump-shaped cake, cut off the head, and eat it to celebrate. I had to laugh and then, instead of saying what first came to mind—that it would feel great to do so!—I found myself piously telling her that we probably shouldn’t dream of that kind of proto-violence, even when it comes to leaders who have caused as much suffering as Trump.
Over the past two decades, however, it’s a fact that Americans have grown ever more violent, as have our police. Mass shootings are spiking, for example. And despite the government’s longstanding preoccupation with Islamist militants, over the past decade more than 75% of politically related murders in this country have been committed by far-right extremists, just like the ones tending their fields in my region who, being white, the police would never assume to be “not from here” and so, by definition, dangerously sympathetic to extremists.
How did we get to this point of violence at home?
If you held a gun to my head (no pun intended) and demanded an answer, I’d say that our decision to respond to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with the military invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq, as well as the launching of a “Global War on Terror,” played a major role in shaping the sort of worldview that’s now become all too American.
Since those initial invasions, after all, Pentagon spending has ballooned almost beyond imagining, being now about twice the 2000 budget in inflation-controlled dollars. Meanwhile, spending on healthcare, education, job creation, and infrastructure has increased so much more slowly. And don’t forget that, in the same years, our police became ever more strikingly militarized (on which more to come). In other words, while we’ve been spending ever greater sums to hurt others, in the process we’ve hurt ourselves, in part by spending far too little to make ourselves healthier, smarter, connected by stronger roads and bridges, and climate-resilient.
What Trump’s rhetoric of violence and victimization obscures is the way increasingly militarized U.S. policies have encouraged Americans to seek out terror in one another.
Another subtler reason is that most of us don’t get what violence is until we suddenly find ourselves caught up in it. In January 1973, after all, the government ended 25 years of the draft, turning our military into an “all-volunteer” force. So many decades later, most Americans don’t know anyone who’s served in our armed forces.
This, in turn, has meant that our 21st-century war on terror, the most prolonged set of U.S. conflicts since the Vietnam era, has been handled by volunteers who experience both longer and more frequent deployments and return home to ever fewer people who have the slightest idea what they’ve been through. As a result, many Americans are now unfamiliar with what killing people professionally does to you. Most have no idea what it’s like to see a family member return from a military deployment in the Middle East or sub-Saharan Africa completely changed—with a 1,000-yard stare that makes eye contact hard, a tendency to startle at loud noises, and possibly a formidable temper. For many privileged Americans fortunate not to live that life or dwell in crime-ridden neighborhoods, violence is something left to Hollywood movies until, at least, someone opens up with an automatic weapon in your local supermarket or dance hall.
No wonder it’s been so easy for Donald Trump and many others to cast blame locally rather than on the effects of the omnipresent war on terror and so many related global forces of terror that are hard to capture in political slogans. In response to his recent Justice Department election interference indictment, Trump told his supporters, “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you.”
In a sense, he was right when it came to the government in this century. Until recently, when President Biden led the way in injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into growing a clean-energy economy domestically, American policies had overwhelmingly been directed at fighting unsuccessful wars abroad rather than creating job (or life) security here at home for the high-school educated men to whom Trump unfortunately appeals so strongly.
Yet what Trump’s rhetoric of violence and victimization obscures is the way increasingly militarized U.S. policies have encouraged Americans to seek out terror in one another. The Costs of War Project at Brown University, which I helped found, has focused on just such policies. Most notably, anthropologist Jessica Katzenstein has shown how the Pentagon’s 1033 program, begun in the 1990s, funneled startling amounts of excess military equipment (sometimes right off distant battlefields), including armored personnel carriers, grenade launchers, and sniper rifles, to thousands of federal and local law enforcement agencies, including park, campus, and school police throughout the U.S.
That program grew dramatically with the post-9/11 buildup of the military-industrial complex. Police departments applying for such donations needed to explain that they would help them in the fight against drugs or terror. Chillingly, as Katzenstein notes, if police departments don’t have an obvious use for such weaponry, equipment, and vehicles, they have to find one fast, including quelling protests or executing home searches, which have increased significantly in communities of color in these years.
Under such circumstances, it becomes easier to imagine why, according to the assessments of some combat veterans, our police can now look more heavily armored than U.S. troops in foreign war zones. Officers wearing gas masks and bulletproof vests typically showed up in Ferguson, Missouri, back in 2014 with K-9 units, pointing sniper rifles at peaceful protesters and using tear gas, stun grenades, and smoke bombs to disperse crowds in that small Midwestern city where an unarmed black teenager had been shot and killed by a police officer several days earlier. And in the years since it’s only gotten worse nationwide.
Once you introduce injustice into a system, it can be applied against anyone.
At the same time, law enforcement of all stripes adopted a new approach called “intelligence-led policing.” The massive Department of Homeland Security, formed in response to the war on terror, has also been training police from across America in counterterrorism tactics, theoretically based on preventing crime rather than responding to it.
While such a focus may sound positive, it’s helped bring the war on terror home by ensuring that the FBI and local police monitor particular ethnic, religious, and political groups—most notably, Muslim citizens and legal residents. Under far more lax standards for surveillance ushered in by laws and policies like the 2001 Patriot Act, many Muslims have been targeted without the slightest suspicion of wrongdoing. The FBI even hired Muslim Americans to act as informants in their own communities, in certain cases encouraging young men to profess their sympathy for Islamist extremist groups and acts of mass violence. In such a world, it shouldn’t be surprising that hate crimes, incidents of racial profiling, and discriminatory comments by public figures spiked in the years after 9/11 and only continue to rise.
Once you introduce injustice into a system, it can be applied against anyone. And that’s just what’s happened. Civil-rights groups have documented cases in which, for instance, the FBI used sting operations to infiltrate, surveil, and target left-wing racial-justice activists during the summer of 2020 as America erupted in protest over the police killing of another unarmed black man, George Floyd.
A lawsuit filed this summer by the American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, alleges that a young Colorado police detective went undercover with a local racial justice organization and tried to enmesh one of its members in an entirely fabricated gun-running operation. In a related case, the FBI reportedly hired as an informant a convicted felon who encouraged two Black racial justice activists to assassinate the Colorado attorney general.
Now, President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security and related law enforcement agencies are focusing their surveillance more on anti-government and white supremacist groups. If terror is a hypothetical rationale for the police getting more weaponry, then anyone can manufacture it. If, on the other hand, it’s about real plans to commit acts of violence, then the overwhelming perpetrators during the Trump years were our government and the president’s right-wing extremist collaborators. In other words, you could finally say that the “terror” of the war on terror had come home to roost.
Though the start of a war may cause people to rally around their leaders, wars against something nebulous like terror or, in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s case, “Ukrainian Nazis,” tend to prove short-lived in their ability to unify. Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, for instance, hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled their country to avoid having to fight their Ukrainian neighbors who often constitute part of their extended families, while their president has called them “flies that we spit out of our mouths.”
As many Americans condemn Russia for its grim invasion, it’s easy to forget that for more than two decades now, others in our world have viewed our post-9/11 foreign policy in much the way we now view Russia’s—as imperialist and expansionist. After all, the U.S. invaded two countries, while using the 9/11 attacks to launch a war on terror globally that metastasized into U.S. counterterror activities in 85 nations.
This has, in fact, been the violent American century, but even less recognized here is how our war on terror helped cause us to turn on one another. It injected fear and the weaponry that goes with it into a country where relatively prosperous, connected communities like mine would have had the potential to expand and offer other Americans far more robust support.
If we don’t find a way to pay more attention to why this didn’t happen and just how we did so much negatively to ourselves, then a police-state mentality and its potential companion, civil war (like the ones we’ve seen in countries we sought to “democratize” by force of arms) may, in the end, become the deepest reality of an ever more polarized America. Of that, Donald Trump is but a symptom.
"International cooperation is not only in the best interests of all countries, but is absolutely necessary for the survival of the planet."
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders warned Monday that hawks in both his country and China are pulling the two superpowers into a "disastrous cold war" that threatens to undercut the possibility of cooperation against the worsening global climate emergency.
Sanders (I-Vt.), whose home state suffered catastrophic flooding last month, wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian that "if the United States, China, and other industrialized countries do not come together to dramatically decrease greenhouse gas emissions, the world we leave our children and future generations will become increasingly unhealthy and uninhabitable."
"Now is the time for a radical rethinking of geopolitics to reflect the reality that international cooperation is not only in the best interests of all countries, but is absolutely necessary for the survival of the planet," wrote Sanders.
Tensions between the U.S. and China have risen steadily in recent years as the two nuclear-armed nations have intensified trade restrictions and repeatedly exchanged warnings and threats over Taiwan, which the U.S. arms. Earlier this year, China voiced outrage over U.S. plans to sell nuclear-powered submarines to Australia as part of a new military partnership.
After U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Beijing in June, China's foreign ministry said the relationship between the two nations was "at the lowest point since its establishment" and "in a downward spiral." A survey released last week found that 43% of Americans believe it is likely that the U.S. and China will be engaged in "direct military conflict" within the next five years.
"The science is clear: If the U.S., China, and the rest of the planet do not act with greater urgency to dramatically cut carbon emissions, our planet will face enormous and irreversible damage."
In his op-ed, Sanders argued that a deteriorating U.S.-China relationship is disastrous for the world, particularly given that the countries are the two largest contributors to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, which are fueling extreme weather that has impacted both the U.S. and China in recent months.
U.S. and Chinese officials
revived bilateral climate talks in July, but they did not come to any concrete agreement.
"The science is clear: If the U.S., China, and the rest of the planet do not act with greater urgency to dramatically cut carbon emissions, our planet will face enormous and irreversible damage," wrote Sanders.
While expressing opposition to China's treatment of the Uyghurs and other policy actions, Sanders argued that "organizing most of our national effort around a zero-sum global confrontation with China is unlikely to change Chinese behavior and will alienate allies and partners."
"Most importantly, it could doom our planet by making climate cooperation impossible between the world's two largest greenhouse emitters," the senator added. "We need to move in a bold new direction."
Sanders noted that both the U.S. and China have exploding military budgets, spending close to $900 billion and $300 billion per year respectively—an "insane dynamic," according to the Vermont senator.
"So here's a 'radical' idea," Sanders added. "Instead of spending enormous amounts of money planning for a war against each other, the U.S. and China should come to an agreement to mutually cut their military budgets and use the savings to move aggressively to improve energy efficiency, move toward sustainable energy, and end our reliance on fossil fuels," Sanders wrote. "They should also provide increased support for developing countries who are suffering from the climate crisis through no fault of their own."
Acknowledging that establishment figures would likely dismiss such a policy recommendation as "naive and unsophisticated," Sanders responded: "Go talk to the people in Vermont who have lost their homes because of unprecedented flooding and the families in Hawaii who lost loved ones in the recent fires. Go talk to the more than 1 million people in China who have been displaced by catastrophic floods. Go talk to the people in southern Africa who are starving because of the terrible drought and floods they are experiencing or farmers around the world who can no longer grow their crops because of water shortages."
"Perhaps most importantly, go talk to the hundreds of millions of young people in every country on Earth who are losing hope, wondering whether they should even have children of their own, given the enormous challenges the climate crisis poses for a normal life," he added. "If we are to save the planet, now is the time for bold action. Let's do it."
The first step in fighting back is to develop a shared understanding of militarization of law enforcement, stigmatization of protest, and corporate capture of government as an intertwined strategy to undermine democracy.
The fight in Atlanta over Cop City, a massive police training facility, has turned into ground zero for overlapping crises facing our country: the climate emergency, vast political and economic inequality, ever-militarizing police forces, and systemic racism.
If we want a democracy healthy enough to solve these crises, it’s worth paying attention to what is happening in the South River Forest.
On May 31, in a disturbing move shortly before Atlanta’s City Council approved more funding for the facility, Georgia law enforcement arrested three members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which provides activists with legal support and bail money.
Organized bail support for activists is a longstanding tradition, exemplified by the historical precedent of churches and community groups raising funds to bail Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders out of jail. Now, however, the authorities are deeming such acts “money laundering” and “charity fraud.”
In reality, the fund was targeted for supporting the Stop Cop City movement, which opposes the police training facility.
“When private corporate donors are able to fund militarized training facilities for the police, they are essentially buying off the police. They are making it clear who the police work for.”
Many in the community fear the Cop City facility will be used to train police in counterinsurgency, further militarizing an already armed and equipped force. In a city with wide wealth and income disparities, more militarized policing fits into what community activist Micah Herskind describes as “the state’s retreat from the provision of social welfare and the interrelated build-up of policing and imprisonment to manage inequality’s outcomes.”
The facility is largely funded by the corporate-backed Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), whose donors include Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, Home Depot, and Wells Fargo. Militarized policing is a growing concern in the United States, and corporate-funded militarized policing raises further unease about law enforcement becoming directly beholden to corporate interests.
As local resident Brad Beadles put it, “When private corporate donors are able to fund militarized training facilities for the police, they are essentially buying off the police. They are making it clear who the police work for.”
Cop City also has adverse environmental justice effects. Building the facility will require cutting down part of an urban forest adjacent to a majority-Black, working class community.
Urban forests provide critical environmental benefits for nearby residents. They filter pollutants from the air, store carbon, and mitigate floods and the urban heat island effect. Destroying community access to nature and outdoor recreation also negatively impacts mental health, as individuals with less access to green spaces have higher prevalence of mental distress, anxiety, and depression.
Cutting down forests anywhere in an age of climate crisis is a bad idea, but doing it next to a working-class Black community is particularly egregious when there are already nationwide racial disparities in urban heat island exposure and access to greenspaces. By 2050, summer high temperatures in the Atlanta metropolitan area are predicted to be 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than they are today, making preservation of Atlanta’s tree coverage all the more imperative.
The arrests of the bail fund organizers are only one example of state repression against the Stop Cop City movement.
In a January raid on a protest encampment in the forest, police killed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, an activist also known as Tortuguita. Police claim Tortuguita shot first, but have refused to provide proof. Results from two independent autopsies contradict the official story, raising the possibility that this was a cover-up of a “friendly fire” accident between police officers—or worse, an assassination.
Activists in the movement have also been arrested on “domestic terrorism” charges for having muddy shoes or having legal support numbers written on their arms—prosecutorial overreach with clear intent to intimidate.The state is using violence and terror to try to stamp out a movement opposing a facility meant to train law enforcement in violence and terror.
Residents of Atlanta have spoken out against Cop City. A September 2021 City Council hearing on the subject received 17 hours of testimony, with about 70% against the project. The Council approved the project regardless.
In June 2023, the Council held a hearing on approving more public funding for Cop City. This time, they heard 13 hours of testimony, with the overwhelming majority in opposition. Once again, the Council approved the funding anyway.
The criminalization of protest in Atlanta is part of a years-long trend.
In a 2020 Institute for Policy Studies report called Muzzling Dissent: How Corporate Influence over Politics Has Fueled Anti-Protest Laws, we examined state repression of oil and gas infrastructure protesters with so-called “Critical Infrastructure Protection” laws.
Similar to the Cop City project in Atlanta, the communities impacted by the oil and gas projects we studied had high levels of economic insecurity and were overwhelmingly Black, Indigenous, or poor white people. We examined pipeline resistance struggles in three different states—a Black environmental justice community in Louisiana with the highest rates of cancer in the country, an Indigenous nation fighting to protect their cultural resources in Minnesota, and impoverished Appalachian communities in West Virginia.
The fossil fuel industry is weaponizing the term “critical infrastructure protection”—which is historically associated with safeguarding infrastructure that serves a vital function for communities, such as roads and bridges—to restrict the ability of communities to protect themselves against destructive oil and gas projects.
Versions of “Critical Infrastructure Protection” legislation in Louisiana and West Virginia (which have the laws on the books), and Minnesota (where the legislature passed a bill that was subsequently vetoed by the governor), all included similar language that identified varying types of fossil fuel infrastructure as “critical infrastructure” and criminalized entering these sites with the threat of felony charges.
Many versions of the bill also held supposed “co-conspirators” of such activities liable. These types of charges criminalize participation in a group or social movement involved in protesting, which parallels many of the police repression tactics against Stop Cop City, also known as the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement.
Forest defenders who were arrested in Atlanta have often faced “domestic terrorism” enhancement charges in addition to “felony trespassing” due to their association with the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” movement, which prosecutors claim is a “criminal organization” under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
In Muzzling Dissent, we identified how the fossil fuel industry is weaponizing the term “critical infrastructure protection”—which is historically associated with safeguarding infrastructure that serves a vital function for communities, such as roads and bridges—to restrict the ability of communities to protect themselves against destructive oil and gas projects.
Similarly, the State of Georgia and the City of Atlanta are now weaponizing RICO, a 1970s law to prosecute violent mafia activity, against an autonomous and decentralized environmental justice movement.
“Critical Infrastructure Protection” laws are most successful in states with the most concentrated fossil fuel industry power at a time when domestic oil and gas production is at a record high.
In all three of our case studies, the “Critical Infrastructure Protection” bills were led by state legislators who took large campaign donations from oil and gas companies. In fact, the original model text for the bills was drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a nonprofit heavily funded by the fossil fuel industry and closely tied to many of the policy makers who passed the bills.
Muzzling Dissent was ultimately an illustration of how unfettered corporate power leads to the criminalization of community resistance against wealthy, private interests. Similarly, it’s no coincidence that Cop City is being built in a heavily corporatized city.
Atlanta is also home to Coca-Cola, UPS, Delta Airlines and Home Depot—each of which are represented on the APF’s Board of Directors, with the recent exception of Coca-Cola.
Atlanta has been dubbed the “Silicon Peach” because of its position as one of the fastest growing urban technology hubs in the United States. In addition to a booming technology sector, recent tax cuts for the film industry have made Atlanta a new hotspot for high-budget entertainment studios.
Atlanta is also home to Coca-Cola, UPS, Delta Airlines and Home Depot—each of which are represented on the APF’s Board of Directors (with the recent exception of Coca-Cola, which stepped down after Color of Change exposed the corruption and controversies surrounding the foundation).
The unwillingness of the majority of elected officials in Atlanta to acknowledge the widespread opposition to Cop City is a testament to the power of the corporate-backed APF.
The recent Congressional intervention to force construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) is also consistent with the trend of powerful corporate interests promoting militarized state repression to protect their interests against the popular will.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), the architect of the provision benefiting MVP in the debt ceiling bill, gets the most oil and gas industry money of any federal legislator. And Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who made the back-room deal with Manchin to force the pipeline’s approval, has received more than $300,000 from MVP developer NextEra Energy.
While the MVP deal does not directly criminalize dissent, it closes off regulatory and legal tools for project-impacted communities to fight back, making protest and direct action even more indispensable. It requires regulatory agencies to issue all permits for the project without going through the customary review process that projects usually have to go through, cutting communities out of intervening in permitting processes by filing comments in regulatory dockets. It also exempts permits issued to the MVP from judicial review, closing off the courts as another venue for communities to fight back.
Despite their opponents’ best efforts, Atlanta Forest Defenders have not given up on democracy.
When the so-called “proper channels” for communities to resist harmful corporate projects are made inaccessible, protest tactics are sometimes seen as the only choice left for those fighting to defend their communities. And as the crackdown in Atlanta shows, such protest tactics can lead to activists being locked up, creating a chilling effect for those engaging in dissent.
This trend is a serious threat to social movement organizing. The first step in fighting back is to develop a shared understanding of militarization of law enforcement, stigmatization of protest, and corporate capture of government—not as isolated evils, but as an intertwined strategy to undermine democracy.
In the meantime, Stop Cop City organizers are circulating a petition to put the issue before voters on the ballot for municipal elections on November 7. If the organizers collect enough signatures to put the decision on Cop City question on the ballot, voters will get to choose whether or not to lease the city-owned land for the project. Despite their opponents’ best efforts, Atlanta Forest Defenders have not given up on democracy. They are taking their case against Cop City directly to the people of Atlanta, asserting organized people power as the antidote to concentrated corporate power.