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How We Can Counter the Far-Right’s Dangerous ‘Deep State’ Conspiracy Theories
To mobilize people, we must have a compelling alternative vision for turning government into a force for equity and justice.
Oct 15, 2024
Lies and rumors about the federal hurricane response serve to build the far-right’s governing power. At the expense of human lives, the far-right—which nowadays includes the Republican party, the Trump campaign, billionaire donors, GOP governors, and the advocates behind Project 2025—deliberately sows distrust in government, specifically targeting federal public administration.
Federal agencies’ roles in a disaster are to issue warnings, provide rescue and relief, and support rebuilding. Across the spectrum of public administration, agencies’ regular jobs involve the things we rely on every single day: ensure our tap water is clean, our food and medicines are safe, our collective bargaining rights are protected, our retirement checks arrive on time, and much more. Yet the far-right peddles a dangerous narrative that casts public agencies and civil servants as the “deep state,” the enemy of the people. By delegitimizing our government, they pave the way for an authoritarian takeover.
As we knock on doors to mobilize voters, we must be prepared to address widespread distrust in government, whether it manifests in anger or apathy. If people give up on government—which we formed to solve problems together that we cannot tackle alone—they retreat or turn to strongmen for answers. How do we debunk the “deep state” conspiracy and shine a light on the essential role of government in delivering on our needs?
There is a bleak logic to gutting public protections and public services: When government is unable to deliver, people become resentful and receptive to authoritarian fixes.
This summer I worked on a new toolkit, recently released by Race Forward, to help shift the narrative and block the far-right’s assault on public administration. It offers ideas for talking about what public administration is, and what it can be. While we know that the federal government produced or maintained many of the inequities and injustices we see today, it can also be part of the solution. Throughout history, movements for civil rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and many others taught us how to bend government towards justice.
We must begin by taking people’s affective responses to government seriously. Working class and poor people feel disaffected and disempowered because government hasn’t delivered for them. The class divide is real, the power and wealth gap between the rich and the rest of us is growing, racial injustice remains entrenched, misogyny is on the rise. Decades of neoliberal policies, pushing the commercialization of everything, have produced a full-blown crisis for working class people, disproportionately people of color. Privatization, disinvestment, and corporate capture have hollowed out public institutions and dismantled public goods. Our human rights are violated on a daily basis by unaffordable, commoditized housing and healthcare, food deserts, grocery price gauging, and hazardous workplaces, thereby shortening the lifespans of people pushed to the economic margins. Public administrative agencies are seen as bureaucratic barriers at best, and as controlling, coercing, and policing Black, brown, and poor people at worst.
This crisis has produced a fertile ground for a far-right plan, laid out by Project 2025, to capture the institutions of public administration. By delegitimizing government and setting it up to fail, authoritarians make it easier for themselves to take it over and turn government against communities.
Lying about federal disaster response fits neatly into this strategy. Rumors about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) seizing people’s property and spending aid dollars on migrants sow distrust, division, and hate and undercut the agency’s ability to deliver. This sets the stage for the far-right’s goal to end any government action to address the climate crisis. Project 2025 plans to drastically shrink federal disaster aid, shift costs to localities, privatize federal flood insurance, and terminate grants for community preparedness. Because climate research and planning are seen as harmful to what Project 2025 calls “prosperity,” the plan is to break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), including the National Weather Service that sends out hurricane warnings, and commercialize weather forecasting, likely putting warnings behind paywalls.
There is a bleak logic to gutting public protections and public services: When government is unable to deliver, people become resentful and receptive to authoritarian fixes.
This is particularly painful because it comes at a time when the Biden-Harris administration has taken some steps toward making federal agencies more responsive to people’s needs. This includes not only climate-related investments and jobs, but also new regulations that advance environmental justice, protect workers from heat exposure, increase overtime eligibility, ban non-compete clauses, and limit credit card penalty fees. But such agency actions often remain invisible, obscured by bureaucratic procedures, buried in the tax code, or held up in courts. We can surface these tangible efforts when we talk to potential voters and point to the purpose and possibilities of public administration.
A Trump presidency would reverse both recent progress and systemic protections embedded in the work of federal agencies. Project 2025 is not shy about terminating the enforcement of hard-won civil rights laws and privileging the narrow interests of corporations that price gauge, pollute, and exploit our communities. It would staff agencies with white Christian nationalists who seek to divide and dominate us.
These threats cannot be averted through a merely defensive stance. By calling on people to defend “democracy,” establishment politicians ignore popular anger, rooted in persistent experiences of inequity and injustice. Promoting an “opportunity economy” that relinquishes the goal of equitable outcomes simply doesn’t cut it. We can only block a far-right power grab if we tackle the injustices that fuel resentment. To mobilize people, we must have a compelling vision for turning government into a force for equity and justice. The job of public agencies is to protect our rights and deliver on our needs, and we can make them do just that—as long as we stand together, united.
In this election and beyond, we must contest the far-right narrative that undermines government and public administration. When people are reluctant to engage because the system is not working for them, let’s raise their expectations of government as a protector of rights, a provider of public goods and services, and a site for exercising our collective power.
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A Simple Safety Net Could Keep People Like Me out of Prison
When those facing the most systemic barriers receive sufficient income support, then economic security, thriving, and freedom are the result.
Aug 13, 2024
I received a 60-year prison sentence for a murder I didn’t commit. After 25 years of fighting this injustice, I was exonerated.
I’ve learned some hard lessons about our criminal justice system. I’ve also learned how simple safety net policies—like a modest guaranteed base income or no-strings-attached child allowance—could have kept millions of struggling young people like me out of trouble.
I had a good childhood in Flint, Michigan, but we were poor and opportunities were few. My parents were loving and supportive, but engaged in illegal activities to make ends meet. It seemed normal to me, but I was in an environment that normalized abnormal things.
I eventually dropped out of high school, moved to Indianapolis, and started a family. But when I got laid off, I turned in desperation to the drug life, trying to do for my family what my parents did for me.
If I’d had a modest child allowance for my own children, I wouldn’t have had to rely on the most accessible path available to me, the drug business.
One fateful night, I heard gunshots near the building where I had my drug business. I didn’t think much of it—shots weren’t unusual in that neighborhood. I finished my business for the day, proud of the money I’d made, and went home to my family.
Later, I learned a young man had been shot—and I was arrested for the murder.
I’d been blamed by someone with a drug-related grudge against me. A bystander had identified a very different man with a different physical description, but the detective buried that evidence. Advocates uncovered this evidence 25 years later, and I was exonerated and released. I’d spent a hellish 11 of those 25 years in solitary confinement.
During my incarceration, I became a teacher and mentor. Now I’m an advocate for people returning to society after incarceration.
I see the systemic barriers they face. Returning citizens are prohibited from hundreds of jobs—from working in education, health, and government to even becoming a barber or Uber driver. They’re barred from public assistance, public housing, and student loans. They face discrimination in housing and employment. They often have significant physical and mental health issues they can’t afford to treat.
These are the very conditions that sometimes lead to offenses and recidivism. Numerous studies have found that when people are securely employed, housed, and allowed to receive an education and meet their health needs, they don’t re-offend.
These people have already been punished and served their time—sometimes for offenses they never committed, like me. We shouldn’t be punished again when reintegrating into our families and societies.
As part of my work, I volunteer with Michigan Liberation, a statewide organization looking to end the criminalization of Black families and communities of color. Recently, they joined a Guaranteed Income Now conference co-hosted by Community Change and the Economic Security Project.
Guaranteed income can take many forms. It can be an expansion of current tax credits like the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit. It can be a no-strings-attached Child Allowance or a monthly payment to qualifying people, families, unpaid caretakers, undocumented immigrants, and returning citizens—all of whom are currently ineligible for assistance.
In Flint, it looks like a new program that offers pregnant people and new parents a monthly check for the first year of the baby’s life.
If my parents had a guaranteed income floor, we wouldn’t have been in danger of falling through into hunger and homelessness. They would have had significantly better chances to pursue well-paying jobs to provide for my security—without relying on illegal activity.
If I’d had a modest child allowance for my own children, I wouldn’t have had to rely on the most accessible path available to me, the drug business. I wouldn’t have been anywhere near the site of that murder—and wouldn’t have lost decades of my life to a false accusation.
It’s worth it to support our families and communities, no matter where we live or what we look like. When those facing the most systemic barriers receive sufficient income support, then economic security, thriving, and freedom are the result.
And I can tell you, there’s nothing sweeter than freedom.
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We Need a Movement to Counter the Supreme Court’s Cruelty to Homeless People
Despite the court’s abhorrent decision, cities and states aren’t required to prosecute the unhoused. Instead, they should double down on proven and humane solutions.
Jul 19, 2024
It’s hard enough not having a safe place to live. Now it’s easier for cities to arrest you for it.
“I am afraid at all times,” testified Debra Blake, who’d been forced to live outside in Grants Pass, Oregon, for eight years after losing her job and housing. Her disability disqualified her from staying in the town’s only shelter. “I could be arrested, ticketed, and prosecuted for sleeping outside or for covering myself with a blanket to stay warm,” she said.
In 2018, after being banished from every park in town and accruing thousands in fines, she sued the city as part of a class action suit for violating homeless residents’ constitutional rights. The Oregon District Court agreed in 2020 that the city’s actions constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Sadly, Blake died before seeing the results.
Today, a person who works full-time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the country.
But Grants Pass appealed the decision all the way to the Supreme Court. The billionaire-backed justices ruled this summer that unhoused people aren’t included in the Constitution’s protections against “cruel and unusual punishment,” overturning a federal appeals court.
But punishing people for our country’s failure to ensure adequate housing for all is inherently “cruel and unusual.” Widespread homelessness directly violates the human right to housing under international law, which must be recognized in the United States.
The court’s ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, “leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested.” Fines and arrests on a person’s record, in turn, make it more difficult to get out of poverty and into stable housing.
The decision comes as housing is increasingly unaffordable in our increasingly unequal nation. Today, a person who works full-time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the country.
With half of all renter households now spending more than 30% of their income on housing, millions are one emergency away from homelessness. According to federal data, last year over 650,000 Americans experienced homelessness on a given night—a 12% increase from 2022. Nearly half sleep outside.
Research confirms what should be obvious: Unaffordable housing and homelessness are intertwined. A lack of adequate health care and social safety net supports further compound the problem.
Hedge funds and private equity firms have also driven up housing costs since gaining control over a greater share of the market. Blackstone alone owns and manages over 300,000 units, making it the nation’s largest landlord. This financialization of housing treats a basic necessity and fundamental human right as just another commodity.
Cities and states face complex challenges in responding to homelessness. But experts have long documented that the real solution is affordable housing and supportive services, not punishment. Housing those in need ultimately costs less than imprisoning them, both financially and morally.
Despite the court’s abhorrent decision, cities and states aren’t required to prosecute the unhoused. Instead, they should double down on proven and humane solutions like Housing First, which provides permanent housing without preconditions, coupled with supportive services.
Guaranteed income programs offer another promising and cost-effective solution. Denver’s innovative, no-strings-attached cash assistance to 807 unhoused participants helped increase their access to housing within one year, while decreasing nights spent unsheltered and reducing reliance on emergency services.
Congress must also do more to invest in all those who call America home.
Currently, only one in four eligible households receive federal rental assistance. Housing rights organizations like the National Homelessness Law Center recommend that Congress invest at least $356 billion on measures like universal rental assistance, expanding the national Housing Trust Fund, and eviction and homelessness prevention.
It will take a broad-based movement to achieve these goals and counter the court’s latest cruelty against everyone who struggles to get by in America. But the impacts of housing are just as wide-ranging and consequential—from our health to education, security, economic mobility, and even our dignity.
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