“Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds” - Famous proverb
First a basic fact must be established: The US has the world’s largest prison system and population by far, incarcerating more than 20% of the total global prison population in 2015 despite only having 4.4% of the total population. Of all OECD countries the US imprisons at least more than twice as much than the next highest country (Turkey), and it only gets worse as you go down the list. Keep this in the front of your mind as you read on.
Over the past year or so TYT and in particular Ana Kasparian have been waging a fascistic law and order tough on crime propaganda campaign that would make Reagan and Bush senior blush with shame. They keep posting videos of crimes happening somewhere in the US, and then stare at the camera and say all solemnly: “Oh my god, how can progressives stand for this? How can leftists allow these depraved violent criminals to do what you just saw on your screen?” As the pushback against them grows, you can expect Ana to shed some tears as she does these staged moments. Perhaps she will also unleash a personal anecdote about some bad experience she had recently with some “violent criminals” to add to the effect.
This is the purest, most banal form of fascist propaganda. And I don’t use the term fascism loosely as a cheap slur. I mean something specific by it: namely the effort to appeal to people’s base, reactionary, violent, vengeful emotions, for specific political ends that align with them, and only further perpetuate violence rather than doing anything to alleviate it. That is what TYT and Ana Kasparian have become experts in, following the lead of accounts like Libs of Tik Tok and outlets like Breitbart which had a “black crime” tag. They too are experts in this fascist propaganda, compiling videos of crimes happening, especially by black people (something Ana loves as well), and then doing the worried solemn stare into the camera.
What fascist propaganda is aimed at is the destroying of any kind of reality and its replacement with comfortable abstractions that make the well-off, upper middle class asset-owner feel safe and secure in their social and economic being. When you show a video of a horrific violent act being perpetrated, and intentionally frame it as a universal phenomenon, as something that happens all the time, regularly, everywhere you go, and hence you and your family are also at risk of it being done to you—that is a violent act itself. You are imposing a fascistic mindset which, motivated by fear, resorts to violent acts in the political sphere, except this violence is the structural, systemic kind inflicted on the poor and marginalized who get ensnared into the American prison-industrial system and have their lives destroyed by the millions and millions.
Do they matter? Do any of the countless millions who have had their lives destroyed by the American carceral state over the past decades, predominately from poor and minority backgrounds, have any humanity? In fascist propaganda, no. They are erased from view. At best turned into meaningless abstract statistics, an afterthought. Liberals in particular love doing this. No no, don’t think about the actual humanity of the victims of the carceral state, that’s just a Very Big Number that we have to do something about sometime in the future maybe if it’s convenient and makes sense but just ignore it for not, let it slip away to the back of your mind as these Big Numbers tend to do.
I want you to focus now on this video I shared of a violent act being done, and solely let your political actions be guided by that. Nothing else matters, just this one moment. And anyone who tries to enter into a discussion about it, I will force them to remain within the intentionally narrow frame I’ve concocted as part of my fascist propaganda spectacle: you can only talk about this video clip I shared.
Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur and TYT more generally are not unique in how easily they slip this kind of fascist propagandizing. It’s an intrinsic part of their liberal ideology, wherein the primary concern is maintaining the status quo even when all the empirical evidence shows that it creates untold violence and misery. You cannot as a liberal think systemically, focused on the root material causes of pathologies like crime or war or alienation, even though there is massive amounts of research compiled on it (for crime in particular I highly recommend the work of one of the world’s leading sociologists on the subject, Loïc Wacquant, whose work I will reference below).
The liberal thinks eclectically, randomly, individually, informed by their base instinctive reactionary impulses. That is why whenever the media apparatus begins to whip up a hysteria for war, you can see poll numbers of support for it among liberals spiking immediately. And we have seen the same in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, the largest in US history. At first liberals were allied to it, even encouraged it, but already during the protests Biden and Nikole Hannah-Jones and Deray and all those Warrenite-liberal-progressive types began calling on them to calm down and not go too far, and blaming the radical aspects of the movement on “white anarchists”, sowing divisions within the movement by pouring cynical neoliberal identitarian acid on top of it (I still remember the video of some Warrenite creep at a BLM demonstration demanding that whites separate from black people, just the most grotesquely depraved act of sabotage you can imagine). And over the past year or so, as the media apparatus began whipping up the fake “crime wave” hysteria, liberals immediately threw overboard any remaining positive sentiments they had about BLM and went full Reagan-Bush era tough on crime deranged. Why wouldn’t they? It’s in their ideological DNA. They did the same thing in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Without them mass incarceration wouldn’t have been possible. Joe Biden did that. Liberal New York Times writers did that. Progressive social liberals in New York and San Francisco did that. Together with their conservative allies, with whom they always end up back in bed whenever the neoliberal state has to punish and discipline the poor and marginalized at home and abroad.
The depraved pathology of fascistic carceral liberalism having been diagnosed, I will now offer an antidote to it, the work of the aforementioned Loïc Wacquant. I also highly recommend following Alec Karakatsanis and Ben Spielberg. Both have been responding in detail to the recent fascist outburst by Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur on their timelines, and this thread in particular is very good:
Here are recommendations of Wacquant’s main writings on the American carceral state, and how its creation went hand in hand with the broader neoliberal agenda of the 1970s and after. You can find more of his work on his website. Everything you need in terms of data can be found here. Read this and/or watch some of the lectures by Wacquant I will link to as well, and you will have the ability to easily counter the fascist propaganda of carceral state liberals and conservatives.
Books:
Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity
Articles:
The Penalisation of Poverty and the Rise of Neoliberalism
The Place of the Prison in the New Government of Poverty
Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity
Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh
Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality
The Punitive Regulation of Poverty in the Neoliberal Age
The Prison is an Outlaw Institution
Lectures:
“The liberal thinks eclectically, randomly, individually, informed by their base instinctive reactionary impulses.” This is the best description of Liberals and their craven politics that I've seen.
I was endorsed by some local 'progressive' liberal organization when I ran for office in 2013. I remember reading their creed at the time, it went something like this (I'm paraphrasing): "We are not tied to an ideology, but rather look at each idea individually and form policy based on the best practices."
I immediately thought of Comrade Lenin's quote on "unprincipled practical politics," and Chairman Mao's "But liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, Philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration in certain units and individuals in the Party and the revolutionary organizations."