169.-anatomy-of-a-counter-insurgency.pdf

169.-anatomy-of-a-counter-insurgency.pdf
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notably, the third precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department was
besieged and burned. Minnesota activated the National Guard on May 29
in response to the unrest. The American state’s disastrous response to
COVID-19, massive unemployment, and indiscriminate police killings that
disproportionately target people of colour provided the impetus for an
enormous and unprecedented outpouring of rage; protests, many of them
violently targeting the police, spread across the United States like wildfire.

While the initial uprising was ferocious in its explosive anger and militancy,
within just three weeks the protests seem to have been channeled largely
into the decidedly less militant demand of “Defund the police.” What
happened? | largely agree with what Kandist Mallett wrote in a brilliant
article in Teen Vogue, in which she argued that: “those in power...are
working tirelessly to destroy this wave of unrest before it becomes a
tsunami they cannot control... They are trying to kill this movement"? The
defanging of the George Floyd Uprising was not accidental but was rather
a deliberate attempt on the part of the American ruling class to regain
social control in the wake of the most militant protests in recent memory
—and, as a movement, possibly the largest in U.S. history.

What | want to do in this article is to examine the dimensions of how this
defanging took place: how, within the space of two weeks, we went from
burning down a police station to making small budgetary demands. |
argue that the massive effort to defang the George Floyd Uprising should
be understood as a deliberate counter-insurgency operation, combining
the (sometimes coordinated) efforts of: various police forces, the capitalist
media, the American military, NGOs, the Democrats, both state and
federal governments, and other liberal establishment figures. What | also
want to show is that these efforts were not extraordinary: there was no
shadowy conspiracy to intervene, Rather, each of these apparatuses
functioned exactly as intended to in order to defend the existing capitalist
order. By examining the response to the George Floyd Uprising, the left
can gain a better understanding of just how difficult it will be to overthrow
capitalism and the capitalist state and potentially avoid pitfalls in the
future.

Before continuing, | want to address the initial and most obvious
opposition to my argument. If the efforts to defang the protests should be
understood as a counter-insurgency, then it stands to reason that the
George Floyd Uprising should be considered an insurgency. Is this not
hyperbolic? Given the extent of the crisis of legitimacy the protests created
for the American state, | do not think itis hyperbolic at all. As Kristian
Williams argued in “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and
‘community policing”, insurgency and counter-insurgency is precisely the
lens through which the American state views much of its domestic policing,
activity, from gang-related operations through to protest management.

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Highlighting the specificity of counter-insurgency operations, the manual
argues that:

GG COIN [councer-insurgency] is distinguished from traditional warfare
due to the focus of its operations—a relevant population—and its
strategic purpose—to gain or maintain control o influence over—and
the support of that relevant population through political,
psychological, and economic methods.!!

Central to how the U.S. Military sees insurgency is the question of political
legitimacy:

GG The struggle for legivimacy with the relevant population is
typically a central theme of the conflice between the insurgency and
the HN [host nation] government. The HN government generally
needs some level of legitimacy among the population to retain the
confidence of the populace and an acknowledgment of governing
power. The insurgency will attack the legitimacy of the HN
government while attempting to develop its own legitimacy with the
population, COIN should reduce the credibility of the insurgency
while strengthening the legitimacy of the HN government.!2

And in turn, central to the question of legitimacy is the task of building and
controlling narratives:

GG COIN planners should compose a unifying message (che COIN
narrative) that is consistent with the overarching USG narrative,
which is coupled to the USG [U.S. government] objective. Narrative
isa structure of planned themes from which both messages and
actions are developed. Narrative provides a common thread of
communicative influence. The objective speaks to desired outcome;
narrative communicates the story of the how and why of an
operation, Common themes within a COIN narrative may be
reinforcing the credibility and perception of legitimacy of the HN
and USG COIN operation, exploiting the negative aspects of the
insurgent efforts, and preemptively presenting the expected insurgent
argument along with counter-arguments. ... The COIN narrative
should be the result of meticulous target-audience analysis
conducted by cultural and language subject matter experts ...
‘The COIN narrative should provide the guidance from which
themes, actions, and messages can be planned in. support of the
COIN objectives.!3

Narrative construction and control is reiterated in practical terms later in
the Manuat

GG 1" COIN, the information flow can be roughly divided into
information which the USG requires to guide its political-military
approach (ie., knowledge of local conditions) and inform
the USG wishes to disseminate to influence populations. Ac the same
time, counterinsurgents also seek to impede the information flow of
insurgent groups—both their intelligence collection and theie ability
to influence the relevane population. "1

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(One of the tactics emphasized to impede the ability of insurgents to
influence the target population is working with local authorities—
especially non-governmental ones like religious leaders, and NGOs- to
coopt the message of the insurgency and explicitly to moderate it." This
latter point is extremely important; while moderate movements may enjoy
more popular support, they are also far less successful at winning their
demands.'® It is therefore in the interest of those defend the existing
order to support the moderate elements of a movement.

All this is to say then that the U.S. Military understands insurgency and
counter-insurgency as being not just a military question, but rather a
question of politics. To this end, the Manual heavily emphasizes the
importance of political action in counter-insurgency operations:

GG Tobe effective, officials involved in COIN should address ewo
imperatives—political action and securiey—with equal urgency,
recognizing that insurgency is fundamentally an armed political
competition... COIN functions, therefore, include
informational, security, political, economic, and development
components, all of which are designed to support the overall objective
of establishing and consolidating control by the HN government. ..
This is the core of COIN, because it provides a framework around
which all other programs and activities are organized. As described
above, depending on the root causes of the insurgency, the strategy
may involve elements of political reform, reconciliation, popular
mobilization, and governmental capaciey building.!”

If we understand insurgency and counter-insurgency as involving both a
military and political aspect, in which the political is primary, with
insurgency being primarily about building a counter-legitimacy to the state
and counter-insurgency being primarily about the political isolation of
insurgents through the creation of narratives, we can begin to see how
such an understanding is useful to apply to American domestic politics.
The George Floyd Uprising saw insurgents directly undermine the
legitimacy of the existing state, especially the police, through both armed
and political action. In turn, the state and establishment responded with
both armed and political actions, the latter in the form of co-optation and
narrative control.

But the connections between American counter-insurgency and domestic
politics are not just on the discursive level. In “The other side of the COIN:
counterinsurgency and community policing’, Kristian Williams provides an
excellent overview of the material relationship between American military
counter-insurgency programs and American policing, This is specifically
evident with regard to trends towards the militarization of the police and
so-called “Community Policing" initiatives. Williams demonstrates how, in a
modern example of the “imperial boomerang"’®, many of the methods
employed by modern police forces were developed and refined by the
American military, including during its occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan

In turn, the military partnered with police forces to learn how to better
control conquered populations, be they black people living in American
Cities or Iraqis living under American occupation in Iraq."

Of particular interest is the role that NGOs play in this process. As was
noted earlier, the U.S. Military makes special mention of NGOs in the
process of counter-insurgency. An earlier version of the Manual, published
in 2006 and authored by David Petraeus, is more explicit, remarking that
some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot” and
referring to NGOs as “force- multipliers”. Williams is able to show how
NGOs were directly involved in de-escalating responses of the community
to murders committed by American police in Oakland, as well as involved
in anti-gang activities in Boston. Both of these separate efforts fall under
the playbook of counter-insurgency.?°

Before going in depth into the George Floyd Uprising, it is worthwhile
looking at the “why” of counter-insurgency. Why is it that the police and
military have developed a comprehensive strategy intended to undermine
threats to the existing order? Fundamentally, the modern state exists to
protect the interests of the capitalist class—namely the continuation of
capital accumulation and exploitation—against the interests of everyone
else. In turn, specific states exist to protect the specific interests of their
specific capitalist classes. Thus anything that attempts to undermine
capitalism, or the ability of capitalists to exploit, must be itself
undermined. The state has a myriad of tools at its disposal to help with
this process. Some are ideological (they convince people exploitation is in
their own interest) whereas others, like the police, are repressive, Insofar
as the goal of counter-insurgency is ultimately to protect the accumulation
of capital, we should understand counter-insurgency as extending beyond
just the actions of the repressive apparatuses of the state. What | will
explore below is that in this case, counter-insurgency was a joint effort of,
the entire American ruling class, both inside and outside the state, to
defang the George Floyd Uprising. The American ruling class used both
violent and non-violent means to defang the uprising: they deployed what
could be called a carrot-and-stick approach in order to protect the social
order.

The Carrot...
The Media Narrative

In the days following the murder of George Floyd, the media worked
tirelessly to defang the George Floyd Uprising. They did this not by
creating reality through discourse, but by selectively and pointedly
reporting on certain aspects of reality. As a result, they encouraged people
to think about the uprising in specific ways, and in turned called them into
action in specific ways. | will focus primarily on the Minneapolis Star

Tribune; the narrative trends developed there were later repeated in
media across the United States.

Initial media reaction to the uprising directly condemned property
destruction. After a Target was looted on the night of May 27, the Star
Tribune spent the following day reporting on the impact that riots would
have on small businesses." True to form, the Star Tribune printed a call
for peace from the family and partner of George Floyd?2 as well as from.
“political, faith, community leaders" calling for an “end to riots."°3 The
latter story was particularly interesting insofar as the group was called
together for a conference by Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and included
both church leaders and NGO managers. Here is an example of a top state
official picking and choosing who counts as a “community leader” without
direct input from the community. In turn, the Star Tribune reported on the
‘meeting treating these externally hand-picked “community leaders” as
though their legitimacy derived from the community itself.

In the following days, the Star Tribune shifted focus to the human cost of
the riots to the local community. The publication blamed the riots for
creating a food desert due to the closing of large corporate grocery
stores.24 Rioters were also blamed for the lack of access to medicine now
faced by the local community due to the closure of pharmacies.?5 Rioters
were alleged to have burned down nearly 200 units of affordable housing,
thus exacerbating the housing crisis.?° The riots were also allegedly
responsible for devastating Minneapolis famed Lake Street, home to
immigrant-owned business and a hub, according to the Star Tribune, of
multi-culturalism.2?

In its discussion of the immediate impact of the uprising on the local
community, not once did the Star Tribune go beyond surface-level
condemnations of the rioters. Suddenly concerned with access to food
and medication, the stories did not include discussions as to why the
closure of a few grocery stores could create a food desert. There was no
discussion on the increased price of food and wealth-disparity. There was
no discussion on the monopolization of food sources by large chains.
‘There was no discussion on the effects of for-profit healthcare on access
to medicine, No discussions on gentrification and stagnant wages leading
to the necessity of specifically designated “affordable” housing. No
discussions on the context of the riots: namely 40 million unemployed
Americans staring down a pandemic with miniscule government relief. No
discussion of looting as a means of getting necessities such as medicine,
food, and clothing; no discussion as to why Target and pharmacies
became targets. Instead the riots were presented largely without context,
as simply an irrational outburst of anger, alone causing problems to the
‘community. Those fighting back against the existing order were blamed
for the worst effects of the very order they fought against.

In addition to direct condemnation, the Star Tribune also took a more
nuanced approach to the riots. Instead of the riots being an organic.
expression of community anger, they were presented—both by the media,
and the government—as being the work of (usually white) “outside
agitators’. Rioting was purported to be the work of secret white-
supremacists that had infiltrated the protests in order to cause mayhem.
In that same meeting of community leaders called together by Tim Walz
on May 30, the executive director of the Council for Minnesotans of African
Heritage put it succinctly: "White people from other communities are
coming into my community, our communities as some kind of perverse
poetry, as if it wasn't bad enough already. ... Go home now. The fascists on
the plan right now, turn around.’2® The Star Tribune reported on an Illinois
‘man who had been arrested with explosives in Minneapolis, who had
specifically traveled there to riot.22 The mayor of St Paul and the governor
of Minnesota had each tweeted that the vast majority -80% to all- of the
arrestees in the week preceding June 6 had been from out-of-state despite
the fact that there was no evidence to back up such claims. The claims
were so ludicrous that the Star Tribune ran a story walking back many of
the claims about outside agitators; well after the damage had been done
to the protests?

The goal of these various media narratives—first, condemning the riots;
second, emphasizing the damage to the community; and third, blaming
outside agitators- was to drive a dual process of bifurcation within the
protest movement. The goal of the ruling class was on the one hand to
separate “peaceful liberal protestors from the more radical element, both
to avoid radicalization of the moderate protestors but also to isolate the
radicals within the movement. Second, the goal was to lump the radical
protestors together with apolitical opportunist looters, whether or not the
latter group actually existed, and in turn ignore the radical critiques of
both policing and society as a whole that the radicals put forward. Thus
the establishment attempted to call into being two groups: a group of
good, peaceful, moderate protestors; and a second group of opportunist,
Violent protestors who did not care about the injustice the protests were
about. The tactics and message of the first group was to be lauded,
whereas the tactics and message of the second group was to be
condemned.

Meanwhile, seemingly out of nowhere, another narrative appeared in the
media, Across both social and traditional media outlets, stories appeared
showing police supporting the protests. Most famous were the images of
police (and sometimes National Guard) kneeling with the protestors. Often
times this was displayed as the result of a request from the "good
protestors”, who were then portrayed as applauding police initiative,
However, in this case reality cut through the media spin: the American
police were simply too vicious for their “spontaneous” (more on this below)
‘outpouring of empathy to be taken seriously. There were abundant

accounts of the same police transitioning from kneeling to attacking
protestors within the space of hours.

As the protests spread in the early weeks of June, it was no longer possible
for the media to rely on the “outside agitator” platitude. Indeed, with.
protests in literally every major city in the United States, there was no
“outside” for the agitators to come from. And with the utter inhumanity of
the police on full display, stories of police taking a knee simply didn't hold
water. The media then turned to focusing almost exclusively on the efforts
of liberal NGOs engaged in “rebuilding” efforts", and the activities of the
"good" protestors. The degree to which the “good” protestors were signal-
boosted by the media is evident in the speed at which the “Defund the
Police” slogan, itself a moderated version of the already moderate “abolish
the police” demand, became the public rallying cry of the movement as a
whole.2? Finally, towards mid-June, with the protests now largely contained
and the radical element isolated, the media began largely ignoring the
massive protests that are still occurring, instead only providing local
coverage of incidental events.

While | have focused largely on the narrative created in the Minneapolis
Star Tribune, the same pattern (from demonization, to outside agitators,
to focusing on the community cost, the good/bad protestor division, the
police sympathy, to NGOs and liberals, to ultimately ignoring the
movement) was a pattern that was repeated more-or-less within all major
‘media sources in North America. Why was this the case? The similarity in
editorial line between media companies does not indicate direct
coordination between media onwers nor does it point to state intervention
or censorship. Rather, insofar as media in North America is either owned
by large corporations or run by the state, the commonality of interests
that exists between rich owners and rich state managers is inevitably
reflected in the editorial line of the media which they run.33 it makes total
sense then that the media would relay a narrative which had as its effect
the defanging of the George Floyd Uprising; such an action was absolutely
within the interests of the large capitalists which control the media. The
capitalist class, by owning the media and therefore controlling its content,
was able to utilize media narratives as part of the counter-insurgency
effort against the George Floyd Uprising

In the case of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the connection between
ownership and editorial line could not be clearer. Glen Taylor, the
billionaire former state senator, admitted as much when he bought the
newspaper in 2014. In an interview with MinnPost, he stated that his,
‘ownership of the paper would result in the editorial line being less
liberal It is unsurprising then that the overall editorial position of the
paper reflects Taylor's public position, namely that the problem is not
specifically law enforcement and that protests are only legitimate if they
are peaceful.3® insofar as the George Floyd Uprising threatened the
existing order in Minneapolis, an order that Glen Taylor benefitted from,

that suggests that the police spend a staggering amount on PR. For
instance, in 2016 the Denver Police Department was revealed to have
spent $1.3 million over three years on its “media relations unit’.8 The
Metropolitan Police in the UK had, in 2015, a 10 million pound annual PR
budget that employed 100 communications staff, with a police across the
UK spending 36 million pounds annually on PR.3? The LAPD, rather than
just employing a Public Information Officer (PIO), has an entire Public
Relations Unit.“? In Toronto, the 2019 police budget requested an
additional $7.9 million to be partially used on nine new positions in the
Corporate Communications Unit, increasing the total staff from 16 to 25,
to be used to “help increase capabilities in public relations, internal
communication and digital strategy.’4" And in 2020, the NYPD allotted $3.2
million for public relations, in order to tell their “side of the story. "4?

Direct police department expenses on PR are just one of the PR avenues
available to police, Police unions also hire PR firms to improve the image
of their officers or to advance specific goals.4? Individual police officers can
also hire PR firms to represent them in times of need. One such service,
Cop PRotect, allows officers to pay $50 per month for guaranteed
representation if something should go wrong, In a story placed in Police
‘Magazine, the need for such a service is related directly to the Ferguson
Uprising:

GG Ps today are completely at the mercy of activists who don’t care
about the truth ... Darren Wilson was nearly murdered and now lives
in hiding, while the man who tried to kill him is declared a hero by
activists. Cop PRotect gives cops like Darren Wilson a trusted friend
to tell their stories in ways agency information officers, union
representatives and the media cannot or will noc.

In this case, the firm was created directly to mitigate community blowback
against individual officers in the wake of racist police terror.

While the amount that is spent on pro-police PR is hard to find, the
indirect effects make it more obvious. Indeed, there exists an entire
parasitic cottage industry of pro-police PR firms and consulting services,
Which exist solely to increase public perceptions in the police. For instance,
a quick search turned up John Guilfoil Public Relations which specializes in
the public sector, including the police. A testimonial from the chief of the
Massachusetts Police Department states that the firm “provides an
extremely valuable service to those agencies that want to be proactive in
getting out a positive message to the community."*® PolicePR in Indiana
offers a Public Information Officer boot camp, in partnership with the
Greenwood Police Department.“ Melissa Agnes, a crisis management
strategist who has been featured on Police One, has a whole series of
articles and talks dealing specifically with police misconduct, ranging from,
"Discussing the Divide Between Police and Their Communities” to
"Discussing The #Ferguson Crisis with Tim Burrows”.4? None of these firms
or services would exist if the police were not paying for them,

Police PR strategies are not limited to traditional media. To give the
strategies a more organic feel, police forces and their hired PR firms make
frequent use of social media in order to help control the narrative around
their actions. Police Chief Magazine warns officers that “Hiding and Hoping
is Not a PR Strategy’: police forces not only need to monitor social media
to see what perception of the police force is after an incident, but must
also build “a social media presence’. This latter point can include
spreading information about a suspect in the event that video showing
police misconduct spreads.“® As part of the U.S. Department of Justice's
‘Community Oriented Policing Services’ (COPS) Strategic Communication
Practices guide, there is an entire section on the importance of social
media.*® Another article on Police One suggests that police departments
send officers onto Reddit, both to get ahead of a story, but also to
intervene in the discussions as police.* These efforts can be bolstered by
using “community outreach programs’ to “build an online army of
supporters.”5t

Lest anyone think that the police simply use social media to inform their
audience about their activities, the police consciously use social media to
‘manipulate public opinion during moments of crisis. Taken from another
Police One article (a fantastic resource for those wanting to understand
the mindset of police), this one published ominously on May 28, 2020,
titled “12 things every police department's civil unrest plan needs”, there is
an entire section on social media. Departments are instructed to be aware
that protestors can use social media to amplify and coordinate their
activity; departments should also be aware and be ready to counter those
that would “lower the perception of [their] department.” If that fails,
there's always the National Guard.®? Force Science News published an
article/advertisement featuring Melissa Agnes in 2018, which advised
departments to have prepared a ‘Communications Bible’ to help navigate
crises such as “officer-involved shootings’.53 in a mid-June Police One
leadership briefing, after weeks of anti-police protests, authors mockingly
reflected: “Now do you recognize the power of social media?” arguing that
police “must start viewing... social media as an integral tool in policing."®4

All this is to say there exists a massive and highly coordinated police PR
machine, which the police use to try and directly control media narratives
in their favour. They do this as part of a broader effort to maintain the
current social order. While it is impossible to prove this soon, | strongly
suspect that it was this machine which was responsible for the flood of
sympathetic stories about the police that featured prominently across
traditional and social media in early June. Despite the best efforts of the
police, their unions, and their employed PR firms, they were unable to shift
the broader media narrative for more than a few days; the brutal actions
of police across the United States spoke for themselves and undermined
attempts to portray the police in a positive light.

While ultimately unsuccessful, the wave of pro-police media in early June
gave credibility to the more moderate argument that the institution of
policing itself is not the problem, but rather that itis only some “bad
apples” amidst an otherwise salvageable police force. This in turn gave
more ideological power to moderate and liberal elements, the so-called
“good protestors", within the broader protest movement. To tie this back
into counter-insurgency, control over information in the form of both
narrative construction and information dissemination is one of the main
tools of counter-insurgency strategies. The police consciously did just this,
and in the process strengthened the moderates within the movement.

The Non-Profit Industrial Complex

As noted earlier, the U.S. military considers NGO partnerships to be a vital
part of counter-insurgency efforts. Much has been written about the
negative effects of non-profits on social movements. In the classic
collection of essays titled The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the
Non-Profit Industrial Complex, Andrea Smith argues that capital and the
capitalist state use nonprofits to: monitor and control social movements,
divert public resources into private hands, manage and control dissent,
redirect activist efforts towards careerism and away from mass-based
modes of organizing, allow corporations to mask exploitation through
philanthropy, and encourage social movements to model themselves in
terms of structure and politics after capitalist models.°° For the purposes
of this essay, | want to focus on two areas: first, how NGOs have a
moderating effect on the politics of a movement. Second, | will alk about
how NGOs frequently work with the police to protect the current social
order under the guise of changing it.

How is it that non-profits are able to moderate social movements? The
capitalist class is well aware of their own interests and spends an
inordinate amount of money defending them. In the process, they create
philanthropic foundations. These philanthropic foundations not only allow
capitalists to transfer wealth inter-generationally without taxation (giving
their children positions in the foundations) but also fund charitable
activities, such as non-profits. There is a catch though: the capitalists will
not fund anything that does not fit their interests, namely the continuation
of exploitation. They are happy, for instance, to fund affordable housing
initiatives insofar as those i
homelessness, namely private property. Capitalist foundations therefore
provide resources to NGOs which act in line with their interests. In turn,
NGOs knowingly moderate themselves in order to better secure
resources. Furthermore respectable NGOs can become the public face of a
movement, effectively forcing the more radical organizations out of the
public eye.

jatives do not tackle the root causes of

‘The Civil Rights and anti-police movements are full of examples of the
moderating effects of NGOs. For instance, in the 1960s white

philanthropist Stephen Currier set up the Council for United Civil Rights
Leadership in order to channel foundation funding to Civil Rights groups.
The so-called ‘Big Six’ were brought together; of the six, the Student Non-
Violent Coordinating Committee, the most radical of the groups, received
the least amount of funding. More radical groups, such as the Nation of
Islam, were completely excluded. In 1963 Malcolm X specifically criticized
the Big Six and the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership in his famous
‘Message to the Grass Roots’ speech in which he reflected on the March on
Washington which had taken place earlier that year.*° The goal of these
maneuvers by white philanthropists was clear: fund the more moderate
element of the Civil Rights movement to avoid the movement taking a
radical turn and undermining the ability for American capitalism to
operate.57

Fast forward 50 years, and the same pattern reoccurs. In Oakland in 2009,
non-profits directly intervened to deradicalize the response to the killing of
Oscar Grant. Ahead of a major rally in January 2009, the Oakland police
arranged meetings with various nonprofit and church leaders in order to
defang the protests before they even began.® Religious leaders asked
their congregations to not attend the protests. A coalition of NGOs came
together and formed the Coalition Against Police Execution (CAPE). CAPE
explicitly called for a lack of militancy in their protests, and stood as a
physical barrier between police and protestors. °° In turn, CAPE became
the public, legitimate face of the protests, which was reinforced through
media coverage.

The uprising in 2014 in Ferguson saw a similar process play itself out.
There the NGO influence was given an organizational existence in the form
of Black Lives Matter. | want to be clear here; when speaking of Black Lives
Matter | am talking about the official organization and not the broader
movement of the same name. Black Lives Matter, while first conceived of
in 2013, organized its first major action in 2014 with the Black Lives Matter
Freedom Ride in response to the killing of Michael Brown by the Ferguson
police. Black Lives Matter became the public face of the movement.
Despite the Ferguson uprising originating in riots, Black Lives Matter and
other organizations planned a series of actions over the course of the
summer of 2014 that channeled local activism into safer and less
rebellious avenues.

Following the Ferguson uprising, moderate elements of the Black Lives
Matter movement became a relatively safe outlet for liberals to support
and into which the capitalist class could channel outrage. Black Lives
Matter and the constellation of new organizations and networks around it
received an absolutely immense amount of donations from larger donors
like The Ford Foundation and George Soros.® The more liberal elements
of the movement, able to secure donations, were able to take centre-
stage. For instance, one recipient, the Organization for Black Struggle,
used some of its funding to create the Hands Up Coalition. This coalition

popularized the "hands up, dontt shoot” slogan used by protestors; this ran
against slogans by more militant black power activists such as “arms up,
shoot back’ and “fists up, fight back’, More radical yet equally active
groups, such as the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, received no funding
In 2016, Black Lives Matter and 27 other organizations, as part of the
Movement for Black Lives, issued a platform of demands titled 4 Vision for
Black Lives. Rather than a comprehensive plan and program to mobilize
the masses to fight for their own liberation, the document is a set of policy
guidelines. The effect is that efforts are taken off the streets and
channeled into traditional power structures where they are ultimately
destined to fail,

‘The founders of Black Lives Matter were first introduced to each other
through an NGO known as Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity
(BOLD). The board of directors of BOLD, those who decide its political
direction, is made up of managers of other NGOS." BOLD also receives an
immense sum of money from private donors, such as through the
“philanthropic intermediary” known as Borealis Philanthropy" and
through Funders for Justice.©3 This latter group, also created in response
to the Ferguson Uprising, in turn receives funding from The Ford
Foundation and the Open Society Foundations; hardly groups interested in
a radical transformation of the social order or the end of exploitation. |
don't bring this up to allege a conspiracy that Black Lives Matter is being
secretly run by The Ford Foundation, but rather to show that even Black
Lives Matter has its origins within the non-profit industrial complex milieu,
which in turn effects its politics. Turning back to the George Floyd Uprising,
it is unsurprising that in a recent Reddit Ask-Me-Anything, Kailee Scales,
the Managing Director for Black Lives Matter, condemned the riots and
announced efforts to channel the George Floyd Uprising into voter
registration and “civic engagement” through the #WhatMatters2020
campaign.

The ways in which non-profits have attempted to moderate explosions of
rage during the George Floyd Uprising are too many to list. One example |
want to focus on, however, is particularly telling. On May 30, two days after
the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis, a local non-profit called
Pillsbury United Communities had a press conference. Pillsbury United
Communities is an incredibly well established NGO; founded in 1879, it
runs a number of outreach and education programs, community
programs (such as free COVID-19 testing), as well as “social enterprises”
including a grocery store. The press conference on May 30 brought
together Jamie Foxx, Stephen Jackson, BLM activist Tamika Mallory,
alongside George Floyd's family. Speakers were explicit in their calls for
peaceful protests, but generally did not condemn the riots. A peaceful rally
followed.® Thus at the height of the militant protests, people were asked
by “legitimate” community leaders to temper their anger and engage in

traditionally and easily ignored protests. These calls were amplified by
liberals outside the community and the media,

A few days after the rally, Pillsbury United Communities used George
Floyd's death to issue a fundraising call it is unclear from their website
how the money will be used to ensure “Justice for George Floyd”.® But
individual donations are not the only way that Pillsbury United
Communities raises funds. It also receives donations from massive
foundations such as the Greater Twin Cities United Way, the Minneapolis,
Foundation, and the St, Paul & Minnesota Foundation, The United Way, for
instance, acts as a “philanthropic intermediary’, collection donations from
large corporations, and then granting money to non-profits. n this specific
case, the money given to Pillsbury United Communities comes from
sources such as 3M, U.S. Bank, Cargill, and Target.°7 The latter, notably,
also provides hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to police
foundations.®® One can see the issue of an organization fighting for justice
against the police having similar funding sources to the police themselves
Itis also unlikely that the capitalist class would fund those capable of truly
undermining it.

That an NGO intervened in a mass struggle to both channel the movement
in a more liberal direction while monopolizing resources is not particularly
surprising, What is particularly interesting though is Pillsbury United
Communities connection to community policing. A 2006 report by the
Minneapolis Department of Health & Family Support lists Waite House, a
Pillsbury United Communities site, as a "Weed & Seed Safe Haven’.®? Weed
and Seed programs, for context, gained prominence in 1992 after the
Rodney King riots as a way to connect police and community leaders in
order to ostensibly combat gang violence”; they made cohesive the
militarization tactics (weed) and community policing tactics (seed)
employed in counter-insurgency efforts.”" In December 2014, the FBI gave
Pillsbury United Communities its “Director's Community Leadership
Award’, an annual award given to groups for crime prevention efforts.”2
Then-president and chief executive, Chanda Smith Baker, accepted the
award. Coincidentally, Chanda Smith Baker—now working for the
Minneapolis Foundation—also sits on the Minnesota Department of Public
Safety's newspeak titled "Working Group on Police-Involved Deadly Force
Encounters". The goal of the working group was to “identify ways to reduce
deadly force encounters with law enforcement’”3. Members of the group
included the Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, the Minnesota
Attorney General, Philando Castle's (killed by police in Minnesota in 2016)
uncle, and other judge's, academics, politicians, and NGO managers.
Tragically and ironically, the working group released its findings in
February 2020; that George Floyd was murdered, just a few months later
in a "police-involved deadly force encounter’, demonstrates the extent to
Which so-called community policing is useful to the community.

(One final interesting link between NGOs and the police in Minneapolis: as
mentioned earlier, Chanda Smith Baker, after working for Pillsbury United
Communities, went on to work as the Senior Vice President, Impact for The
Minneapolis Foundation. The current president and CEO of the
Minneapolis Foundation is R.T. Rybak, who was also the former mayor of
Minneapolis. R.T. Rybak also sits on the board of a company called
Benchmark Analytics: an IT company which has designed a system capable
of predicting when officers will become problematically violent, Rybak
therefore has a direct material interest in “reforming” the police. In an
article written on June 2, titled "I Was the Mayor of Minneapolis and I Know
Our Cops Have a Problem’, Rybak recalls surveying the damage to
Minneapolis after the riots with Chanda Smith Baker, before advertising
his firm's solution to police violence.” Unsurprisingly he emphasizes the
humanity of the police, and he sees the solution as being community
policing informed by predicative behavior technology.

The organizational and interpersonal links between NGO managers,
politicians, police leadership, “community leaders’, and the board
members of large capitalist firms points to the existence of a ruling
capitalist class. The above is just a small illustration of how the ruling class
rules in Minneapolis.

To summarize all of thi

Pillsbury United Communities is an established,
well-respected local NGO. It is part of the non-profit industrial complex,
relying on philanthropic intermediaries for much of its funding, which in
turn are funded by massive corporations. It came out very vocally in the
early stages of the George Floyd Uprising, urging a more liberal and
institutional approach to activism as opposed to the riots. And, it has close
ties to the Minneapolis Police Department and state police through
community policing programs. Itis just one textbook example of many of
how NGOs act as elements of a counter-insurgency strategy.

The Democrats

The Democrats have been referred to as the “graveyard of social
movernents" insofar as they absorb, coopt, and disorganize them.7° Their
approach to the George Floyd Uprising is no different. What the
Democratic Party sought to do in the wake of the George Floyd Uprising
was a combination of repression (in those places in which it exercised
power, such as Minneapolis, New York, LA., etc.) and coopt its energies
into the Biden 2020 campaign. Given the unpopularity of Biden and the
overall increasing disinterest in electoral politics by much of the left the
attempt to coopt the movement, at least ostensibly, has been
unsuccessful. It is, however, still worth examining in order to paint a full
picture of the counter-insurgency campaign against the uprising.

At the beginning of the uprising, the Democratic Party machine jumped
into motion but was unsure how to act. While top Democrat strategists

spoke to media about how the uprising could affect the election”®
(indicating that they were in fact working on a response), there was little in
the way of official high-level statement or actions for almost a week. Then
on June 2 two fairly major events occurred. First, Biden publicly brought
Julian Castro into his campaign; Castro had been a vocal proponent of
liberal police reforms during his bid to become the Democratic nominee
for president.7” Second, Pelosi, the multi-millionaire Speaker of the
House, asked the Congressional Black Caucus to draft a series of police
reforms.”

(On June 8, following a ridiculous display in which Pelosi and other top
Democrats took a knee wearing Ghanaian kente cloths, the Justice in
Policing Act was revealed. The act is fairly milquetoast—far behind the
nebulous demands of the uprising—and includes provisions for more
easily prosecuting police in cases of brutality, mandatory body cameras, as
well as a ban on chokeholds. The Act does absolutely nothing to abolish or
even defund police departments. 79 Nor is the act likely to become law;
even if the act was to pass the Republican-majority Senate, Trump has
announced his attention to veto it.

Rather than an accident, the unlikelihood of the bill passing is a feature,
one of the ways in which so-called “checks and balances” help protect the
current order. The Democrats know this; had it been likely to pass the bill
would have been even more muted. The inaction of the Democrats in the
face of the George Floyd Uprising is not surprising: they are one of the two
parties that have overseen the construction and maintenance of the
white-supremacist order in the United States, Biden is himself a career
segregationist and author of a 1994 crime bill?! which was a cornerstone
in the construction of the modern for-profit prison behemoth. The
Congressional Black Caucus has itself helped to make the police a
“protected class", and also contributed to the militarization of police
through the 1033 program.

Despite the lack of success of the official Democrat cooptation attempt of
the George Floyd Uprising, | want to point out one of the more insidious
ways that the Democrats are attempting to coopt outrage against police
murders through social movements themselves. It is worth first pointing
out that Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, is a
supporter of the centrist-wing of the Democrats, specifically Elizabeth
Warren. Black Lives Matter has recently launched a campaign called
+#WhatMatters2020. The goal of the campaign is to bring “BLM supporters
and allies to the polls in the 2020 U.S Presidential Election to build
collective power and ensure candidates are held accountable for the
issues that systematically and disproportionately impact Black and under-
served communities across the nation.’®® A campaign video calls on
people to vote for an America where “police are held accountable" and
“where we have access to quality healthcare”. The problem with this
campaign, of course, is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans

are even pretending to deliver on promises like this. Biden does not
support medicare for all, and was an architect of the current racist
criminal justice system. The #WhatMatters2020 campaign is a cynical
sheepdog campaign, bringing black people angry at the current injustices
of American white-supremacist capitalism back into the Democrats.

Invasion of the Liberals

Earlier in this article, | mentioned that the media was attempting to call
into existence a group of "good", peaceful protestors. | want to spend
more time now talking about this process. Ideology is both produced by
practice, but also exists as a way of calling particular types of people into
activity.®6 When the media began focusing almost exclusively on “good”
protestors, it was at first inventing this category out of almost thin air; the
line it was drawing was an artificial one. But by putting forward this
ideological pole, the media called into action people who had hitherto not
been involved. The media, alongside notable liberal politicians and other
establishment figures, created a group of liberal protestors out of inactive
liberals who now saw themselves and their own political predilections
reflected in the ongoing uprising. Included in these efforts by the media
and liberal establishment figures is a now-famous essay by former
president Barrack Obama, posted to Medium on June 1, in which he said
he supported the protests, condemned violence, and urged reform efforts
to be focused on institutional channels.®”

The flip side of the liberal “call to action” is that it also acts as a safeguard
against radicalization. When reality confronts ideology, itis often ideology
that is changed. Reality forces a rupture in one’s worldview which can lead
to radicalization. In this case it became difficult to substantiate the story of
a good, neutral, and protective state in the face of ubiquitous police
violence against even peaceful protestors. If reality can be changed or if
powerful narratives can reinforce ideology, ideology is cemented rather
than discarded. In this case, liberalism as a worldview was able to escape
challenge due to the emergence of establishment liberals in support of the
protests.

The result of the liberalization of the protests on public opinion is
interesting. By mid-June, 67% of Americans reportedly supported the
ongoing protests. The racial breakdown was more stark: 60% of white
people supported the protests, whereas 86% of black people supported
them. Despite this, 59% of Americans (including 62% of white Americans
compared with 43% of black Americans) believed that the protests were
spurred on at least in part as a means for people to engage in criminal
behavior.®® Thus the liberalization of the protests resulted in a situation in
Which the majority of a country deeply enmeshed in white supremacy
supported protests proclaiming the value of black lives, despite the
majority of the country materially benefitting from that same unjust racial
hierarchy. That major politicians like Canadian Prime Minister Justin

the space this opened up and stated that “defund” meant "defund
everything’. They argued that the police were not reformable and
therefore had to be abolished.®3 What followed was a discussion in the
‘media about whether or not “defund” actually meant “defund”. There was
no shortage of liberals assuring other concerned liberals that defunding
didn't actually mean that there would be no police. While Minneapolis
has since begun steps to disband their police force, demands in other
locations seem to ask for a portion of police budgets to be re-allocated to
community resources, in line with the Movement for Black Lives policy
demands.?°

‘The conceptual slippage of “defund" has not gone unnoticed by the police
themselves. In a June 18 article on Police One, Mike Walker, a police officer
for 27 years, wrote that “defunding is really just a way of saying reduced
funding’®6 In the same article he offers assurance to worried police
officers by noting that budget cuts were already on the agenda due to
COVID-19, and that most municipalities legally cannot function without
police due to their municipal charters.

That at least some police are fine with temporarily defunding the police
speaks to the heart of just how defanged a demand “defund the police”
actually is, But “abolish the police” as a slogan absent a critique of the
conditions that give rise to the police is itself a demand that does not cut
to the heart of the matter. The police exist because capitalism requires
force to defend inequality and exploitation. Without ending exploitation,
there will still need to be some form of coercive apparatus to ensure the
continued existence of exploitation. Thus the coercive functions of the
police will be offioaded to other state apparatuses; there will stil be
violent, racist coercion whether or not the police exist. This is something
that already happens; consider, for instance, the racist terror that child
welfare services across Canada (not armed, not police) put Indigenous
people through for years. The George Floyd Uprising opened the space for
discussions about the fundamental nature of society, about capitalism,
imperialism, and racial inequality in America. Liberals shifted the overton
window to exclude visions of radical transformation, instead focusing on
the degree to which police should be defunded. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s,
now viral Instagram post which stated that police abolition looks like white
suburbia, an atomized capitalist dystopia, makes total sense in this,
context. 2?

The liberal invasion resulted in a defanging of protest tactics, results, and
even the demands themselves, This process, which was aided by the
police, the media, and “legitimate” community leaders, was nothing less
than the political side of a counter-insurgency campaign by the American
ruling class directed against the George Floyd Uprising. Thus a movement
which began with the burning of a police station has been transformed
into one of requesting minor amendments to municipal budgets.

..And the Stick

‘The majority of the article has focused on the less-obvious methods that
the American ruling class has used in its counter-insurgency efforts against
the George Floyd Uprising. However, while counter-insurgency is more
effective if it involves elements of soft power, no counter-insurgency effort
is complete without open repression. The efforts against the George Floyd
Uprising are no exception.

Itis hard to overstate the scale of the police operation against protestors
over the past month. For instance, by June 2 there already been over 11
000 arrests of protestors.%8 The volume of arrests was used as an excuse
to temporarily suspend habeus corpus in New York.%? There have been
numerous documented arrests and attacks on journalists from even
liberal platforms such as CNN. To my knowledge there are no up to date
figures on the total number of arrests. In terms of the intensity of the
police response, over the past month there have been countless scenes of
police using tear gas and pepper spray to clear otherwise peaceful
protests. An online database has logged over 670 individual incidents of
police brutality caught on video. Police have killed at least four
protestors over the course of the uprising. Many more have been
maimed."°" As a result there are at least 40 different lawsuits currently
underway against police departments for brutality during the George
Floyd Uprising.*©2

As if the level of direct repression was not enough, there has also been an
increase in surveillance of activists. A recent leak, titled “Blue Leaks", has
revealed that the FBI monitored social media extensively during the
protests and forward information it thought relevant to local police
departments. 193 FBI agents have also harassed activists after they
attended recent protests against police brutality.'* The goal of FBI
harassment in general is to intimidate protestors and organizers into
inactivity as a means of disorganizing movements. These most recent
incidents are reminiscent of FBI surveillance and intimidation of the anti-
war movernent and COINTELPRO.

‘The extraordinary level of police terror was not enough to contain the
uprising, The National Guard was deployed to 31 states and Washington
D.C.. This involved over 62 000 soldiers.'°5 The National Guard was itself
involved in the violent repression of the protests.'®° Over 200 cities
imposed a curfew, which affected more than 60 million people."°? Trump
went as far as to threaten to use the American military to impose order on
cities where the protests could not be contained by conventional
repression. 108

One final aspect to overt repression of protests which needs to be
included is the role of far right organizations and militia groups. While
these are ostensibly distinct from the state, there is significant overlap and

cooperation between police forces and far right organizations; a now
infamous 2006 FBI report details the extent to which white supremacists
have infiltrated police departments. For instance, in early June police in
Oregon were caught on video coordinating with the far-right Proud Boys to
help them avoid arrest after they intimidated George Floyd protestors."
Much has also been written about the so-called Boogaloo Movement,
which has targeted anti-police brutality protests."

There have been many attacks by the far right on recent protests.
Incidents include a mob of armed counter-protestors in Bethel, Ohio
Which attacked a black lives matter rally searching for “antifa”.""2 The KKK
has also been active in these efforts: they attacked a black lives matter
rally in Nevada," and a local KKK leader in Virginia drove his car into a
protest in mid-June.'14 The autonomous zone set up in Seattle has also
been a magnet for far-right attacks; on June 15 the Proud Boys and Patriot
Prayer entered the zone and beat a man,""S and there have been five
shootings directed at the zone in recent weeks, somehow allowed by
police, The most recent one resulted in the death of two attackers and
injuries to a 14 year old boy.1¥® Far right groups have also announced a
plan to “retake” the zone on July 4.1"?

Police and national guard brutality, police harassment and surveillance,
threats of military intervention, and attacks by the far right all serve as the
coercive elements to the American establishment's counter-insurgency
efforts against the George Floyd Uprising. Without the threat of violence
the "carrot" side of the “carrot and stick” formula would not be as
attractive, The end goal however, is the same: the maintenance and
defense of an order defined by exploitation and white supremacy.

Conclusion

Over the course of this article what I have sought to do is outline some of
the ways that the American ruling sought to defend itself during the
course of one of the largest threats to its own existence in recent years. |
have shown how combined and coordinated efforts by: police forces, the
military, capitalist media, NGOs, the Democrats, far-right groups, and
liberal establishment figures have all combined to undermine the George
Floyd Uprising. Thus far these efforts seem to have been rather successful

The beautiful thing about history, however, is that it is never
predetermined. The future is not written. While the establishment has a
mind-boggling array of resources and sophisticated counter-insurgency
techniques at its disposal, it is not infallible. Indeed, it does (and has!)
made mistakes, Itis these mistakes that provide openings for
revolutionary forces to intervene and change the existing social order.
Even the outcome of these protests is not yet decided: they continue, and
the protestors become increasingly sophisticated in fighting back. The
massive uprising of the past few weeks has shown the degree to which the

people do possess power, But the events have also shown the pitfalls into
which movements of resistance can fall. By writing this article | hope to
have exposed some of these pitfalls, so that liberation struggles now and
in the future can avoid them.

Notes

1. 2 VOA News, "Minnesota Calls National Guard to Quell Violent
Protests in Minneapolis”.

2. © Kandist Mallett, “The Black Lives Matter Revolution Can't Be Co-
Opted By Police and Lawmakers’.

3. © Kristian Williams, "The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency
and community policing,” interface, Vol 3, No 1, May 2011

4, © Aaron Morrison and Tim Sullivan, “Minneapolis overwhelmed again
by protests over Floyd death,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 30, 2020.

5. © Reid Forgrave, “On patrol in St. Paul, National Guard waits ‘for the
scales to tip", Minneapolis Star Tribune, june 2, 2020.

6. © Jamie Ehrlich, ‘The hidden history of the secret presidential bunker,
CNN Politics.

7. Hilary Hanson, “NYC Transit Union Backs Bus Drivers Who Refuse
To Transport Protestors For NYPD". HuffPost U.S, May 30, 2020.

8. © Joe DeManuelle-Hall, “West Coast Dockers Stop Work to Honor
George Floyd”. Labor Notes, June 11, 2020.

9, © Matthew Impell, "54 Percent of Americans Think Burning Down
Minneapolis Police Precinct Was Justified After George Floyd's Death,”
Newsweek, June 6, 2020,

10. © Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, GL-5.

11, © Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, xi

12. ® Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, |-7.

13, © Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, -8

14, © Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, II-6.

15, © Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, II-14.

16, © Feinberg, M., Willer, R., & Kovacheff, C. (2020). "The activist’s
dilemma: Extreme protest actions reduce popular support for social
movements". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance
online publication.

17. ® Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, II-5,

18. © Connor Woodman, ‘The Imperial Boomerang: How colonial
methods of repression migrate back to the metropolis",

19, © Kristian Williams, “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency
and community policing,” interface, Vol 3, No 1, May 2011.

20. © Williams, “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and
community policing”.

21. © Kavita Kumar and Miguel Otarola, “Small-business owners pick up
the pieces after night of rage, destruction’, Minneapolis Star Tribune,
May 28, 2020.

George Floyd protest by the White House (5/30/20). Image credit: Geoff
Livingston,

Anatomy of a counter-
insurgency: Efforts to
undermine the George Floyd
uprising

Posted Jul 03, 2020 by Martin Schoots-McAlpine

# Culture, Media, Movements, Protest, State Repression 4 Americas,
United States = Commentary ® Black Lives Matter, BLM, Featured,
George Floyd, Police

Introduction

(On May 25, 2020, police in Minneapolis Minnesota murdered George Floyd
in cold blood. Responding to allegations of counterfeit money, police
arrested Floyd, with one officer kneeling on his neck for nearly nine
minutes, ultimately suffocating him. The killing was captured on video and
quickly spread across the internet.

Protests soon followed. The first protest organized in Minneapolis was on
May 26. By May 28 the protests had spread to the nearby cities of St Paul
and Duluth with riots occurring in Minneaopolis that evening. Mostly

the Lef vf

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Monthly Review Essays

Marxism and STS: From
Marx and Engels to
COVID-19 and COP26

Helena Sheehan

met!

[At the recent conference of the

Society for the Social Study of
Science, | came to the
conclusion that the history of
Marxism in relation to science
and technology studies is an
increasingly forgotten story,

Daraja Press

Q
notably, the third precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department was
besieged and burned. Minnesota activated the National Guard on May 29
in response to the unrest. The American state’s disastrous response to
COVID-19, massive unemployment, and indiscriminate police killings that
disproportionately target people of colour provided the impetus for an
enormous and unprecedented outpouring of rage; protests, many of them
violently targeting the police, spread across the United States like wildfire.

While the initial uprising was ferocious in its explosive anger and militancy,
within just three weeks the protests seem to have been channeled largely
into the decidedly less militant demand of “Defund the police.” What
happened? | largely agree with what Kandist Mallett wrote in a brilliant
article in Teen Vogue, in which she argued that: “those in power...are
working tirelessly to destroy this wave of unrest before it becomes a
tsunami they cannot control... They are trying to kill this movement"? The
defanging of the George Floyd Uprising was not accidental but was rather
a deliberate attempt on the part of the American ruling class to regain
social control in the wake of the most militant protests in recent memory
—and, as a movement, possibly the largest in U.S. history.

What | want to do in this article is to examine the dimensions of how this
defanging took place: how, within the space of two weeks, we went from
burning down a police station to making small budgetary demands. |
argue that the massive effort to defang the George Floyd Uprising should
be understood as a deliberate counter-insurgency operation, combining
the (sometimes coordinated) efforts of: various police forces, the capitalist
media, the American military, NGOs, the Democrats, both state and
federal governments, and other liberal establishment figures. What | also
want to show is that these efforts were not extraordinary: there was no
shadowy conspiracy to intervene, Rather, each of these apparatuses
functioned exactly as intended to in order to defend the existing capitalist
order. By examining the response to the George Floyd Uprising, the left
can gain a better understanding of just how difficult it will be to overthrow
capitalism and the capitalist state and potentially avoid pitfalls in the
future.

Before continuing, | want to address the initial and most obvious
opposition to my argument. If the efforts to defang the protests should be
understood as a counter-insurgency, then it stands to reason that the
George Floyd Uprising should be considered an insurgency. Is this not
hyperbolic? Given the extent of the crisis of legitimacy the protests created
for the American state, | do not think itis hyperbolic at all. As Kristian
Williams argued in “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and
‘community policing”, insurgency and counter-insurgency is precisely the
lens through which the American state views much of its domestic policing,
activity, from gang-related operations through to protest management.

Moving Beyond Capitalist
Agriculture: Could
Agroecology Prevent...

Rob Wallace

The current complex of COVID:
induced crises fits hand-in-
glove with the system's
normal" operation. Stability
hhas been the delusional realm
of a small sliver of the Global
North, awash in post-World
War Two imperialism and the
repeated reinvention (and re-
Imposition) of various
plantation systems of cheap
and racialized labor.

Lost & Found

Boring From Within che
Bourgeois Press: Part
One

‘A Kent MacDougall

Eugene V, Debs may be my all
time favorite American and Karl
‘Marx my all-time favorite
journalist. But my employer for
a decade was The Wall Street
Journal, and for another decade
itwas the Los Angeles Times.
The uprising truly
created a crisis of
legitimacy for the
American state. It
needs to be stated
outright that the
burning of a police
station and the forced
retreat, under siege, of
the police inside is
unprecedented in the
history of modern
American protest. The vulnerability of the police was put on full display:
the following night police were attacked in Los Angeles and New York,
among other locations. The National Guard was deployed throughout the
United States. While not as historically unprecedented for dealing with
dissent, there were concerns, at least in Minnesota, that the National
Guard would be insufficient to quell the uprising. Governor Tim Walz on
May 30 in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: "We do not have the numbers.

We cannot arrest people when we are trying to hold ground."* Three days
later, a Senior Airman in the Minnesota National Guard said in an
interview that he was “waiting for the scales to tip” with regards to the “riot
purgatory’ that existed; the National Guard had, as of June 2, been unable
to gain control of the city.> Trump was even rushed to his White House
bunker in response to protests in Washington D.C; the last time those
bunkers were used was during the September 11 attacks.° Transit workers
used their collective power to refuse to transport arrested protestors.”
Inspired by the protests, longshore workers of the International Longshore
and Warehouse Union struck and shut down ports across the West Coast

George Floyd protest by the White House (5/30/20). Image
credit: Geoff Livingston

in mid-June.8 And in terms of putting numbers to the crisis of legitimacy
faced by the American state, on June 3. a Monmouth University survey
reported that 54% of Americans thought that the burning of the precinct
was justified, higher than the level of support enjoyed by either Biden or
Trump?

Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency

The United States military, in Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency,
defines an insurgency as: “The organized use of subversion and violence to
seize, nullify, or challenge political control of a region.” Counter-insurgency
then is defined as “Comprehensive civilian and military efforts designed to
simultaneously defeat and contain insurgency and address its root
causes.""°

Itis worth quoting from the manual at length to demonstrate the
sophistication with which the U.S. Military approaches counter-insurgency
operations.

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Highlighting the specificity of counter-insurgency operations, the manual
argues that:

GG COIN [councer-insurgency] is distinguished from traditional warfare
due to the focus of its operations—a relevant population—and its
strategic purpose—to gain or maintain control o influence over—and
the support of that relevant population through political,
psychological, and economic methods.!!

Central to how the U.S. Military sees insurgency is the question of political
legitimacy:

GG The struggle for legivimacy with the relevant population is
typically a central theme of the conflice between the insurgency and
the HN [host nation] government. The HN government generally
needs some level of legitimacy among the population to retain the
confidence of the populace and an acknowledgment of governing
power. The insurgency will attack the legitimacy of the HN
government while attempting to develop its own legitimacy with the
population, COIN should reduce the credibility of the insurgency
while strengthening the legitimacy of the HN government.!2

And in turn, central to the question of legitimacy is the task of building and
controlling narratives:

GG COIN planners should compose a unifying message (che COIN
narrative) that is consistent with the overarching USG narrative,
which is coupled to the USG [U.S. government] objective. Narrative
isa structure of planned themes from which both messages and
actions are developed. Narrative provides a common thread of
communicative influence. The objective speaks to desired outcome;
narrative communicates the story of the how and why of an
operation, Common themes within a COIN narrative may be
reinforcing the credibility and perception of legitimacy of the HN
and USG COIN operation, exploiting the negative aspects of the
insurgent efforts, and preemptively presenting the expected insurgent
argument along with counter-arguments. ... The COIN narrative
should be the result of meticulous target-audience analysis
conducted by cultural and language subject matter experts ...
‘The COIN narrative should provide the guidance from which
themes, actions, and messages can be planned in. support of the
COIN objectives.!3

Narrative construction and control is reiterated in practical terms later in
the Manuat

GG 1" COIN, the information flow can be roughly divided into
information which the USG requires to guide its political-military
approach (ie., knowledge of local conditions) and inform
the USG wishes to disseminate to influence populations. Ac the same
time, counterinsurgents also seek to impede the information flow of
insurgent groups—both their intelligence collection and theie ability
to influence the relevane population. "1

ion which

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(One of the tactics emphasized to impede the ability of insurgents to
influence the target population is working with local authorities—
especially non-governmental ones like religious leaders, and NGOs- to
coopt the message of the insurgency and explicitly to moderate it." This
latter point is extremely important; while moderate movements may enjoy
more popular support, they are also far less successful at winning their
demands.'® It is therefore in the interest of those defend the existing
order to support the moderate elements of a movement.

All this is to say then that the U.S. Military understands insurgency and
counter-insurgency as being not just a military question, but rather a
question of politics. To this end, the Manual heavily emphasizes the
importance of political action in counter-insurgency operations:

GG Tobe effective, officials involved in COIN should address ewo
imperatives—political action and securiey—with equal urgency,
recognizing that insurgency is fundamentally an armed political
competition... COIN functions, therefore, include
informational, security, political, economic, and development
components, all of which are designed to support the overall objective
of establishing and consolidating control by the HN government. ..
This is the core of COIN, because it provides a framework around
which all other programs and activities are organized. As described
above, depending on the root causes of the insurgency, the strategy
may involve elements of political reform, reconciliation, popular
mobilization, and governmental capaciey building.!”

If we understand insurgency and counter-insurgency as involving both a
military and political aspect, in which the political is primary, with
insurgency being primarily about building a counter-legitimacy to the state
and counter-insurgency being primarily about the political isolation of
insurgents through the creation of narratives, we can begin to see how
such an understanding is useful to apply to American domestic politics.
The George Floyd Uprising saw insurgents directly undermine the
legitimacy of the existing state, especially the police, through both armed
and political action. In turn, the state and establishment responded with
both armed and political actions, the latter in the form of co-optation and
narrative control.

But the connections between American counter-insurgency and domestic
politics are not just on the discursive level. In “The other side of the COIN:
counterinsurgency and community policing’, Kristian Williams provides an
excellent overview of the material relationship between American military
counter-insurgency programs and American policing, This is specifically
evident with regard to trends towards the militarization of the police and
so-called “Community Policing" initiatives. Williams demonstrates how, in a
modern example of the “imperial boomerang"’®, many of the methods
employed by modern police forces were developed and refined by the
American military, including during its occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan
In turn, the military partnered with police forces to learn how to better
control conquered populations, be they black people living in American
Cities or Iraqis living under American occupation in Iraq."

Of particular interest is the role that NGOs play in this process. As was
noted earlier, the U.S. Military makes special mention of NGOs in the
process of counter-insurgency. An earlier version of the Manual, published
in 2006 and authored by David Petraeus, is more explicit, remarking that
some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot” and
referring to NGOs as “force- multipliers”. Williams is able to show how
NGOs were directly involved in de-escalating responses of the community
to murders committed by American police in Oakland, as well as involved
in anti-gang activities in Boston. Both of these separate efforts fall under
the playbook of counter-insurgency.?°

Before going in depth into the George Floyd Uprising, it is worthwhile
looking at the “why” of counter-insurgency. Why is it that the police and
military have developed a comprehensive strategy intended to undermine
threats to the existing order? Fundamentally, the modern state exists to
protect the interests of the capitalist class—namely the continuation of
capital accumulation and exploitation—against the interests of everyone
else. In turn, specific states exist to protect the specific interests of their
specific capitalist classes. Thus anything that attempts to undermine
capitalism, or the ability of capitalists to exploit, must be itself
undermined. The state has a myriad of tools at its disposal to help with
this process. Some are ideological (they convince people exploitation is in
their own interest) whereas others, like the police, are repressive, Insofar
as the goal of counter-insurgency is ultimately to protect the accumulation
of capital, we should understand counter-insurgency as extending beyond
just the actions of the repressive apparatuses of the state. What | will
explore below is that in this case, counter-insurgency was a joint effort of,
the entire American ruling class, both inside and outside the state, to
defang the George Floyd Uprising. The American ruling class used both
violent and non-violent means to defang the uprising: they deployed what
could be called a carrot-and-stick approach in order to protect the social
order.

The Carrot...
The Media Narrative

In the days following the murder of George Floyd, the media worked
tirelessly to defang the George Floyd Uprising. They did this not by
creating reality through discourse, but by selectively and pointedly
reporting on certain aspects of reality. As a result, they encouraged people
to think about the uprising in specific ways, and in turned called them into
action in specific ways. | will focus primarily on the Minneapolis Star
Tribune; the narrative trends developed there were later repeated in
media across the United States.

Initial media reaction to the uprising directly condemned property
destruction. After a Target was looted on the night of May 27, the Star
Tribune spent the following day reporting on the impact that riots would
have on small businesses." True to form, the Star Tribune printed a call
for peace from the family and partner of George Floyd?2 as well as from.
“political, faith, community leaders" calling for an “end to riots."°3 The
latter story was particularly interesting insofar as the group was called
together for a conference by Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and included
both church leaders and NGO managers. Here is an example of a top state
official picking and choosing who counts as a “community leader” without
direct input from the community. In turn, the Star Tribune reported on the
‘meeting treating these externally hand-picked “community leaders” as
though their legitimacy derived from the community itself.

In the following days, the Star Tribune shifted focus to the human cost of
the riots to the local community. The publication blamed the riots for
creating a food desert due to the closing of large corporate grocery
stores.24 Rioters were also blamed for the lack of access to medicine now
faced by the local community due to the closure of pharmacies.?5 Rioters
were alleged to have burned down nearly 200 units of affordable housing,
thus exacerbating the housing crisis.?° The riots were also allegedly
responsible for devastating Minneapolis famed Lake Street, home to
immigrant-owned business and a hub, according to the Star Tribune, of
multi-culturalism.2?

In its discussion of the immediate impact of the uprising on the local
community, not once did the Star Tribune go beyond surface-level
condemnations of the rioters. Suddenly concerned with access to food
and medication, the stories did not include discussions as to why the
closure of a few grocery stores could create a food desert. There was no
discussion on the increased price of food and wealth-disparity. There was
no discussion on the monopolization of food sources by large chains.
‘There was no discussion on the effects of for-profit healthcare on access
to medicine, No discussions on gentrification and stagnant wages leading
to the necessity of specifically designated “affordable” housing. No
discussions on the context of the riots: namely 40 million unemployed
Americans staring down a pandemic with miniscule government relief. No
discussion of looting as a means of getting necessities such as medicine,
food, and clothing; no discussion as to why Target and pharmacies
became targets. Instead the riots were presented largely without context,
as simply an irrational outburst of anger, alone causing problems to the
‘community. Those fighting back against the existing order were blamed
for the worst effects of the very order they fought against.
In addition to direct condemnation, the Star Tribune also took a more
nuanced approach to the riots. Instead of the riots being an organic.
expression of community anger, they were presented—both by the media,
and the government—as being the work of (usually white) “outside
agitators’. Rioting was purported to be the work of secret white-
supremacists that had infiltrated the protests in order to cause mayhem.
In that same meeting of community leaders called together by Tim Walz
on May 30, the executive director of the Council for Minnesotans of African
Heritage put it succinctly: "White people from other communities are
coming into my community, our communities as some kind of perverse
poetry, as if it wasn't bad enough already. ... Go home now. The fascists on
the plan right now, turn around.’2® The Star Tribune reported on an Illinois
‘man who had been arrested with explosives in Minneapolis, who had
specifically traveled there to riot.22 The mayor of St Paul and the governor
of Minnesota had each tweeted that the vast majority -80% to all- of the
arrestees in the week preceding June 6 had been from out-of-state despite
the fact that there was no evidence to back up such claims. The claims
were so ludicrous that the Star Tribune ran a story walking back many of
the claims about outside agitators; well after the damage had been done
to the protests?

The goal of these various media narratives—first, condemning the riots;
second, emphasizing the damage to the community; and third, blaming
outside agitators- was to drive a dual process of bifurcation within the
protest movement. The goal of the ruling class was on the one hand to
separate “peaceful liberal protestors from the more radical element, both
to avoid radicalization of the moderate protestors but also to isolate the
radicals within the movement. Second, the goal was to lump the radical
protestors together with apolitical opportunist looters, whether or not the
latter group actually existed, and in turn ignore the radical critiques of
both policing and society as a whole that the radicals put forward. Thus
the establishment attempted to call into being two groups: a group of
good, peaceful, moderate protestors; and a second group of opportunist,
Violent protestors who did not care about the injustice the protests were
about. The tactics and message of the first group was to be lauded,
whereas the tactics and message of the second group was to be
condemned.

Meanwhile, seemingly out of nowhere, another narrative appeared in the
media, Across both social and traditional media outlets, stories appeared
showing police supporting the protests. Most famous were the images of
police (and sometimes National Guard) kneeling with the protestors. Often
times this was displayed as the result of a request from the "good
protestors”, who were then portrayed as applauding police initiative,
However, in this case reality cut through the media spin: the American
police were simply too vicious for their “spontaneous” (more on this below)
‘outpouring of empathy to be taken seriously. There were abundant
accounts of the same police transitioning from kneeling to attacking
protestors within the space of hours.

As the protests spread in the early weeks of June, it was no longer possible
for the media to rely on the “outside agitator” platitude. Indeed, with.
protests in literally every major city in the United States, there was no
“outside” for the agitators to come from. And with the utter inhumanity of
the police on full display, stories of police taking a knee simply didn't hold
water. The media then turned to focusing almost exclusively on the efforts
of liberal NGOs engaged in “rebuilding” efforts", and the activities of the
"good" protestors. The degree to which the “good” protestors were signal-
boosted by the media is evident in the speed at which the “Defund the
Police” slogan, itself a moderated version of the already moderate “abolish
the police” demand, became the public rallying cry of the movement as a
whole.2? Finally, towards mid-June, with the protests now largely contained
and the radical element isolated, the media began largely ignoring the
massive protests that are still occurring, instead only providing local
coverage of incidental events.

While | have focused largely on the narrative created in the Minneapolis
Star Tribune, the same pattern (from demonization, to outside agitators,
to focusing on the community cost, the good/bad protestor division, the
police sympathy, to NGOs and liberals, to ultimately ignoring the
movement) was a pattern that was repeated more-or-less within all major
‘media sources in North America. Why was this the case? The similarity in
editorial line between media companies does not indicate direct
coordination between media onwers nor does it point to state intervention
or censorship. Rather, insofar as media in North America is either owned
by large corporations or run by the state, the commonality of interests
that exists between rich owners and rich state managers is inevitably
reflected in the editorial line of the media which they run.33 it makes total
sense then that the media would relay a narrative which had as its effect
the defanging of the George Floyd Uprising; such an action was absolutely
within the interests of the large capitalists which control the media. The
capitalist class, by owning the media and therefore controlling its content,
was able to utilize media narratives as part of the counter-insurgency
effort against the George Floyd Uprising

In the case of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the connection between
ownership and editorial line could not be clearer. Glen Taylor, the
billionaire former state senator, admitted as much when he bought the
newspaper in 2014. In an interview with MinnPost, he stated that his,
‘ownership of the paper would result in the editorial line being less
liberal It is unsurprising then that the overall editorial position of the
paper reflects Taylor's public position, namely that the problem is not
specifically law enforcement and that protests are only legitimate if they
are peaceful.3® insofar as the George Floyd Uprising threatened the
existing order in Minneapolis, an order that Glen Taylor benefitted from,
the Star Tribune would come out against the uprising. This same process
played out across the United States over the course of the uprising.

The Copaganda Machine

No account of how the media treated the George Floyd Uprising would be
complete without a discussion of something that is often overlooked in
accounts of reactionary media spin: the absolutely massive public
relations machine employed by the police themselves. While itis possible
that the speed with which stories of police “taking a knee” with protestors
went viral was entirely natural, itis far more likely that in the wake of the
largest anti-police protests in a generation that the police PR machine
jumped into overdrive.

The goal of police public relations (PR) is like any public relations
campaign, to influence how the public views the police. in one article
written for Police One, the largest English-language online community of
police boasting literally tens of thousands of members, the point of police
PRis described as “to establish a positive relationship with the community
before an incident occurs.” The point of PR is directly contextualized to
counteract the public's reactions to racist police terror: “Events dating back
to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, Rodney King, Tamir
Rice, Freddie Gray and others have been covered extensively in the media
and have tarnished the reputation of many agencies. The public relations
team must establish or repair the image of the agency within the
‘community.’3* In another article on the same website, another officer
describes the utility of “branding” (using a PR campaign to build a police
“brand”) insofar as it allows police departments to control messaging and
make clear a department's “value proposition.’2” The goal of branding is to
build preconceptions about the role of police, thus filtering any
observations through the preconceived image of how police should act.
This allows the police to have greater impunity in their actions, as anything
they do is seen immediately through the lens of police being good and
necessary protectors

On the surface this seems fairly obvious and innocuous. All firms employ
PR strategies in one form or another, in which the firm seeks to use the
‘media to influence public reaction to the firm. However if we consider the
social role of police, namely a repressive apparatus of the capitalist state
designed to protect the conditions which allow for exploitation, the police
use of PR becomes more sinister. Police directly attempt to manipulate
public perceptions of their actions in their favour, including racist murder.

How widespread is the police use of PR? It is difficult to say. An
examination of several police budgets over the past years of cities such as
New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Toronto turned up little
information; the police are remarkably good at concealing precisely what
they spend their money on. There is some scattered information though
that suggests that the police spend a staggering amount on PR. For
instance, in 2016 the Denver Police Department was revealed to have
spent $1.3 million over three years on its “media relations unit’.8 The
Metropolitan Police in the UK had, in 2015, a 10 million pound annual PR
budget that employed 100 communications staff, with a police across the
UK spending 36 million pounds annually on PR.3? The LAPD, rather than
just employing a Public Information Officer (PIO), has an entire Public
Relations Unit.“? In Toronto, the 2019 police budget requested an
additional $7.9 million to be partially used on nine new positions in the
Corporate Communications Unit, increasing the total staff from 16 to 25,
to be used to “help increase capabilities in public relations, internal
communication and digital strategy.’4" And in 2020, the NYPD allotted $3.2
million for public relations, in order to tell their “side of the story. "4?

Direct police department expenses on PR are just one of the PR avenues
available to police, Police unions also hire PR firms to improve the image
of their officers or to advance specific goals.4? Individual police officers can
also hire PR firms to represent them in times of need. One such service,
Cop PRotect, allows officers to pay $50 per month for guaranteed
representation if something should go wrong, In a story placed in Police
‘Magazine, the need for such a service is related directly to the Ferguson
Uprising:

GG Ps today are completely at the mercy of activists who don’t care
about the truth ... Darren Wilson was nearly murdered and now lives
in hiding, while the man who tried to kill him is declared a hero by
activists. Cop PRotect gives cops like Darren Wilson a trusted friend
to tell their stories in ways agency information officers, union
representatives and the media cannot or will noc.

In this case, the firm was created directly to mitigate community blowback
against individual officers in the wake of racist police terror.

While the amount that is spent on pro-police PR is hard to find, the
indirect effects make it more obvious. Indeed, there exists an entire
parasitic cottage industry of pro-police PR firms and consulting services,
Which exist solely to increase public perceptions in the police. For instance,
a quick search turned up John Guilfoil Public Relations which specializes in
the public sector, including the police. A testimonial from the chief of the
Massachusetts Police Department states that the firm “provides an
extremely valuable service to those agencies that want to be proactive in
getting out a positive message to the community."*® PolicePR in Indiana
offers a Public Information Officer boot camp, in partnership with the
Greenwood Police Department.“ Melissa Agnes, a crisis management
strategist who has been featured on Police One, has a whole series of
articles and talks dealing specifically with police misconduct, ranging from,
"Discussing the Divide Between Police and Their Communities” to
"Discussing The #Ferguson Crisis with Tim Burrows”.4? None of these firms
or services would exist if the police were not paying for them,

Police PR strategies are not limited to traditional media. To give the
strategies a more organic feel, police forces and their hired PR firms make
frequent use of social media in order to help control the narrative around
their actions. Police Chief Magazine warns officers that “Hiding and Hoping
is Not a PR Strategy’: police forces not only need to monitor social media
to see what perception of the police force is after an incident, but must
also build “a social media presence’. This latter point can include
spreading information about a suspect in the event that video showing
police misconduct spreads.“® As part of the U.S. Department of Justice's
‘Community Oriented Policing Services’ (COPS) Strategic Communication
Practices guide, there is an entire section on the importance of social
media.*® Another article on Police One suggests that police departments
send officers onto Reddit, both to get ahead of a story, but also to
intervene in the discussions as police.* These efforts can be bolstered by
using “community outreach programs’ to “build an online army of
supporters.”5t

Lest anyone think that the police simply use social media to inform their
audience about their activities, the police consciously use social media to
‘manipulate public opinion during moments of crisis. Taken from another
Police One article (a fantastic resource for those wanting to understand
the mindset of police), this one published ominously on May 28, 2020,
titled “12 things every police department's civil unrest plan needs”, there is
an entire section on social media. Departments are instructed to be aware
that protestors can use social media to amplify and coordinate their
activity; departments should also be aware and be ready to counter those
that would “lower the perception of [their] department.” If that fails,
there's always the National Guard.®? Force Science News published an
article/advertisement featuring Melissa Agnes in 2018, which advised
departments to have prepared a ‘Communications Bible’ to help navigate
crises such as “officer-involved shootings’.53 in a mid-June Police One
leadership briefing, after weeks of anti-police protests, authors mockingly
reflected: “Now do you recognize the power of social media?” arguing that
police “must start viewing... social media as an integral tool in policing."®4

All this is to say there exists a massive and highly coordinated police PR
machine, which the police use to try and directly control media narratives
in their favour. They do this as part of a broader effort to maintain the
current social order. While it is impossible to prove this soon, | strongly
suspect that it was this machine which was responsible for the flood of
sympathetic stories about the police that featured prominently across
traditional and social media in early June. Despite the best efforts of the
police, their unions, and their employed PR firms, they were unable to shift
the broader media narrative for more than a few days; the brutal actions
of police across the United States spoke for themselves and undermined
attempts to portray the police in a positive light.
While ultimately unsuccessful, the wave of pro-police media in early June
gave credibility to the more moderate argument that the institution of
policing itself is not the problem, but rather that itis only some “bad
apples” amidst an otherwise salvageable police force. This in turn gave
more ideological power to moderate and liberal elements, the so-called
“good protestors", within the broader protest movement. To tie this back
into counter-insurgency, control over information in the form of both
narrative construction and information dissemination is one of the main
tools of counter-insurgency strategies. The police consciously did just this,
and in the process strengthened the moderates within the movement.

The Non-Profit Industrial Complex

As noted earlier, the U.S. military considers NGO partnerships to be a vital
part of counter-insurgency efforts. Much has been written about the
negative effects of non-profits on social movements. In the classic
collection of essays titled The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the
Non-Profit Industrial Complex, Andrea Smith argues that capital and the
capitalist state use nonprofits to: monitor and control social movements,
divert public resources into private hands, manage and control dissent,
redirect activist efforts towards careerism and away from mass-based
modes of organizing, allow corporations to mask exploitation through
philanthropy, and encourage social movements to model themselves in
terms of structure and politics after capitalist models.°° For the purposes
of this essay, | want to focus on two areas: first, how NGOs have a
moderating effect on the politics of a movement. Second, | will alk about
how NGOs frequently work with the police to protect the current social
order under the guise of changing it.

How is it that non-profits are able to moderate social movements? The
capitalist class is well aware of their own interests and spends an
inordinate amount of money defending them. In the process, they create
philanthropic foundations. These philanthropic foundations not only allow
capitalists to transfer wealth inter-generationally without taxation (giving
their children positions in the foundations) but also fund charitable
activities, such as non-profits. There is a catch though: the capitalists will
not fund anything that does not fit their interests, namely the continuation
of exploitation. They are happy, for instance, to fund affordable housing
initiatives insofar as those i
homelessness, namely private property. Capitalist foundations therefore
provide resources to NGOs which act in line with their interests. In turn,
NGOs knowingly moderate themselves in order to better secure
resources. Furthermore respectable NGOs can become the public face of a
movement, effectively forcing the more radical organizations out of the
public eye.

jatives do not tackle the root causes of

‘The Civil Rights and anti-police movements are full of examples of the
moderating effects of NGOs. For instance, in the 1960s white
philanthropist Stephen Currier set up the Council for United Civil Rights
Leadership in order to channel foundation funding to Civil Rights groups.
The so-called ‘Big Six’ were brought together; of the six, the Student Non-
Violent Coordinating Committee, the most radical of the groups, received
the least amount of funding. More radical groups, such as the Nation of
Islam, were completely excluded. In 1963 Malcolm X specifically criticized
the Big Six and the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership in his famous
‘Message to the Grass Roots’ speech in which he reflected on the March on
Washington which had taken place earlier that year.*° The goal of these
maneuvers by white philanthropists was clear: fund the more moderate
element of the Civil Rights movement to avoid the movement taking a
radical turn and undermining the ability for American capitalism to
operate.57

Fast forward 50 years, and the same pattern reoccurs. In Oakland in 2009,
non-profits directly intervened to deradicalize the response to the killing of
Oscar Grant. Ahead of a major rally in January 2009, the Oakland police
arranged meetings with various nonprofit and church leaders in order to
defang the protests before they even began.® Religious leaders asked
their congregations to not attend the protests. A coalition of NGOs came
together and formed the Coalition Against Police Execution (CAPE). CAPE
explicitly called for a lack of militancy in their protests, and stood as a
physical barrier between police and protestors. °° In turn, CAPE became
the public, legitimate face of the protests, which was reinforced through
media coverage.

The uprising in 2014 in Ferguson saw a similar process play itself out.
There the NGO influence was given an organizational existence in the form
of Black Lives Matter. | want to be clear here; when speaking of Black Lives
Matter | am talking about the official organization and not the broader
movement of the same name. Black Lives Matter, while first conceived of
in 2013, organized its first major action in 2014 with the Black Lives Matter
Freedom Ride in response to the killing of Michael Brown by the Ferguson
police. Black Lives Matter became the public face of the movement.
Despite the Ferguson uprising originating in riots, Black Lives Matter and
other organizations planned a series of actions over the course of the
summer of 2014 that channeled local activism into safer and less
rebellious avenues.

Following the Ferguson uprising, moderate elements of the Black Lives
Matter movement became a relatively safe outlet for liberals to support
and into which the capitalist class could channel outrage. Black Lives
Matter and the constellation of new organizations and networks around it
received an absolutely immense amount of donations from larger donors
like The Ford Foundation and George Soros.® The more liberal elements
of the movement, able to secure donations, were able to take centre-
stage. For instance, one recipient, the Organization for Black Struggle,
used some of its funding to create the Hands Up Coalition. This coalition
popularized the "hands up, dontt shoot” slogan used by protestors; this ran
against slogans by more militant black power activists such as “arms up,
shoot back’ and “fists up, fight back’, More radical yet equally active
groups, such as the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, received no funding
In 2016, Black Lives Matter and 27 other organizations, as part of the
Movement for Black Lives, issued a platform of demands titled 4 Vision for
Black Lives. Rather than a comprehensive plan and program to mobilize
the masses to fight for their own liberation, the document is a set of policy
guidelines. The effect is that efforts are taken off the streets and
channeled into traditional power structures where they are ultimately
destined to fail,

‘The founders of Black Lives Matter were first introduced to each other
through an NGO known as Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity
(BOLD). The board of directors of BOLD, those who decide its political
direction, is made up of managers of other NGOS." BOLD also receives an
immense sum of money from private donors, such as through the
“philanthropic intermediary” known as Borealis Philanthropy" and
through Funders for Justice.©3 This latter group, also created in response
to the Ferguson Uprising, in turn receives funding from The Ford
Foundation and the Open Society Foundations; hardly groups interested in
a radical transformation of the social order or the end of exploitation. |
don't bring this up to allege a conspiracy that Black Lives Matter is being
secretly run by The Ford Foundation, but rather to show that even Black
Lives Matter has its origins within the non-profit industrial complex milieu,
which in turn effects its politics. Turning back to the George Floyd Uprising,
it is unsurprising that in a recent Reddit Ask-Me-Anything, Kailee Scales,
the Managing Director for Black Lives Matter, condemned the riots and
announced efforts to channel the George Floyd Uprising into voter
registration and “civic engagement” through the #WhatMatters2020
campaign.

The ways in which non-profits have attempted to moderate explosions of
rage during the George Floyd Uprising are too many to list. One example |
want to focus on, however, is particularly telling. On May 30, two days after
the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis, a local non-profit called
Pillsbury United Communities had a press conference. Pillsbury United
Communities is an incredibly well established NGO; founded in 1879, it
runs a number of outreach and education programs, community
programs (such as free COVID-19 testing), as well as “social enterprises”
including a grocery store. The press conference on May 30 brought
together Jamie Foxx, Stephen Jackson, BLM activist Tamika Mallory,
alongside George Floyd's family. Speakers were explicit in their calls for
peaceful protests, but generally did not condemn the riots. A peaceful rally
followed.® Thus at the height of the militant protests, people were asked
by “legitimate” community leaders to temper their anger and engage in
traditionally and easily ignored protests. These calls were amplified by
liberals outside the community and the media,

A few days after the rally, Pillsbury United Communities used George
Floyd's death to issue a fundraising call it is unclear from their website
how the money will be used to ensure “Justice for George Floyd”.® But
individual donations are not the only way that Pillsbury United
Communities raises funds. It also receives donations from massive
foundations such as the Greater Twin Cities United Way, the Minneapolis,
Foundation, and the St, Paul & Minnesota Foundation, The United Way, for
instance, acts as a “philanthropic intermediary’, collection donations from
large corporations, and then granting money to non-profits. n this specific
case, the money given to Pillsbury United Communities comes from
sources such as 3M, U.S. Bank, Cargill, and Target.°7 The latter, notably,
also provides hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to police
foundations.®® One can see the issue of an organization fighting for justice
against the police having similar funding sources to the police themselves
Itis also unlikely that the capitalist class would fund those capable of truly
undermining it.

That an NGO intervened in a mass struggle to both channel the movement
in a more liberal direction while monopolizing resources is not particularly
surprising, What is particularly interesting though is Pillsbury United
Communities connection to community policing. A 2006 report by the
Minneapolis Department of Health & Family Support lists Waite House, a
Pillsbury United Communities site, as a "Weed & Seed Safe Haven’.®? Weed
and Seed programs, for context, gained prominence in 1992 after the
Rodney King riots as a way to connect police and community leaders in
order to ostensibly combat gang violence”; they made cohesive the
militarization tactics (weed) and community policing tactics (seed)
employed in counter-insurgency efforts.”" In December 2014, the FBI gave
Pillsbury United Communities its “Director's Community Leadership
Award’, an annual award given to groups for crime prevention efforts.”2
Then-president and chief executive, Chanda Smith Baker, accepted the
award. Coincidentally, Chanda Smith Baker—now working for the
Minneapolis Foundation—also sits on the Minnesota Department of Public
Safety's newspeak titled "Working Group on Police-Involved Deadly Force
Encounters". The goal of the working group was to “identify ways to reduce
deadly force encounters with law enforcement’”3. Members of the group
included the Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, the Minnesota
Attorney General, Philando Castle's (killed by police in Minnesota in 2016)
uncle, and other judge's, academics, politicians, and NGO managers.
Tragically and ironically, the working group released its findings in
February 2020; that George Floyd was murdered, just a few months later
in a "police-involved deadly force encounter’, demonstrates the extent to
Which so-called community policing is useful to the community.
(One final interesting link between NGOs and the police in Minneapolis: as
mentioned earlier, Chanda Smith Baker, after working for Pillsbury United
Communities, went on to work as the Senior Vice President, Impact for The
Minneapolis Foundation. The current president and CEO of the
Minneapolis Foundation is R.T. Rybak, who was also the former mayor of
Minneapolis. R.T. Rybak also sits on the board of a company called
Benchmark Analytics: an IT company which has designed a system capable
of predicting when officers will become problematically violent, Rybak
therefore has a direct material interest in “reforming” the police. In an
article written on June 2, titled "I Was the Mayor of Minneapolis and I Know
Our Cops Have a Problem’, Rybak recalls surveying the damage to
Minneapolis after the riots with Chanda Smith Baker, before advertising
his firm's solution to police violence.” Unsurprisingly he emphasizes the
humanity of the police, and he sees the solution as being community
policing informed by predicative behavior technology.

The organizational and interpersonal links between NGO managers,
politicians, police leadership, “community leaders’, and the board
members of large capitalist firms points to the existence of a ruling
capitalist class. The above is just a small illustration of how the ruling class
rules in Minneapolis.

To summarize all of thi

Pillsbury United Communities is an established,
well-respected local NGO. It is part of the non-profit industrial complex,
relying on philanthropic intermediaries for much of its funding, which in
turn are funded by massive corporations. It came out very vocally in the
early stages of the George Floyd Uprising, urging a more liberal and
institutional approach to activism as opposed to the riots. And, it has close
ties to the Minneapolis Police Department and state police through
community policing programs. Itis just one textbook example of many of
how NGOs act as elements of a counter-insurgency strategy.

The Democrats

The Democrats have been referred to as the “graveyard of social
movernents" insofar as they absorb, coopt, and disorganize them.7° Their
approach to the George Floyd Uprising is no different. What the
Democratic Party sought to do in the wake of the George Floyd Uprising
was a combination of repression (in those places in which it exercised
power, such as Minneapolis, New York, LA., etc.) and coopt its energies
into the Biden 2020 campaign. Given the unpopularity of Biden and the
overall increasing disinterest in electoral politics by much of the left the
attempt to coopt the movement, at least ostensibly, has been
unsuccessful. It is, however, still worth examining in order to paint a full
picture of the counter-insurgency campaign against the uprising.

At the beginning of the uprising, the Democratic Party machine jumped
into motion but was unsure how to act. While top Democrat strategists
spoke to media about how the uprising could affect the election”®
(indicating that they were in fact working on a response), there was little in
the way of official high-level statement or actions for almost a week. Then
on June 2 two fairly major events occurred. First, Biden publicly brought
Julian Castro into his campaign; Castro had been a vocal proponent of
liberal police reforms during his bid to become the Democratic nominee
for president.7” Second, Pelosi, the multi-millionaire Speaker of the
House, asked the Congressional Black Caucus to draft a series of police
reforms.”

(On June 8, following a ridiculous display in which Pelosi and other top
Democrats took a knee wearing Ghanaian kente cloths, the Justice in
Policing Act was revealed. The act is fairly milquetoast—far behind the
nebulous demands of the uprising—and includes provisions for more
easily prosecuting police in cases of brutality, mandatory body cameras, as
well as a ban on chokeholds. The Act does absolutely nothing to abolish or
even defund police departments. 79 Nor is the act likely to become law;
even if the act was to pass the Republican-majority Senate, Trump has
announced his attention to veto it.

Rather than an accident, the unlikelihood of the bill passing is a feature,
one of the ways in which so-called “checks and balances” help protect the
current order. The Democrats know this; had it been likely to pass the bill
would have been even more muted. The inaction of the Democrats in the
face of the George Floyd Uprising is not surprising: they are one of the two
parties that have overseen the construction and maintenance of the
white-supremacist order in the United States, Biden is himself a career
segregationist and author of a 1994 crime bill?! which was a cornerstone
in the construction of the modern for-profit prison behemoth. The
Congressional Black Caucus has itself helped to make the police a
“protected class", and also contributed to the militarization of police
through the 1033 program.

Despite the lack of success of the official Democrat cooptation attempt of
the George Floyd Uprising, | want to point out one of the more insidious
ways that the Democrats are attempting to coopt outrage against police
murders through social movements themselves. It is worth first pointing
out that Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, is a
supporter of the centrist-wing of the Democrats, specifically Elizabeth
Warren. Black Lives Matter has recently launched a campaign called
+#WhatMatters2020. The goal of the campaign is to bring “BLM supporters
and allies to the polls in the 2020 U.S Presidential Election to build
collective power and ensure candidates are held accountable for the
issues that systematically and disproportionately impact Black and under-
served communities across the nation.’®® A campaign video calls on
people to vote for an America where “police are held accountable" and
“where we have access to quality healthcare”. The problem with this
campaign, of course, is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans
are even pretending to deliver on promises like this. Biden does not
support medicare for all, and was an architect of the current racist
criminal justice system. The #WhatMatters2020 campaign is a cynical
sheepdog campaign, bringing black people angry at the current injustices
of American white-supremacist capitalism back into the Democrats.

Invasion of the Liberals

Earlier in this article, | mentioned that the media was attempting to call
into existence a group of "good", peaceful protestors. | want to spend
more time now talking about this process. Ideology is both produced by
practice, but also exists as a way of calling particular types of people into
activity.®6 When the media began focusing almost exclusively on “good”
protestors, it was at first inventing this category out of almost thin air; the
line it was drawing was an artificial one. But by putting forward this
ideological pole, the media called into action people who had hitherto not
been involved. The media, alongside notable liberal politicians and other
establishment figures, created a group of liberal protestors out of inactive
liberals who now saw themselves and their own political predilections
reflected in the ongoing uprising. Included in these efforts by the media
and liberal establishment figures is a now-famous essay by former
president Barrack Obama, posted to Medium on June 1, in which he said
he supported the protests, condemned violence, and urged reform efforts
to be focused on institutional channels.®”

The flip side of the liberal “call to action” is that it also acts as a safeguard
against radicalization. When reality confronts ideology, itis often ideology
that is changed. Reality forces a rupture in one’s worldview which can lead
to radicalization. In this case it became difficult to substantiate the story of
a good, neutral, and protective state in the face of ubiquitous police
violence against even peaceful protestors. If reality can be changed or if
powerful narratives can reinforce ideology, ideology is cemented rather
than discarded. In this case, liberalism as a worldview was able to escape
challenge due to the emergence of establishment liberals in support of the
protests.

The result of the liberalization of the protests on public opinion is
interesting. By mid-June, 67% of Americans reportedly supported the
ongoing protests. The racial breakdown was more stark: 60% of white
people supported the protests, whereas 86% of black people supported
them. Despite this, 59% of Americans (including 62% of white Americans
compared with 43% of black Americans) believed that the protests were
spurred on at least in part as a means for people to engage in criminal
behavior.®® Thus the liberalization of the protests resulted in a situation in
Which the majority of a country deeply enmeshed in white supremacy
supported protests proclaiming the value of black lives, despite the
majority of the country materially benefitting from that same unjust racial
hierarchy. That major politicians like Canadian Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau and former Governor of Massachusetts and presidential
candidate Mitt Romney joined the protests—both politicians with
significant power to change the conditions against which they protested-
signals only that the political message of the uprising had shifted in the
popular consciousness away from “dismantle white supremacy" to the
base level of “black people are human”. That nearly one third of America
could not even support such a basic affirmation of humanity is telling

The liberal invasion had three main effects on the uprising, First, the influx
of liberals into the rallies not only led to the proliferation of protests and
an increase in attendance, but also to their pacification. Protestors began
to self-police, modifying their tactics in line with the interests of the
existing order. Protestors made sure to demarcate themselves and their
actions as “peaceful, thus robbing themselves of even the specter of
militancy. To a certain extent there is a degree of “selection bias" here;
militant protestors are more likely to be arrested, and therefore over time
the composition of a protest will naturally become more liberal. Police are
aware of this and consciously seek to tie up activist time and resources in
legal proceedings.

Internally to the protests, liberal protestors acted like “peace police”,
disrupting the activities of militants. Examples included liberals in
Washington DC turning over a “rioter” to the police (at an anti-police
march!) at the end of May,®? as well as the doxxing by liberal activists of
Rayshard Brook's girlfriend, pegged as an outside agitator.°° She is
accused of setting fire to the Wendys outside of which her partner was
murdered by police. Another high-profile example of the liberalization of
the protests on the tactical level is Al Sharpton’s call for a march on
Washington in August, which took place at the height of militant protests
occurring in Washington D.C.°! Such a call, not to support the existing
protests but to postpone them, was a calculated attempt to de-escalate
the uprising

Second, the influx of liberals into the movement has paved the way for
false victories. By this | mean superficial gains that ultimately leave the
underlying power structure which gave rise to the protests unchallenged.
Included here is the “Black Lives Matter’ street mural in Washington D.C.,
various corporate black-washing campaigns, the changing of band names,
and the cancelling of shows like COPS. One notes the irony of the mayor of
New York ordering that “Black Lives Matter" be painted outside of Trump
Towers while overseeing a police department which brutalizes black
people and and while also opposing efforts to defund the NYPD.

Third, the influx of liberals into the movement had an effect on defanging
the demands of the movement. Black Lives Matter was quick to issue the
demand to defund the police in the early days of the George Floyd
Uprising: they explicitly pushed for a defunding of the police, without
going into detail as to what that would entail.22 Other activists seized on
the space this opened up and stated that “defund” meant "defund
everything’. They argued that the police were not reformable and
therefore had to be abolished.®3 What followed was a discussion in the
‘media about whether or not “defund” actually meant “defund”. There was
no shortage of liberals assuring other concerned liberals that defunding
didn't actually mean that there would be no police. While Minneapolis
has since begun steps to disband their police force, demands in other
locations seem to ask for a portion of police budgets to be re-allocated to
community resources, in line with the Movement for Black Lives policy
demands.?°

‘The conceptual slippage of “defund" has not gone unnoticed by the police
themselves. In a June 18 article on Police One, Mike Walker, a police officer
for 27 years, wrote that “defunding is really just a way of saying reduced
funding’®6 In the same article he offers assurance to worried police
officers by noting that budget cuts were already on the agenda due to
COVID-19, and that most municipalities legally cannot function without
police due to their municipal charters.

That at least some police are fine with temporarily defunding the police
speaks to the heart of just how defanged a demand “defund the police”
actually is, But “abolish the police” as a slogan absent a critique of the
conditions that give rise to the police is itself a demand that does not cut
to the heart of the matter. The police exist because capitalism requires
force to defend inequality and exploitation. Without ending exploitation,
there will still need to be some form of coercive apparatus to ensure the
continued existence of exploitation. Thus the coercive functions of the
police will be offioaded to other state apparatuses; there will stil be
violent, racist coercion whether or not the police exist. This is something
that already happens; consider, for instance, the racist terror that child
welfare services across Canada (not armed, not police) put Indigenous
people through for years. The George Floyd Uprising opened the space for
discussions about the fundamental nature of society, about capitalism,
imperialism, and racial inequality in America. Liberals shifted the overton
window to exclude visions of radical transformation, instead focusing on
the degree to which police should be defunded. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s,
now viral Instagram post which stated that police abolition looks like white
suburbia, an atomized capitalist dystopia, makes total sense in this,
context. 2?

The liberal invasion resulted in a defanging of protest tactics, results, and
even the demands themselves, This process, which was aided by the
police, the media, and “legitimate” community leaders, was nothing less
than the political side of a counter-insurgency campaign by the American
ruling class directed against the George Floyd Uprising. Thus a movement
which began with the burning of a police station has been transformed
into one of requesting minor amendments to municipal budgets.
..And the Stick

‘The majority of the article has focused on the less-obvious methods that
the American ruling class has used in its counter-insurgency efforts against
the George Floyd Uprising. However, while counter-insurgency is more
effective if it involves elements of soft power, no counter-insurgency effort
is complete without open repression. The efforts against the George Floyd
Uprising are no exception.

Itis hard to overstate the scale of the police operation against protestors
over the past month. For instance, by June 2 there already been over 11
000 arrests of protestors.%8 The volume of arrests was used as an excuse
to temporarily suspend habeus corpus in New York.%? There have been
numerous documented arrests and attacks on journalists from even
liberal platforms such as CNN. To my knowledge there are no up to date
figures on the total number of arrests. In terms of the intensity of the
police response, over the past month there have been countless scenes of
police using tear gas and pepper spray to clear otherwise peaceful
protests. An online database has logged over 670 individual incidents of
police brutality caught on video. Police have killed at least four
protestors over the course of the uprising. Many more have been
maimed."°" As a result there are at least 40 different lawsuits currently
underway against police departments for brutality during the George
Floyd Uprising.*©2

As if the level of direct repression was not enough, there has also been an
increase in surveillance of activists. A recent leak, titled “Blue Leaks", has
revealed that the FBI monitored social media extensively during the
protests and forward information it thought relevant to local police
departments. 193 FBI agents have also harassed activists after they
attended recent protests against police brutality.'* The goal of FBI
harassment in general is to intimidate protestors and organizers into
inactivity as a means of disorganizing movements. These most recent
incidents are reminiscent of FBI surveillance and intimidation of the anti-
war movernent and COINTELPRO.

‘The extraordinary level of police terror was not enough to contain the
uprising, The National Guard was deployed to 31 states and Washington
D.C.. This involved over 62 000 soldiers.'°5 The National Guard was itself
involved in the violent repression of the protests.'®° Over 200 cities
imposed a curfew, which affected more than 60 million people."°? Trump
went as far as to threaten to use the American military to impose order on
cities where the protests could not be contained by conventional
repression. 108

One final aspect to overt repression of protests which needs to be
included is the role of far right organizations and militia groups. While
these are ostensibly distinct from the state, there is significant overlap and
cooperation between police forces and far right organizations; a now
infamous 2006 FBI report details the extent to which white supremacists
have infiltrated police departments. For instance, in early June police in
Oregon were caught on video coordinating with the far-right Proud Boys to
help them avoid arrest after they intimidated George Floyd protestors."
Much has also been written about the so-called Boogaloo Movement,
which has targeted anti-police brutality protests."

There have been many attacks by the far right on recent protests.
Incidents include a mob of armed counter-protestors in Bethel, Ohio
Which attacked a black lives matter rally searching for “antifa”.""2 The KKK
has also been active in these efforts: they attacked a black lives matter
rally in Nevada," and a local KKK leader in Virginia drove his car into a
protest in mid-June.'14 The autonomous zone set up in Seattle has also
been a magnet for far-right attacks; on June 15 the Proud Boys and Patriot
Prayer entered the zone and beat a man,""S and there have been five
shootings directed at the zone in recent weeks, somehow allowed by
police, The most recent one resulted in the death of two attackers and
injuries to a 14 year old boy.1¥® Far right groups have also announced a
plan to “retake” the zone on July 4.1"?

Police and national guard brutality, police harassment and surveillance,
threats of military intervention, and attacks by the far right all serve as the
coercive elements to the American establishment's counter-insurgency
efforts against the George Floyd Uprising. Without the threat of violence
the "carrot" side of the “carrot and stick” formula would not be as
attractive, The end goal however, is the same: the maintenance and
defense of an order defined by exploitation and white supremacy.

Conclusion

Over the course of this article what I have sought to do is outline some of
the ways that the American ruling sought to defend itself during the
course of one of the largest threats to its own existence in recent years. |
have shown how combined and coordinated efforts by: police forces, the
military, capitalist media, NGOs, the Democrats, far-right groups, and
liberal establishment figures have all combined to undermine the George
Floyd Uprising. Thus far these efforts seem to have been rather successful

The beautiful thing about history, however, is that it is never
predetermined. The future is not written. While the establishment has a
mind-boggling array of resources and sophisticated counter-insurgency
techniques at its disposal, it is not infallible. Indeed, it does (and has!)
made mistakes, Itis these mistakes that provide openings for
revolutionary forces to intervene and change the existing social order.
Even the outcome of these protests is not yet decided: they continue, and
the protestors become increasingly sophisticated in fighting back. The
massive uprising of the past few weeks has shown the degree to which the
people do possess power, But the events have also shown the pitfalls into
which movements of resistance can fall. By writing this article | hope to
have exposed some of these pitfalls, so that liberation struggles now and
in the future can avoid them.

Notes

1. 2 VOA News, "Minnesota Calls National Guard to Quell Violent
Protests in Minneapolis”.

2. © Kandist Mallett, “The Black Lives Matter Revolution Can't Be Co-
Opted By Police and Lawmakers’.

3. © Kristian Williams, "The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency
and community policing,” interface, Vol 3, No 1, May 2011

4, © Aaron Morrison and Tim Sullivan, “Minneapolis overwhelmed again
by protests over Floyd death,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 30, 2020.

5. © Reid Forgrave, “On patrol in St. Paul, National Guard waits ‘for the
scales to tip", Minneapolis Star Tribune, june 2, 2020.

6. © Jamie Ehrlich, ‘The hidden history of the secret presidential bunker,
CNN Politics.

7. Hilary Hanson, “NYC Transit Union Backs Bus Drivers Who Refuse
To Transport Protestors For NYPD". HuffPost U.S, May 30, 2020.

8. © Joe DeManuelle-Hall, “West Coast Dockers Stop Work to Honor
George Floyd”. Labor Notes, June 11, 2020.

9, © Matthew Impell, "54 Percent of Americans Think Burning Down
Minneapolis Police Precinct Was Justified After George Floyd's Death,”
Newsweek, June 6, 2020,

10. © Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, GL-5.

11, © Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, xi

12. ® Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, |-7.

13, © Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, -8

14, © Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, II-6.

15, © Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, II-14.

16, © Feinberg, M., Willer, R., & Kovacheff, C. (2020). "The activist’s
dilemma: Extreme protest actions reduce popular support for social
movements". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance
online publication.

17. ® Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency, II-5,

18. © Connor Woodman, ‘The Imperial Boomerang: How colonial
methods of repression migrate back to the metropolis",

19, © Kristian Williams, “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency
and community policing,” interface, Vol 3, No 1, May 2011.

20. © Williams, “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and
community policing”.

21. © Kavita Kumar and Miguel Otarola, “Small-business owners pick up
the pieces after night of rage, destruction’, Minneapolis Star Tribune,
May 28, 2020.