Host and "Movement Meteorologist" Ejeris Dixon welcomes Rachel Herzing, Director of the Yarrow Institute for Organizing and Analysis, to the Fascism Barometer.
What does the expansion of policing, imprisonment, and surveillance reveal about the rise of fascism? Host Ejeris Dixon sits down with long-time organizer, activist, and author Rachel Herzing to unpack the interlocking systems of state violence known as the prison industrial complex. Herzing, director of the Yarrow Institute and co-author of How to Abolish Prisons, connects the dots between rising fascist power, the racism and violence of the prison and policing system, the erosion of public dissent, and the work of preventing a police state.
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Rachel
“You know, so I think we’re seeing a shrinking of the spaces that are availably to express oneself, a shrinking of the networks of support that many of us have come to rely on. And I think those are hallmarks of a regime that is trying to extend its control.”
Ejeris
Hi friends. Welcome to the Fascism Barometer. I’m Ejeris Dixon, your movement meteorologist, and The Barometer is an educational project where we learn together what fascism is, how to stay safe, and how to create democracy and liberation for us all. As a black, queer feminist, I exist at the intersections of communities that fascists see as the enemy. And for a long time, I have desired a way for us to understand, measure, and track the threat of fascism and how it impacts all of us.
In each episode, we work to learn what fascism is and what we can do about it from the perspectives of each of our guests. And as barometers measure pressure, we unpack the pressure that fascism puts on all of us.
So, I’m looking at the barometer today, and its reading continues to be very high. The regime has recently canceled funding to public media, and mass deportation efforts continue to expand their devastating impacts on immigrant communities. But amidst all these challenges, we’re seeing multiple ways that people are confronting Trump’s authoritarian and fascist power.
As Timothy Snyder, a scholar of tyranny, authoritarianism and fascism states, “Do not obey in advance.” So, yes the fascism barometer is rising, but pushing back on fascist power is completely within our ability. I know we can navigate the storm, and I believe we will come out the other side, but we’re going to need all of us.
And as we’ve said before, fascism is best fought with massive amounts of people power, and that’s what we’re building together. Thank you for listening and joining the anti-fascist movement. Before we get to today’s conversation on fascism, prisons and policing, here are the latest updates on fascism in the news.
Welcome to the Fascism Roundup. In this segment, we talk about current trends in fascism in the United States. And a reminder, this is just a snapshot because there’s so much in the news.
So in the past week, Congress has voted to cancel $9 billion in federal aid. This includes a substantial cut to international aid and also cuts all federal support to PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service, and NPR, National Public Radio. These cuts amount to over $1 billion.
This will also critically hurt local news stations in which three in every four Americans rely on public safety notices, according to an article from NPR. And while Republicans have claimed that NPR and PBS have a liberal bias, fascists often see media as a tool of the regime. And within this as a tool, they seek to eliminate and manipulate all forms of media that they do not control.
Additionally, CBS canceled the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. This happened three days after Colbert voiced his criticism for the settlement deal between Paramount, CBS’s parent company, and Trump after a 60 Minutes episode featuring Kamala Harris. On Truth Social, Trump recently stated, “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. I hear that Jimmy Kimmel is next.”
And Jimmy Kimmel is another late-night host critical of Trump. So as the media manipulation and consolidation continues, the work of independent media and public media becomes more and more critical.
We have a list of independent news sources in the Resource Hub for you to use and to support. Additionally, the ongoing saga around the Trump administration’s refusal to release the Epstein files highlights fractures within the MAGA movement.
For some background, Jeffrey Epstein was a wealthy investor who was convicted of sexual violence and trafficking of young women and girls girls and he died of an apparent suicide awaiting trial in 2019. If you’re less familiar with Epstein, we’ve placed an article in the Resource Hub for you.
Now the Trump Administration had suggested that more Epstein files would be released, including a client list that Attorney General Pam Bondi had claimed she once had on her desk. However, in a surprising shift, the Justice Department recently stated that no further disclosures are appropriate, leading to criticism from some of Trump’s supporters who had pushed for the files and the client list.
There has been an uproar for weeks from Republicans, MAGA influencers, and podcasters, and Democrats. Trump has downplayed the importance of the Epstein case, calling it a hoax perpetrated by political opponents. He has called some of his supporters weaklings and even stated on Truth Social, “I don’t want their support anymore.”
So, of course, this created an even bigger uproar. And there have been concerns, publicly and within MAGA, around what exactly does Trump have to hide. Finally, Trump capitulated and agreed to release more documents. But what we need to remember, according to a Vice article, is that Trump helped create this context of distrust in MAGA. He told people that the system was rigged, that elites were hiding conspiracy, and that he could drain the swamp. What’s important here is that fascism is a movement, and movements are made up of people. The Trump regime has worked to neutralize the power of systems, from the courts and Congress, to have any checks on the power of the regime. But what we’re seeing here is that Trump is still influenced and affected by both popular opinion and his base. So we’ll continue to observe and note the fractures in the MAGA coalition and how they can be used to push back against rising fascism in the US.
Now this fascist war on immigrants continues. Florida congressman, Maxwell Frost, toured alligator Alcatraz, the new Florida immigration jail, naming horrible conditions from 32 men per cage and drinking water that comes from the toilet apparatus. He went on to state that the administration is essentially trying to ethnically cleanse the country of Latinos, of Haitians, and said, “Because I’ll tell you, when I was in that facility, I didn’t see any Europeans.” We should expect more facilities like these, especially connected to ICE’s large budget increase from the big, terrible bill.
Reportedly, Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff stated, “We want every governor of a red state, pick up the phone, call DHS, and work with us to build facilities in your state.”
Additionally, Truthout recently had an article about how ICE using plain clothed officers, ICE agents using masks to cover their faces, and agents not bringing or showing identification has essentially opened the door to multiple instances where individuals are impersonating ICE agents. So, within these instances, people stopped immigrants and Latinos while driving and demanded to see documentation of their immigration status, people robbed stores in these disguises, and even kidnapped people. Deportation and detention of particular ethnic groups and communities is about as fascist as it gets.
And this regime creating a culture where individuals feel empowered to terrorize immigrants, well, that’s the same culture that leads to people ignoring the regime’s violent efforts to remove immigrants, people of color, and all people it deems unworthy.
But in hopeful news, there’s a new Gallup poll that highlights that US attitudes on immigration and around immigrants have become more positive in the last year. The amount of people who are in support of reducing immigration has dropped from 55% in 2024 to 30% just in June. And a record high 79% of US adults say immigration is a good thing for this country.
These shifts reverse a four-year trend of rising concern about immigration that began in 2021. And these shifts reflect changes among all major party groups. Additionally, Trump’s approval rating on the government’s immigration policy is down to 35%. This shows us another example where the will of the people is against the fascists. And now our job is to continue to increase and exercise our power.
Ejeris
I am very excited to welcome Rachel Herzing to the Fascism Barometer. Rachel is an organizer, activist, and educator whose work has spanned grassroots movements against imprisonment and policing, community and movement education and philanthropy. Herzing is the co-author of How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons From the Movement Against Imprisonment with Justin Piche and is the director of the Yarrow Institute for Organizing and Analysis.
I've been lucky to call Rachel a friend and a collaborator for many years, and she keeps me sharp along with so many of us. She's rigorous, precise, hardworking, and passionately works to end imprisonment and policing.
Welcome to the Fascism Barometer, Rachel.
Rachel
Thank you for having me.
Ejeris
So this podcast is a place where we're kind of puzzling through together what fascism is and what to do about it. So let's say you're at a conference and some newer activists heard you speak on a panel and they ask you what you meant by fascism, and I'm curious around how you would explain it.
Rachel
Yeah. You know, I think that, in this period I hear so many people parsing out kind of what it is and what it isn't that these days I'm less interested in a very crisp definition, that's my precision goes out the window a little bit. But, um, I think about it generally as a political ideology and of course, you know, the practice of that ideology that has a few key features.
So I would say racism, xenophobia, nationalism, religious fundamentalism I would put in there and that it uses exclusionary practices to maintain a kind of rigid separation between inside and outside. So who gets to be inside of society, or who gets to be inside of who is deserving or who gets that kind of belonging. And then that boundary is justified, one through kind of claims of victimization by the dominant group, right? Like we will not be replaced. That kind of victimization. And then the boundaries that get set up are also enforced and maintained by coercive force through the punishment system or the military, and also through hegemony or kind of the use of ideology and culture to convince oppressed groups that their oppression is somehow natural or correct.
So, while I don't have a great definition, I think those are the kind of features that I would highlight.
Ejeris
No, I think the features are important and even the scholars don't agree and a singular definition of fascism. And so we're really interested on how each of our guests think about it and talk about it. You've been a long time organizer in the prison and police abolition movement, and it's actually how we met.
But I'm curious for folks who are newer to this work, um, people who are coming to the podcast as one of their sources of their new activism, how do you talk about prison and police abolition?
Rachel
So I usually talk about prison industrial complex abolition. So I'm talking about kind of the whole shebang there, right? So I'll start there. So really when I'm talking about the prison industrial complex, I'm talking about the interdependent relationship between both public and private interests that use imprisonment and surveillance and policing and courts and execution and all of the kind of cultural stuff associated with those institutions to maintain social control and power differences while claiming to provide safety. So if that's how we understand the prison industrial complex, then prison industrial complex abolition is a political praxis that seeks to eliminate the use of surveillance and policing and sentencing and imprisonment, and to build healthy, stable, self-determined societies that don't rely on coercion or vengeance to address harm.
Ejeris
And I think there's a lot of people who would understand the part that's public, but can you talk about what you mean by also private interests when we're talking about the prison industrial complex.
Rachel
Yeah, I mean, so the phrase comes from the military industrial complex. It's kind of a run on from the military industrial complex and in both cases what we're interested in is not whether an actor is public, or whether an actor is private, but rather the relationship and the interdependence between both of them that offer military response or a punitive response as a solution for every single problem.
So they're kind of benefiting both the public sector and the private sector by offering a single solution to every problem.
Ejeris
Got it. So we're talking about the connection between corporations that benefit from prisons or even like privately owned prisons or detention centers and in addition to how they're related to other like public institutions.
Rachel
Sure. But you know, even in the case of a fully public prison or jail, for instance, somebody's making financial gain off of that because we live under capitalism, right? So, you know, there may be private actors through the use of bonds or other kinds of things that are benefiting even when a public institution is being constructed or run.
But again, the, the question for me is much less about kind of who it is or whether or not there's profit because we presume profit as the driver under capitalism, but really the kind of partnership, the kind of relationship between them that distills everything down to single solution.
Ejeris
Got it. So, you've written about how fascists, especially in these times where they have state or government power, really expand prison and policing systems as a part of how fascism works. I'm curious about how you're seeing this now and the work that people are doing to challenge this.
Rachel
Yeah, well, you know, authoritarian regimes, fascist and otherwise, cannot maintain themselves without coercive force. And the kind of frontline of most of that tends to be the punishment system, right? People don't tend to go instantly to the military. They tend to start with the cops. They tend to start with threats of imprisonment or actual imprisonment, kangaroo courts, all of those hyper surveillance, not even hyper surveillance, regular old surveillance, right? They start using those tools of the prison industrial complex to put a chill on dissent or to suppress certain kinds of activities that they would like to not see happening. And so that is always the frontline, this kind of enforcement arm, this kind of threat of violence at the hands of the punishment system. If you do not fall into line, if you do not conform, if you do not consent. And so I think in the present day in the United States for instance, we're seeing lots of examples of that, right?
So we can think about the way that right now ICE has unleashed this kidnapping program across the country. There are talks about tent villages for detainees that should remind all of us of Japanese internment, um, and other kinds of setups like that
Ejeris
Even concentration camps.
Rachel
Yeah, yeah. I mean, full fledged concentration camps, um. And, you know, we're seeing the policing of public space for gender non-conforming people, trans people, what, you know, how they can participate in public life is heavily policed right now.
Ejeris
Mm-hmm.
Rachel
We're seeing the kind of punishment and policing of people who give birth.
If you know people who are able to give birth, right? If they are choosing to try to not give birth because of health issues or whatever, we're seeing people being forced to carry pregnancies to term even at the risk of their own health. You know? So I think we're seeing articulations of that kind of a clamping down, a shrinking of autonomy in some sense, a shrinking of the spaces that are available to express oneself. A shrinking of the kind of networks of support that many of us have come to rely on. And I think those are hallmarks of a regime that is trying to extend its control, and it's using actual violence at the hands of the punishment system or the threat of violence of the punishment system is kind of the leading edge of that.
Ejeris
One thing that it makes me think of is, um, under the big terrible bill that was recently passed, we saw this massive expansion of the ICE budget, and supposedly what we're hearing is that Steven Miller has this goal of 3000 ICE arrests per day. But I've also been hearing in different circles where people feel that confronting mass deportation and addressing imprisonment and policing or prison and police abolition, that they're different things and I'm curious about your take when people see those systems or those struggles as separate
Rachel
I mean, I think they are not the same. The systems are not the same systems, and they have, you know, some key features that distinguish them that are worth paying attention to if you are organizing against them. I would also say in kind of the broadest sense, when I think about imprisonment, I'm thinking about all the locked cages.
So detention is a hundred percent in the mix in that kind of broad sense. Border patrol, customs enforcement is definitely in the big sweep part of what I think about when I think about policing. So when I say policing, that's always already in the mix there. It's not an add-on. But having said that, you know, the bulk of the prison system really operates at the state level. That's very, very different than the detention system. You know what your rights are so-called under the regular punishment system. The so-called criminal punishment system, are very, very different than what they are as a detainee.
And so there are many key features that are really crucial for us to understand so that we don't get into a kind of everything is everything approach to this stuff, particularly as I said, if we wanna fight it well. But I do think when we're imagining the kind of biggest picture of what we're up against, all of the kind of apparatus of border enforcement, detention, deportation should be on our minds.
Ejeris
So with the kind of increasing power and scope of fascism in these times, what are abolitionists focusing on these days? Like has rising fascism and authoritarianism changed what folks are working on? What are the struggles that our listeners can get involved with?
Rachel
Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I think it depends on what you mean by abolition, right? There are a lot of people out there calling themselves abolitionists these days, and a lot of the time I'm not sure what they're talking about. So again, from my vantage point as a prison industrial complex abolitionist, I think most people are continuing to do a lot of the same stuff that they've been doing. They're advocating for the elimination of violence, of imprisonment and policing by doing things like fighting against the construction of new jails and prisons. They're fighting against the use of those institutions for ICE detention.
They're trying to get cops out of schools or trying to stop cop cities or trying to prevent cops from being involved in emergency responses. Um, they're opposing the ways that policing is being used in evictions, against protestors and being leveraged in the provision of social services. They're fighting ICE and CBP raids.
And, you know all of those things are kind of standard operating procedure for most prison industrial complex abolitionists, right? Like people will pick a lane so that they're not trying to do all of those things that I just listed at once. But the kind of ethic of prison industrial complex abolition, as I was just describing, has this kind of big picture of the interconnectedness of all of these different parts of the system.
So all of those kind of aggregate scale up to be the movement for the abolition of the prison industrial complex. I think organizers are also responding to, uh, real time conditions, right? So when ICE and customs and border patrol start attacking our neighbors and our loved ones, that obviously impacts how people are thinking about how they wanna fight policing or how they want to bulk up people's capacity to intervene an arrest and disappearance.
Um, I think when the cages that already exist are given additional resources to be turned into cages for immigrants, as I was just describing, you know, of course that also sends people into a different kind of relationship. Um, and I think, you know, the other thing that we've been seeing a lot of, particularly among people who fight the violence of policing is that many, many people are being mobilized, inspired, I think in part by the campus protests of the past few years to really take on the suppression of dissent.
So to take on the kind of surveillance of organizations, groupings, individual leaders who may have oppositional politics to the current administration. They're trying to figure out how to keep people safe out on the streets during mobilizations. That kind of work, I think, has always been part of what goes on inside the movement.
But I think how people are being mobilized in support of direct action and protest has accelerated as the attacks on that have accelerated as well. So, I don't know. I think it's all the same and more. And I think it's all the same and more for the reasons I was describing earlier, right?
Which is that we already know that the prison industrial complex is the leading edge of any kind of authoritarian rise, of any kind of fascist set of moves. And we've then kind of ringing the warning bell about that for some time, saying, you know, if we don't disrupt the punishment system, if we do not do something to shift a reliance on coercion and control as the default response to things that happen that we don't like, we will wind up being under the complete control of the punishment system. We wind up being under the complete control of what some people call the police state. Right? Or we'll see the emergence of a police state. And I don't know that we're all the way there yet. So I'm not trying to be overly alarmist here, but I do think, you know, the writing's on the wall in some ways.
And so I think because that is so much the work of prison industrial complex abolitionists already, it's not a new day, but the kind of, the pace is accelerated, the scope is expanded, and so we're seeing people have to make different choices about where they prioritize their time and energy.
Ejeris
So. Recognizing we're talking about this acceleration of imprisonment and policing under fascism and these fears of a police state, can you distill that a bit for us? Like what do we mean by police state? What could that look like? And some of the work that people are, are doing to prevent that.
Like I, I know that if we were in a police state, this conversation and this podcast would probably not be happening, but it's also useful to kind of break down what, um, what this could look like for, for some people
Rachel
Yeah, I mean, when I just used it now I was talking about the state being kind of dominated by policing as a practice, by the logics of policing as a way of trying to maintain control of the populace and really foregrounding surveillance and punishment in that way. So, I mean, I'm sure there's somebody out there who's like, well, that's what we're living under now.
And it's like, well bro, it could get a lot worse. And I think, you know, we could talk to our comrades in the Philippines to learn about that. We could talk to our comrades in India to learn about that. We could talk to our comrades in Brazil to learn about that, right? So I think we're, we are seeing globally, conditions that are dramatically worse than ours.
And where, you know, the kind of rule of policing is much, much more dominant even than it is here. While we don't have to kind of downplay the violent impacts that it's having where we live as well.
Ejeris
Absolutely. And I also feel like there is a place of expansion because some of the criminalizing of dissent particularly of immigrants and immigrants who are pro-Palestinian activists, like some of that is absolutely stuff we would see in a police state, like people who are speaking out for their politics and then the government has decided it's against its interests and those people need to be locked up. But there's this piece around the expansion of those types of practices and the way that fascists will test those practices on certain communities imagining that there wouldn't be an outcry and the work that we need to do around an outcry around them.
But yes, relying on the work and the longtime work of prison and police abolitionists to prevent even more of us from being caught up in the practices that create a police state that are occurring now.
Rachel
Yeah, and you know, one of the things Ejeris that I failed to mention earlier that I think really comes into play in what you were just raising is particularly some of the narrative and culture work that happens inside of the movement for the abolition of the prison industrial complex, that really is aimed at shifting common sense about the kind of legitimacy of the punishment system and the necessity of the punishment system, right? And some of that kind of eroding of the idea that we need it and that it's necessary and that we can't live without it, and they're helping us kind of shift our common sense, but also helping us dream the how of that.
And you know, that's not, um, magical blueprint. I know when I say that, you know, detractors are like, well, tell me exactly how that's gonna happen. Then it's like, well, we need to make that together and no, I will not provide you, uh, you know, a hundred percent blueprint there. But I think that that kind of dreaming work that visioning work is very, very key, to kind of foregrounding what we want to make. We need to have a vision before we can start to move in that direction, I think.
Ejeris
Yeah, and I think it connects to, like people have been talking about two sets of coalitions that are needed to defeat fascism. The no coalition that's about all these groups of people that are against the regime, but also the Yes coalition and how deep there's a need for us to build this vision, not just of opposing fascism, but a liberatory world because what many folks are talking about, the opportunity here is that we can build something far better than what we had, including the work of prison and police abolitionists now.
Rachel
I actually wish that prison industrial complex abolitionists were more integrated into those conversations because not only have we been doing that visioning, but we've been practicing those visions in the real world. And I think we have a lot of experience and a lot of chops to offer to the kind of yes coalition there.
I think if we were taken more seriously as a political force, then, you know, we could bring more of that to bear.
Ejeris
I mean, on this piece on how serious or not broader movements are taking abolitionists, after the election, and this was mostly in Democrat settings, there was a lot of discussions around like, what caused this election?
And there was conversation around blaming of trans communities or people were talking about that there needed to be a different conversation around immigrant communities or also that the Democratic Party was not focusing enough on working people, but then there was also this discussion around defund and, that activists working on these campaigns were too radical or had pushed people towards MAGA.
Because there was this tremendous opening to talk about police murdering communities of color, different visions of society. And now there's this kind of pushback against many of those ideas and I'm curious around your take on the conversation around defund and are abolitionists also thinking the same way about like maybe we could have approached those campaigns differently, or is this a case of like demonization or is it somewhere in between? I'm super curious on your, around your thoughts there.
Rachel
I think there's a little bit of, of all of those things going on, my sense is that the movement for defunding the police got demonized and scapegoated, particularly by the Democrats, who, as we've seen, have a fundamental problem with legitimacy of their own that has very little to do with any of the groups or campaigns that they chose to, to scapegoat.
And I think we keep seeing proof of that. So I'm like, you know, James Clyburn, okay, keep, keep blaming defund, but your party is in shambles, you know? And I think that there are opportunities for organizers to think about how to bring those demands forward in ways that maybe have a little bit more longevity.
You know, I think it's complete BS to fall for what Obama was saying, that's just like the wrong demand. It's like, no, it's the precise demand that organizers had. They did not wanna see the majority of the general fund of the places that they lived going to policing. It's the exact correct demand.
You just didn't like the demand, right. Um, so to say that the language was bad, I think is intellectually lazy. But I think that there are, every time we run campaigns, we look back and we're like, oh, we could have done this differently or tried to bring these allies along in a different way or planned, you know, for this particular obstacle that we should have seen coming.
So there is that as well. I think people are doing assessments of the viability of those kinds of campaigns moving forward. And they're not all gone. Right. Like everybody didn't lose and they're not all done. Right. Which I think is the other kind of mythology that started to swirl out there and we did lose in a lot of places.
Right. And not, maybe not upfront, but you know, the following year or the following two years, municipalities came back and they were like, oh, by the way, we're restoring all of that money and we're bumping it up, or we're restoring all of that money and we're gonna beef up the force, or whatever the case might be.
So, I don't think that we should be particularly surprised about that, and I don't think that that's a defund issue or even a imprisonment or policing abolition issue. I think we should think about that as an organizing issue, right? When we win, our opponents come back and try to get back what they lost.
The same way that when we lose, we should be going back and trying to get back what we lost. Right? So there is always push and pull in organizing and I think to flatten it out and suggest that this one campaign, framed the way that it was, using the language that it did, undid anything politically for the country is a load of crap.
And that doesn't mean that every single one of those campaigns was run beautifully either, right? I think there are lessons to learn from all of that, but a hundred percent it was scapegoated. A hundred percent there’s lessons to learn and a hundred percent there has been backlash.
Ejeris
Yeah. Now it reminds me of like a series of conversations I had with my mom. I started doing work around abolition. I started doing work around building alternative safety structures. She was like, you're always gonna need the police, you don't understand real violence if you think there could be a world without the police.
Right? And so we kept talking and we kept talking and it's, and it's part of the work that I think is the work of all of our movements, right? Like, how are we in these conversations with our communities? But, after George Floyd was murdered, and after there were so many articles around defund, my mom says to me, not me asking her a question, “Maybe we do need to defund the police!” you know, and it was this moment in her own process. And then the, the hope and opportunity from a movement building perspective is that we have the organizing infrastructure to have conversations for us to plug my mom into, into some organizing work for us to plug all of the people who are having those awakenings.
And so, um we're a learning space, but we're also an action space. And there are many listeners who are interested in deepening their organizing, who would love to kind of really support this work of what does it mean for us to prevent a police state? What does it mean for us to support prison industrial complex abolition?
I'm curious around what action steps you have for people who are interested in deepening this work.
Rachel
I absolutely wanna talk about that. I also wanna like get in my time machine and go back like a minute to talking about your mom, because I feel like that is also a beautiful, everything you said I agree with, right? Like, that was a compelling movement. A lot of people got activated by that or got really like interested in thinking about the cops in a new way because of that, because of the fact of the conversation, let alone anything else that those organizing drives did.
And that is also I think, the hard work of a lot of that kind of narrative and cultural change stuff that I was talking about earlier. So those campaigns were happening and they were happening within a context in which it was finally okay to say, maybe we don't need the cops. Or you know, like, oh yeah, okay, Minneapolis is trying to change their city charter so that they aren't obligated to have cops. It's an interesting experiment. Let me think about whether or not I really do think that cops are necessary. It opens up all of these different ways of thinking that are necessary for our campaigns to be more successful, right?
So the success of Defund, for instance, also I think has something to do with kind of how much work we did to shift common sense to make it not like a science fiction concept, but like a “Yeah, I would rather have my money going to libraries than to the violent enforcement of laws that are not for me anyway.”
Onto the question of what is going on that might be good to get into. I mean, you know me, so you know that my first thing is always like, join an organization. And I believe in organizations. I know there are a lot of people out there who are like, nah, organizations are corrupt or coercive or whatever.
I disagree with that. I think there are some that can do that. But I think there are many, many organizations out there that do their work really, really well are principled and impactful. And the other thing is that it makes you accountable. So if it's not a formal organization, get up with some other people.
Don't try to do stuff alone. So that's thing one, join something, get with people, work for a common purpose. And I think there, you know, I won't name names here 'cause I do not wanna be accused of playing favorites, even though everybody knows I have favorites. But I think, you know, find something that speaks to you that you can stay with.
If that's a local group that's doing something, you know right in your backyard, that impacts how you live on the day to day. That is great, do that. If it's an identity-based group because you really wanna get up with black people or you really wanna get up with indigenous people or whatever and really make changes that way, do that.
If you're interested in broad based stuff and you wanna get up with like a national formation, do that. Pick something and start is my advice there. I also really, really believe in study and I believe that we need to keep learning, all the time throughout our entire lives and that we need to do that with other people as well.
And I think our work is better, it goes more in the direction that we hope for, achieves more of what we hope it will achieve, if we are learning as we do it, if we understand the conditions we're working with, if we understand our enemies, if we understand ourselves. All of that stuff, all of that learning really, really is key to us being able to execute the plans that we make.
So study, always study, and it doesn't have to be fancy study. I'm not saying go and get a degree, although degrees are dope too. But like you could study with friends and studying could be watching a movie as much as it could be reading a book, right? But it's like, try to learn something about the things that you're interested in impacting.
In this period, I think also, and there are lots of ways to study, I know you were asking me about specific stuff and I'm speaking in generalities, so there are, there are ways to do that. Lots of people right now are having all kinds of learning opportunities. There are organizer schools, there are Sunday studies, there are webinars, there are book clubs.
Pick a thing. Again, any of those forms is good. You just pick something that speaks to you and you can stick with. In this period, I also think it's important to practice non-compliance all the time, and I think not preemptively giving up anything you don't have to is really important. And I think that that's a practice and it's a practice that we have to work at developing.
And particularly when we are thinking about cops for instance, you know, they will just assert that they have the right to do certain things. And knowing your rights is always helpful and there are many, many ways to do that. Used to be the case that the National Lawyers Guild made little cards that you could stick in your wallet that would give you some of your basic stuff that you could remember if, if somebody tried to, if a cop tried to stop you or some questions to ask them so that you could assert your your rights more effectively.
I will say, knowing your rights and being able to practice those are two different things. And I know that it is also true that not everybody has the same rights in practice, even if they do on the books. And I think we all know that that's the case. So having rights is a starting place, but when somebody is actually stopping you, your capacity to engage those or to access them or exercise them may be severely compromised.
So having them is not sufficient in my opinion. That being said, I'm sorry, that was a little bit of a tangent, but in terms of practicing noncompliance, really what the interest is there is in the case of the ICE raids that we were talking about, for instance, right?
You don't need to tell anybody that you think your neighbor is not documented to be in the United States. Nobody needs to know that. You don't have to give up that information. And even if somebody asks you, even if law enforcement asks you directly for it, you don't have to tell anything about anybody else.
And in fact, you could act as a buffer if you have a little bit of privilege like you are legal to be in the United States. You could act as a little bit of a buffer between somebody who's looking for people who they're trying to deport and those people that they're trying to seek out, that is noncompliance, right?
You can be noncompliant in giving up information about your members. If you get asked to give a list of all of your members, you know, you get some weird letter from the federal government that's not a subpoena, and they're like, Hey, we're interested in knowing every single bit of information about all of the people associated with your organization.
You don't have to just give it up. You should try to get some probably legal support and maybe additional movement support to figure out, what, maybe you're obligated to give. And I would say stall on that as long as you can. And what nobody ever can compel you to give and parse those things out and give the absolute bare minimum to meet whatever threshold you're you're setting for yourself.
Maybe that's staying out of jail. Maybe that's keeping your organization from being in jeopardy, whatever the case might be. There are many ways to do that and they're all really important and there's also a way that sharing all of that information, if you get approached by cops, if you get asked to give up information, all of that stuff, letting people know - I think that's also really important. There are many, many very skilled movement defense movement, safety and security people out there. I am not one of those people. So I'm not gonna give you a million tips and I'm speaking to one of those people. So I will keep, I will keep those tips more to a minimum here.
But I think not giving up stuff that we don't have to, not giving in without any kind of push, is a really easy thing that people can do. And they can do that with their neighbors, they can do that with their organizations, they can do that with their friends. Then as we were just discussing, I think making some kinds of preparations, some plans to defend your organizations, to defend your neighbors, to defend vulnerable communities from targeted attacks. I think that's something everybody could do right now.
There are mutual aid networks across this country that were established during the pandemic that either are still operating or could easily be activated. That's one way to do that. Doing some assessment about kind of what's going on where you are, whether that's your home or your organization, understanding your own risks and assessing your threshold or your tolerance for risk.
Knowing all of that stuff is gonna set you up better to deal with this period. Particularly when it comes to facing state repression, and that's really what we're talking about when we're talking about the cops and cages, is we're talking about the tools of state repression. So, get in an organization, join a campaign, keep on learning, protect yourself, protect the people around you, and don't give up.
Ejeris
Rachel. Thank you. It was so critical for us to talk, especially in these times about the intersection of imprisonment, and policing, and fascism, but also all the things we can do about them and all the liberatory possibilities. So I'm so grateful that you took some time to talk with us. And while Rachel doesn't choose favorites, and I don't choose favorites either, we will give you lots of recommendations on organizations that you can join and also like various forms of study that you can take up so that you can follow those incredible recommendations that Rachel just gave us.
Thank you so much for joining us, friend.
Rachel
Thank you for having me and um, thank you for doing the podcast. It's a really, really important tool for our movements right now.
Ejeris
Thanks