Assuming Your Positions

 Some thoughts on the pros and cons of taking a stand.

For a little of the more immediate context, I've spent much of the past eight months writing songs or other things that have sought to raise awareness of the horrors of the genocide the Israeli military is carrying out in Gaza, which is ongoing.  I've been writing songs along these lines for the past 24 years or so.  Not coincidentally, in 2020 I wrote a lot of songs about the still-widespread problem in the US of cops killing people for the crime of being Black.  The first song I wrote on that subject was around 1993.

I mention these things just to attempt to establish that I am a very opinionated and even prolific proponent of the rights of the Palestinian people to exist, and the rights of African-Americans to walk down the sidewalk or drive down the highway or go shopping without being tortured to death or summarily executed, among other causes.

I love to see people organizing events, taking to the streets, occupying buildings, blocking ports, going on strike, etc.  Social movements and collective action get the goods, history has demonstrated over and over again.  And the sustained, successful social movements have been inclusive, welcoming, vibrant, musical, big tent kind of movements.

How to build a movement like that is a big challenge, and if it were easy, there would be a lot more of them.  One of the tactics that, by my observation, seems often to have more drawbacks than benefits, is that of taking a position on a controversial subject that may not be directly related to building the movement or organization you're part of.

Looking back at 2020, it starts to seem like it was a methodical, strategic thing on the part of those seeking to nip in the bud the social movement that might have been developing at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown period.  There were so many organizations that I hardly ever heard about anymore unless they were announcing some new political position they now agreed on, after much internal struggle.  So many organizations seemed to become paralyzed by the constant internal debates over whether they should announce their support for the abolition of police or not.  And if not, were the opponents to police abolition white supremacists?

I'm seeing what looks like this kind of circular discussion playing out in various places around the genocide in Gaza as well.  As urgently as we all need to be opposing Israel's hourly war crimes somehow, in practice, engaging in endless discussions that risk weakening an organization in order to strengthen its principled stands on important issues seems like a bad option.  If the other option might be to keep on building an organization, while keeping its positions on different issues less defined, that seems better.

Then, instead of dragging down and diminishing an organization with internal strife and ending up with a principled position on something, people passionate about stopping this genocide can apply their efforts more directly towards that endeavor -- join those groups who are organizing blockades of the ports, marches, occupations, boats to Gaza, etc.  If you're a communicator, use your communication skills to reach the broader public around these things, instead of spending your time arguing with your board of directors.

I know that in a time of genocide it may seem terribly trite to say this, but it seems evident that there is more power in unity than in purity, and it's better to agree on common denominators rather than dividing over controversial questions.  Whether the issues at hand seem controversial to us or not, this isn't for us to define.  If it's controversial for the membership of your organization, it's controversial, and there may be negative consequences to taking a position.

And if your organization fails to come up with a statement denouncing this genocide, does that make the leadership or the board or the membership a bunch of genocide supporters?

There would seem to be a significant number of people out there these days who would answer "yes" to that question.  And that orientation, it seems to me, is one of the heaviest chains weighing us down in the modern era.

I'll illustrate the point I'm trying to make with an older example.

Many people I know and admire have been involved with the Irish Republican movement in that part of the United Kingdom officially known as Northern Ireland.  The biggest Irish Republican group was the Irish Republican Army, represented by the political party, Sinn Fein, which has become the biggest party throughout the island of Ireland, on both sides of the imposed border.

Sustaining an armed struggle against an overwhelmingly more powerful foe for years in an urban environment (or any other environment) is nothing short of an incredible feat, requiring absolutely astounding degrees of dedication, organization, and solidarity with the general public.  The IRA's goal was to win the hearts and minds of as many Irish people as possible, and also, crucially, to keep the support of the Irish emigrant diaspora throughout the world, in places like the United States.

In the Republic of Ireland, abortion is basically illegal.  Many Irish progressives, like progressives in other countries, would rather abortion be legal, and there is a movement in Ireland working towards that end.  The IRA, however, despite internal debate, did not make any statements supporting the rights of women to have abortions.  The clear concern, even among those who would have been supportive of such a statement, was the loss of many of their members and supporters, both in Ireland and overseas.

In many popular online environments today there's no doubt the IRA leadership would be condemned in progressive circles as misogynists, regardless of their genders, for failing to support a woman's right to choose.

There are some fairly large organizations that basically collapsed under the weight of internal debates over racial reckoning and white supremacy circa 2020.  Others are currently engaged with similar internal debates around Israel's genocidal war in 2024.  There's no particular point in getting into the details of these internecine conflicts, even if I knew about them, but they always involve lots of accusations and they rarely seem to result in strengthening organizations in the long run.

There are a couple examples I'll mention, though, just to have some current examples to point to, in the hope of avoiding confusion about what I'm trying to say.

I hear on the local news here in Oregon that the Oregon Food Bank has lost some of its biggest donors due to the leadership of the food bank's declaration of solidarity with the people of Gaza being systematically starved by the Israeli occupation forces.  I completely agree with the Oregon Food Bank's statement and their desire for making it, and their desire to in some way play some kind of role in highlighting the genocide that is underway.  I didn't hear about the statement they made until it became a news item because of some Jewish donors pulling their funding.  Now the organization may be diminished in its ability to do its work, and we're left to wonder whether making this statement had any other impact.

An organization that I've had a lot of involvement with over the decades, the People's Music Network, is currently engaged in an ongoing discussion over making a similar statement.  There is a general lack of consensus, not, I glean, because of people supporting Israel's bombing and starvation campaign, but because of different views on the whole context of the war, and what words to use to describe Israel's actions.  If it were me making the statement, I'd be making statements like the ones the faction most critical of Israeli genocidal policies, like I make any time I get in front of a mic anyway.  But given that there is serious division within PMN on this question, given that PMN stands to lose members and drag itself down by continuing with this internal debate, and given that PMN's core mission is to be a big tent kind of forum for people that identify with the concept of music within social movements, it seems to me the organization and its membership would be best served by PMN continuing to do what it does, and members who want to bring music and messages to the various online and physical gatherings PMN puts on should be encouraged to do so.  We could all form a faction, or a committee, or an organization of artists focused on opposing the genocide -- or build on organizations that already exist (there is an international group of musicians already organized in some form called Musicians for Palestine, for example).

In conclusion, I'd say when thinking about drawing a line, make sure the line you're drawing isn't the one that the surgeon is going to use when determining where to make the incision to initiate the amputation of your limb.

Mass Media, Social Media, and the New Civil War

How close are we to being in the movie?

Leila and I went to the Baghdad Theater, down the road from our apartment in Portland, Oregon, to see the new film, Civil War, a few weeks ago.  There were a few pieces of dialogue where I wished I could have been on the writing team to make some minor improvements, but overall it was an excellent movie.

The story itself was a good one -- at least to the extent that what was happening could really be understood.  What was at least as good as the story was how it was told, which was to throw the viewers into the middle of the action and let us try to figure out along the way what's going on in this familiar but fictional American landscape. 

Relentlessly seeing their world from the viewpoint of the immediate was, I think, a brilliant storytelling device for this tale of conflict in particular, because it evoked the sensation we might get from trying to understand world events by looking at our social media feed -- with nothing put into context, no history, no sense of place.

The scenario depicted in the film seems like something along the lines of how things might conceivably be going around two years after someone along the lines of Donald Trump refused to abdicate the presidency.

If at any point during the film you thought you had a clear understanding of which of the various political factions, armies or terrorist groups represented what kind of perspective, you'd be thrown for a loop, with moral ambiguity appearing from every direction.  If, like me, you've become accustomed in the real world or on social media to being attacked by elements of both the right and the left, all the confusion seems exceedingly appropriate.

It seems to me the pressure cooker situation we're in -- designed for us by the combination of an ever-growing divide between the haves and the have-nots along with a political system that facilitates the continuation of that process, a mass media that tries to direct our attention elsewhere, and social media algorithms and censorship practices that have the tendency of siloing us all off into various intolerant sociopolitical sects -- has all the ingredients necessary for making the movie a reality.  The main elements temporarily lacking are the right political circumstances and the right combinations of authoritarian leaders.

It's been less than two decades since a handful of billionaires almost completely hijacked our primary means of communication as well as our primary means of understanding the world around us.  In that space of time, the world has endured many wars, fires, floods, and famines, among other things, and these things certainly can't all be blamed on social media, any more than they can all be blamed on climate change.

But if you were trying to socially engineer an atmosphere ripe for the kind of conflict portrayed in the movie, I'm not sure if you could do much better than the kingpins of social media, and of our polarized, politicized mass media landscape, have done already.

The magic of capitalism and the converging interests of the billionaire media and social media moguls is such that they don't need to get together and collude to create this disaster.  If they just follow their political and economic interests, the disaster will largely create itself.

But in my imagination, the American oligarchs are all on friendly terms and have meetings together where they speak openly.

One billionaire says to another, "as we destroy and reshape the world's industries in our favor and remake societies so we can reap heretofore unknown degrees of profit from every interaction humans have with each other, how are we going to effectively keep them distracted from the massive siphoning of their wealth upwards that we're engineering?"

Another responds, "how about your TV network blames the racists, sexists, and homophobes for all the problems of society, and my network blames the anarchists, terrorists, and immigrants?"

Another billionaire chimes in, "and then we'll set up the social media algorithms so people mainly see the heated arguments far more often than the reasonable discussions.  That's good for business and good for keeping the population appropriately distracted and divided, as we do our dirty work of taking over their minds and siphoning up their money."

"And let's be sure to focus our media coverage and social media algorithms on centering conflicts related to culture war issues, while any discussions or activism around class issues are systematically suppressed," adds another.

"Yes, because if they were to all realize that we're responsible for all of their rents tripling, regardless of their race, gender, or opinions about marriage equality, it would be pitchforks for us billionaires!  Let's keep them all divided and profitable instead," says another.

In a way, I wish such conversations just like this actually took place, because we could then imagine the capitalists had a master plan, that couldn't possibly end in civil war and rampant destruction of everything.  But I'm afraid the workings of the free market, and a political elite captured by it, has a logic that doesn't require any leadership, but can fabricate the appearance of it, since that's often useful.

With humans in control, consciously, on a meta level, rather than just as overseers of whatever little aspect of the machine of corporate hegemony they're responsible for, then there might be the possibility of leaders acting on their observation that this madness isn't sustainable.  But I see no indication that this kind of leadership exists, or even might be possible, under capitalism.

And so the best the progressive politicians can seem to do is to improve some social programs around the edges of the housing crisis, which then renders all their progressive efforts inert.  They can't take on the housing crisis itself, since it was the developers and real estate barons that put them into office in the first place.

The best the polarized mass media networks can do is blame the other side of the aisle for everything, without highlighting the fact that the same economic crisis is happening everywhere, in states "red" and "blue," for the same reasons.  But it may be some excellent investigative journalists uncovering the dirt on the other party, even as they are unwittingly part of this propaganda game.

Meanwhile on social media, the tribalization algorithms, the systematic suppression of so much content deemed troublesome to the corporate elite, along with amnesia-inducing aspects of the news feed phenomenon work their dark magic year in and year out, creating the kinds of paralyzing social divisions that Machiavelli could have only dreamed of.

Once again, it would be unfair to assign a single cause to a complex array of developments, but there are very credible studies linking the dominance of social media directly to the rise in mental illness and suicide among young people.  Although political violence is not new, there are also clear links between disinformation campaigns on social media and all kinds of political/racial/ethnic violence in many different countries.

There would be no need for an organized campaign in many cases to achieve the ends that less intentional-seeming mechanisms such as conflict-enhancing algorithms can reach.  Without any extra help, I would say these algorithms -- and the disinformation or very partial pieces of information detached from any larger realities that they actively, methodically promote -- could be the biggest single cause of the stunning rise in political violence in so many countries.  

There have been three thousand reported incidents of political violence in Germany in the past year, with both left- and right-wing candidates attacked while campaigning.  Two members of the British parliament stabbed to death -- one progressive, one conservative.  Quite a number of serious assaults against members of the US Congress, including two shootings, and one siege.  Scores of incidents of drivers ploughing into crowds of protesters in recent years in the US.

What happens next?  Go watch the movie.

Blockout 2024 and the Star-Making Machinery

In light of the Blockout 2024 social media campaign, some thoughts on celebrity.

I follow every awful development in Gaza that is being covered by the heroic journalists on the ground there, but I pay very little attention to what they call "popular culture," and even less to those bizarre creatures known as "celebrities," so I'm only just now hearing about the Blockout 2024 social media campaign that's been going on since early May.

In case you're as out of the loop as I am, the idea is to get people to block celebrities on social media who have failed to condemn Israel's ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, the "full-scale" version of which began last October.  Some apolitical celebrities have apparently lost hundreds of thousands of social media followers as a result of Blockout campaign efforts. 

One online effort that was brought to my attention last night is focused on those celebrities who supported a Ceasefire Now initiative during the first few weeks of the ongoing Israeli bombing campaign, or who posted something critical of a previous Israeli bombing campaign of Gaza in 2014 or 2021, but have been completely silent about the issue ever since -- even as the situation there gets unimaginably more dire by the hour.

Prior to hearing about this campaign, and all of those celebrities who have posted something at some point and then went dark forever afterwards -- the most popular handful of whom have collectively well over a hundred million followers on X alone -- I had myself noticed how even the few more politically-inclined celebrities I follow on social media have also had very little to say about Gaza.  For those artists whose fans look to them as icons of political dissent, one might hope for a much more robust response to a US-funded carpet-bombing and forced starvation campaign being carried out in broad daylight, covered 24/7 by Al-Jazeera and other networks.

While I am completely sympathetic with any campaign that might raise awareness among the general public that there is a US-funded, US-sponsored genocide happening right now, which the western press is misleadingly calling the "Israel-Hamas War," it's probably worth pointing out a few important things about celebrities and celebrity culture.  Especially the fact that, like the overwhelming majority of the US Congress today and for a long time before now, the overwhelming majority of those who we call celebrities are puppets.

I don't know who my audience is as I write this, or if I am saying anything that's remotely useful or new for anyone.  But at least for the "in case you didn't know" department, it is not just the political elite in the USA that are essentially appointed by corporate handlers.  Here in Oregon, progressive Susheela Jayapal's bid for a seat in the House of Representatives was defeated by a flood of money that, upon some fine journalistic investigation, turns out to have come from AIPAC donors.  You'll find other Congressional races like that one across the country.

It's not that AIPAC is picking random Israel supporters off the streets and running them for Congress.  The candidates they support are generally literate and ostensibly capable of fulfilling the duties of a bought-off politician and can do so convincingly, so many people get the impression they're acting in good faith.

Among the pop stars and Hollywood actors it's long been the same kind of arrangement.  Random people off the street also don't become celebrities -- the people who do tend to have all kinds of impressive skills that they've worked very hard at, involving things like acting, singing, and dancing.  But it has been the case for over a century in the US, with occasional exceptions to prove the rule, that people who become celebrities were prepared from the outset either to tow a political line, or to stay out of making political statements altogether, depending on the time and place in question.

Someone may be talented, rich, and famous, be they a politician, a football player, or a musician, but whether they were elected with money from AIPAC, or they're playing for the 49ers, or they're signed to one of the big three record labels, the idea that these celebrities are independent players with their own voices is overwhelmingly nonsense, propaganda -- but propaganda actively disseminated by the Congressional campaigns and the record labels alike, as the "self-made man," "rags to riches" story is an essential element of marketing most celebrities.

A pop star is as unlikely to go off-script and start advocating for causes that aren't approved by management as a senator elected with AIPAC money is to vote against military aid to Israel.  In both cases, the reasons are the same:  they're puppets, they don't have independent voices, and if they dare to exercise their voice to promote a non-approved message, there will be severe consequences.

My assumption as far as why celebrities don't go off-script very often is not that they fear the potential consequences as much as that if they had wanted to be rebels against imperialism they wouldn't have spent their lives aspiring towards and working to achieve stardom in the first place.

We needn't look much beyond Roger Waters to see why a celebrity would want to steer clear of being outspokenly critical of Israel.  Waters is now a regular target of vilification and ridicule by Israel supporters, regularly facing cancellations of events and both legal and extralegal consequences of all kinds.

Specifically because I am not a celebrity and have never been one, my own case might also be a good illustration of the challenges faced by celebrities who might once have spoken out, and then stopped.

People who have read much of what I've written in the past may already be familiar with my sordid tale, but to briefly summarize salient points in the career timeline:

• I used to get regular airplay on BBC until the programmer who played my music was questioned by the BBC Board of Governors -- for the first time in his thirty years at the corporation -- about his playing my pro-Palestine songs, and was fired soon after.  
• I was on my way to Vancouver, BC to accept an award from a Palestinian community center and I was turned away at the border and banned from entering Canada for a year.
• After doing a benefit concert for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to buy a new printing press in New Zealand, I was banned from entering New Zealand the next time I tried to tour there.
  
• For years, any time I try to do a gig anywhere, venues and fellow performers get targeted by trolls making all sorts of false statements about me.  More recently venues in the UK receive threats of legal action from lawyers if they don't cancel my appearance.
• The pro-Israel trolling in recent months has meant, in the month of April, getting an average of 1,000 comments per day on Facebook from pro-Israel trolls or bots, saying vile things.

And again, this is what happens to a pro-Palestine musician who is not even close to being a celebrity.  I don't even have a booking agent.  I can only try to imagine the scale of the bile that must have flowed in the direction of any of the actually famous people who made statements against Israel's war crimes, if a bit player like myself has been targeted to such a degree by organizations like UK Lawyers for Israel, with their legal threats and troll farms.

In conclusion, block the celebrities all you like, I hope it has some kind of positive result.  But there is a wizard behind the curtain that is putting on those musicals, just as there is a wizard behind the curtain who turns the lawyers into your elected officials.  And it is the puppeteers, rather than the puppets, who have the real power and the real influence.

Fear and Suspicion in the Northwest

Amidst all the solidarity is the unavoidable observation there is a whole lot of fear and suspicion making sure it's unlikely to spread.

I read in the news this morning a study that finds that 50% of interactions on the internet involve bots.  The article, on Al-Jazeera's website, was particularly focused on the role of the pro-Israel bot factories they're monitoring.  They found that early in the ongoing Gaza genocide, posts on social media worldwide were overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Palestinians.  Then that changed, due to armies of bots being unleashed, as it turns out.

At the beginning of this month Facebook commended me for having as much engagement as celebrities I follow on the platform such as Tom Morello and Joan Baez.  I got 27,000 comments in the past 28 days, the Meta bot congratulated me.  It was abundantly evident to any casual observer of my Facebook page that at least 95% of those comments were from pro-Israel accounts that had recently been set up.

I had wondered how many trolls-for-hire Mossad was paying, in some corner of the world where people were desperate enough to do such work.  But apparently these days most of the accounts openly advocating for the mass murder of children, the razing of Gaza, and the non-existence of Palestine are bots.  Which means that all those accounts actively arguing with these bots, among the majority of them which I suspect are real humans, are really, truly wasting their time.

Although my Facebook account and sometimes my X/Twitter account are frequently flooded with such Hasbara bot bile, to me and other people I actually know who also are prone to seeing my posts, the flood of blatantly pro-genocide hatred that follows any photo I post that includes words like "Gaza" or "Palestine" are easy enough to dismiss, though of course quite intentionally bewildering.  What has much more potential destructive power are the trolling activities of those who consider themselves on the "antifascist" side.

There is a certain cohort of self-proclaimed antifascists who spend much of their time posting on social media and writing articles that involve efforts at character assassination of ostensibly fellow leftists who have strayed from their convoluted version of antifascism.  Once such character assassination has been carried out -- along with regular, well-timed reminders of the supposed transgressions of the target -- then the modern culture of fear and suspicion that has been cultivated by social media algorithms and other factors takes over.  That is, the suspicion of others resulting from the fear of association.

In the modern culture of the online American left and the slippery slope beyond, association with a tainted person taints you, and you are then guilty by association.  We must avoid being burdened by the need to constantly fend off accusations.  We've seen this happen to so many others, and we don't want it to happen to us.  Therefore we avoid associating with those who are under suspicion.  The power of false rumors has never been greater, in the entire history of humanity, I'm pretty sure.

Those spreading the rumors don't even need to identify themselves or say why they feel unsafe, they need only make the accusation, anonymously online, and it must be believed, or else the unbelievers may be tainted by their unbelief, and accused of all the same transgressions as the one they are possibly about to be guilty of associating with.

Thus Rose City Antifa cult guru Shane Burley posted a video shot of me surreptitiously and from a safe distance, from behind me as I was busking near the library at Portland State University, while it was occupied by protesters.  "David Rovics seems to think the world just loves him as much as he loves himself," he posted, attempting to mock the notion that I was having an album release party on the sidewalk, with an audience of disinterested passersby, as I had joked I was doing.

I am guilty of loving myself and thinking the world loves me, because I play music in front of audiences on occasion, I guess?  Shane employs the same type of condescension in his posts as the Hasbara trolls do, and as all the trolls do, in an effort to toxify the target of their condescension.

He developed his interest in destroying my career when I violated the rules of his "antifascist" principles by communicating with the wrong person.  By committing the crime of communication with the wrong person I am now that person's advocate, supporter, buddy, and collaborator, and should thus be shunned, as the person I associated with was also being shunned.  For other reasons?  The same reasons?  It doesn't matter.  Shun them all to be safest.

Spotify doesn't allow comments, and thus, trolling on the platform is pretty much impossible.  As a result, this very popular platform works very well for introducing people to music they'll be likely to like, once the algorithm has a good idea of what kind of music they're into.  This is how I get a significant percentage of my new fans on the platform.  Most of them are young, and most of them are sympathetic to the Palestinians, and responding very well to my recent albums.  People are streaming over 100,000 of my songs on Spotify each month.

It's when they move onto other platforms, where anyone can post and comment, where they may learn about my many scarlet letters.  Between the time a fan from Spotify organized an appearance on the campus in Eugene and the time I arrived in Eugene, someone let someone else know that this guest is tainted by association with the wrong person, and associating with him may taint us, too, regardless of the veracity of any of the allegations.  Best be safe.  The truth doesn't matter, anyway -- being tainted means being rendered ineffective, and this work is too important.  Safest to shun, to isolate, to divide, to be as pure as possible, and thus hopefully avoid our own cancellation.

Last week I got a message from someone in Portland, with an anonymous account on Signal, who wanted to talk about eviction resistance.  Great, I thought.  I've been working on cultivating an eviction defense network in my spare time for years, and I've made a bit of progress, too.  I welcome people who are working on similar projects and want to work together.

This person asked me if I wanted to join the Signal group with other people involved with similar projects.  Of course, I replied.  It only took a few hours before I mentioned my admiration for Portland Tenants United founder, Margot Black, and I found myself unceremoniously removed from the Signal group.  Margot, you see, is tainted by the ridiculous accusations made about her by a very discredited former activist.  Although it was obvious to anyone who looked into it that the allegations were ridiculous, Margot can no longer effectively organize in the city of Portland, along with some other of her colleagues at PTU who were similarly smeared.  The need for others in the left milieu to avoid being smeared themselves by associating with Margot meant they had to shun her, and so many others.

Even mentioning her name in a positive light today will get you immediately kicked out of a Signal group, by people who themselves openly admit to me that they haven't looked into the accusations against Margot, it's all before their time, they say, but they trust their colleagues who believe the accusations to be true.  Their colleagues, in this case, may be anonymous accounts on Signal, but that's good enough -- victims don't need to reveal their identities or say why they feel unsafe, that's against the new rules of communication, that seem to have been written by Cointelpro.

Last weekend I played three gigs in different parts of the northwest, outside of Portland.  (This weekend the "northwest tour" continues with a Sing Out for Gaza and a concert in downtown Portland.)

I managed to catch up with a bunch of different friends in various places on my little trip.  I was in Vancouver, BC on Saturday.  Among the folks I visited with was longtime internationally-traveling journalist and brilliant singer as well of proud Lebanese heritage, Hadani Ditmars.  She had just recently written about a jarring experience, where she visited the pro-Palestine encampment at the University of British Columbia and after an hour of talking with various folks there, she was escorted off of the campus by masked, self-appointed encampment security people, who claimed with no basis that she was a Zionist.

I visited an old friend in Seattle who has started a line of coffee she's calling Antifascist Coffee.  The coffee is fantastic.  In her efforts to spread the word about it on social media, she has found herself getting attacked by a handful of accounts that are saying all kinds of snarky and nasty things, denouncing her line of coffee for one reason or another.  She did what I did in identical circumstances, and asked someone with far greater IT skills than either of us have if they could tell us about these people posting this nonsense.  As with my attackers, she found all these accounts had Portland, Oregon IP addresses.

On Sunday in Seattle, before heading to Olympia, I looked online to discover my old friend John Baine, aka Attila the Stockbroker, responding to people claiming to be from Antifascist Action who were attacking him very publicly and in a profoundly uncomradely fashion, for having the wrong position on Israel-Palestine.

John and I have done 14 tours together, and we've spent a significant minority of our time on those tours arguing about politics.  We're both well-read and well-traveled leftist musicians, but we have had various spicy political differences that have made for lots of good arguments about lots of subjects, one of them being the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state.  He's for it, I'm against.  This has never stopped us from touring together, and has never led either of us to feel the need to publicly denounce the other for having a different perspective, even at a time like this.  But now that an allegedly official representative of AFA has written all of this bile about John online, despite the thousands of people who have eloquently defended John on his Facebook page in light of these attacks, we can all be reasonably sure there will be more trolling of John based on the original allegations, because that's how it works with such public allegations and social media's bottom-feeding, sensationalistic algorithms. John's attacker also made reference to his loving himself too much, apparently a common transgression for artists who habitually perform for audiences.

In Olympia, the house concert happened in a beautiful backyard of an old friend there who has long ago been canceled himself for saying the wrong things, thinking the wrong thoughts, and posting them online.  Some of the folks who did come to the show were nice enough to let me know that the reason why they didn't tell other people they knew about it was because of where it was taking place.  

Other folks who showed up had come from Centralia.  The last time I played in Centralia, they were the organizers of the gig.  When some self-proclaimed, allegedly local "antifascist" heard they were having me play there, they tried to get the gig canceled based on my supposed transgressions, but the organizers couldn't figure out what my transgressions were supposed to have been, so the gig went on, though perhaps with a smaller attendance than it might have otherwise had.  

There will be another one in Centralia soon, and in Olympia as well, not to mention Seattle and BC, but no doubt there will be those who try to get all of those gigs canceled, and try to make sure people who were thinking of going think otherwise, lest they be associated with one who has been associated with those who are accused of committing transgressions.

Remember when Obama was running for office and the Republicans were trying to smear him for his associations with former members of the Weather Underground and all that?  They called him a terrorist supporter.  That's what the Hasbara trolls constantly call me, too, because of my association with the Palestinian cause.  But for daring to unapologetically interview a couple of allegedly rightwing guests on my YouTube channel, I'm denounced as an insidious member of the sneakily antisemitic, supposed "red-brown alliance" that festers in the imaginations of the self-appointed gatekeepers of antifascism today.

Kicking the heretics out of churches and then literally or symbolically burning them at the stake goes back a long way in this country.  With this tradition being joined so actively by armies of rightwing bots along with self-appointed antifascist cult gurus and their anonymous followers, all amplified to a staggering degree by conflict-feeding social media algorithms, it really is a clusterfuck.

People say very often in commenting on missives such as this one that I must be doing something right to be getting all of this negative attention.  I agree.  But knowing this to be the case sure doesn't solve any of our collective problems here.

To Sing or Not to Sing?

A brief analysis of some of the considerations that go into deciding whether or not to have live music at your protest rally or other social movement event.

Many people have observed, for many years, how dramatically less music tends to be involved with protests in the US in recent years, and to some extent in other English-speaking countries as well, which tend to be very influenced by what goes on here.  

I have had a lot of experience singing at protests, as well as attending protests where there's no live music involved.  In my capacity as a professional protest singer (to use a term invented by the media) I've become intimately familiar with many of the reasons why protest organizers decide not to have any live musical performers at their events.  In the interest of helping people think through some of this stuff a little, and especially in the interest of aiding the pro-music contingent at any of those protest organizing meetings, I thought I'd go through some of the reasons why people decide not to have music, and consider the pros and cons of the different reasons.

But first, I want to emphasize that there is a solid logical, practical, or ethical basis underlying all of the reasons why organizers would choose not to involve themselves with musicians.  In some rare cases, depending on the circumstances, I'm sure it's the right decision not to have any live music in a protest.  From my experience it's overwhelmingly usually the wrong decision, but I don't want to dismiss the reasoning undergirding the many decisions not to have music at rallies as if they make no sense.  I just want to argue that having live music usually makes more sense, given the options.

And how much sense does it make?  This would be hard to overstate.  Many historians and participants in making history have commented on the power of music within social movements.  Many have said that without the music, the movement would have withered away or been defeated, but because of the fact that we were singing together all the time, this helped us persevere, not run away, and to feel the community that we had formed together in struggle.  The music is what kept our "eyes on the prize," to quote a famous song from the Civil Rights movement.  Therefore, if the answer is "and so we shouldn't have live music at the event," we are almost certainly asking the wrong questions.

Now, to get to some of the reasoning behind organizers deciding not to have live musicians at a rally, and my responses to that reasoning.

1)  It's a very serious issue we're protesting, and music might make us seem frivolous

The music industry has been promoting frivolous music for most of its existence in their music charts and radio stations, etc., which has colored the general perception of what music is all about.  But around the world they still know, and in social movements all over every continent you'll traditionally and currently find music at the core of things.  The US in recent decades is an outlier as far as that goes.  This very much includes the very places we may be protesting about -- the Palestinians and others across the Arab world love music, and great, politically-charged music is everywhere at protests across the Arab world, and in society generally, where singers like Fairuz and poets like Mahmud Darwish are household names.

2)  Having music at a protest seems so antiquatedly 1960's throwback

In the US, and in some other countries, music at protests, or just politically-oriented music generally, is associated with the 1960's.  In the popular imagination this is a negative thing, because the 1960's are associated with things like hedonism, frivolity, utopianism -- "drugs, sex, and rock & roll."  I and others would argue that the creation of these negative impressions about the 1960's and how deeply the movements of the period were connected to music and art has been a concerted effort on the part of the powers-that-be to put the genie back in the bottle, and overcome "Vietnam Syndrome" in all its various forms, including the cultural one.  Also, the 1960's was the last era of truly massive-scale social movement action that was heavily covered by the media, so we still associate the very act of protesting with the chants and songs we learned from the movies about the period.

3)  There's not enough time, and there are too many people we want to have speak

There are good reasons why organizers of a rally would want a representative from each of the different groups that may have been promoting the event to speak at it.  From a certain perspective that makes good sense.  From the perspective of the impact of the rally on the assembled crowd and the prospect for the rally to be a movement-building and community-building exercise, this orientation tends to be disastrous, and tends to lead to the cutting out of the music from the program.  The question should not be how do we pack in all these speakers, but how do we create a rally that will be memorable, powerful, moving, and community-building.  For a rally like that, as we see around the world currently and historically, most of the program should be music or other artistic forms of expression, rather than speeches.

4)  We don't have any politically-oriented musicians around here

If the whole program can stay on message, that can be a really powerful thing.  But if the only way to do that is to not have any live music, it's probably not worth what you sacrifice by not having any music.  You can instead focus on involving good musicians, professional sorts, who are sympathetic to the cause.  See what they come up with.  If they know they're singing at a rally about a certain issue, they'll very likely come up with a cover song from somewhere that's relevant.  You can encourage them to do that, even.

5)  All the politically-oriented musicians around here are preachy and cringe

Along with all the great musicians out there, there are also a lot of bad ones.  As with programming any other kind of event, it's good if the people organizing it have an idea about the quality of the performers they might be involving in the thing.  Just because someone wrote a political song doesn't mean they should be playing at your rally.  You can still discern whether the individual is capable of tuning their instrument and moving from chord to chord with ease before you ask them to sing at a rally.  If the only politically-oriented musicians around can barely play an instrument and the songs they write are the verbal equivalent of beating someone over the head with a bat, skip them, and have some other music in the program that may not be as on-message, but is going to get the crowd moving a bit.

6)  The musicians might go off-message

Is it such a disaster if there might be a variety of perspectives represented on the stage?  How much control do you think is necessary over every aspect of the messaging here?  In general, the concept of "artistic license" is a very good one, and one that a lot of people are familiar with.  Give them a break.  As long as you didn't accidentally end up with some patriotic, pro-war Nashville act, they probably won't go too far off-message, and if they do, chalk it up to artistic license.  If they're good musicians and they're thematically in the ballpark, the overall impact will be positive.

7)  We don't have a sound system

Rather than being a reason to not have music, this is actually a very good reason to be in touch with musicians.  The people that own the sound systems you want to use for your rallies are largely musicians.  Especially if they play in a band, they very likely own lots of sound gear.  Unlike a lectern and condenser mic, which isn't very good for public speaking and really sucks for musicians, the gear that the musicians have will work for them as well as for the speakers -- and much better, too.

8)  None of the famous musicians want to play at our protest

Famous musicians are usually very careful about public displays of politics, lest they alienate a big chunk of their audience.  For that and a lot of other reasons, they'll probably say no when you ask them to play at your protest.  But there are lots of great musicians near you who are not famous, who can serve the role the famous musicians would also have served, of playing good music and helping to foster a sense of community, make for an interesting occasion, etc.  The famous musicians are great if you can get them, and may help with media coverage and crowd size, but if they're not available, there are much better options than skipping the music.

9)  The bands want to charge and we can't pay anything

Being an independent musician, these days perhaps more than ever, is a very expensive endeavor.  A lot of bands can't afford to take time off, possibly rent a moving van, and do whatever else might be involved with playing at a rally for free.  If you're able to offer something, even if it's far less than what they may be asking for, it can't hurt to tell them what's possible and see what they say.  Otherwise you'll very likely find good musicians happy to play for free, but it's much more likely they'll be a good solo act rather than a good band, because the solo acts have much less overhead, for one thing.

10)  The solo acts or other acts willing to play for free skew towards the white and male, and we want to have a diverse roster of speakers and performers

This is a big problem, no doubt, and it's a big problem across the board in the arts in contemporary America, for a lot of reasons, including an almost total lack of support for an industry that is under siege from so many directions.  The ranks of those who can afford to be professional artists are getting fewer, wealthier, and therefore also more male and more white, with each passing year, as demonstrated by tax filing data.  If you want to have a more representative array of performers, you need to be able to pay people for their time, otherwise you end up with people who are well-off enough that they can afford to play for free.  However, if your choices are between paying a great multicultural hip-hop band that you can't afford, having a white guy with an acoustic guitar who is a good performer and will play for free, or having no music, the best option here is definitely not the "no music" option.  (The ideal option, which is the one likely to be employed in a place like Denmark, is to hire both the hip-hop band and the singer/songwriter, and to pay them all union scale...)

11)  This is a protest in solidarity with Palestinians (for example), and we want to center Palestinian voices and have Palestinian performers, but we don't know any

There are lots of good things about centering Palestinian voices at a protest about solidarity with Palestinians, of course.  There are also lots of great Palestinian musicians.  Most of them are in certain parts of the world, however, and you often won't find any nearby, wherever you happen to be.  Sometimes you won't even find any Arab musicians nearby of any kind!  However, music that is related to the struggle at hand, whether it's performed by Arabs or people from another part of the world, such as your part of the world, can be at least as powerful for an audience, especially if the lyrics are in a language they understand, such as English.  Great to center Palestinian voices, but if there aren't any around to center, the lack of Palestinians is a terrible reason to forego music of solidarity from non-Palestinians or non-Arabs.

In conclusion:  more music!

Where's the Music?

For many years now we hear a lot on the news about "the culture wars."  But there's another war that's been going on for decades:  the war against culture itself.

Most anytime that there's a resurgent social movement in the news and on the streets in my adult life, I have learned to expect some rock star baby boomer like Neil Young to editorialize somewhere about how when he was young, music was at the center of everything, but now all you hear is vapid pop songs, rather than songs of resistance and social change.

To which people from younger generations, like me, who missed out on the brief period during which songs the media characterized as "protest music" could get signed to a major label and become popular on commercial radio, would typically take offense.  Looking at reality from my own limited vantage point, I saw social movements that I and other artists were playing an artistic role in.  Most of my fellow artists that have played a role in the environmental movement, the global justice movement, the Palestine solidarity movement, the post-2001 antiwar movement, Occupy Wall Street, etc., have not been famous.  Like me, they have been artists that played at protests and otherwise rallied the troops at concerts and other events -- operating in the background, out of view of the Billboard charts or the Hollywood balls.

It's easy to get offended when someone who was born at the right time to become a protest singer appears to be complaining about the absence of younger generations of protest singers, when you're one of them, and always struggling to survive in that capacity.  It's true, I responded somewhere online to Neil, you won't find this music on commercial radio anymore -- but we're out there!

That was well over a decade ago, and as time has passed since then, and I've lived a little and read a couple more books in the intervening years -- particularly one by my friend Mat Callahan that he published in 2017, The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965-1975 -- I think I owe Neil Young an overdue apology, and a whole bunch of thanks as well.

I mean, I forgive myself for my defensive reaction to the point he was making.  It was understandable.  I was only just born when Neil was at the peak of his rock stardom, and I entirely missed all of the formative events of his youth.  But luckily, people like Mat wrote books about it, as did a lot of other people.  The films are helpful as well.  And many of the participants who were young back then, like Neil, are still around today to talk to.  (Though I've personally never met him, and probably never will, but for the record, I think he pretty much invented punk rock.)

I guess for me, connecting the dots and understanding what all these boomers are going on about has been a sudden development, brought on by witnessing, and to some extent participating in, this global movement against the genocide underway in Gaza.  Although if not for the pandemic, perhaps this realization might have happened sooner.

One of the things that overwhelmingly characterized the protest movement in 2020 -- at least of the ones I witnessed, mostly in Oregon -- was the absence of live music.  At the time, this was mainly explained by the desire to be abundantly cautious about Covid-19, which meant nobody singing, and spreading the virus that way.

The masks were about the pandemic back then, but now they're being worn at protests for other ostensible reasons.  And still nobody's singing at the protests, and if anybody's speaking at them, the sound systems folks are using are usually inadequate for many people to hear what they're saying.

Now that I'm living in an era where it's not a question for me of whether I'm going to be one of the musicians playing at a protest, but whether anyone is going to be singing at this protest at all, the penny dropped inside my head.  Indeed, Neil, where is the music?

The question is not where is the music against the genocide in the charts -- no one is expecting to see any.  But where is the music within the grassroots of this movement?  Or specifically, where is it in the United States?

In so many other countries it's not a question.  The music is front and center, on stage and everywhere else.  In Jordan or Yemen or Germany or Mexico -- but not here.

There are surely many different reasons why this is the case -- some related, others not.  I won't try to analyze all the different trends that may have led us from 1968 to the current moment.  I'll just explore a few salient points.

From my perch, having seen or participated in the social movements that have come and gone from the late 1970's to the present in this country, it remains the case that there has been nothing in my lifetime that has rivalled the kind of massive, highly organized, and sustained social movements this land experienced throughout the latter 1960's, and also throughout the 1930's.

Other social movements have come and gone, we've had some very big demos now and then, and some movements of various sizes have gotten dramatically outsized amounts of media coverage, but in the end, nothing has really come close to what this country experienced in either of those two decades.

To perhaps oversimplify the picture, what were the results of the struggles of these two decades?  In the aftermath of the 1930's, arguably the response by the powers-that-be was two generations of a generous welfare state.  In the aftermath of the 1960's, it would be almost a generation before there would be another large-scale deployment of US troops to fight a war overseas, and to overcome what they called "Vietnam Syndrome."

What were the hallmarks of the massive social movements during those decades, that so shook the ruling class in the US and achieved such relatively huge policy changes?  And in what other various ways has the establishment responded to these achievements, aside from the institution of the welfare state in one case, and a lengthy bout of "Vietnam Syndrome" in the other?

One of the central features of the social movements of these periods, as well as earlier periods, was culture of all kinds, used intentionally as a vehicle for popular education, political agitation, and bringing people together -- often in ever greater numbers.

When Neil Young was young there was a movement that may have originated in San Francisco but which had spread throughout the continent that believed emphatically that music and culture would be pivotal vehicles for bringing about a transformation of the society at large.  

Critical numbers of people believed with a missionary zeal that music festivals should be organized regularly -- weekly -- they should be big, loud, and open to the public, and as more and more of the public got exposed and turned on to the music and the scene, they would no longer want to be part of the war machine.  That was the intent of the movement, and it worked.  Not by itself, by any means -- I'm not suggesting there weren't other important factors, but this was certainly one of them.

With popular culture having been basically hijacked by the movement back then, with music that undermined martial culture permeating every corner of society, it seems to me that those in power have been trying to seize the cultural upper ground ever since.

One form that effort has taken has been the consistent derision of "the Sixties" and the supposedly ridiculous utopian nature of the movements of the day.  I remember listening to pop radio stations in the early 1980's, only five or six years after the end of America's war in Vietnam, and hearing the DJ refer only with open derision to the "leftover hippies" and the era whose music he wasn't playing.  In mainstream media, the period would be repeatedly characterized by naked freaks rolling around in the mud, having sex and doing drugs, everything reduced to its most sensational elements, when the period was mentioned at all.  And now the use of the term "boomer" as an insult is all the rage on social media, and has been for years.

Aside from relatively recent revelations about the FBI's efforts to sabotage the careers of a number of different prominent leftwing musicians in the 60's and 70's, my own observation of the obvious targeting of culture during the global justice movement of the late 90's and early 00's was unmistakable.  At one protest gathering after another during the course of the movement, in one place after another, the police would find a reason to confiscate massive numbers of giant puppets and other things people had been working on constructing for the protests.  

Puppets had long been a powerful tool for communicating what the protests were all about, and this tool was consistently, methodically targeted by authorities at every turn, for years.  There were other consistent, methodical ways they targeted our movement -- police brutality was consistent as were undercover police provocateurs, as was an almost complete lack of mainstream media coverage.  But targeting the puppets was one of those very consistent things.

During the course of the antiwar movements that peaked during the 1991 "Gulf War" and the post-2001 invasions there was the phenomenon of two large, popular, and competing networks of organizations, parties, and activists that were each responsible for organizing the biggest protests.  The names of the coalitions changed over the years, but one of them organized rallies that were about half music and half speakers, while the other one organized rallies that were almost completely bereft of live music.

By international standards, according to my observation of social movements in a couple dozen countries with which I'm intimately familiar, even the half-speeches, half-music model for a protest rally is heavy on the speeches.  The IAC/ANSWER Coalition model of no music whatsoever was and is a real outlier globally.  But it has now become the norm, as could be seen at the protests in 2020, continuing on to 2023-2024, with no competing pole that has a deeper connection with the power of culture manifesting anywhere that I'm aware of, not in this country.

So, belatedly, yes, indeed, Neil -- where's the music?  I know lots of musicians, representing lots of different musical genres and lots of different demographics, including some with songs that would be ideal for any number of different sorts of protests, very much including the ones happening now.  But very few of these musicians seem to be singing at rallies in the US these days, and this has been true for years.

I have so many more questions than answers.  But I think the question is a profoundly important one, a civilizational one, really:  how did music become so completely sidelined in social movements in the US in the modern era?  And how can we reclaim the vital role of culture in building and sustaining social movements, and in doing effective outreach to the broader public, while we still have a planet worth fighting for?

It seems to me that the time is yesterday when we needed to have a singing social movement on the ground that's capable of growing to become the kind of movement we so deeply need, if this madness is to change.

If the question is whether music and culture are essential in building such a movement, it seems to me the answer is abundantly clear, from the history of social movements around the world.  The only real question as far as that goes is how do we bring music back into the social movements of the modern era in the United States, the country that brought the world jazz, blues, bluegrass, rock & roll and hip-hop?  Neil and I aren't the only ones scratching our balding heads.

What Would Cointelpro Do?

If Cointelpro were still active today, what would the modern G-Men be doing?

I was a guest at a class at the University of Massachusetts in Boston recently.  When I'm trying to describe reality today, and particularly the media and social media landscape we're all confronted with, I often mention the 1999 film, the Matrix.  I tend to assume everyone has seen it, for some reason.  On this occasion I asked the class in front of me if they'd seen the movie, and only around 1/4 of them raised their hands.  So my basic framework for explaining how our means of communication have been taken over by this matrix of control, that being the movie, is a bit lost on a lot of folks, evidently.

Even less familiar than that movie to most people, I surmise, is the history of the FBI's Cointer-Intelligence Program, or Cointelpro.  You can look it up on Wikipedia.  Through a daring raid of an FBI office in 1971, activists unearthed this massive nationwide FBI campaign to disrupt the left that had been going on for decades.  Tactics were often so underhanded that a lot of folks would never have imagined they were being practiced, like writing fake love letters to create love triangles between leaders of organizations like the Black Panther Party, to divide the organization, or knowingly making all kinds of other false allegations in order to sow division.  Cointelpro tactics included lots of character assassination, along with far more violent forms of disruption, such as the other kind of assassination, as well.

Since the raid on the FBI offices in Pennsylvania in 1971, as far as I know there has never been such an exhaustive record of FBI misdeeds brought to light, though there have been many more isolated incidences when disruptive and divisive undercover police activity of various kinds has been exposed.

Of course, to have an agenda of disruption and division doesn't require you to be working for the FBI.  You could be working for another country's secret police.  You could be a corporation trying to break a union, or a corporation trying to undermine an activist group working to get it to stop fracking or clearcutting or whatever else.  You could be a brainwashed sectarian, a member of a cult, or a group with many cult characteristics.  You could be a deranged misanthrope who enjoys destroying things.

There are lots of possibilities, and in the end it doesn't matter as much which ones are the cops and which ones are volunteering for them.  What matters much more is identifying the kinds of patterns of communication and tactics of disruption that underly the left's floundering nature in the modern era, so we can be less likely to continually fall prey to these things.

People who don't want to be seen as wild-eyed tin hat-wearing types tend to avoid too much speculation, wanting instead to stick to accusations that they can substantiate with a Wikileaks expose.  Or if there's something going on that seems exactly like something that went on during Cointelpro, people might make an observation (which will then be taken as an accusation by some).

Rather than speculating about which movement trends or underhanded tactics that can be observed in play at any given time might be inspired by FBI disruptors or police provocateurs, I thought it would be interesting to just speculate on what kinds of strategies and tools are the sorts of things a modern team of secret police would want to be using, in the course of their work to divide, disrupt, and misdirect groups or movements that are becoming worrisome to them for one reason or another.  Bearing in mind that none of this is especially new thematically -- just new platforms and new participants.

If I were running Cointelpro today, what would my modern G-men be doing?  As undercover operatives online or off, what kinds of ideas would they be supporting?  What kinds of memes would they be spreading?  What kinds of tactics would they be promoting?  How would they be framing reality?  What strategies might be most successfully disruptive and divisive to any potentially threatening social movements?

So, if I were running Cointelpro for the past few decades, long after the program supposedly ended, what would I have done, and what kinds of instructions would my agents have now?  Here are the first 20 of them.

1)  Embrace anonymity in the name of safety and security.  Emphasize the importance of safety and security over effective communication or success.  Encourage everyone to use pseudonyms and wear masks.  This makes it much easier for us to pretend to be people who we're not and otherwise to more effectively plant ideas and steer the narrative.  It makes people generally seem less trustworthy and to communicate less effectively, which is good for defeating the movement we're trying to defeat.

2)  Embrace "diversity of tactics."  Reject the idea that having an agreed-upon tactic for an action is a good thing.  Paint this notion as an elitist sign of some kind of "privilege" instead.  Mass nonviolent civil disobedience is too effective and it must be stopped.  Support Black Bloc tactics.  Join the Black Bloc.  Always be the first one to light a dumpster on fire, since that generally makes half of the protesters leave the scene.

3)  Establish a narrative in the mainstream media and by posting on and participating in conversations on social media that anyone who claims to be a victim of someone else should be believed, and should not have to traumatize themselves by even telling the rest of us what happened.

4)  Establish a narrative that anyone claiming to be a victim who is also perceived to be from a marginalized group of any kind should be believed even more readily than other sorts of victims, and questioning their claim to having been victimized by someone is even more egregious, and in fact a terrible transgression in itself.

5)  When anyone becomes prominent and influential on the left, get the rumor mill churning about those people.  Plant suggestions about their improprieties or transgressions, real or imagined.  Accuse them of making you unsafe.  Get their public appearances canceled by spreading this kind of messaging.  Prevent leadership from developing.

6)  Establish as much control as possible over the social media corporations through which most of our communications now happens.  Get your agents on the boards that control the algorithms and everything else.

7)  Make sure the algorithms on the dominant platforms of communication suppress the truth and promote the lies.  Make sure they promote controversy and polarization, and keep people arguing ineffectually.

8)  Make sure the social media platforms' algorithms and other aspects of the way they function continue to make it really easy for any troll to plant a rumor, but really difficult for most people to ever see the explanation for why the rumor is false.

9)  Whenever a movement of solidarity is developing and new allies of the cause are coming on board, make sure to highlight the perception that they are joining the cause for opportunistic, selfish reasons, and that they have all kinds of problems which they need to overcome before they can be good allies.  Make them disappear this way, to prevent the movement from growing.

10)  Whenever there is discussion about the programming for a rally, discourage having music or other forms of artistic expression.  Emphasize the supposed frivolity of music and art, how it undermines the message.  Make sure the program at the rally consists of only speakers, preferably all sectarian ideologues who will alienate as many people as possible and make sure the next rally is smaller than this one.

11)  Whenever possible, promote the notion that what's most important is one's identity, and only people who claim a certain identity have a right to an opinion about that identity.  In the context of the war on Gaza, make it clear that only Jews and Muslims have a right to an opinion on this matter, and anyone else with an opinion on it is probably either antisemitic or Islamophobic, and should ideally just keep quiet.

12)  Always methodically work to undermine solidarity by highlighting the relative perceived "privilege" of any advocate for a cause, with the message being that they should shut up and allow the "centering" of other voices.

13)  If anyone is advocating for a certain cause, circulate suggestions that by doing so, they are dismissing other causes.  Such as if you oppose the genocide of Palestinians it may be because you are a racist who doesn't care about what's happening in Sudan.  Always seek to undermine solidarity, rather than building bridges or making connections.

14)  Whatever positions you're advocating, maintain an atmosphere of toxicity on social media platforms, to discourage participation in political or activist discourse.

15)  Make sure to take every opportunity to undermine solidarity between generations by insulting and dismissing the knowledge and experience of the older generations.  Make sure to destroy any potential for intergenerational passing on of knowledge and strategies by creating an atmosphere of contempt towards older people.

16)  Further emphasize the generational divide by introducing new concepts and new vocabulary along with the notion that anyone who doesn't change their way of speaking and their use of the English language is now a problem.

17)  Push divisive concepts in every arena, and undermine solidaristic notions.  With concern to sexual orientation and identity, emphasize the apparently irreconcilable differences between "the trans agenda" vs. "the TERFs" at every opportunity.

18)  When anyone is trying to make connections and build bridges between groups with common interests but big differences, emphasize the differences.  If anyone on the left is trying to make an alliance with a group of anti-imperialist Republican dissidents, make it clear that by associating with any kind of Republicans, they are themselves now basically fascists, and part of a "red-brown coalition."

19)  When people are trying to organize coalitions to accomplish a commonly-held goal, emphasize how by entering into a coalition we are undermining one cause in order to support another.  Emphasize the problematic nature of this coalition, and how it is somehow implicitly sexist, racist, transphobic, antisemitic, or has some other kind of major problem.  Can you be in the same union with or engage in public discourse with a fascist?  Make it abundantly clear that this is unthinkable.  Maintain the polarity and make it clear that fascists must all be beaten up instead, on sight.  Argue that anyone who thinks otherwise is a fascist, or fascist-adjacent.

20)  When people are advocating for free speech or open discourse, emphasize how hate speech makes people unsafe, and must therefore be opposed by any means necessary.  Accuse advocates for free speech of being privileged, racist, transphobic, etc.  Always undermine the possibility of communication or mutual understanding.

We could easily make this list much longer, and in fact, that could be a nice collective endeavor.  Additions welcome.  Let's understand what's happening, so we can change it.

A Cheerleader Without A Team

One more chapter in the tragic story of the League of Canceled Cheerleaders.

I don't remember when I first heard of or thought of the term, "cheerleader for the left," but that's what I always used to say I was, when people would ask what I did.  Sometimes people would seem perplexed; they'd see me singing at some anarchist event or some communist event, they'd get the impression that I was some kind of professional, and they'd wonder how I possibly made a living as a musician, in the context of this or that group.  

Was I a member of this group?  Depending on the group, the answer was usually no.  Then what was I doing singing at their event?  I'm a cheerleader for the left, I'd explain.  If there are people trying to shake things up in one way or another, whether they're doing civil disobedience to try to stop a pipeline, or having a protest rally against an imperial war, or trespassing onto the floor of an arms factory to smash up the equipment, or just having a conference in a lecture hall, or any number of other initiatives, I'll write songs about the fine things they're doing, and sing them at their events, along with other relevant material.

My model for this career, such as it was, was Pete Seeger.  I always thought of myself as probably having more militant politics than Pete, but the ecumenical way he did things was inspiring for me.  He was a big advocate for nonviolent civil disobedience a la Martin Luther King, Jr, and is responsible for writing the version of "We Shall Overcome" that most of us are still familiar with from studying the history of the Civil Rights movement.  But you'd also find Pete singing lots of songs glorifying the armed struggle of the socialists, communists, and anarchists who fought fascism in Spain, and saying nice things about all sorts of participants in rebellions and revolutions from throughout history, including very contemporary ones.

Sometimes people would look at what seemed like fairly erratic behavior on the part of Pete, playing at so many different sorts of events, for different sorts of groups, and they'd try to pin him down as being part of one political tendency or another.  This would often be a frustrating endeavor for people, since Pete was so ecumenical in his support for what would at some point have been called "Movement activities" and so interested in building bridges between disparate communities that his politics could seem very slippery, from the vantage point of an ideologue.

In the 1940's and early 1950's, when Pete was in his twenties and early thirties, he was really famous, as a member of the hit-producing folk sensation, the Weavers.  Then the McCarthy era fired up and the Weavers were blacklisted from TV, banned from commercial radio, etc.  So Pete spent most of his thirties, in the 1950's, making a living traveling and playing on college campuses, for the sorts of student groups that weren't bothered by such bans or blacklists.

Although I had never been famous and therefore never had an opportunity to be blacklisted, coincidentally I also spent the entirety of my thirties traveling around the US and playing largely on college campuses, for the sorts of student groups that were interested in the sorts of things people like Pete or I sang about -- peace, justice, equality, the environment, and things like that.

I had wanted to follow in Pete's footsteps by being an ecumenical cheerleader for the left across the US and elsewhere, for popular struggles, for the labor and environmental and peace movements, and I did just that, with the aid of the student groups, and the college gig economy.

I didn't know it at the time, but the end of my thirties was to coincide with the end of the college gig economy as me and my contemporaries knew it, as it had been known at least since the days when Pete was touring the campuses when he was young.  The end of my thirties also happened to coincide with me becoming a parent, and moving to Portland, Oregon, where Leila's mother wanted to move to, to go to medical school here.

Before actually moving and holding down an apartment in this city, which was also before I had a kid, I had been making a habit of doing at least one, sometimes two, full-on driving tours around the country per year, where I'd go by car, stopping every few hours in a different town to do one or more gigs there, and I'd cover 25 states that way on a typical tour.  The only parts of the country where I'd usually be driving more than a few hours between gigs would be the Dakotas, or Nebraska.  Otherwise the gigs were everywhere where there were colleges, and there are thousands of colleges in the United States.

The year before I actually moved to Oregon I remember as being a typical visit to this state.  In the course of a week or so, I played concerts for students at Reed, at Lewis & Clark, at PSU, at some little Portland branch of the University of Oregon, along with the bigger campus in Eugene, and at the big university in Ashland as well.  And that's not including the other gigs I did just over the river, in Vancouver, Washington, and all over the state of Washington.

I kept at the task of being a cheerleader for the left even when the college gig economy collapsed, which also coincided with the rise of social media.  The college gig economy had begun to collapse before the rise of social media, and was a phenomenon that was not necessarily a consequence of it, but I'm sure in many ways these things are also connected.  In any case, to think of the loss for the colleges and universities of all those people like me who used to travel and speak and perform and participate in workshops, seminars, festivals, teach-ins, etc., that used to happen regularly on college campuses across the country when there was the college gig economy, is really overwhelming.  It's a loss that has largely gone unnoticed and unmeasured, as far as I know, but I think it's been a huge one.

By the time the rest of the economy for indy musicians trying to make a living in the United States collapsed, with the introduction of Spotify's free tier in 2013, I had to stop doing those driving tours around the country.  There were too many big spaces between gigs, and too many of the gigs I was doing were not well organized and didn't pay enough.  With the college gig economy, if a gig were badly promoted and badly attended, it still paid, but that's not how it usually was outside of the colleges, in the USA.

I became a cheerleader for the left mainly on the internet, and in some countries in Europe, where touring still works financially.  2013 was the beginning of the days for me when I began to feel like a spectator rather than a participant, when it came to anything happening in the US.  I would fly to other countries and do gigs for a hundred enthusiastic leftwing teenagers, and sing at peace or labor-related rallies for sometimes hundreds of thousands of people, then go back to Portland to hang out with my kids and live in relative obscurity.

As good as tours continued to be in other countries, I was no longer the cheerleader for the American left that I had once set out to be.  But, tantalizingly, unable to tour in my own country, I regularly get word about signs of life.  People report hearing my music played through sound systems before the speeches start at a rally somewhere, in some part of the country I haven't been to in over a decade.  I get regular messages from people asking when I might ever be playing a gig near where they live, so they can come to it.  Spotify reports that of my 18,000 monthly listeners, a disproportionately large number of them are Americans in their teens and twenties.

With my world shrinking, at least in terms of what's happening on the ground in the United States, unable to go anywhere else very often, what I have to go on, what I see mostly, is Oregon, and especially Portland.  Sometimes I start to take it personally when I never get asked to sing at a rally in this city, until I actually attend the rallies, and discover that not only are there no musicians performing at all, but the sound system the organizers are using is completely inadequate for hearing someone speak, let alone hearing anyone sing.

And then the pandemic hit in 2020, and here in Portland it still seems to be happening.  Downtown is still a shell of what it once was, not that it was so impressive before that.  And at the rallies, there's an even lower likelihood that there might be a live performer involved than there used to be.  And the sound systems are still awful.

I miss the cheerleader of the left role that I once had all over the US, and I occasionally try to revive my role in that regard, only to get swatted back down in one way or another, when it comes to efforts here in Oregon.

During the heyday of Portland Tenants United I was providing the sound and singing a few songs at their public events, but then PTU founder Margot Black became a subject of vilification for completely bizarre and ridiculous reasons, canceled in a cancelation campaign of the sort that have become completely familiar here in Portland and many other places, in left/alternative milieus in particular.

Around the time of Margot's cancellation, it was also becoming evident at rallies that happened downtown, connected to PSU groups, that if there was a rally happening, anyone speaking or singing had to be clearly connected to an oppressed group of some identifiable sort, and white people like me who didn't want to play the Jewish card were not welcome to get behind a microphone.  For me this was only a little relevant because really there just was hardly any live music happening at rallies anymore anyway.

Over the years I've made efforts to let different people know that I have a sound system and can provide it for rallies, so the speakers can be heard, but my speakers mostly just gather dust in my apartment.  In 2020, my friend who was providing the sound for all the protests downtown borrowed my equipment whenever the cops took his.  2020 involved some good sound, while Rabble was doing it, but 2020 was the year of no live music because of the fear of singers infecting audiences, so there was even less of that than there had been, despite the uprising that year.

When the genocide in Gaza began last October and I figured that there would be sustained protests against US support for Israel, I crowdfunded an upgrade to my outdoor, battery-powered sound equipment, and contacted folks who were organizing rallies, to offer up its use.  This happened once, and then it stopped.  The last rally I heard about reportedly had a terrible sound system.  In the space of a few months, whatever has changed within the ranks of the folks involved with organizing around stopping this war, keeping the phone number of the guy who offered to provide sound gear is apparently impossible to do.

Or there are other things happening, like I'm not someone folks want to associate with.  Hard to know what to attribute to disorganization and what to attribute to cancel culture, but there's a lot of both of those things going on around here, no doubt.

While I'm so glad to see people trying to do any kind of public event or make any kind of effort to highlight and oppose this genocide, it's so sad to see the context from which people are having to act, the reality of the left in 2024 that people all find themselves having to try to navigate.

For one thing, the best organizers, both Jewish and Palestinian, from the Palestine solidarity movement that has existed in this city since I moved here in 2007, have been canceled -- targeted by cancelation campaigners for their supposed transgressions, and unable to effectively organize anymore.  Part of the reason people might say this is a youthful movement in this city, anyway, is because the slightly less youthful organizers that anyone who lived here 10 years ago would expect to see are absent, due to their cancellations.  Not due to them having moved out of town, though some of them did that, too.

Nonetheless, when the campus occupations started happening all over the country, I once again thought -- and still do -- that I should be going to those locations, and being a cheerleader of the movement.  I have, after all, put out two albums in the past few months that are all or mostly about the genocide in Gaza.  There are actually millions of people who have heard some of these songs, as some of them are being shared widely online in the Middle East in particular, where I've been a guest fairly regularly on Arabic-language TV stations, and I'm receiving daily messages of praise for my songs from that part of the world, as well as from around the US.

Last week my friend Al Glatkowski called to ask me if I would like him to send me a 16'-long banner that says "stop the genocide, permanent ceasefire now."  Al is not only a long-time member of Veterans for Peace, but in 1970 he participated in a mutiny on a ship transporting massive amounts of napalm bombs to Vietnam, and spent eight years in prison for it.  I'm proud to know Al, and of course I wanted one of those banners.

I posted on social media a picture of the banner, with Al holding one end of it.  I mentioned that I would soon have that banner in Portland, and if anyone wanted to go out on the street somewhere and hold it, I'd bring a sound system and a guitar and play appropriate music for the occasion.

The post got a lot of response.  I posted it a little over a week ago, and looking at Facebook now, I see that post has gotten over 9,000 comments.

About 98% of those comments are from pro-Israel trolls.  Since February I've been targeted by some kind of troll farm.  I got a notification from Facebook recently congratulating me for having gotten 27,000 comments on my Facebook Page in the past 30 days.  That's how it's been.

Despite this, I have to look at the comments, and especially at the messages on my Page, most of which are also from vile pro-Israel, pro-genocide trolls, who hurl the most awful insults, that I support raping women and beheading babies and killing all the Jews, and those are the very sanitized versions of the kind of content I'm seeing constantly.  I have to look at the comments and messages because other people, who aren't Hasbara trolls, are still using my Facebook Page as their main platform for communicating with me about gigs they're organizing in Australia, or a campus occupation they'd like me to sing at.

I got one such message from a student at a campus in the state of Washington who was in touch with students in Eugene at the University of Oregon who were putting together cultural activities and looking for more musicians to sing there.  Given that I have a lot of songs on the subject, I'm a fairly obvious person to be part of such a program, and I was happy to volunteer to participate, although Eugene is a 100-mile drive to the south of Portland.

I'm always especially glad to get invitations to sing at occupations or encampments.  Having sung at hundreds of them around the world, whether it's people occupying a factory, occupying a coal mine, occupying a building, keeping a picket line moving, barricading a road, or doing a public encampment like a lot of what's happening on the campuses lately, one thing these sorts of endeavors always have in common is they involve a lot of people spending inordinate amounts of time in one place.  From the perspective of a performer, they tend to make great audiences, because they desperately need more things to do, generally.

Occupying spaces like that has a lot in common with warfare, from what people often say, in that you're spending most of your time doing nothing or not much, possibly being very bored, and then you spend a small amount of your time involved with some kind of often terrifying confrontation with police or counter-protesters.  But during the time that you're not involved with such confrontations, people need things to do, and entertainment.  Also, occupations in public places are great opportunities for doing popular education, and for putting on public programs involving musicians and speakers who can do a good job of amplifying the message of the occupation in so many ways.

The banner from Al had just arrived in the mail the day before.  I was up earlier than usual Sunday morning, excited for the day's events.  Before moving to Oregon 17 years ago, I imagined that even if I weren't touring as much as I used to before having kids, I'd still be participating in local events.  I imagined I'd be making regular trips to relatively nearby cities like Eugene, whether it was for a paying gig or to sing at a protest.  I never imagined I'd live in Portland and hardly ever go to Oregon's biggest college town for any reason, for years on end.  So it felt good to be going to Eugene for some reason, any reason.

I put it and my sound gear and a couple of stringed instruments in the back of my car, bid my little children adieu for the day, and headed south.  I had plans for Eugene in addition to singing on the campus.  Lunch with an old friend who I knew from the east coast, who I hadn't seen in thirty years.  An interview for the local community radio station, with a long-time activist who's lived in Eugene ever since I can remember Eugene.

Out of habit, I had Google Maps on on my phone, though I wouldn't need it until I got off the long, straight highway between Portland and Eugene.  In any case, since February my phone behaves the same way, when the screen is on; every ten seconds or so the top bit of the screen is taken over with another notification from Facebook, which is generally another insult from a pro-Israel troll.  "You're a terrorist," "Destroy Gaza," "Kill all the Palestinians," "Their children deserve to die, too," "I hope you get beaten up by a Jew."  I know I can turn off notifications, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

After having lunch with my friend just north of Eugene, I got back into my car, preparing to head to the U of O campus to set up and play for the encampment there.  For all kinds of reasons, I habitually check my email inbox far too often, and I did it in the car before heading into town, to find this message:

Some people in jvp [Jewish Voice for Peace] brought up some concerns about associations with a white supremecist and steering committee has decided it would be best if you didn’t perform. I apologize for letting you know so late especially if you were already on your way, there were some miscommunications and I thought someone else had contacted you. Thank you again for offering to perform and sorry it had to be cancelled.

A cheerleader without a team to sing for,  instead of going to the campus, I visited my friend and long-time videographer for the left, Todd Boyle, who was going to film my concert for propaganda purposes, I did the interview at KEPW with David Zupan, and I got back in the car to make the 100-mile drive back to Portland.

This morning I received a Google Alert that my name had appeared in the news somewhere in the world.  It was in an article in the Daily Emerald, what used to be the student paper, with an update about goings-on during week two of the pro-Palestine encampment on campus, updated at 1 pm on Sunday:

The guest speaker talk that was scheduled for 2:30 p.m. with singer-songwriter David Rovics has been canceled.

Talk about hasty, last-minute cancellations, that's about as last-minute as it gets, without being literal.

Needless to say, if anyone were to ask anyone I know, or to take five minutes to look at the types of songs I write, it would quickly become obvious that rather than being a white supremacist, I'm quite explicitly an anti-racist songwriter, very clearly against white supremacy, fascism, racism, settler-colonialism, Zionism, etc. 

But this is not a time of reason, where people can take five minutes and make an obvious determination like that.  Ours is an age -- and this is a place -- when some anonymous troll on social media can link to a badly-written article on a website literally dedicated to praising every dumpster fire that anyone in the world ever starts, and this article on that website denouncing my supposed transgressions, those being engaging in discourse with alleged rightwingers, trumps everything else.  All the hundreds of anti-racist songs are irrelevant, because of a claim made by someone who is quite likely and literally working for the FBI and serving the interests of dividing and conquering the left, as the FBI has verifiably been doing for over a century now.  This is where we're at.  Reality is irrelevant, while false rumors reign supreme, and everyone communicates anonymously on corporate-run platforms.  It is a wet dream for Cointelpro, and if anyone in those compromised circles of the left says what I just said, for stating the obvious they will be accused of "cop-jacketing," whatever that's supposed to mean.

Only the day before I took this bizarre little ride to Eugene, I wrote an article titled "The Silenced Majority and Why It Stays That Way."  One section of that article was titled "Left Capture."  My experience on Sunday was a case in point -- and only one of so, so many others, involving so many good people rendered useless by the hegemony of paranoia, suspicion, and identitarianism.