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.

The Silenced Majority and How It Stays That Way

It's wonderful to see significant and dedicated fractions of the population take to the streets, or at least the campuses.  But where is everybody else?

As the war for the narrative of the war heats up to heretofore unknown extents for the western world in particular, the strategies for controlling the narrative become more and more evident.  Between the US and Israel, I don't know which one is the tail and which one is the dog, but the narrative we're all supposed to believe seems to be the same either way.  And it seems very evident that maintaining control of the narrative is of the utmost importance to the power structure in the US, the UK, Germany, and many other parts of the world.

In much of the world we can see absolutely massive outpourings of support, with a sustained seven months now of millions of people in the streets, mostly outside of what we call the west, but including within the western countries.  In the United States, where Israel finds its most important political and military ally and funder of war crimes, the outpouring has been far more muted.

In many countries where the population veritably pours into the streets to show solidarity with the Palestinians, to the extent that there is criticism for their own governments involved with these protests, it is to say that they should do more than they may already be doing to stand with the Palestinians.  Nothing about these protests is in opposition to the societies they're in, because the whole society, pretty much, supports the Palestinian struggle.

In the US, on the other hand, until the campus movement took off and started getting mass media coverage, in most cities if more than a few hundred people were in the streets, that was considered a big crowd.  If there was a crowd bigger than this, it was almost inevitably in a major city with a large Jewish and/or Muslim population.

On the streets of Portland, while students and other folks were occupying a library on the campus of Portland State University, in solidarity with Gaza, as I was hanging around I heard many passersby conversing with each other, and it was abundantly clear that most of them were not sympathetic with what was going on here, and did not understand the context.

On social media, my observation has been there are certain groups and individuals with large followings who can drum up a lot of reposts and discussion about Palestine, but posts that don't get shared by one of those accounts tend not to do well.  There's always the likelihood of algorithmic throttling and shadowbans and all that, but to some extent it's also evident what's going on when you see the numbers of people who saw or liked a post, relative to the tiny fraction of that group who dared to share the post.

What explains the relative silence on the streets of the US, compared with so many other countries?  Some of the factors I think are big ones are also factors held in common elsewhere, but with others, that's less the case.  Taken as a whole, I think what we end up with is a mind control experiment with more than 300 million participants, mostly unwilling and unwitting.

The five basic pillars of social control that I see operating on overdrive in relation to the Gaza war and the control of the narrative around it fall into the categories of mass media, social media, left capture, political persecution, and violent repression.

Mass Media

The western media varies from the reasonable-sounding to the rabid.  Some of it tries to give us at least some impression of the horrors Israel is wreaking upon Gaza, and sometimes even the West Bank as well.  But generally the focus is on making sure we continue to humanize the suffering of Israelis, even if in order to do so we have to keep on coming back to last October, whereas the suffering of Palestinians beneath indiscriminate Israeli bombardment and an imposed famine has been a constant ever since October.

Another major focus has been the supposed rise in antisemitism everywhere.  Even recently on Al-Jazeera, which usually does some of the best coverage of this crisis, a newscaster was repeating the line that pro-Palestinian protesters somewhere "resorted to anstisemitic chants," without telling us what they were.  I'm especially curious, because in all the cases I've heard of, the chants in question have only been anti-Jewish if you use a pro-Israel hate group's definition of the concept, such as phrases like "from the river to the sea."

At least until the campus protests began, the overriding tactic of the mass media in the US in particular has been to pretend nothing is happening.  What so many countries are calling a genocide -- for which Israeli leaders may soon have international arrest warrants out on them, in which hundreds of people have been killed under Israeli bombardment on a typical day, for the past seven months -- is often not headline news, often not even a story in today's broadcast.

Whether we're talking about "liberal" or "conservative" outlets, there is a tendency to take Israeli government talking points about the war and the preferred narrative around it, and continually drive those talking points home with every story on the subject.  "There was a ceasefire on October 6th."  "Hamas wants to kill all the Jews."  "Opposition to the war is at least likely antisemitic."

Social Media

If the mass media is overwhelmingly disinformation with a liberal or conservative bias (and it is), social media is like a form of algorithmic brainwashing, along with its many other problems.

Whether it's educated guessing or not, we're all basically just guessing at what the algorithms are, and what they're doing, aside from the few who might have the overview.  Conflict and sensationalism reigns, it's systematically pushed up in the algorithms, just as content related to Palestine is suppressed, or content related to world events generally.  It's not like censorship, rather, it's much more sophisticated than that.  As with the mass media, through these more subtle, algorithmic systems of control, any story, any angle, can be emphasized or de-emphasized, and this is very much happening, it's not conjecture, it's how the platforms work.

It would also be hard to over-emphasize the potential impact of pro-Israel trolling activities.  Since I became a target in February, it has been really eye-opening.  Just in the past 30 days, Facebook informed me in a notification, I got over 27,000 comments on my Page.  What Facebook's notification bot doesn't seem to know is at least 26,000 of those comments were from pro-Israel trolls.

My case is extreme, to be sure.  Most people don't get targeted with such a firehose of propaganda like that, so it's abundantly obvious what's going on.  But that, in fact, is far more dangerous.

You can see what I'm talking about if you look at one of my posts on Facebook that doesn't get deluged with thousands of pro-Israel commenters.  Look at one of the ones that got a few positive comments from friends and fans like usual, and then the pro-Israel troll comes in with their views.  In that context, they can often be taken seriously, and people engage with them with good intentions, sometimes having huge debates that go on forever.

What these untold thousands of operatives are doing to try to keep control of the narrative on platforms like Facebook is a seriously large campaign, bound to have all kinds of impact, along with the many other mechanisms the platforms can employ with the same aims.

Left Capture

While the cause in opposition to genocide and in support of the Palestinians is broadly popular around the world, it's probably most popular in countries with large Muslim populations, such as Yemen or Jordan or, to a lesser but still significant extent, England.  This is understandable; people who identify as Muslim naturally identify with others who do, and they also may identify with Palestinians because of their own experiences with colonization or with the legacy of colonialism, or their own background involving friends or family who lived through Israel or America's wars.

For similar reasons, in countries like the US, or parts of the US, that have a large Jewish population, there is a very disproportionately large support for the Palestinian cause.  Again because of identity, because of being from a background where there is often a strong affiliation with the self-proclaimed Jewish state, and because of the Jewish history of persecution, disproportionate numbers of Jews feel compelled to speak out against this genocide, specifically because it is a genocide being carried out by Jews.

All of this makes sense to me.  What doesn't make any sense is the silence of so much of the rest of the population, specifically in the United States.  There is no question to me where this silence comes from.  It is especially those who are not part of the small Jewish or Muslim minorities in this country, who are won over by the notion that because they don't perceive themselves to be of the identities involved with this conflict, they should just stay out of it, lest they get attacked for being anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim.

The phenomenon I'm talking about here is what I mean by "left capture."  What used to be a left that was driven largely by concepts such as international solidarity and a global working class alliance against the plutocratic imperialists has become myriad fractured gatherings of people who identify primarily with other members of increasingly narrowly-defined social or political groups, and who are reticent about having opinions on subjects which they feel they may be unqualified to talk about, as they perceive themselves to be a non-member of any of the relevant identities involved with the conflict.

Political Persecution

Elise Stefanik, in her role as the new Joe McCarthy, is going after what she mis-identifies as antisemitism just as McCarthy was labeling everyone and their grandmother a communist and attacking them for being one.  Looking back, McCarthyism seems like some kind of bizarre comedy, but it really happened, and in the process, many lives were ruined and careers destroyed.  The same thing is happening now, as can be seen from the numbers of university presidents who have been forced out of their jobs in the past few weeks, along with many more less media-worthy purges of pro-Palestinian voices that have been taking place within academia and in other sectors of society.

For those from the UK, all of this is especially familiar, because of what people there went through, in the process of the pro-Israel forces within British society re-taking control of the Labor Party from its popularly-elected leader, Jeremy Corbyn.  In England, there have been many people purged for their nonexistent antisemitism, and as with those under attack for standing up in the United States, in England, too, they are disproportionately people of Jewish background being accused of these things.

Violent Repression

In the face of severe and severely misinformed criticism from both Democratic and Republican political leaders nationally and in states like New York, Texas, and elsewhere, university administrations have been inviting in the armed enforcers of the law all over the place.

Violent repression can backfire.  It can be the case that a lot more people come into the streets to support those being attacked, and we've seen this happen.  But especially if the tactic of violent repression is sustained, it can certainly succeed in stopping a movement in its tracks.  Despite the proclamations by many revolutionaries over the generations that the revolution is unstoppable, you can't kill an idea, etc., it's not really true.  

History shows that unless you have the kind of social movement that involves large numbers of people from the ranks of the police and the military abandoning their posts and joining the movement, your movement can be violently repressed into insignificance, if doing that is seen by the leaders of the government to be important enough a goal to pursue.

If you want to change the world, first you have to know what's going on.  And what's going on here is a coordinated, bipartisan, multi-front attack on humanity, human rights, human decency, and reality itself.