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Corporate Democrats don’t defend people’s rights when they are in power, but with Trump in the White House the Democrats now “pretend to care so deeply about racism and patriarchy,” said Crystal Fleming, Associate Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Stony Brook University. Fleming is author of the new book, How to Be Less Stupid About Race.

The midterm elections are a week away and I can’t find anybody worth voting for. I live in Georgia, the 6th congressional district, where Stacey Abrams is the Democrat running for governor, and Lucy McBath is the Democrat congressional candidate. McBath is running four points behind Republican incumbent Karen Handel. Stacey Abrams has been polling only two points behind Brian Kemp well within the polling margin of error for months now.

For those outside Georgia, if Donald Trump is some kind of horrible bad grandpa Brian Kemp is an especially mean uncle out of Athens GA, normally a pretty liberal college town. Kemp ran commercials in which he blew up stuff, fired up his big chainsaw to cut regulations, waved his guns that nobody better try to take, and slammed the door of that big truck he’s got in case he has “…to round up some criminal illegals and take ‘em home myself.”

Republican Kemp has been GA Secretary of State, in charge of Georgia’s elections for eight years now, during which time he’s struck about a million or so mostly minority voters off the rolls, interfered with voter registration drives, and caused several tens of thousands of other new voter registrations to simply disappear. This is standard Republican practice across the country because the numbers of their dependable vote are shrinking. So Republicans try to hold down the vote in Democratic areas, and Democrats try to maximize registration and turnout.

6th district congresswoman Karen Handel was Brian Kemp’s predecessor in the office of Georgia Secretary of State for eight years. In that capacity she disappeared her own share of minority votes and voters. She also had a hand in cooperation with the crooked Democrat who held that office before her, in bringing Diebold’s faith based voting machines into Georgia.

The Democrat running against Handel is Lucy McBath. Her son was murdered in Jacksonville FL back in 2012 for the crime of playing his music too loud, and since then McBath has become a professional gun control advocate. The big problem though, with the professional gun control advocates are completely unable to point the way to a less violent society without telling the truth about America’s present and past. The narrative the professional gun control advocates spin around gun control generally ignores the official violence of police and the military. In the real world, the Second Amendment to the US Constitution was written to guarantee that every able bodied white man was armed and ready to take part in slave patrols or Indian killing and land stealing militias. When chattel slavery mostly ended and the theft of the continent was complete, the gun industry had to find other markets and other reasons for existing, and some of what they came up with included the myths about civilians with pistols being able to hold the government accountable and more.

An even bigger problem with Lucy McBath is that like many 2018 so-called progressive Democrat congressional candidates this year, McBath is running for US Congress without a single word to say about foreign policy, except a vow of support for the apartheid state of Israel. She’s a candidate for US Congress without a word to say about the four or five countries we’re bombing or the dozens of other countries we’re deploying US special forces in or flying drones over. Almost-a-congresswoman Lucy won’t talk to us at all about the 800 US military bases around the world which cost us about a trillion dollars a year, more than what the next nine or ten nations spend put together, and reporters don’t ask. The Republicans don’t bring it up either, a sure sign that this is something they pretty much agree on.

And then there’s Stacey Abrams. Stacey is a tax attorney, Spelman and Yale Law grad from Gulfport MS. She was first state rep from an Atlanta district in 2006. In American legislatures, party caucus leaders are chosen by the amount they bring into party coffers in donations from PACs, corporations and wealthy individuals and their expertise in doling it out to other lawmakers. By 2011 Stacey Abrams was chosen Democratic leader in the GA House, a post which she held until beginning her run for governor in 2017. She’s written several romance novels on the side too.

Stacey Abrams wants to be president, and Georgia governor is one of the checkmarks on the way there, and election to governor will immediately put her on the short list of contenders. She lays that out quite clearly in her latest book Minority Leader How to Lead From the Outside and Make Real Change. It’s a memoir-centered self-help book, an I-did-it-you-can-do-it-too kind of thing with checklists at the end of every chapter. The “it” she talks about in the book is achieving power, but for all her deep understanding of how to maneuver to obtain this power Stacey offers very few if any clues about what great things she wants to do with that power.

We’ve seen that movie before though haven’t we? Didn’t we just finish eight years of an unaccountable black president presiding over the greatest loss of black family wealth since we started keeping statistics on it? Didn’t we just see three million American families lose their homes? Didn’t we hear Eric Holder, the first black attorney general tell us the banks to were too big to jail and too important to investigate, and didn’t we see Loretta Lynch the second black attorney general literally write the fine print on get out of jail free cards for CitiGroup and other criminal investors who walked away with billions. We’ve lived to see a black president break his word on raising the minimum wage and delivering single payer health care? The first black president blockaded and bombed all the countries the white presidents before him were blockaded and bombed and added a few new ones, including the actual overthrow of a prosperous African country, where black Libyans and other Africans are being traded as slaves right now. Didn’t we see the first black president expand fracking around the world, privatize big chunks of public education, and let all the torturers and kidnappers on the US payroll off the hook?

Given all that, why should we let Stacey Abrams and Lucy McBath and the rest off with not even a pretense that they’re accountable for their stands on all these issues where they intend to exercise the power granted by our votes? Why? Giving Stacey and the others room to figure out where they are on all this is not an option. They’re all bright and well informed people, especially Stacey. They know where they stand, they just don’t feel obligated to let voters know. And why should they? Stacey is running against a crew of frank and open racists. It should be enough for her to show up with advanced degrees from humble beginnings, both of her parents preachers and apologetically black, female with dreads. And what do governors have to do with foreign policy anyway?

Well, the truth is that governors conduct foreign policy all the time. So do local governments down to cities and counties, when they decide whether to do business with ICE. and how aggressive they want to be in funneling bodies into the ICE detention machinery. Joe Arpaio in Arizona certainly had his own foreign policy, so do Cobb and some other Georgia counties, and so does Brian Kemp. Stacey Abrams and her party will pay lip service to the scriptural notion that we are obligated to be kind to the stranger. But she surely knows that hundreds of thousands are fleeing Central America. Stacey knows knows the US has invaded and occupied and bullied and blockaded Central America countries about two centuries now, putting in place the governments of gangsters and military death squads that have made those places the murder and human trafficking capitals of the world. The Central American refugees are fleeing the hellscape that US military and economic intervention have imposed on their countries.

Brian Kemp and Donald Trump want to greet them with theatrical cruelty, and that sells, especially to frustrated white Americans looking for someone to blame for their economic insecurity. In the face of that, pleas for kindness to the sojourner don’t sell well. The truth – that the US created a hell people are fleeing from might sell, but it’s a place Stacey and her party have never laid the groundwork to go, and never intends to go. Hondurans elected a mildly social democratic president in 2014, and the black president’s secretary of state Hillary Clinton lost no time letting the world know she favored a military coup to oust him.

Stacey and her party never bothered to explain to Georgians what Medicare For All was, or to line up behind it. As a result we got the Affordable Care Act, in which health care for thirty or forty million was to come through Medicaid expansion vulnerable to interference in states under Republican control like Georgia which had the option of rejecting, and Georgia did just that. She also opened up more room for Brian Kemp to tell bigger lies about what Medicare For All is, and what Abrams represents. That day in Ebenezer Church when Congressman John Lewis told young black activists that free college tuition and health care were un-American Stacey was almost certainly in the room, and in definitely in agreement with Lewis.

If eight years of Obama taught us anything, it’s that a black president can do immense damage to the cause of black working class families. Showing up female with dreads and riding on black girl magic just isn’t enough, and keeping your politics on war and peace a secret till after you’re elected – as Stacey Abrams, Lucy McBath and a host of others are doing this year is a sign of pure contempt and real disregard for the folks she expects to support her political career. We have indeed seen this before. Lucy, Stacey and the rest can continue their careers without my vote, thank you very much.

There’s already a cohort of thirty or so CIA Democrats, Democratic congressional hopefuls straight out of the military, police, intelligence and homeland security world. Add those to the progressives who won’t speak on the subject, and it looks like any congressional blue wave that hits will be mostly blue dogs, right wing Democrats. We have indeed seen this one before.

For Black Agenda Report, I’m Bruce Dixon. Google and other corporate social media companies have actively limited the availability of Black Agenda Report in search results for more almost three years now, on the specious grounds that we might be under the influence of the Russians. The day isn’t far off when they might ban Black Agenda Report from Facebook or Twitter to protect people from news, commentary and analysis from the black left. So the only way you can be sure you’re getting fresh Black Agenda Report each and every week is to go to www.blackagendareport.com and hit the subscribe button which delivers summaries and links to all our new content each and every week to your email box, where corporate social media companies can’t block or even trace it, which is why they call email “dark social media.” Dark social media is the only social media still under our control, so subscribe.

Thank you.

Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and serves on the state committee of the GA Green Party. He can be reached via email at bdixon@georgiagreenparty.org

Georgia was one of the first places in the US, at the beginning of Governor Deal’s administration, to embrace what has come to be know as “bipartisan prison reform.”  In the Obama and now the Trump administration, it’s gone national. That’s not a good thing.

A specter is haunting the United States — the specter of “bipartisan prison reform.” Although the last effort at bipartisan prison reformstalled out in 2014-15, the US now seems poised to pass the “First Step Act,” after Donald Trump signaled his support for the measure in a statement at the White House on Wednesday.

Passage of the bill would be a major victory for Trump. A number of liberal and progressive commentators have gone all in on the legislation, which has been heavily shaped by Jared Kushner and Koch Industries attorney Mark Holden. CNN commentator and Cut50 cofounder Van Jones praised Trump. “Give the man his due,” Jones tweeted, saying the president is “on his way to becoming the uniter-in-Chief on an issue that has divided America for generations.”

Yet, regardless of who is “uniting” around its passage, the bill itself is both weak and dangerous. While it offers a few token reforms — some of them, like the end of shackling for pregnant and post-partum women in federal custody, necessary and long overdue — it leaves many of the most pressing issues off the table. It barely makes a dent in terms of reducing the length of prison sentences or reducing the number of people in prison. Meanwhile, it heightens the use of racist and classist assessment mechanisms and expands the net of surveillance.

The proposed bill includes a few minor reductions in sentence length for federal prisoners, by expanding potential access to good time credits and lowering the age of consideration for compassionate release However, it will not make any sentence reductions retroactive (except for the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which minimized — but did not erase — the disparity between crack and cocaine sentences). This means that people who are currently serving, for example, life sentences for drug offenses will not get any relief from this bill. A press release from the National Fraternal Order of Police, which endorsed the First Step Act, indicates that the organization “engaged” with lawmakers to ensure that most sentencing changes would not be applied retroactively. Despite Trump taking a deserved pot shot at Bill Clinton’s support for punitive crime policy of the 1990s, the bill would leave intact the lengthy sentences and limited legal access that Clinton enacted in a trifecta of laws (the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Reform Act, the Prison Litigation Reform Act).

The bill also expands the cruelties of “e-carceration.” These reforms use electronic monitoring and other forms of often-privatized surveillance to build what activists have dubbed “digital prisons” that fatten the wallets of prison telecommunication companies while further extending carceral control into people’s homes and daily lives. Vivian Nixon, a formerly incarcerated person and director of College and Community Fellowship, dubbed First Step “an insidious move toward expanded control and surveillance in our homes and communities.”

Additionally, the First Step Act relies on the same tried-and-terrible “risk assessment” algorithms that have been repeatedly proven to reproduce racism in sentencing. These risk assessment techniques demonstrate the deep conservatism driving the bill. Treating incarcerated people as entrepreneurial supplicants, the legislation seeks to “incentivize” their participation in prison programs — except that people who fail the “risk assessment” cannot access many of the benefits anyway. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights wrotethat the Act’s use of algorithms risks “embedding deep racial and class bias into decisions that heavily impact the lives and futures of federal prisoners and their families.”

We are seeing a dangerous combination of overwhelming Democratic support for this woefully misguided legislation and terribly misguided excitement for bipartisan cooperation with a white nationalist administration. This combination is bad policy — and bad politics.

In fact, one should scuttle any talk of bipartisanship. For Republicans, the First Step Act is a calculated political move. They want, first and foremost, to rescue their moribund, dying minority of a political party from the dust heap of history. The successful, if partial, overturning of policies that disenfranchise people with felony convictions in Alabama, Florida, Virginia, and elsewhere poses new political questions. Republicans can no longer ignore formerly incarcerated people or their families as a political constituency: 70 million Americans have criminal records, and mass incarceration is increasingly being felt in conservative white rural communities. Though the US prison system is thoroughly racist, there are still hundreds of thousands of white people who have been in prison or whose family members have. Some GOP strategists are hoping that they can be convinced to vote Republican. And indeed, many of them might.

The First Step Act needs to be seen in the context of both what the federal government can do in general on prison issues — and what this federal government can, or will, do. The federal government oversees two primary areas of punishment: the federal prison system and immigrant detention. The federal prison system is about 13% of the overall prison system — so no matter what the bill does, it will only impact a small portion of those incarcerated. (That, in and of itself, is not a reason to oppose it, but it bears mentioning for the sake of clarity.) Even if it wanted to — which it most assuredly does not — the federal government simply cannot enact the massive reductions in the US prison population that would be required to end mass incarceration. That fight remains strongest at the state and local levels.

Meanwhile, when it comes to immigrant detention, of course, the Trump administration is not even pretending to attempt to reduce the incarcerated population. The severity of this administration’s approach to immigrants and refugees reveals the punitive foundations of its worldview. This is, after all, the party of concentration camps for migrant children. The party of expanded detention and accelerated deportation. The party of raids on immigrant communities. The party of border walls, border fences, border guards, and border militarization. The party of the Muslim ban. The party of ending abortion and erasing transgender people out of legal personhood, both of which rest on expanded criminalization. The party of “lock her up.”

None of that has changed, nor will it. Six weeks ago, the administration diverted nearly half a billion dollars from medical research, FEMA, and other necessary federal projects to pay for its expanded regime of immigrant detention (including family separation). The First Step Act continues this nativistic violence by excluding undocumented immigrants as well as “people who are convicted of high-level offenses.”

In pushing the First Step Act, Republicans are hoping to score a public relations victory to stabilize their power. They are aiming to shore up their legitimacy while the party otherwise advances transparently dangerous and historically unpopular policies to strip people of their health care, right to organize, and environmental and personal safety. The First Step Act does not signal any change of heart or action by the core violence of this administration.

Such is the way of politics. Even white nationalist kleptocrats need to adjust to changing circumstances. Yet progressives do a dangerous disservice to give any comfort to this agenda. The First Step Act is only being debated as a result of the hard work that a large number of grassroots organizers have put in over the years and decades. Yet the bill evacuates many of their demands. As author, activist, and formerly incarcerated person James Kilgore tweeted, this act aims “to sideline voices of radical critics of mass incarceration/prison industrial complex. A moderate reform agenda like this will not bring us to 1980 levels of incarceration before the earth boils due to climate change.”

Bipartisanship requires a “middle ground” on which to find a mutually agreeable solution. And that middle ground has been fundamental to the development and maintenance of mass incarceration. Though Democrats and Republicans have at times disagreed on the particulars, both have shared what historian Julilly Kohler-Hausmann has called a “get tough” approach to limiting welfare and expanding punishment. Both parties have tried to solve social problems through expanding the power of police, the scope of prisons, and the scale of surveillance. Both parties have persecuted working-class communities of color through domestic wars on crime, drugs, gangs, and terrorism. Each new front in these wars has moved the middle rightward.

Ending mass incarceration will require more partisanship, not less. Stemming the rising tide of fascism will require more partisanship, not less. Partnering with Trump and company in the name of “bipartisanship” to achieve a few tepid reforms pretends that their extreme violence against Black, Native, Latinx, and multiracial queer and transgender communities is somehow separate from the field of prison rather than central to it.

There is no victory in walking the path of co-optation. Instead of trying to meet in the middle with white nationalists and corporate shills, progressives should be trying to make the middle ourselves: to build the common sense reasoning and policy platforms that advance new paradigms of justice, safety, and sustainability. We’ve got a world to win.

For a politician’s biography, the Sam Pollard documentary currently available on Netflix, which recounts the life and career of Maynard Jackson, the first of Atlanta’s six consecutive black mayors, is remarkably free of politics. But when you think about it, this should not be a surprise.

After all, politics in any and every historical era is how we humans address our collective affairs. Politics is how we struggle to determine who produces what for whom, and under which conditions. Politics is how we decide which groups of people get to access the resources and the wealth that the planet provides and which its people produce, and which groups see their needs ignored. It makes perfect sense then, for elites to protect themselves by constructing fake histories which portray their own triumphs as virtuous and inevitable, histories which minimize or deny the very existence of struggles from below conducted by and for the masses of people who actually produce the wealth which elites mostly take for themselves, histories stripped clean of inconvenient politics.

The Pollard film walks us through Jackson’s illustrious family history, the grandson on his mother’s side, of John Wesley Dobbs, an influential college educated postal employee and Prince Hall Masonic Grand Master who prescribed “bucks, ballots and books ” as the keys to black uplift.

Dobbs was a key player in registering tens of thousands of black Atlanta voters in the 1940s, a time when many rural black Georgians were either illiterate or not allowed to vote. His efforts were widely credited with getting the city of Atlanta to finally put street lights on Auburn Avenue, where many black businesses were located, and to hire the first handful of black Atlanta cops, who of course were not permitted to arrest white people. It’s not in the movie, but Billy McKinney , decades later a Georgia state representative, and the father of former Atlanta congressperson Cynthia McKinney was one of those first black Atlanta cops.

Jackson’s dad was a prominent black Atlanta pastor and his mother was one of six Dobbs daughters all of whom graduated from Atlanta’s Spelman College , earning her PhD at the University of Toulouse in France. Upon her return to Atlanta she was the first black person granted a library card by the city’s public library. If there was such a thing as an African American elite, Maynard Jackson was born into it. An exceptionally smart young man, he was admitted to Morehouse at 14, graduated at 18, and bounced around a little before obtaining a law degree in North Carolina. According to the movie, it seems Maynard Jackson never much considered a career doing anything else other than running for and winning elected office.

In 1968 Maynard Jackson ran for US Senate against arch-segregationist senator Herman Talmadge, who’d inherited a political career from his daddy, three term governor Eugene Talmadge . Jackson lost, but thanks to the black vote he did carry the city of Atlanta. The following year he was elected Atlanta’s vice-mayor, and four years later at the age of 35 he became the first black mayor of Atlanta.

The movie dwells nostalgically upon the star studded celebration

which attended his ascension to mayoral office, and contemptuously dismisses the aspirations of the black masses who voted for Jackson and his successors, saying they somehow expected the election of black mayors to solve all their problems. Pollard spends the biggest chunk of the movie following the ins and outs of Jackson’s struggles, in his three terms as mayor, with Atlanta’s white elite to put black faces on the boards of banks and planning bodies, and his adamant insistence that black companies be cut a fair share of city contracts and professional services. It’s quite clear that for the film makers, for Jackson’s contemporaries who they interviewed, and for Maynard Jackson himself, that the project of diversifying and opening up the capitalist elite was then and remains today the main objective of black politics, not the struggles of ordinary people for jobs, decent wages, housing, health care, education, justice and peace.

The movie goes so far as to portray the effort of Maynard Jackson and former mayor Andrew Young in which they shamelessly invoked the ghost of Dr. Martin Luther King to bring the 1996 Olympics to Atlanta as some kind of visionary achievement that really put the city on the map, whatever that term means. In real life, as lived by most residents of cities which “win” the right to host the Olympic Games, the prize consists of an orgy of predatory real estate speculation in which entire low to moderate income neighborhoods are demolished to make way for stadiums, luxury hotel and tourist destinations, for upscale shopping and residential development, all of it lavishly subsidized with tax dollars taken from property taxes and wages of the poor, not from the wealth of the rich. Atlanta was no exception to this rule. Neighborhoods surrounding the Olympic sacrifice zone experienced precipitous increases in real estate taxes and rents to levels which Atlanta residents who were there before the Olympics could not sustain. The lion’s share of the displaced Atlanta homeowners and renters were of course black. But their struggles, their politics have no place in the self-serving histories written by the black elite, so the movie just doesn’t see them.

This political biography ignores the political struggles of ordinary Atlanta residents for decent housing, wages and working conditions, when they could get a job at all. It never mentions the decades long fights for universally accessible health care which resulted for a time, in a well funded health care system in Atlanta’s Fulton and Dekalb counties – the Grady Hospital system, parts of which endure to this day.

Tellingly, it omits Maynard Jackson’s decisive and shameful intervention in the 1977 strike of Atlanta’s heinously abused and underpaid black sanitation workers, in which the first black mayor hired scabs and mobilized SCLC, black pastors and civil rights leaders against self-organizing black workers standing up for their human rights.

The only person the film makers interviewed who wasn’t a family member, a successor, aide or associate of the late mayor or reverends named Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson was a relative of one of the victims of Atlanta’s child murders during Jackson’s final term as mayor. To hear them tell it, that and the insurrection following the Rodney King verdict, and Jackson’s failure, typical of every other deeply change the institution of policing beyond hiring and promoting more black officers, were the only real failures of Jackson’s career.

Sam Pollard’s kind of political history with most of the politics removed is the rancid foundational myth for the long running hoax of Atlanta as North America’s Black Mecca. Fact is, Black Mecca was never anything other than the self-promoting, self-serving and self-celebrating PR campaign of black elites. As I wrote back in 2005,

“Today’s elite black leadership does not measure cities by their incarceration rates , nor do they measure their own performance by the prevalence or absence of child poverty, affordable health care, equality of access to good education or any of the things that matter to ordinary black families. What matters to these “black leaders” are big-ticket projects, bragging rights, relentless self-promotion, and the accumulation of contacts, contracts and personal wealth. “Black Mecca” was always intended to be where their dreams came true, not ours.”

For a generation now, Atlanta has been among the top four or five US cities for black millionaires. But 2013 census data plainly reveal that among the 71 US cities with populations over a quarter million

Atlanta ranked 1 2th in child poverty with 38%, three of every eight children – you can bet they’re mostly black children – in households below the poverty line. That yardstick pegs Atlanta’s performance as a bit better than Cleveland, Newark, St. Louis or Milwaukee, but worse than Chicago, Los Angeles, Philly or Houston. But child poverty, let alone black child poverty is just NOT the the sort of measure of the learned scholars and practitioners employ to evaluate the efficacy of what passes for black politics.

The accepted wisdom ignores these things, and the Sam Pollard documentary lazily slides right into that established groove. The film does get a couple of important things right. Jackson’s enduring political legacy was the cynical hoax of Atlanta as Black Mecca, and his career, which relied on the votes of black masses whose votes were mobilized behind the first black mayor who they imagined would deliver for their class instead of his own foretold the career arc of the first black president early in the 21st century.

I’d give the thing two and a half stars out of five.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Bruce Dixon. Please note that Google has limited public access to Black Agenda Report, suppressing the appearance of our material in search results for almost 3 years now, after the Washington Post endorsed a specious claim that we were somehow under the influence of the Russians. We are the first and as far as we know the only black owned and operated outfit to enjoy this distinction. Facebook’s recent partnership with the Atlantic Council puts deep state intelligence and propaganda operatives in charge of what you can and cannot see on Facebook as well. So the only way you can be certain you’re getting fresh news, commentary and analysis from the black left is to visit us at www.blackagendareport.com and hit the SUBSCRIBE button, so you’ll receive links to all our newly published print and audio content in your email inbox each and every week, free from the interference of the corporations which otherwise run the internet.

The marketers call email “dark social media” because they cannot suppress, control, censor or track it. You can also find our audio podcasts – not our printed articles but our our weekly one hour Black Agenda Radio at iTunes, Stitcher and wherever else you get your podcasts, along with shorter Black Agenda Radio Commentaries like this one. If you catch us on iTunes or wherever you get podcasts be sure and leave us a glowing review, because that’s how other people discover us.

We invite readers and listeners to respond to and comment on our articles and podcasts on Black Agenda Report’s Facebook page, or via email at comments@blackagendareport.com , that’s comments@blackagendareport.com . Some of the comments will appear and be answered in our new weekly letters column.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the GA Green Party. He livesw and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

Kyle Mays, who teaches at the African American Studies Department and the Native American Center at UCLA, says Hip Hop “builds solidarity between the two communities,” which share a complex history of slavery, displacement and state violence. Mays is author of the book, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in North America.Water rights and climate change are connected with larger political empowerment issues. “We need to somehow deal with the issue of returning land to native peoples,” said Mays, who is of Black and Native American ancestry.

Originally published at Black Agenda Report on November 14, 2018.

Short-sighted U.S. foreign policy that backs jihadists in the Middle East and neo-Nazis in Ukraine is once again blowing back on the United States, as Max Blumenthal explains.

FBI: Azov Battalion Trained Rise Above Movement

By Max Blumenthal

Last month, an unsealed FBI indictment of four American white supremacists from the Rise Above Movement (RAM) declared that the defendants had trained with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi militia officially incorporated into the country’s national guard. The training took place after the white supremacist gang participated in violent riots in Huntington Beach and Berkeley, California and Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.

The indictment stated that the Azov Battalion “is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing United States-based white supremacy organizations.”

After a wave of racist violence across America that culminated in the massacre of twelve Jewish worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, the revelation that violent white supremacists have been traveling abroad for training and ideological indoctrination with a well-armed neo-Nazi militia should cause extreme alarm.

Not only are white supremacists from across the West flocking to Ukraine to learn from the combat experience of their fascist brothers-in-arms, they are doing so openly — chronicling their experiences on social media before they bring their lessons back home. But U.S. law enforcement has done nothing so far to restrict the flow of right-wing American extremists to Azov’s bases.

There is one likely explanation for the U.S. government’s hands-off approach to Azov recruitment: the extremist militia is fighting pro-Russian separatists as a front-line proxy of Washington. In fact, the United States has directly armed the Azov Battalion, forking over anti-tank rocket launchers and even sending a team of Army officers to meet in the field with Azov commanders in 2017.

Though Congress passed legislation this year forbidding military aid to Azov on the grounds of its white supremacist ideology, the Trump administration’s authorization of $200 million in offensive weaponry and aid to the Ukrainian military makes it likely new stores of weapons will wind up the extremist regiment’s hands. When queried by reporters about evidence of American military training of Azov personnel, multiple U.S. army spokespersons admitted there was no mechanism in place to prevent that from happening.

Today, Azov boasts combat experience, unlimited access to light weapons, and supporters honeycombed throughout the upper echelons of Ukraine’s military and government. No longer just a militia, the organization has developed into a political juggernaut that can overpower Ukraine’s government. Two years ago, the group flexed its muscle on the streets of Kiev, bringing out 10,000 supporters to demand that the government bend to their will or face a coup.

“With its military experience and weapons, Azov has the ability to blackmail the government and defend themselves politically against any opposition. They openly say that if the government will not advance an ideology similar to theirs, they will overthrow it,” Ivan Katchanovski, a professor of political science at the University of Ottawa and leading expert on Ukraine’s far-right, commented to me. He continued, explaining:

Currently the organizations that are fascist are stronger in Ukraine than in any other country in the world. But this fact is not reported by Western media because they see these organizations as supportive of the geopolitical agenda against Russia. So condemnations are limited to violence or human rights abuses.”

The revelations of collaboration between violent American white supremacists and a neo-Nazi militia armed by the Pentagon add another scandalous chapter to a long history of blowback that dates back to the 1950’s, when the CIA rehabilitated several Ukrainian Nazi collaborators as anti-communist assets in the Cold War.

The almost unbelievable story exposes an axis of fascism that stretches across the Atlantic, from the Ukrainian capital of Kiev to the sun-washed suburbs of Southern California, where some of the most rabid modern white supremacist gangs were born.

White Nationalist Fight Club

This October, four members of the RAM gang — Robert Rundo, Benjamin Drake Daley, Michael Paul Mirelis, and Aaron Eason — were arrested by FBI agents. They were accused of “using the internet to encourage, promote, participate in, and carry out riots” from Huntington Beach to Berkeley, California. Four other members had been arrested in connection with their participation in the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed in a vehicular homicide by a white supremacist.

RAM first appeared in the national limelight during a celebration of Donald Trump’s election victory in Huntington Beach in March 2017. As about one hundred far-right activists marched along the beach donned in red “Make America Great Again” caps and waving Trump flags, they were confronted by a small group of masked anti-racist counter-demonstrators. When a melee ensued, RAM members assaulted their outnumbered opponents, pummeling them into submission and even attacking a local reporter. Afterwards, Orange County police arrested several anti-racist demonstrators, but the RAM gang walked free.

RAM markets itself as a self-defense organization that protects the free speech of white Americans against an onslaught of “Cultural Marxism,”  a classic anti-Semitic trope. Its founders emphasize a vaguely anti-consumerist Fight Club mentality along with a rigorous dedication to mixed martial arts. Its co-founder, Rundo, operates an online clothing and apparel company, Right Brand Clothing, that hawks slickly designed t-shirts promoting “European Brotherhood,” stickers emphasizing a straight-edge “nationalist lifestyle,” and ethically sourced designer “Demagogue pants” (yes, white supremacists apparently care about sweatshops). RAM members can be seen at the site modeling their gear with a clean-cut “fashy” look that contrasts sharply with the stereotypical image of skinheads in jackboots.

RAM’s careful attention to its public image has not stopped its members from putting their crude neo-Nazi ideology on display at rallies, however. During the Huntington Beach riot, for example, RAM’s Robert Boman was seen waving a sign reading “Da Goyim Know.” This alt-right slogan refers to the white nationalist understanding of the supposed Jewish plot to dominate the world.

“I’m a big supporter of the Fourteen, I’ll say that,” RAM’s Rundo proclaimed into a camera in Huntington Beach. The gang leader was referring to the notorious 14-word slogan coined by convicted white supremacist terrorist David Lane, which has become a rallying cry for fascists across the globe: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

Two months after the violence in Huntington Beach, two RAM members were photographed in the same spot dousing literature they dubbed as “Cultural Marxist” with lighter fluid and setting it ablaze. Among the volumes they torched were “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “The 9/11 Commission Report,” and “Schindler’s List.” Besides evoking memories of the early days of Nazi Germany, the spectacle cast the group’s purported devotion to free speech in an extremely ironic light.

Following RAM’s highly publicized street battles, the group became the subject of intense media scrutiny. In October 2017, the investigative outlet ProPublica produced a video that exposed the identities of RAM’s core membership and wondered why they had not been investigated by law enforcement for their violent actions in Huntington Beach and elsewhere.

But the media coverage of RAM glossed over the group’s attraction to a burgeoning trans-Atlantic conglomeration of white supremacists that centered on U.S.-allied Ukraine as the base for a fascist reconquest of Europe. By the Spring of 2018, RAM leadership was barnstorming through Germany and Italy and heading east to meet fascist cohorts from across the West at a conference in Kiev.

RAM’s Ukrainian Hate-cation

Buried in the FBI indictment of RAM members are details of their meetings with one of the key figures in Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion militia.

In August, according to the indictment, RAM members published photos on Instagram showing themselves meeting with Olena Semanyaka, the leader of the international department of the Ukrainian National Corps, which functions as a civilian arm of the Azov Battalion:

The indictment also referenced a video of RAM co-founder Benjamin Drake Daley performing a crossed-forearm salute to the Southern California-based white supremacist Hammerskin gang while in Ukraine:

 

RAM’s Gab account provides additional details of the group’s foray through Ukraine this May. The trip centered around the Paneuropa conference, an event that brings together fascists from across the West to encourage international collaboration. It is hosted at the Reconquista Club in Kiev, and included an a mixed martial arts competition.

“One of our guys has had the honor to be the first American to compete in the pan european organization Reconquista in Ukraine!” RAM declared on its Gab account. “This was a great experience meeting nationalist[s] that came [sic] as far as Portugal and Switzerland to take part.”

The visit, which followed on the heels of meetings with white supremacists in Germany and with Italy’s fascist CasaPound party, highlighted the centrality of Ukraine to international fascist organizing. Further, the Paneuropa conference, where fascists build connections across national borders, revealed the Azov Battalion as much more than a militia fighting for control of a sliver of contested territory in eastern Ukraine.

Semanyaka did not respond to an interview request delivered through Facebook messenger; however, she told Radio Free Europe’s Christopher Miller that RAM “came to learn our ways” and showed interest in learning how to create youth forces in the way Azov has.

Today, Azov leaders openly acknowledge that were it not for the U.S.-backed coup that unfolded in Kiev’s Maidan Square in 2014, their organization would never have developed into the powerhouse it is. As Semanyaka said this year, according to a summary:

The Ukrainian nationalist movement would have never reached such a level of development unless the war with Russia had begun. For the first time since the Second World War, nationalist formations have managed to create their own military wings, the brightest example being the Azov regime of the National Guard of Ukraine.”

Right-wing Maidan Revolution

The 2013-14 Maidan revolt was the cataclysmic event that Ukraine’s already potent ultra-nationalist camp had been waiting for. The protests erupted in Kiev’s Maidan Square after the democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign an economic association agreement with the EU. Celebrated in the West as a pro-Western movement guided by tech-savvy middle-class youth, EuroMaidan depended heavily for its success on phalanxes of black-masked hardmen from Right Sector (see appendix at bottom), an ultra-nationalist party that did battle with the government’s Berkut riot police.

Along with Right Sector, the leadership of the far-right Svoboda Party assumed a prominent role at the Maidan, dubbing the protests a “Revolution of Dignity.” Svoboda co-founder Oleh Tyahnybok — who had once demanded an investigation of the “Jewish-Muscovite mafia” that he saw controlling Ukraine — appeared on stage at the square beside U.S. Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy when they arrived to encourage the protesters.

Another key figure in Ukraine’s neo-Nazi scene was Andriy Biletsky. A university Ph.D. who stressed physical violence as a means to revolutionary change, Biletsky led the Patriot of Ukraine militia, an early forerunner of Azov that attacked migrant camps and menaced foreigners. In a manifesto published during the height of the Maidan clashes, Biletsky outlined his post-revolutionary agenda: “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival,” he wrote. “A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

In May 2014, Right Sector and an assortment of far-right forces banded together to massacre their opponents in Odessa, attacking a pro-separatist protest camp with iron pipes then burning the fleeing protesters alive after they took shelter in a local trade union building. Over 40 pro-separatist Ukrainian citizens were consumed in the flames. The U.S. and EU studiously looked the other way, legitimizing the violence and setting the stage for more.

Behind the scenes, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt were carefully stage managing the opposition, positioning the pliable Arseniy Yatsenyuk as the future leader of a U.S. client-state. Meanwhile, billionaire-backed U.S. soft-power entities like the Omidyar Network and Open Society Foundation plowed money into the opposition, providing it with high-tech organizing capacity and establishing new media outlet Hromadske overnight.

Given the amount of U.S. investment in regime change in Ukraine, it was necessary for American pundits who cheered on the operation to downplay or simply deny the central role neo-Nazi forces played in making it all possible. In perhaps the most absurd attempt at whitewashing the fascist presence, the neoconservative pundit James Kirchick described Right Sector in an article for Foreign Affairs as “Putin’s imaginary Nazis.” Meanwhile, groups like the Anti-Defamation League — which supposedly exist to battle anti-Semitism — refused to support a congressional effort to ban arms to groups affiliated with Right Sector, because “the focus should be on Russia.”

With all the cover he needed from Washington, Biletsky organized the “imaginary Nazis” of Patriot of Ukraine, Right Sector, and assorted football ultras into a real militia called the Azov Battalion. Together, they fought under the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel symbol, which also happens to be incorporated into the logo of the U.S.-based Aryan Nations.

On the frontlines of eastern Ukrainian flashpoints, Azov did battle with Russian-speaking separatists and set up government-sponsored indoctrination camps for children and teens closer to the country’s interior, instructing ten year olds on marksmanship and the evils of foreigners. Azan was subsequently absorbed into Ukraine’s military as a national guard unit, and began appearing in the field with PSRL-1 rocket launchers supplied under the watch of the U.S. Department of Defense. In November 2017, Azov leadership received a team of U.S. Army officers for training and logistical discussions (see photo below and to the right).

By the time Congress approved a ban on arms to Azov this year, the Trump administration had already authorized a new shipment of offensive weapons to the Ukrainian military, including advanced Javelin anti-tank missiles. As in Syria — where the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army functioned as a de facto “weapons farm” for jihadist groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS — any new U.S. arms are likely to wind up in the possession of Azov, the congressional ban notwithstanding.

“It’s very corrupt in Ukraine and money can be stolen — the same as in Syria where extremist fighters got guns from U.S.-backed units,” said Katchanovski. “Azov can just establish new political fronts so they can circumvent the U.S. prohibitions.”

Foreign Fighters for Fascism

The Azov Battalion has received not only U.S. weapons, but also volunteer American military veterans like Brian Boyenger. “It’s not illegal,” Boyenger told a Ukraine Today interviewer of his presence in an Azov camp. “From a U.S. perspective, as long as you’re not fighting with a terrorist group or committing war crimes or things like that. It is legal — mostly I’ve been serving as kind of like an advisor.”

Azov has also welcomed Islamist fighters from Chechnya to continue their long war against Russia in a new theater. A sniper from Sweden with “typical neo-Nazi views,” Mikael Skillt, has been assigned to oversee an entire Azov regiment. And neo-Nazis from as far away as Brazil have flocked to Ukraine to join the fascist crusade. One foreign fighter from France, a young anti-Semite named Gregoire Moutaux, returned from a Ukrainian militia camp in 2016 “armed to the teeth and ready to strike” synagogues, mosques and the 2016 soccer championships when he was arrested on the Ukrainian border by national police.

To consolidate its political influence over the country, the Azov Battalion established a National Druzhina, or street patrol unit. A slickly produced recruitment video released in 2017 featured drone footage of National Druzhina members marching in formation into Kiev as Biletsky, their ideological guide, impelled them to “restore Ukrainian order” to a corrupted society. The street patrol was openly backed by Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, a powerful patron of Azov who belongs to the ruling party of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

This year, the National Druzhina and state-funded neo-Nazi militias like C14 (the “14” represents the notorious “fourteen words” mantra) staged a series of lethal pogroms against the local Roma population, vandalized the offices of insufficiently pliant politicians, stormed city council meetings, and even sued the Hromadske station that was established with U.S. funding for describing their members as neo-Nazis.

“Their connection to power is why they can commit any crime and they will never be punished,” Katchanovski said of Azov and its various street-muscle brigades. “Because they have the police and senior police members like [Vadym] Troyan, they can intimidate people and intimidate politicians with impunity.” (Once a member of Azov, Troyan now serves as Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Interior).

The U.S. has not only kept silent about the wave of ultra-nationalist violence sweeping across Ukraine, it has been complicit in legitimizing the perpetrators. This November, America House Kyiv — a U.S. government-funded cultural center — hosted a speech by a uniformed leader of the neo-Nazi C14 gang, Serhiy Bondar. Months earlier, Republican House Majority Leader Paul Ryan and the NATO-funded Atlantic Council hosted Andriy Parubiy, the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament and co-founder of the fascist Social-National party, for a friendly exchange on Capitol Hill.Given the free rein and open acceptance right-wing extremists enjoy in post-Maidan Ukraine, it is no wonder the country has become a haven for fascists from across the West.

Grand Reconquista Strategy

As the international secretary of Azov’s National Corps, Olena Semanyaka has emerged as one of the most prolific publicists of Eastern European fascism. With jet black hair and a faintly gothic look, she brands herself as a “traditionalist,” emulating her hero, Julius Evola, the late Italian occultist philosopher who espoused a “racism of the spirit.” Though she has been photographed bearing a Nazi flag and throwing up a sieg heil salute, Semanyaka has also been a welcome guest on Ukrainian nationalist TV to promote her campaign for the release of Ukrainian nationalist activists held by Russia.

In her role with Azov, Semanyaka organizes conferences aimed at popularizing the concept of “the great European Reconquista” — a pan-European fascist-nationalist takeover that begins in the former Soviet satellite states and ultimately sweeps through Western Europe on the strength of anti-foreigner resentment.

Semanyaka laid out the fascist grand strategy in Kiev at a December 2016 gathering of Black Metal fans from across Europe called the “Pact of Steel:”

For the first time [in] a long period, the success of the Right in Western Europe — the rise of the Right because of refugee influx and terror — gives the chance for the realization of our ‘pact of steel’ between East and West, between Western and Eastern European nationalists.”

She continued:

Our main task today is to show to Western nationalists, to inform them that Putin’s Russia is no alternative to the EU of the West and that the only ally for them is an alternative axis of European integration which is being formed now in Kiev, Central and Eastern Europe, as a springboard for the all-European reconquest, for the new Europe between the EU and neo-Soviet neo-Bolshevik Putin’s Russia.”

Semanyaka and other Ukrainian fascist ideologues refer to the regional springboard for the European reconquest as the “Intermarium.” This is a concept originally envisioned after World War One by Polish military leader Jozef Pilsudski, who imagined a confederation of countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea as a counter-weight to German and Russian aggression. Though his idea never materialized, Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the failure of the EU and NATO to prevent it revived interest in the Intermarium. One of the biggest boosters of the alliance, the right-wing Polish President Andrzej Duda, saw it primarily through the prism of regional security. The extreme right in Ukraine, however, understood the Intermarium as an ethnically pure base for exporting their revolution to the rest of Europe.

The first Intermarium conference was held in Kiev in January 2016 under the banner of Azov’s National Corps. Semanyaka headlined the event alongside Biletsky, the Azov founder, welcoming far-right activists from Poland and the Baltic States. Within a year, the concept was promoted at an officially sanctioned event at the Latvian embassy in Kiev. There, the Latvian ambassador welcomed a who’s who of the Ukrainian fascist scene, from Svoboda to National Corps representatives like Semanyaka, for a ceremony honoring Peter Radzins, a Latvian general who advocated for the Intermarium.

Organized by Latvia’s far-right National Alliance party, a member of the country’s governing coalition, the spectacle provided Azov leaders with the sheen of international legitimacy. As Matthew Kott, an academic expert on the European far-right, argued, Latvia’s “membership in the EU and NATO allows it to act as a Trojan horse for increasing the clout of the far-right in the Euro-Atlantic community.”

While historical tensions between the Intermarium nations are still simmering, Semanyaka has pleaded with her international allies to heed the call of the late pro-Hitler British Blackshirt leader Oswald Mosley for a “great act of oblivion…of all our former struggles, conflicts, historical enmity. What we need,” she argued, “is the revival of a sense of the new European aristocracy, a new European unity as a real basis for the union I am talking about.”

There are no historical grievances between American white supremacists and their cohorts in Ukraine. After all, the U.S. government has made itself the main guarantor of Ukraine’s security, going as far as directly arming Azov in its bid to bleed Russia. And decades before the U.S. backed extremists in contemporary Ukraine, the CIA ran a program to rehabilitate former Nazi collaborators from the country as anti-communist intelligence assets. Backing Ukrainian fascists is a grand American tradition, indeed.

This November, during the latest Paneuropa conference organized by Semanyaka as a safe space for fascists from across the West, she played host to one of the most prominent self-styled intellectuals of America’s white nationalist movement, Greg Johnson.

“I think that what’s happening in Ukraine is a model and an inspiration for nationalists of all white nations and I wanted to learn as much as possible about what you’re doing here and see as much as possible,” Johnson told his rapt audience. “And I’m enormously impressed and I’m taking notes.”  Johnson is a highbrow racist who publishes a journal, Counter-Currents, that advances what he calls “white identity politics.” Like the Rise Above Movement leaders before him, he was clearly inspired by his visit to Kiev. “I’m already planning to come back,” Johnson exclaimed during a break-out session. “I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen here. I want to come back and learn more.”

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Svoboda Party: Originally called the Social-National Party of Ukraine, a Ukrainian political party with long history of anti-Semitism. Led by Oleh Tyahnybok, Svoboda played a prominent role in the 2013-2014 Maidan uprising, where Tyahnybok shared the stage with U.S. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Chris Murphy (D-CT). Andriy Parubiy, who had co-founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine, is now Speaker of Parliament.

Azov Battalion: 3,000-member neo-Nazi formation in Ukraine’s National Guard. Azov began as a paramilitary, originally formed out of the Patriot of Ukraine neo-Nazi gang led by Andriy Biletsky, and is now a Ukrainian National Guard unit. The battalion’s logo incorporates the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel and black sun symbols. Biletsky is now a member of Ukrainian Parliament. Vadim Troyan, another  Azov veteran, is now Deputy Interior Minister.

Ukrainian National Corps: Azov’s civilian arm, responsible, among other things, for coordinating with and recruiting neo-Nazis and white supremacists from around the world. The international outreach is led by Olena Semanyka, who’s been photographed with a swastika flag.

National Druzhina: Azov’s street patrol organization, established in January 2018 with the aim of “restoring Ukrainian order” to the streets. The National Druzhina — whose members pledge personal loyalty to Biletsky — has been involved in pogroms against the Roma, LGBT, and other activists.

Right Sector: Loose formation of neo-Nazis and football ultras, which supplied street muscle to the 2013-2014 Maidan uprising. Later involved in lethal suppression of anti-Maidan movements in places like Odessa.

C14: Ukrainian neo-Nazi gang that receives government funding and has been responsible for some of the lethal Roma pogroms as well as anti-LGBT violence. The 14 is a reference to the Fourteen Word slogan of white supremacy. Led by Serhiy Bondar, who spoke at America House, a cultural center funded by the U.S. government.

This article was originally published on Mint Press News.

Max Blumenthal is the founder and editor of GrayzoneProject.com, the co-host of the podcast Moderate Rebels, the author of several books, and producer of full-length documentaries including the recently released Killing Gaza. Follow him on Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal.

This article was originally published on Mint Press News.