The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host Mansa Musa. In this country, in the United States of America. If we was to put alongside of Germany or any other fastest totalitarian government, it would not be no difference in comparison in this country. Today, we find ourselves in a place where we’re in the constant police, in the form of what they call ICE or any other police force. We find ourselves in a situation where all the institutions that’s in this country right now is being dismantled to the point where people don’t have no jobs, people can’t afford medical people are being forced into homelessness. In the face of all this, we find ourselves at the crossroad of making analysis of what this is and how do we go forward. Joining me today is a Dylan Rodriguez, professor of Media and Culture Studies and UC Riverside and one of the co-founders of the Abolition Organization, Critical Resistance. Welcome to Rattling the Bars, Dylan.

Dylan Rodriguez:

Right on. Thank you. I appreciate you having me. Just a heads up, I’m also, I’m a professor in the Department of Black Study in addition to media cultural studies, very proudly

Mansa Musa:

Well being. Introduce yourself to the, I gave him a brief bow. Tell him about your boots on the ground.

Dylan Rodriguez:

Yes, yes. The least important thing about me is that I’m employed as a distinguished professor at University of California Riverside. I’m in the Department of Black Study and the Department of Media Cultural Study Studies, and I’m co-director of something called the Center for Ideas in Society. Those are again, the boring parts of who I am. More importantly, as Mansa knows, as the late Great Eddie Conway knows, as Cam Granadino and others over at Real News know I have been directly involved in various ways with radical liberation, abolitionists projects, experiments, organizations, and struggles for about 30 years now. And I think very proudly and judiciously. I also participate in various ways with autonomous projects, projects that are under the radar, projects that don’t fit within traditional descriptions of social justice movements in grassroots. So I feel like I’m kind of getting involved wherever I can possibly make some contributions, including today’s discussion

Mansa Musa:

And against that backdrop that we want to thank you for coming on because like I said earlier, this is conversation we are having today is important in educating our artists on how to look at what’s going on in the world today and be able to make an informed decision on where they want to be at in terms of what they want to do. Because I think the saying, if they come for me in the morning, going to come for you at night, it’s happening now. They’re dragging people out under our species of being criminals. But as both me and the criminal element is don’t operate above ground, the criminal element, once they see they can’t operate with impunity, then they go underground. And so the people, they grab the people that put their paperwork in to get citizenship, but they just rounded them up. So that being said, let’s talk about your book wrote this book called White Reconstruction Domestic Warfare, and the Logic of Genocide in 2020, what is white reconstruction and its fundamental characteristic, domestic warfare and hemispheric Congress.

Dylan Rodriguez:

Yeah, I appreciate that. So I wrote this book in 2020, and I’ll tell you that the main purpose of it was to challenge the narrative first of all, of an oncoming supposedly post-racial United States, which was folks can remember that was prevalent through the late two thousands into the 2000 tens. So the book started with that, but then it evolved into a broader analysis of what most people in both university settings and in regular old kitchen settings, everyday organizational settings, neighborhood settings, often called the post civil rights period. So the period following the federal legislation, federal Civil Rights Act. So really post 1964. So I’ve never really had patience with that label, with the notion of a post-Civil rights moment, as if after the federal government inscribes formal versions, liberal versions of civil rights into the law, that it marks a kind of period in which there’s an abrupt departure from anti-black apartheid towards something which might still be rough but is better.

So the idea of white reconstruction tries to identify and think historically about how it is that state government and everyday cultural forms of reform have always been part of the genocidal anti-black US nation building project. So reform is always the ways that anti-black and colonial warfare advance, expand, get more sophisticated and sometimes even recruit people who are from the very same geographies and populations that are targeted by domestic warfare to participate in it. Right? So you think about, and I’ll pause after this, but you think about for example, the two officers, the two ice officers that were apparently culpable for killing Alex Preti, both Latino men from south Texas, not a coincidence. In fact, such a thing is so common now that it almost goes without comment and this is purposeful. This is how the notion of white reconstruction works. That you have the classically anti-black and white supremacist arms of the police state, the war making police state of the everyday US nation state that have expanded and reformed by the way of operationalizing what the right wing now disavows as DEI, right?

There’s a reason why there’s so many people, so-called people of color, non-white people in organizations like ICE in organizations like the LA Police Department, the Riverside Police Department, et cetera. It’s purposeful. It is part of what I’m calling this reconstruction period. So this is historically continuous. The logic of civilizational warfare since its very inception has always been about reform, adjustment, adaptation, revitalization, and it takes the shape a lot of times of bringing the targets of warfare into the operations of warfare sometimes against their own people, against their own neighborhoods. So that’s in shorthand, that’s what I’m thinking about.

Mansa Musa:

And George say if he was hard pressed to describe fascism, he would say it would be called would say reform. And to your point, we had a situation with defund police, right? So what did the fastest do? They say, okay, we are going to take this narrative and we are going reform from the police. What we going to do? We going to create cop city. So we going attract everybody and anybody because this ain’t about color. This is about you being robotic. So we’re going to track and everybody in this training, we’re going to give ’em astronomical money for being a part of this process. Once you say, I’m going to give you $75,000 signing bonus and I’m going to give you a $55 an hour for working the benefits of the yin yang, then I don’t care who you are. If you get to pass a G, you got a GED or you got an eighth grade certificate, you get the job. So to your point, it’s not about racialization, it’s more about the fascism. But what is project civilization?

Dylan Rodriguez:

So building on what you just said, by the way, the entire book in fundamental ways is theoretically and politically based on George Jackson’s work. So when George Jackson develops what thankfully people are now coming, seemingly coming back to and really staying with in a deep way, which is his theorization of fascism as part of the everyday fabric of the United States,

In my view, what he’s doing at the time, he’s writing it as a political captive, as a gorilla fighter who’s a captive of the United States. What he’s thinking about at that moment is the shape that the hemispheric project of civilization, the conquest and chattel project of civilization is taking. And here there is an indispensable black radical scholar, thinker, philosopher, and artist named Sylvia Winter, who has also simultaneous with George Jackson contributed really, I’m trying to contribute to their work more than anything else. Actually, I’m mis it. So Sylvia Winter thinks about civilization through the terms of industrial progress. So when we talk about progressives, we need to be skeptical of that, okay? Because the notion of progress is in Sylvia Winter’s terms, it’s about industrial progress and we know who it is that gets sacrificed for that. We know which populations and places are sacrificed for the sake of what she calls techno industrial progress. And she links it to what she identifies as national racial manifest destiny.

Mansa Musa:

Okay?

Dylan Rodriguez:

And what’s crucial about this is that Sylvia Winter teaches us that civilization meaning national racial manifest destiny never had an end date. So when they teach us in high school US history that the manifest destiny period was this year to this year and then things shifted into modernity or whatever else, however else they want to periodize in our history books.

What we need to understand is that no, what you have is maybe a different branding, a different rhetoric that accompanies what continues as the manifest destiny project. The other thing I’ll say about civilization, especially in this moment where the intensification of Israeli and United States nakba against the Palestinian people and against Palestinian existence, has in a deeply overdue way, attracted a global liberal consensus that calls a genocide and is catalyzing these calls for humanitarian efforts. Again, we need to be skeptical as soon as a liberal consensus starts naming a particular form of violence genocide. Number one, you need to ask questions about, okay, so why are they doing it now? Number two are the people who are the targets of what the liberal consensus is calling genocide? Do they call it that?

Palestinians will call it that only for the sake of being legible to outside audiences. Palestinians have a specific term for it, which can be sort of translated actually. And people called knock by. It means that this atrocity displacement evisceration has been ongoing for about 80 years is what they say. Okay? That’s the point. Ever since the creation of the state of Israel, the creation of the state of Israel is the atrocity, both in the kind of political sense, but also in terms of the forms of displacement and suffering that it really necessitates to be put on Palestinian existence. Civilization. You want to talk about civilization, that’s civilization. So the response response to what the liberal consensus calls Israeli genocide, which is a humanitarian response. My point is this, the humanitarian response, the reformist humanitarian response is also central to what we’re calling civilization. They want to ivil Israel’s violence by telling them, y’all cut it out, slow it down, engage in the traditional forms of respectable genocidal violence against Palestinian people, and let’s bring in humanitarian aid. This is all part of civilization. It’s the state of permanent war,

Mansa Musa:

Right? And to your point, like you say, when they started defining, giving definitions to what the Palestinians see is the systematic eradication of their people from the inception of Israel, to your point, and I think people need to understand that because it’s the larger mouse disease, and I think Haki Mahi and his book, Black Man Obsolete and something in different say the power to Define, he came up with that saying, once you define something, then it gives the meaning that you define it. That’s what it becomes. And he was talking about in the same context that how they define poverty and things of this nature in the United States, he was making a comparison like this is a sanitized version of making us become extinct, but talk about how does domestic world inform us international relationship? How do that play into this narrative?

Dylan Rodriguez:

What I always think about in that, when that question comes up, meaning what is the relation between basically international global war and us so-called international relations, and what you and I in this conversation are calling domestic warfare or really the kind of hemispheric civilization manifest destiny project. It’s often been the case that the understanding of how these two different theaters of warfare are related. It usually takes some version of two different frameworks. One is that they’re not that closely related, mostly because there tends to be a generalized misrecognition of the everyday state terror that is focused on specific populations in the United States, meaning black people, incarcerated people, undocumented people, unhoused people, et cetera. There’s a misrecognition of those forms of state terror as something other than warfare. Those things tend to be seen as either justified. There’s a lot of people who just see those things as justified as okay, as necessary for law and order. And then you have a kind of continuum of positions that in which the other end of it is a position that understands those forms of terror and suffering as flaws in the system

That can be corrected. That’s the general social justice type consensus. Is that right? Even if people use radical and revolutionary and black liberationist and anti-colonial decolonizing language, you need to have a good analysis that cuts through the superficial performative radicalism that people will sometimes articulate, especially in public settings when they’re grandstanding. You’d be able to cut through that and look at what is the actual vision of not what is to be done, but what the United States is. So usually people don’t even identify the condition of United States as a state of perpetual domestic war. They don’t.

And then when you and I talk about it here, and we start from that as both a premise and as an ongoing analysis. In other words mean you’re citing, you’re citing Haki ma de booty, I’m citing Sylvia Winter and George Jackson. These are thinkers who teach us that the analysis of what we’re temporarily calling domestic war. It’s an ongoing perpetual foundational fabric of both the hemisphere of the Americas and of the United States nation state in particular. So if we move from our shared analysis, which is that this is a state of perpetual targeted domestic war, then it is inseparable it is it a reciprocal relationship with whatever we want to call us international relations or foreign policy or whatever other terms you want to use. And it also disrupts the idea that there’s a kind of one way relationship between those things because oftentimes the most you’re going to get from certain versions of liberal and progressive and social justice discourses, including academic and activist ones, is the notion that when the US engages in different forms of terror outside the United States, in conditions of either warfare, whether it’s called the war on terrorism or some other form of warfare,

That those forms of atrocities somehow snake their way back into the United States and get imposed on people in the US and that that’s how it works. So it can work like that. But I think the point of your question is that it forces us to think about how it’s a reciprocal relationship, meaning the atrocities and terror and warfare that are committed on a regular everyday basis in the construction and the defense of the US nation state as such. So looking at the forms of violence exerted on say, black and brown, young people in south side Chicago, in south central LA in Riverside, California where I live, et cetera, Baltimore, Maryland, those forms of violence, those actually form a blueprint for all the other forms of counterinsurgency warfare that the US military will also engage in other parts of the planet, right? From El Salvador to Gaza. So that’s the point. These things are reciprocal and we have to understand warfare is a totality. It doesn’t just stop because of a particular border, right? It’s a technology

Mansa Musa:

And for anyone to think otherwise that border line on normalcy because we recognize that, okay, you take a position, you say in Venezuela, they running drugs to this country in small speedboats and they bring them in. So your first VO is to get people to believe that what you’re doing at this juncture is to stop drugs from coming to this country. The ultimate goal was to invade Venezuela and replace the elected president for cations corporate America before the purpose of the ice analysis. We would be crazy to think that it’s no connection between that and them rounding people up in the United States under the pretense that they’re undocumented, but no, they’re not saying undocumented, they’re saying criminal. So they changed. They define them as such, which goes back to your early point, which makes people say, well, we take a poll, and the polls say that everybody think that people that’s in this country that create crime should be removed in the civilization context in the domestic war. This whole narrative is that we’re going to do what we want. We’re going to do the impunity. Only thing we are doing is we keep misinformation prevalent in order to get people to be ins sensitized to certain behaviors. It’s based on what the media tell us, how we should be outraged versus us having a sensitivity towards saying, this ain’t right. What’s going on in this country ain’t right.

Dylan Rodriguez:

You make an important point by talking about how the current versions of state violence are operating. First of all, they’re operating from a broad sense of impunity where it’s beyond just a police sense of impunity. The police have always had a sense of impunity. That’s why they’re the police. That’s why you always got to talk about how the police come from the slave patrols. Impunity is hardwired into the concept of police in the modern United States. There will be no consequences for what you do to enslaved people. And then in the apartheid context to the segregated black population, so impunity, now it’s inflated. And to add to that, it’s no accident. It’s not scandalous, it’s not conspiratorial in a kind of exotic conspiracy theory way. It’s in the Project 2025 document.

People who watch, listen, and read this conversation, people need to go and get their free download because the right wingers make it available to the Heritage Foundation makes it free all the time, every time it does one of these, it makes it free to download. Go read the first few pages of Project 2025, which is the plan for what the Republican Party and the right wing were going to do as soon as Trump took office after the 2024 election, and they’ve been doing this every four years, the Heritage Foundation think tank, but Project 2025 has it written in plain old language that I would say somebody with third, fourth, fifth grade reading level can process it. And I mean that seriously, because I know there’s a people out there who might have that love that. So it’s not hyperspecialized language, but they make it really plain in this planning document that one of the things that they intend to do after the second Trump administration takes office is to push the force of the state so far beyond any assumed boundary of respectability and consent that they’re just going to stoke a kind of climate of chaotic state terror as an objective.

It’s a strategic objective. So it’s purposeful, exploding. The pretense of trying to win the consent of the citizenry is a primary strategic goal of Project 2025 to explode that. Now, the problem that we have is that especially with these midterm elections coming up in 2020 and fall 2026, is that a large element of the population who would otherwise view themselves as people on the side of some form of liberation and justice and the rest of it, a large block within that element, if not most of that element, are going to encourage us to try to seek a restoration again, a reconstruction of a less fascist normal, a version of us fascism that more resembles the preexisting version prior to the implementation of Project 2025. So that’s our problem. And the problem is how our loved ones and comrades people in our organizations communities, we, and they will get sucked into that if we’re not careful. So if we aren’t armed with a good analysis, we will get sucked right back into the machinery that gets us to call it social justice. But what it actually is, it’s a normalization of what we call perpetual warfare.

Mansa Musa:

Right? And that’s a good point because I think right here, when you see it, you see ’em setting the groundwork. One, they create the fastest, creating this narrative that the whole thing with the Republican Party, gold War was state rights. Everything about the state, state got rights, don’t interfere. Federal government intrusive. Now, the state’s not operating in the capacity they should be. They’re being hijacked by radicals. Therefore, the federal government has an obligation to insert themselves. When he was saying that, the first thing came to my mind how in Selma and Alabama and civil rights where we was calling for the federal government to come down there to protect people. So that’s the reality. But look, you wrote your book right in on the hills of George Floyd at that juncture right there, outrageous to come out like the urban area is the outrage that France phenomenon talk about when you start with internal valve, but then it come to a point where after so much oppression and oppression that at some point in time we ship our thinking and say, hold it ain’t sat next door is my problem. It’s this chunk controlling my neighborhood that’s stopping me every time I go to the store, put me up against the wall. It’s the problem. Let’s get together and deal with that. But talk about what you see now going on in terms of resistance that’s taking place in the urban Chicago, la

Dylan Rodriguez:

So mans, I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier, which is defund. Okay? So let’s think about your question in the context of the rise of what basically became the defund campaign, different versions of a defund campaign,

Taking the energy of widespread ideologically complicated, contradictory, diverse uprising, meaning insurrection against the state, insurrection against racial capitalism, insurrection against property people who are in various ways questioning the legitimacy of state power and police power, specifically who are taking what I think a liberal media was trying to compartmentalize as exceptional scandalous spectacles of anti-black death by way of breonna Taylor George Floyd, and rejecting that narrative and saying, no, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd are symptomatic. They just signify something that’s been going on for generations. They’re signify something that is foundational problem to. So you take that moment of insurgency and insurrection, and again, what you saw was a scramble from the Democratic party to philanthropic organizations to grassroots social justice groups, et cetera, religious organizations, churches, monster, et cetera, that took that energy and tried to compartmentalize it into this thing called defund, right? In other words, people were being told. So me and you would be told back during that time, y’all need to take this rebellious energy and funnel it into something constructive. Go into a dialogue with your city council. Go into a dialogue with your university administration. Go into a dialogue with your representative and your senator and start to try to bargain, argue and negotiate for a defunding for defunding of the police.

Mansa Musa:

Come on.

Dylan Rodriguez:

So one of the organizations that I was an am still part of called Cops Off Campus, we I think identified how there were serious limitations to the defund campaign. What I think we may have underestimated was the degree to which the defund campaign would hijack the energy, hijack the insurrectionist and liberationist energy from all different kinds of people. People way outside, not just university employees, professors and students, but folks who were grounded in their neighborhoods and try to pull them back into a dialogue with the state. That’s what defund meant. Okay? So when you raise this question about what happens after 2020, what you see was a scramble to try to domesticate the insurrection by bringing people into these progressive arguments, debates and dialogues with the state. And man, it’s something we often underestimate. Two things when people get brought into these dialogues with the states, such as with defund campaigns. Number one, almost always they are donating their labor, right? They’re doing that shit for free. So they’re in rooms with paid bureaucrats, including elected officials making these arguments, and they’re usually doing it when they’re off work hours, they tend to be exhausted. Or if you’re a student, right? It’s after it is between classes you’ve got, I’ve seen students get involved in these kinds of operations and they end up failing out of school for a semester.

It’s because you’re donating your labor. So that’s one thing that happens, right? So it’s like a hijacking, not just of your insurrection energy. It actually hijacks your body, your soul, your energy, your labor. The second thing that I didn’t appreciate fully, I think a lot of us didn’t appreciate fully is that when our radical energy gets pulled back into these dialogues and negotiations with the state, we also get really, really bored. Okay? It’s a boring interaction and there’s nothing more boring than interacting with state bureaucrats. They use meaningless jargon. They don’t have souls. They tell us bullshit. And then we got to argue with them about how it was bullshit, and it is actually fucking boring, right? And it took me way too long to realize that creating these forms of boredom, which are actually demoralizing, that’s my point, Mansa, right? If we are, this is what happens when people, this is what I hear from people who are incarcerated for different periods of time, is that the enforcement of boredom is actually demoralizing.

And so you think about this and you think about how post 2020, I think the state philanthropic organizations, et cetera, understood that if you can just suck all these radical and militant people into conference rooms and get involved in boring, then they will get demobilized and demoralized by boredom. So both those things happened post 2020. Now, on the other hand, what I think you’re pointing out in your movements with CAM and other folks, I think the people who have stayed committed in a militant way to some version of liberation, anti and decolonization, abolition, et cetera, have been over the last five years in an extended moment of clarity about how the state is not and will never be a source of solutions to their suffering. Let me repeat that. Okay? I think we are in a particular moment of clarity among people who are militantly and consistently committed to liberation, abolition, decolonization, anti-colonialism, et cetera, where there’s a shared increasingly common understanding that going to the state, that going to the state to solve suffering, targeted, concentrated, asymmetric suffering is never going to work because the state is invested in reproducing it.

That’s the whole notion of this white reconstruction thing. So I think what we’re seeing over this period is as part of that moment of clarity, this extended moment of clarity about the state never being a source of solutions for suffering and terror is I think the multiplication and spread of autonomous forms of organizing. So you saw this in the Stop Cop City movement. You saw different forms of autonomous groups within the Stop Cop City stroke. You saw this in the struggles around the Dakota Access Pipeline, right? You saw the above ground organizations and you saw autonomous organizations, and you saw organizations that weren’t even organizations. They were anarchist collectives or they were Liberationist Collective. They would engage in extra legal activity. There was a successful moment in Stop Cop City where one autonomous group disabled, I think they disabled a couple of the earth movers from one of the main construction companies. And that actually successfully exemplified how it’s actually not incredibly hard to undermine the terror creating infrastructures of empire. There’s a long history to this kind of thing. So what you see is a proliferation of this, and also, of course, other forms of autonomy. The thing that people have been, I think rightfully calling Mutual aid, they need to continue stressing that mutual aid is not the same thing as charity.

Our comrade, Dean Spade says this over and over again. Mutual aid is actually part of a long liberationist and anticolonial set of tools because what you do is you actually build solidarity, build political solidarity through mutual aid. Why? Because it’s mutual. So I think what we’re seeing at the same time as we identify the problems, we also see a proliferation of those forms of organizing and activity, which don’t necessarily take the shape of traditional social movements or traditional organizations,

Mansa Musa:

Right? And the audio, when we say defund, which by itself was an explosive term because now when they circled back, they circle back and the fastest circle back and say, we got issues with y’all liberal cities because y’all wanted to take money from the police in the face of, so they can always make this argument that taking money from the police is anti-police. But the thing they didn’t do, and they stayed away from what we did with the 10 point platform program police, Black Panther Party, we didn’t say defund the police, we say community control over the police. So we put the issue back where it should be at. If you going to police our neighborhood, then the community should have control over who you are and what you do in our community.