Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

I’m Told Black Folks Are Lying Low in the Face of Stephen Miller’s Crackdown

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On October 10, 2025

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In response to a post of mine at Naked Capitalism about Trump’s dispatch of National Guard troops to support ICE in Chicago, and the possibility of thing escalating beyond his control or intention, a commenter  wrote that “so many Black people are avoiding the protests entirely and are considering each antiBlack outrage from the TrumpAdmin as a provocation designed to lure them out onto the streets, which so far they have not done.”

I replied in violation of my general practice of not commenting on Black American internal politics, and wanted to share it as a full post here.

The Black folks I know are keeping their heads down and have generally been on full alert since it became clear Trump would be re-elected.

Black folks know which citizens’ heads end up on the chopping block in this country. Every. Single. Time.

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It’s obvious the feckless Democrats (both centrist and progressive) are not allies to be counted on in a crunch.

I also hope it’s obvious that what the late Glen Ford of The Black Agenda Report called the “Black Misleadership Class” cannot be trusted one bit.

The twinned fates of the martyrs of Ferguson and the grifters of the official BLM orgs are so sick and sad.

Many of the best, bravest, and most selfless organizers of resistance came to tragic, mysterious (yet obvious) ends at the hands of we all know who.

Meanwhile, the loudmouths, the leeches, the grifters stole and squandered millions of dollars and even more social capital.

This Medium essay addresses many of the flaws of the ideology driving “the movement” that should have been obvious as soon as bullshit artists like Robin “White Fragility” DiAngelo were “centered.” From Martin X:

I watch a narrative war drive the written legacy of the Black Lives Matter movement. On one side: celebrity activists maximizing their visibility through self-aggrandizing books, articles, and speaking engagements. On the other: conservative commentators claiming the movement pushed a divisive Marxist agenda, among other things. When America’s political right wing exposed the BLM’s organization’s financial mismanagement, I noticed the very same individuals who once built careers advancing the movement’s organizing theory began to write vague criticisms of identity politics and the financial fallout it produced. Despite many, like myself, being well aware of these issues long before conservatives got involved, few activists dared to challenge the core theory itself or the people who institutionalized it.

This came at a cost that I find myself working through. When a theory becomes both the foundation of racial progress while being immune to critique, it reveals a flaw in the frameworks we desperately rely on to change society for the better. We lose the ability to evaluate strategies by their effectiveness, causing promising analyses, such as identity politics, to become a shield for harmful ideas.

The relentless, racist, revisionist history of the protests has become the sole narrative of what happened when a large majority of Americans stood up together in outrage at an endless series of racist murders committed with impunity by police and were met with agents provocateurs, police riots, systematic misreporting of events in the media, disorganization, fools, looters, and indifferent to hostile politicians of both parties.

Never forget that Obama single-handedly stopped the NBA walkout.

Clyburn and Obama rigged the 2020 primary for Biden and then kept quiet when AIPAC systematically kept out or took out the best young Black leaders in bought election after bought election. How is Nina Turner not in Congress? Cori Bush? Jamal Bowman? How is Richie Torres in? Hakeem Jeffries?

The Democrats were so dazzling and efficient at preventing a competitive 2024 primary, despite 2/3 of their voters not wanting Biden to run for re-election, but Obama and Pelosi couldn’t manage to stop Kamala Harris from seizing the nomination and pissing away $1.5 billion in 15 weeks in a campaign that completed the discrediting of establishment Democrats.

And now here we are, being fed into the wood chipper, divided we fall.

The endless cynical abuse of identity politics in the service of the status quo helped Trump win in 2024 as much as Facebook or CNN helped him in 2016.

It’s all so sick and heartbreaking.

I think many of us have a feel for just how crushed the Reconstruction era interracial alliance of southern populists must have felt by 1900, after fighting so hard and coming so close and losing so badly, except we didn’t accomplish a fraction of what they did in their era.

I fear we may be crushed even more thoroughly, if more subtly, via mind control, drugs, diabesity, and despair.

And if necessary, they’ll resort to guns and camps and bombs.

But I don’t think the American right is any more on top of its game than the left.

The blender is going to spit up unexpected outcomes, and I fear we’re all going to regret what happens by the time the dust settles.

 

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18 Comments

  1. Jan Wiklund

    It’s quite possibly right, but incriminations flung in all directions make resistance weaker. Remember, for example, the communist accusations of “social fascism” directed at social democrats in early 30s Germany. All cooperation became impossible and they both ended in concentration camps.

    Yes, I know, the German social democrats had behaved in the most cowardly way imaginable, but everyone knew. There was no need to rub their faces with it.

    The essential is that the “best, bravest, and most selfless organizers” keep the initiative and don’t pass it over to “the loudmouths, the leeches, the grifters”. If they do keep it, there is not much to win from calling them ugly names. If they don’t, there is not much need either.

    North-Atlantic anti-bourgeois opposition is too moralist, too condemning, too guilt-dealing, and too little strategic. That’s why they are where they are. Never in 200 years the rulers have behaved more idiotic and more irresponsible than today – but where are those that should have replaced them?

  2.

    Nat Wilson Turner

    @Jan Wiklund re: “The essential is that the ‘best, bravest, and most selfless organizers’ keep the initiative and don’t pass it over to ‘the loudmouths, the leeches, the grifters’. ”

    I should have quoted from this Aurelian essay in the piece, which explains the failure of BLM and Occupy brilliantly and also “the Resistance” etc:

    Aurelian is referencing the most recent protests in France as well as the yellow vest protests:

    “the fundamental problem faced by ordinary people today trying to influence those in power. A minimum degree of consensus and organisation is necessary if anything is to be achieved, but consensus and organisation don’t just appear magically: they have to be developed and practised. In the past, opposition political parties and trades unions often provided the basis of this organisation: as far as anyone can see, Mélenchon and other political figures primarily used last week’s protests to further their own interests. For all that the Internet was supposed to bring people together (and the Gilets jaunes which we’ll get to in moment could not have happened without it) the Internet doesn’t promote consensus or organisation automatically: indeed, there’s some evidence that it’s a divisive force in such cases.

    “It’s worth recalling how this kind of thing would once have been organised, say in the 80s or 90s. Protests in those days were articulated around two main pillars: organisations and community. Last week’s protests would have been organised by the trades unions and the Socialist or Communist parties (OK, often in competition with each other) and would have been professionally organised, with synchronised demonstrations, massive rallies addressed by political leaders, banners, flags, hand-outs and articulated demands with lots of media coverage. It might not have achieved an enormous amount in the end, and there would certainly have been a performative element, but it would not have been damp squib like last week’s episode.

    One little-noticed characteristic of such marches and rallies was the high degree of organisational control. For example, the political parties and trades unions would have had their own security teams controlling the event. As well as the usual marshalling, they would be on the alert for attempts at infiltration by extremists, or stupid or aggressive behaviour by the marchers. By convention, the police left control and security of the marches to these people, who were generally robust individuals who had done military service and were trained in unarmed combat. With the Gilets jaunes, all this had disappeared. The GJ had no central organisation, no membership, and no way of controlling access to their events. The result was that these events were quite rapidly infiltrated by all sorts of activists of different political persuasions, often looking for a fight, as well as thieves and looters. The effect of this was to give the protests an undeserved reputation for violence and destruction and so reduce public support.”

    The problems faced by 21st century resistance efforts are deeply structural. IMO they predate the Internet and were caused by mass media, especially television and suburban car culture.

    The world of “Bowling Alone” is far removed from the America chronicled by de Tocqueville.

    If somehow the internet had come along in a pre-TV world I expect it would have hyper-charged already robust organizations and organizing abilities, as is it attempted to fill an empty stomach with the sugar rush of online fundraising and flash mobs.

    But also the worthless centrists need to be called out or they will remain in power. They’re currently destroying Katie Porter over a stupid spat at an interview, just as they destroyed Howard Dean in 2003 over yelling into a microphone.

    These failures and betrayals must be called out or they will never stop.

  3. someofparts

    So let’s look at it this way – when this rotting carcass of an alleged country is finally defeated, guess who will be around to pick up the pieces and build the future? I don’t know where you live, but in my town if they come for my black neighbors, the white people I know are gonna stand beside them.

    Decades ago I walked out on a white boss for being abusive to my black supervisor. When I came by a couple of days later to pick up my last check everyone was jubilant when they saw me. Turns out that in my unexpected absence, that abusive white boss had to sit there and try to do my job for a day – with no success, to the great amusement of my colleagues. Nobody would tell him what I did because everybody was having too much fun watching that piece of garbage try to do one of our jobs for even an hour.

    Don’t worry about us. We know how to do the work and we damn well know how to have each others backs. Maybe worry about yourselves with your gas guzzling vehicles and your inflated salaries from your show jobs.

  4. different clue

    Here is an example of the kind of people that Charlie Kirk represented, mobilized and stood for. Here is an example of why Black America is not revering the memory of the Sainted Charlie Kirk. ( Said lack-of-reverence which is inspiring various Young Kirkoids to invade HBCUs and attempt to invade Black Churches, to get Black people onto the streets and fighting so that the Young Kirkoids and the New Klux Klan ( MAGA) can have their race war. And so far Black America is not falling for it).

    ” Vivek Ramaswamy goes to a Turning Point USA event in Ohio and quickly finds out that he is not on the team. ”
    https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1o32s24/vivek_ramaswamy_goes_to_a_turning_point_usa_event/

    Not as White as you thought, eh Mr. Ramaswamy?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOifa1WrOnQ

  5. Mark Level

    Thank you very much for this post. It is not my place to say what “black people” should do during this time, I cannot know because I will never face the level of hate and violence they have endured in this country for centuries.

    Yes, the “left” is totally phony, the NYC DSA promised that if Mamdani wins, their biggest priority will be opening up free medical care in NYC for people who want to gender-transition, NOT rebuilding public housing or starting community gardens, or divesting from Israel, or reining in violent police, or anything else that will help the majority of people, black, right or any other color on the spectrum.

    I am afraid to click on most of your links, because I know they will be well-sourced and show what deepest Circles of Hell are now being planned for most USians apart from the 0.1%. The electoral whores in the Dimmie party are not on the side of ordinary people, they have as much contempt for them as an Elon Musk does. Bullying PMC monsters like Katie Porter and Amy KlobberChair do not want a better world, and when the “left” is led by the Pritzker family Nepo-babies, Richie Torres, Hakeem Jeffries, etc. nobody with any intelligence sees things getting better.

    The Right at least has a Vision and tries to change things, but always for the worst. Thus with the Dimmie capitulations (endless) to the Bad Cop Daddies, the US Overton window always moves toward fascism and oligarchy, and more police/military brutality and violence.

    I personally have no problem with people who don’t match their assigned gender trying to transition to who they know they are (once they reach an age of consent that is rational, say 16 at the lowest, arguably 18 since ‘Muricans are so stupidly socially conservative, certainly not 21.) One would assume those DSA people are at least well-read, so how pathetic that they decide to promote a niche issue like gender transitioning over and before some old-fashioned idea like “the greatest good for the greatest #”, something I’d imagine a few of them heard of in the fusty old past when there were actual Left Revolutionaries and not PC lickspittles.

    The only thing that will save the American populace is the incompetence of the Rulers. If people now under 35 survive and start taking political control in 10-15 years, there may be hope (until Climate Change crests). By then, the US will likely be at the material level of a Ukraine or Bangladesh, so it will be a long climb uphill if it ever even starts . . . I’m glad I was born before the US became a fascist Hellscape, sad for everyone who has been betrayed by my Boomer Cohort, a bunch of delusional idiots who let Neoliberal ideology, Reagan and Endless Wars take over as the future. Who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind. The whirlwind is here, and the just will suffer more than the unjust, but it won’t end well for anyone who doesn’t escape to the Oligarchs New Zealand bomb shelters or yachts.

  6. NR

    Jan Wiklund:

    “North-Atlantic anti-bourgeois opposition is too moralist, too condemning, too guilt-dealing, and too little strategic. That’s why they are where they are. ”

    The left looks for apostates while the right looks for allies. I wish that wasn’t true, but it is.

  7. Daniil Adamov

    “Many of the best, bravest, and most selfless organizers of resistance came to tragic, mysterious (yet obvious) ends at the hands of we all know who.”

    Not being an American, I don’t know who, and the links provide no answers. The FBI? The police? The KKK and similar groups? All of the above acting in tandem? I’d buy it (hell of a thing, this democracy of yours) – but I don’t know.

  8. Daniil Adamov

    “It’s quite possibly right, but incriminations flung in all directions make resistance weaker. Remember, for example, the communist accusations of “social fascism” directed at social democrats in early 30s Germany. All cooperation became impossible and they both ended in concentration camps.”

    I don’t think cooperation was impossible because of the incriminations. It was because the Sozis had good reasons to expect the communists to betray and kill them if they worked together against the Nazis (see how communists treated their left-wing allies in Russia and Spain), and the communists had every reason to expect the same from the Sozis (who, after all, already did that to them in the past in Germany). So both decided letting Hitler run around for a bit before he inevitably crashed and paved the way to either a safer Sozi reelection or a guaranteed communist revolution was the safer bet. It wasn’t because of hurt feelings, it was because of their realistic assessments of each other (and generally somewhat less accurate assessments of Hitler). The politics of Weimar Germany were significantly different from those of modern America.

  9.

    Nat Wilson Turner

    @Daniil Adamov re: “we all know who” — I’d say the murderous forces of racist oppression. Call them night riders or KKK or cops or what you will but they’re always the #1 suspect in the mysterious death of a Black activist.

  10. different clue

    I personally suspect that the local BLM Ferguson activists were quietly assassinated by police or other law enforcement, or by law-enforcement connected and sheltered assassins with extensive law enforcement experience.

    Behold how every “suicide” scene left behind an amazing presence of absolutely zero clues and evidence. Almost as if conducted by masters of knowing what evidence is and how to pre-remove it before Barney Fife arrives to investigate.

    In a parallel but unrelated case, at least one Boeing whistleblower was expertly suicided by highly talented masters of the craft who left behind zero clues.

    There are expert assassinologists and suicide-engineers all around us. Just ask Jeffrey Epstein. Oh wait, you can’t. He was suicided by yet more expert suicide-design engineers in his cell.

  11. different clue

    I recently read about and saw the image of what is supposed to be a Black baby under arrest and being zip-tied by ICE in Chicago. I assume lots of people have. I just took it for granted that this was real.

    But I have just recently seen a Black American content-creator’s video warning her Black audience once again to NOT show up to ANY kind of protest or march under ANY conditions What So Ever. And she presents what she says is an analysis of that “photo” which to her indicates that the “photo” in question is an engineered fake designed to anger Black people into hitting the streets. She claims there never was any such “baby under arrest” in reality and it was a fake engineered to bait and provoke Black people.

    Given various levels of government’s desperate desire to get Black people outside in large numbers where they can be mass-beaten, mass-gassed, mass-arrested and maybe mass-machine-gunned in order to get a Race War started enough to engineer a pretext for the TrumpAdmin to declare nationwide Martial Law; might her theory and analysis deserve some careful consideration? Is there a way for forensic photograph analysts to look at that photograph and determine: is it Real or is it Memorex?

    ” THEY are TRICKING black people to do this! PLEASE dont Do it & PROTECT your energy if you can.WATCH. ”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sat0mkZu2_I

  12. different clue

    I don’t have my own computer. I am computer face-time limited to computers at work when I am “off the clock” or the computers at the public library. So I don’t have all the time I wish I did to leave the most highly organized deeply-sourced or at least ” receipts brought” comments that I wish I could. I still hope to leave one such comment here offering various things I have found or seen relevant to this subject.

    In the briefestly-commenting meantime, here is another Black-Content-Creator/Aggregator’s comment describing in detail why ” BLACK PEOPLE SILENCE IS CONFUSING THE WORLD AND HERE IS WHY THEY CHOOSE TO KEEP SILENT no reaction ” . It is a lot broader and deeper than just ‘fear of a Stephen Miller’. The little talks in this aggregation-video explain how various other grouploads of people reached out and deSTROYED solidarity with Black America and why Black America has chosen to accept the fact that that solidarity has been deSTROYED and how Black America will proceed moving forward based on that basic fact.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6o2-JiGEm0

  13.

    Nat Wilson Turner

    @different clue thanks so much for sharing these comments.

    And yes by all means keep your heads down. Stephen Miller is lying in wait and the lynchings await.

    The rest of this this is aimed at some of the people in the 2nd video: for fuck’s sake, not voting for a pro-genocidal fraud like Kamala doesn’t constitute betraying Black people.

    Everyone has to hold themselves to account and be worthy of respect.

    Kamala betrayed everyone, white, black, brown, everybody.

    If you’re going to die on a hill, pick one that isn’t rep’d by a completely useless drug addled fake who was just fine with committing genocide.

  14. different clue

    @ Nat Wilson Turner,

    Thank you for the kind words. There is more to be offered on this subject, but not in a slap-dash comment-after-comment-after-comment way. And for a little while, I am going to point my brain in other directions.

    How did I even get started watching Black Content Creator videos? I think I remember it starting this way . . . with an accidental video-sighting on Reddit posted just before the first No Kings Protest events were scheduled to happen. It was titled : ” The Ancestors Have Spoken”. I got the vague feeling that this was an early warning of something very long-term and significant beginning but I did not pre-know how and why in detail. I don’t know if I will be able to find that very self-same particular video but there are quite a view different versions of it by different people.

    https://www.tiktok.com/@theejoebraxton/video/7485543786286828846

    https://www.tiktok.com/@phillip1814_/video/7486217883329105183

    ” 🗣 The Ancestors Have Spoken..”Sitcho Blac ahh Down” We Dont Got Not One Dog In that Fight✊️✊️✊️ #viralreel2025 #TruthMatters #APRIL5TH #April5″
    https://www.facebook.com/CWASH3474/videos/990541749350244/

    ( In trying to find that video to present it here again, I stumble apond this video with a very similar title . . . a genteel semi-elderly Black lady journalist commenting upon the occasion of the Historic Nottaway Plantation burning down in Iberville Parish, Louisiana titled: ” 🔥 THE ANCESTORS HAVE SPOKEN — BUT WHAT ARE THEY SAYING? 🔥”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0aT7RPD5lI )

    And that led me to a Reese Waters video, and that led me to a whole genre of videos by African repackagers of American created content. The nice thing about those repackagers is that they don’t take little snips. They repackage and run the entire segment as created by the American content creator to begin with. And it is possible to find You Tube or TikTok dump heaps of their videos. The problem is, neither You Tube nor TikTok offers any titles, indexes, dates of when they were made, or anything. So only tens or hundreds of hours of iron-butt sitting and viewing would reveal which video is what. The best I could do is try to remember and re-find the African repackagers’ videos containing re-shown American content relevant to one or another aspect of this whole area.

    Anyway, I started watching these videos in the spirit of how I used to watch CBC News back when my cable company provided it. Not just a “different take” on the news I was already getting, but a whole other different bunch of different news. And these videos offer a whole bunch of other different news from Black America (which is a whole “country within the country”) about itself, which the MSM doesn’t even cover at all.

    But for now I will offer comments about entirely unrelated altogether different things as time and energy permit.

  15.

    Nat Wilson Turner

    @different clue I’ve been enjoying the Af-Am reaction video genre for a while but mostly people reacting to music videos. Thanks for sharing, very interesting insights and perspective.

  16. different clue

    Here is another such post featuring an American content-creator named Ron ” The Villain” Bishop commenting on Vivek Ramaswamy’s ongoing efforts to keep breaking White. Ron Bishop’s own re-broadcast post is bracketed between timepoints 2:44 and
    8: 56. I offer this mainly for the high-value ( in my opinion) of Ron Bishop’s contribution, and secondarily because I may offer more Ron Bishop re-videocasts from time to time.
    ” INDIAN American Man Gets His Wake Up Call AGAIN & Left Him In Regret As B🖤 Pe0ple Told Him ”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Yf0odvxB2s

    The other contributors are high-value enough that the whole ” featured American Black content” part of the podcast is well-worth watching as well, if one has the patience for it.

  17. different clue

    Thomas ” The Villain” Bishop is getting impatient. ( Thomas, not Ron . . . my memory failure). Just a sample of his flavor and approach when impatient, if not important enough to be published, that is fine.

    ” W🤍 Man Is Having Emotional Meltdown As B🖤 People Refused To Support Their KLANSMEN”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULt05PTAlpM

    Thomas Bishop’s part is from timepoint 2: 56 through timepoint 6:33. ( And the PostHost Cinmanya sped up the Thomas Bishop segment kind of way up. Why? To save time so as to stuff in more sample re-posts? Maybe.)

    Now, I don’t know how these things work on You Tube or TikTok or Instagram or wherever. Do various content creators actually post their comments and rebuttal comments to eachother’s venues or email addresses? Sometimes? Always? Never?

  18. different clue

    There is a Mexican Indiandigenous-descended podcaster living in San Francisco named Ricardo Ignacio. He very recently offered his own thoughts on why so many Latinos voted for Trump.

    To synopsize briefestly, most Latinos are self-hating self-racists who wish they were White and who wish to advance their people towards Whiteness. He says this is the basic social-cultural fact throughout most the White ( Spanish) Settler Colonialist societies and countries of Latin America. He invites us to note how many ICE agents are Latino their own selves and how they brutalize fellow Latinos because they hate their fellow Latinos for reminding them of how Latino they themselves are. He claims that they join ICE precisely beCAUSE they hate other Latinos as an extension of hating themselves , and that if ICE had been set up to persecute illegal Europeans in America, the Latino agents would not join ICE because illegal Europeans are not the people that Latinos for Trump hate. It is other Latinos that Latinos for Trump hate.

    Here is the link.
    ” Latinos For Trump ”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4R7nOFvhOE

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