Feed Them on Your Dreams

What David Crosby left us. Plus, learning from the recent killing of a climate activist in Georgia and from the rise and stalling of the Sunrise Movement.

I am a very late member of the Baby Boom generation, born in 1962. My first musical tastes involved a membership in the Partridge Family fan club that I shared with my younger sister. But I can date precisely when I woke up to the real music of my youth and of the larger counterculture: it was sitting on a grassy field in 1973 at sleepaway camp, hearing for the first time the thrilling harmonies of Suite: Judy Blue Eyes played over the PA system and wondering, who the hell was that? From that moment forward, I became a fan of Crosby, Stills & Nash (and soon Young), and it was through them that I came to discover the whole pantheon of 1960s rock and folk music.

So I was saddened, as were many, by the news of David Crosby’s passing last Saturday at the age of 81. Reading and listening to many of the tributes and obituaries that appeared after his death, though, I’ve been struck by how little most have said about his politics. Yes, he deserves our attention for his seminal role in two great bands, the Byrds and then CSN; and forgive me, for his seminal (semenal?) role in helping singer Melissa Etheridge artificially conceive two children. His battles with drug addiction and the law also belong in any balanced appreciation of his life. But if you read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal or any number of other obituaries, you’d know more about his consumption of drugs along with his defense of menages a trois than you would about his fierce radical politics. Over the years, he poured his musical stature into unpopular causes like opposing the Iraq War in 2006, when CSNY played 33 venues (a project that was instigated mainly by Neil Young); he sang benefit concerts for causes like opposing nuclear power and weapons, for the 50th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, to fight an anti-union campaign finance initiative in California in 2012, as well as performing at Occupy Wall Street in 2011; and in 2022 he along with his old bandmates took their music off of Spotify to protest its spreading of COVID misinformation. None of that got mentioned in any of the obits I saw.

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young performing in 2006

I suppose this is old news; corporate mainstream media long ago sanded the politics off the edges of the Woodstock Generation to make it easier to sell jeans and anniversary concert tickets. But Crosby, like his former bandmate Young, never abandoned his political values. When I saw him perform a solo show at New York City’s Town Hall in 2015, between songs he ranted (perhaps a bit too long) about how the Warren Commission had covered up the truth of who killed John F. Kennedy and he lambasted America’s ever-increasing military budget. His 2019 NPR “Tiny Desk Concert” with The Lighthouse Band includes a beautiful new song, Half the Light, about letting women run the world, along with a great rendition of Joni Mitchell’s anthem Woodstock. On Twitter, where Crosby developed a whole new following, he expressed strong support for climate activist Greta Thunberg, he decried despotism, he slammed far-right Republicans, he bashed rightwing billionaires—and that was all just a sampling from his posts in the last few weeks.

For me, Crosby’s singing stands for remembering and honoring those young people who dared to change the world and shake America open by not conforming, at a minimum, or, at a maximum, by giving their lives for causes like civil rights and ending the Vietnam War. These were not small fights and it’s a shame to see them ignored, belittled or condensed into tidy little packets of pablum. Young people are always the innovators and the cannon fodders of movements for social change, then and now. I can still hear Crosby crying, “Why? How many more?” in the counterpoint to the “Four dead in Ohio” chorus of Young’s protest anthem Ohio, and know that the question is still as relevant today as it was when that song was written in 1970, days after the Kent state shootings.

When Protest Gets Deadly

Indeed, just a few days before Crosby’s death, Manuel Teran, a 26-year-old protestor trying to stop the building of a gigantic $90 million 85-acre police training facility in a forest on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia, was shot and killed by the authorities. While environmental activists have been frequently targeted for death in other countries, this marks the first time that an environmentalist has been killed by the state here in America, according to Lauren Regan of the Civil Liberties Defense Center and Keith Woodhouse, author of the book, The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism.

The circumstances of Teran’s death remain unclear. Police officials claim Teran shot first at a state trooper, who is recuperating in a hospital. But they have produced no proof of the encounter, which took place as the authorities worked to clear the forest, cutting down trees and tree houses that protestors were inhabiting to try to stave off the facility. Teran, who used they/them pronouns, was a trained medic who had previous been involved with the Tallahassee Food Not Bombs group and a participant in efforts to build housing for low income communities hit by hurricanes; both Teran’s family and friends insist they were a nonviolent person.

The fight over the training facility, which was approved in 2021 and is being built by the Atlanta Police Foundation on land previously owned and used by the city as a prison farm, has been fierce. Unfortunately, rather than showcasing a new path forward for climate activism, it seems to mainly turning into a proving ground for a new kind of criminalization of dissent. Opponents, who have been camping on the site illegally, call it “Cop City” and argue that building it will expand the city’s militarized approach to law enforcement, destroy valuable green space and continue a legacy of oppression on the land, which used to belong to the Muscogee Creek tribe. Proponents say it is needed to help boost police morale, which they claim was damaged by the 2020 George Floyd protests. But they have not explained why so much land is needed—the New York Police Department’s training academy is on a 32-acre campus; the Los Angeles facility is just 20 acres. As this CNN story notes, some of the local oligarchs who help rule Atlanta—UPS, Home Depot, Equifax and Delta—hold seats on the police foundation board; the initial funding campaign for the facility was led by the chair of Cox Enterprises, the owner of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, itself a major editorial supporter of the project. I haven’t seen much evidence that the protestors have a plan challenging or perhaps splitting that power structure beyond fervent spiritual witness. Making matters worse, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has repeatedly referred to the protestors as “domestic terrorists,” charged language that local police leaders have also echoed.

Over the last two months, a total of fourteen Defend the Forest protestors have indeed been charged as terrorists under a 2017 state law that was originally passed in the wake of the Charleston church shooting to update the state’s definition of domestic terror. Prior to that, someone who injured or killed less than ten people (as did Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter) would not have been considered a domestic terrorist. Ostensibly aimed at white nationalists, the new law is finding its first actual use targeting leftists. The police say protestors charged with domestic terrorism threw rocks at police cars, and attacked EMTs with rocks and bottles, though a review of the search warrants used to detain five people in December shows that some are accused of doing little more than fleeing an officer and causing cuts to his knee and elbow, occupying a tree house and refusing to leave, and wearing a gas mask and camouflage. It’s not at all clear how or why this qualifies as “domestic terrorism,” and indeed when the law was being debated by the Georgia legislators, opponents worried that its language was too broad and could encompass individuals who were not trying to harm people or commit terrorist acts.

Needless to say, the rightwing media has been referring to the Atlanta forest defenders as “antifa extremists” and their protests as threatening to turn the city into “another Portland.” While it is true that many of the people trying to block “Cop City” from being built come from outside the state, last I checked it was not a crime to care about protecting the environment or defending Native lands even when those places aren’t in your hometown, nor does the First Amendment say that protestors have to live in the state where they are protesting. (Of course, claiming that all activism is the fault of “outside agitators” is a very old trope of Southern reactionaries.)

One might think that the killing of a climate or social justice protestor by state authorities would garner more attention, but so far Teran’s death has been a one-day story for the national media. The same goes for the use of a domestic terrorism statute to go after run-of-the-mill protestors. That said, it’s also far from clear to me what the forest defenders of Atlanta imagine they are doing—movements that use direct action like tree-sitting and similar forms of civil disruption to block the logging of old-growth forests haven’t had much success elsewhere even as they impose huge personal costs on participants in them. On the other hand, pressure campaigns against the building of oil and gas pipelines or against fracking programs have chalked up numerous successes. But that’s because they were tied into larger strategies aimed at influencing state or national decision-makers. What’s happening in the forest outside of Atlanta seems more like yet another place-based line-in-the-sand effort than a movement with a strategy or a plan, another place where idealistic young people throw their bodies willy-nilly at the power structure hoping that their spirit and witness will somehow work wonders.

Whither Climate Activism?

Speaking of which, not having a workable strategy other than manipulating fear of climate catastrophe into acts of disruption seems to be the complaint made by Zion Lights, a former member of the UK movement Extinction Rebellion writing in the latest issue of Bari Weiss’ Free Press Substack, about the movement there. Leaving aside her extremely dubious decision to write for Anti-Woke Central, Lights raises some strong questions about the leadership and tactics of both ER and its successor organization, Just Stop Oil. Her main complaint, which is worth attending to, is that Roger Hallam, one of the founders of these movements, is adept at playing on his followers’ climate guilt and that he thrives on making ever more extreme statements and tactics the norm, at the risk of alienating many of the people they are trying to win over.

On the other hand, Lights also makes some extreme statements of her own, claiming that Extinction Rebellion is actually a cult built around Hallam (if it was, why was it so easy for her to leave), and that the more recent tactics of Just Stop Oil, which have included pouring paint on buildings and famous works of art or people gluing themselves to same, are all backfiring. That’s hardly clear from across the pond, as the drumbeat of actions has, at least in my view, managed to keep the urgency of the issue front and center.

What Lights doesn’t discuss is the same thing that the forest defenders in Atlanta haven’t articulated: how they imagine their direct action work will lead to the power to make real change. That, of course, is the challenge all climate activists face as the crisis worsens and government action lags behind what is needed to avert catastrophe. In a previous issue of The Connector, I mentioned in passing a piece by Dyanna Jaye and William Lawrence, two founders of the Sunrise Movement here in America, as offering some useful thinking on what went right and what went wrong with that effort. Now I’ve had some time to read their whole three-part series of essays and want to urge you to do the same.

Why? Because we have to learn, quickly, how to re-elevate and keep climate and decarbonization at the top tier of government and societal priorities, and the recent past can be a helpful guide to the near future. Here are the key takeaways offered by Jaye and Lawrence:

First, Sunrise’s strategy grew out of a previous period of episodic and place-based climate activism – the 2014 People’s Climate March, the 2015 Paris climate summit, and the 2016 Standing Rock anti-pipeline movement – that had drawn thousands of youthful participants but that hadn’t converted a surplus passion to very much power. As Lawrence writes in the first installment, “We had very little power, and we needed a lot of it, quickly. We did have a confirmed network of young people who were terrified of climate change and furious that nothing was being done about it, and we knew that there were more out there. And in spite of some evidence to the contrary, we decided to take a gamble on the near-term political power of this constituency.”

He notes that this was a risk because college students are an unsteady base at best, but notes rightly that “Unlike prior efforts, young people, through Sunrise, were able to place climate change near the top of the national political priority list, and reorient the conversation about climate solutions among the public and at the highest levels of government around a new lodestar — the Green New Deal.”

How did they create power? By smartly using direct action to create a sense of urgency, aligning themselves with the then-rising progressive wing of the Democratic party, and committing to multi-racial cross-class coalition building. And, like other broad populist movements, by inventing a big goal – the Green New Deal – and keeping the specifics of that goal ambiguous, the better to allow more people to attach themselves to it. Between 2018 and 2020, Sunrise boomed, buoyed by videogenic birddogging tactics (remember the middle school kids who got a backfiring lecture from Senator Dianne Feinstein?) and a bold occupation of incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, in partnership with newly elected progressive lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“In the days following the Pelosi sit-in and Green New Deal introduction, our phones were constantly buzzing,” Jaye and Lawrence write in their second installment. “Thousands of articles were written and everybody wanted to get involved. Our training in Momentum and distributed organizing kicked in, and we pulled together several escalating cycles of action in the ensuing weeks. We grew from 200 activists (which represented nearly our entire active leadership at the time) in Pelosi’s office, to over 100 local actions in dozens of states a week after that, to a second wave of DC office sit-ins with 1,500 people in December. Before November 2018, you could count Sunrise’s hubs on your fingers and toes; by spring 2019 they numbered in the hundreds.”

This strength, however, was also a weakness, Lawrence argues (back in part one, which he wrote on his own without Jaye’s byline). Especially once forward motion got harder. The nearly simultaneous end of Bernie Sanders’ presidential primary bid and the COVID shutdown in March 2020 stopped Sunrise in its tracks; from that point forward the organization struggled to sustain its momentum. Lawrence writes, “One reason why Sunrise couldn’t be more decisive after March 2020 is because the political ambiguity that we had previously deployed to strategic effect externally, had been equally necessary for the internal functioning of the organization, where it had helped protect against division over different visions for how the Green New Deal should play out.”

He also suggests that Sunrise’s much-hyped decentralized structure wasn’t nearly as balanced between national leaders and local hubs as it claimed. “This tendency showed up in 2017-2020 Sunrise as impatience and inadequate support for hubs who wanted to speak in a different voice from the usual Sunrise playbook. Sunrise national occasionally displayed a tendency to over-control the kinds of messages that hubs and spokespeople delivered, rather than truly empowering them to speak in a language suited to their local context. Both hubs and individual spokespeople struggled to translate the focus-grouped feel of the national narrative into a targeted and urgent local narrative that rang true to them and whoever they hoped to organize. This tension was especially acute for members of color, who felt under-supported by the majority-white staff in developing or delivering messages that would connect with communities of color.”

As Jaye and Lawrence write in the second installment of their post-mortem, this isn’t the only reason Sunrise stalled. “A central shortcoming in Sunrise’s organizing model was the absence of a sustained method of mass organizing at a local level, which left us nowhere to go once we could no longer rely on the fast-but-shallow growth of distributed organizing methods.” They add:

“While we knew that the Green New Deal would ultimately require action at the federal, state, and municipal levels, we chose to focus on the federal level first. This was a matter of policy, because only the federal government has the spending and coordination power to guide an energy transition at every level of society. It was also a matter of strategy, in that we believed that building one federal campaign might actually prove to be the most direct path to building many successful local campaigns. Better to ‘change the political weather’ nationally, thus creating conditions for a wave of state and local campaigns down the road. The dozens of local and state Green New Deal campaigns around the country today testify to the truth of our hypothesis.”

Considering how few advocacy groups even talk about changing the political weather, there’s a lot to praise in the choice Sunrise made to go big first. But what Jaye and Lawrence are telling us is that for all the welcome organizing theory offered by the Momentum school, its model of a hybrid between mass protest and structured organizing wasn’t really fleshed out, and thus Sunrise went into action with no template for how to keep a virtuous cycle of protest organizing and growth going. Jaye and Lawrence say it ended up with a cycle of “Act, Recruit, Train” that was firmly in the mass protest tradition, not a structure-based model that would have included detailed power mapping and careful evaluation of local organizing leadership and strategies.

At its best, Sunrise did build a lot of new power. “Thanks to the brilliant efforts of many, it had grown effective enough to bring hundreds or sometimes thousands of volunteers to a mass call on a day’s notice, send thousands of calls in a week to a political target, and coordinate hundreds of in-person rallies with a three-week run-up.” I certainly saw this up close in May and June of 2020, when the Zoom-based phone banks calling on voters in my district to support challenger Jamaal Bowman against the incumbent center-right Democrat Eliot Engel were absolutely flooded with volunteers from Sunrise.

In the final installment of their series, Jaye and Lawrence suggest that the group’s own self-definition as a distributed, decentralized movement was largely a lie. As they write:

“Here’s how it would go early on: a volunteer member of a local hub (chapter) would ask, ‘How are decisions made in the movement?’ The Sunrise trainer would say, ‘Hubs make their own decisions and are fully autonomous. Any three people acting in the name of Sunrise can be creative and independent in the service of our overall strategy.’ The member would then ask, ‘What does the national body do?’ The trainer would say, ‘It puts on trainings like this one to spread the movement. It also provides opportunities for hubs to participate in coordinated national campaigns. But it’s up to each hub to decide whether to participate.’”

“This was all true, but it contained a lie of omission. In the full story, the national body was building a well-oiled distributed organizing machine, shaping our message in the press, running major election-year programs, fundraising from individuals and philanthropy, and maintaining a network of nonprofits and political action committees to do it all. And all of that activity was being directed by a small steering committee of about ten people, including seven founders, who were in legal terms the executives of the nonprofit organizations. Because left activists are suspicious of hierarchy, we worried that our centralized leadership body wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. So . . . we just didn’t talk about it much.”

Jaye and Lawrence also describe how an early decision to create a Sunrise fellowship program for full-time organizers who lived in local “movement houses” had mixed value. On the one hand, it gave many organizing fellows a shared experience of solidarity that they will carry for a lifetime. On the other hand, it bred resentment of the better-paid Sunrise staff, and as a result ultimately was shut down.

The group’s explosive growth after the Pelosi office occupation was also a mixed blessing. It allowed Sunrise to hire more staff, but that only fueled internal class- and race-based tensions. (In 2018, the Sunrise Movement Education Fund took in $716,000; in 2019 that jumped to $4.2 million and in 2020 it ballooned again to $11.7 million.) Ultimately, they brought in the Management Center to get training on how to manage a professional organization, with the result that “The centralized organization driving the decentralized Sunrise Movement had come, step by step, to closely resemble most other nonprofits. We had adopted the nonprofit management model….We had rejected the anti-institutional and anti-leadership horizontalism of Occupy Wall Street, and the faceless bureaucratism of myriad NGOs, but we couldn’t build what we hadn’t ourselves experienced — something both egalitarian and well-structured, both vertical and horizontal. Something, in other words, like a democracy. A genuinely democratic, powerful, mass membership organization.”

Welcome to the American left’s ever-repeating goal and dilemma, my friends!

Jaye and Lawrence do offer this hopeful conclusion: “If the two of us could do it over again, we wouldn’t throw out the distributed toolkit, or the federal campaign, or the nose for momentum. We can’t lose sight of the fact that Sunrise did, for a time, wield a distributed volunteer army to expert effect, positively upending the terrain of climate politics in favor of the Left. A host of issues, from foreign policy to student debt cancellation to labor law reform, could benefit from an insurgent organization built to upend the political terrain, and fast. But we would go back to 2019 and choose to invest more in the practice of local organizing. We were growing plenty of leaves at that time, leaves that withered when the weather changed in March 2020. We would have been well-served by putting down more roots when the weather was good.”

Odds and Ends

—Hate speech on Twitter is rising as Elon Musk loosens the company’s policies and cuts staff, and researchers are reporting a concomitant rise in violence against Jews and gays, Joseph Menn reports for the Washington Post.

—The Democratic party is in free-fall in Florida, where former Miami mayor Manny Diaz has just resigned as its state chair. “We cannot win elections if we continue to rely on voter registration to drive turnout, build field operations only around elections, and expect to get our vote out without engaging voters where they live,” Diaz wrote in his resignation letter.

—One little-noticed but perverse effect of the dance between tech VCs hungry for astronomical returns on investment and start-up founders willing to cut corners to raise funds is that more realistic business proposals get crowded out by fraudsters, notes ProPublica reporter Jesse Eisinger in a comment on the lawsuit filed by JP Morgan against fintech fraud Frank, which inflated its subscriber base with millions of fake emails in order to gain a $175 million valuation. “When any other person had an idea for trying to solve this problem and went to a venture capitalist, that venture capitalist would say: ‘You’re not having that much success. Look at what Frank has done,’” a rival founder said.

—Apply: The Innovation in Politics Institute, based in Vienna, is looking to hire a senior consultant. Their Democracy Technologies database is pretty impressive, by the way.

End Times

“Rich people Columbus social change.” Indeed they do.