Hello and welcome to Fugue Plague, a weekly newsletter where I document my descent into curmudgeonliness in real time. This week, we’re back to talking about the student protests across the so-called United States against the ongoing Israeli genocide campaign being waged on Palestinians in Gaza. Several developments have been unfolding since the last edition of this newsletter, namely: colleges and universities across the country but most notably in New York City and Los Angeles have called local police to clear out the peaceful encampments and barricaded buildings on campus. In at least one situation, Columbia University has asked for sustained NYPD presence until May 17, two days after their graduation ceremony, after allowing the city’s police to invade campus and arrest protestors. USC has canceled their commencement after banning a Muslim student, Asna Tabassum, from making a pro-Palestine statement as part of her valedictorian speech. UCLA let pro-Israeli counterprotestors not only set up a Jumbotron across the lawn, blasting images of sexual assault purported to be from October 7 at the encampment, but also try to break up the encampment themselves – bullying and harassing students – for almost four hours before LAPD stepped in and finished the job.

We’re at the point now where everyone has a position on these protests, and people are holding forth about how or when or whether the students in question should have taken the actions they did. I hold no position on any particular tactic used by students because I wasn’t a participant and I’m not about to shit on them for doing the best they could with whatever resources they had at the time. These kids are not “professional” activists or outside agitators, they’re not paid by Soros or any other ironically-antisemitic-as-fuck conspiracy you might imagine, and they are responding on the fly to wild packs of cops operating on half- or mis-remembered protest suppression training they learned while on vacation in [checks notes] uh, Israel. Is that right? Fuck.

Instead I want to start the newsletter off with a question. What is the cost of a broken window?

It’s not a rhetorical question, by the way. There’s a real answer to it. The business or school or building owner is going to have to pay someone to clean the broken window up, and then someone else to re-install the glass windowpane. How many hundreds or thousands of dollars do you think that is? Depending on how fancy the glass is, and how quickly the work needs to be done, I imagine it could be quite a lot. Probably not in the context of however much money the business or school or building owner has, typically, but, you know. It’s probably not nothing.

Now who has been harmed in the process of the window-breaking? There’s really only a couple of answers to this question. Depending on how the breaker approached their task, breaking said window could have hurt their hands, or cut their bodies; glass could have flown into their eyes if they weren’t wearing proper protection. Ditto for any bystanders who happen to be located immediately adjacent to the window. The costs of these injuries might be minor, no more than the price of a package of Band-Aids.

Was the business or school or building owner harmed in this process? Not physically. Even financial injury might be hard to claim in certain circumstances, where things like broken windows are considered part of normal maintenance costs. But we’ll come back to this.

What is the cost of a rubber bullet shot point-blank at your head? 

If you’re extremely lucky, maybe all you get is a fractured skull. Maybe the delicate bones around your eyes and ears won’t have been shattered, causing permanent vision or hearing loss on the impact side. Maybe your head won’t be violently slammed forward upon impact, causing a concussion or worse brain damage. Maybe your neck won’t be broken. Maybe all you’ll be left with is tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills and a lengthy recovery period, maybe a surgery or two. Maybe you won’t be left having to go to physical therapy for the rest of your life. For protesting against a genocide. For occupying a space authorities didn’t want you to be in. For acting on your values, and refusing to be silent.

When they storm encampments to rip young adults out of the scene, when they shoot at them (and in some cases just straight shoot them) with rubber bullets and other “less-lethal” weaponry, the police are not trying to reinstate “law and order” or “keep the peace.” They are trying to scare and intimidate and in some cases incapacitate these kids so badly that they’ll never return to activism or a protest again, unless it’s properly permitted and gated off behind free-speech zones. They are the embodiment of the chilling effect with badges and guns. Police will do this with impunity, and they hold a legal monopoly on violence – one we know they’re happy to take advantage of.

We know the police are happy to use violence to break up protests. That is, in part, what they’re hired for. It is the reason so many people are opposed to the building of a Cop City in Atlanta or elsewhere in the so-called United States: we don’t want them exchanging notes on how best to suppress dissent and break up gatherings of solidarity. As journalists like Radley Balko have demonstrated, police have been steadily militarizing for well over half a century, and the last thing they need is a place to collectively train, like some Dollar General-ass Marine Corps whose weapons and malice are perpetually turned inward towards regular people (and their own wives).

We know also that the police are not afraid of murdering protestors who pose no threat to them, like they did with Tortuguita in 2023. And if they don’t kill protestors at the protest themselves, we know they’ll go after them later. How many organizers and prominent protestors from Ferguson in 2014 are still alive?

So when Joe Biden, angered by what he apparently saw on the Morning Joe show as “protestor-caused violence,” including property destruction, vandalism, broken windows and the like, came out and declared that the student protests themselves were unacceptable now they’ve apparently crossed the violence threshold, he made two things clear: property damage is somehow violence, and violence is only admissible if done by an agent of the state, whether under a liberal democracy or a fascist autocracy. In other words it is more acceptable to shoot a protestor in the head than it is to break a window or spray paint a wall with messages of liberation.

Over the past few days I’ve been thinking about the liberal imagination. Back when I was hanging out with market anarchists during the second Obama administration, a common refrain I’d hear from them was “anything put into place that could curb civil liberties or remove individual freedom now, even for ostensibly ‘good’ reasons, will be used later by an opposing party’s administration for bad reasons.” Kind of a corollary to that comes in the form of Hannah Arendt’s Imperial Boomerang idea: any repressive practice or weapon of control used against a colonial territory will eventually find its way home, to be used domestically.

These two separate but related ideas have been flitting around in my mind as I’ve once again watched liberals take the defensive stance as people express disgust and horror about what happened last Tuesday night: “fine! Don’t vote for Biden then! I hope you enjoy another Trump term!” I think about the fact that many of the Trump administration’s worst exertions of power weren’t rolled back, and about how he was in turn enabled to perform many of those exercises of control because of frameworks like the PATRIOT Act, continuously and bipartisanly reaffirmed since 2001. I think about how instead of supporting calls to defund the police following the George Floyd uprising in 2020, Biden reaffirmed the state’s support of the cops through both money and equipment as soon as he got in.

Over the past two decades (and for much longer before that) protest in this country has been steadily and continuously constrained through a combination of draconian local, state and federal regulations, increasingly violent police responses, and cooperation from the capitalist class to do things like buy up as much public land as possible, implement hostile architecture everywhere, and allow for large surveillance networks to be set up on their property. Protests are described all throughout education as events that happened at one point but which don’t need to happen today, despite all evidence to the contrary. And direct action? Don’t even think about it.

Another maxim has been rolling around in my mind for a while, this time from Audre Lorde: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” Protest, for all that is exciting about it, for all the opportunities it provides us to create bubbles of resistance and peek into a better world, is still at the end of the day an entreaty to the powers-that-be to be humane and do the right thing on behalf of their constituents. For all the talk about the protestors on campus being “radicalized” by “outside agitators” (and what a joke that is, as if anything could be more radicalizing than a boot to the neck), for all of their property-damage-confused-as-violence and condemnation from the head of state himself, they are still taking a liberal approach to the issue of Gazan genocide. They are still trying to use the master’s tools to fix the master’s house, much less dismantle it.

They just want their university to stop funding Israeli atrocities. They want the so-called US to stop supporting the Israeli state. And for that, they got a rubber bullet to the head.

NOW LISTENING

I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t listen to anything on this one. This issue’s going out early this week because I have a whole weekend of reading and watching YouTube videos at my other job ahead of me.