Socialists in shorts.

I'm reading the NYT article "Is the Democratic Party Facing Its Own Tea Party Moment? A string of primary wins by progressive candidates has revealed the strength of a high-energy insurgent movement but also its potential limitations," which you can read for yourself at that gift link.

It's a topic I'm following, and I've recently blogged about. I said it a week ago: "The socialists are to the Democratic Party what the Tea Party was to the GOP."

So right now, all I want to do is put up something I cropped from one of the photographs:

"Dr. Abdul El-Sayed tried to attract young voters," and he did. They came toddling in wearing shorts, shuffling in slides and sneakers.

If I were a NYT essayist, I'd muse that they are showing us what real, human, embodied and, yes male power can look like.

ADDED: After publishing this post, I dashed off a question to Grok, "Can the males wear shorts and slides to the revolution?" Answer:

"There is certainly enough anger in the Democratic Party to create its own Tea Party. Democrats loathe Republicans..."

"... just as much as Republicans loathe Democrats, but there are important cultural differences between the parties that make a Democratic Tea Party less practical. For one thing, the Democratic turn toward more-educated voters means that the Tea Party’s anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism would be a poor fit for millions of Democrats.... Do Democrats think embracing Tea Party rage is the path back to power? Do they believe they can control that intense anger, once it’s unleashed?....  The Tea Party became a slave to its own rage. No fury was too great — no contempt was too deep — for the Democratic foe. And now we endure a presidency motivated by vengeance and spite. Opposition is necessary. Anger is natural. Courage is indispensable. But under no circumstances will we be better off if another Tea Party takes the political field."

Writes David French, in "The Last Thing Democrats Need Is Their Own Tea Party" (NYT).

"The kind of folks that were Tea Party in 2010 are part of the MAGA movement in 2024. We owe all this to the Tea Party."

Said Scott Huffmon, a Winthrop University polisci professor, quoted in "How Did Haley’s South Carolina Become Trump Country? Ask the Tea Party. Veterans of the conservative, grass-roots movement see the state’s presidential primary as a fight between a 'crazy uncle' and a 'snowflake niece.' They’ve made their choice" (NYT).

Mr. Trump... made few gestures toward the libertarian economics championed by the Tea Party.... Instead, he had won attention from Tea Partiers by fanning the flames of conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate and the construction of an Islamic cultural center near ground zero in Lower Manhattan.

Some national Tea Party organizers had labored to keep such preoccupations on the fringes of the movement, but they remained persistent among its rank-and-file supporters and local activists.

“It was an ethnonationalist passion about a changing America,” said Theda Skocpol, a Harvard University professor of government and sociology who has studied the Tea Party movement. “And that is something that Trump ended up picking up on.”...

"I have argued for years that the conservative-populist coalition was born in 2008 when John McCain became the Republican nominee."

"These voters either stayed home or voted against their interests for Barack Obama because of his candidacy's historic and aspirational nature. By 2009, their breakaway began, and the anti-establishment Tea Party movement was born. The 2010 midterm elections demonstrated the coalition’s strength, but it felt the same way toward Mitt Romney as it had for McCain — nice guy but didn’t inspire them.... Democrats shed their blue-collar and rural voters that had been part of their coalition and went full elite progressive. The 2014 election was the result, an even worse bloodbath for Democrats than 2010. Two things were missed in the coverage of 2016. First, Trump was never the cause of that election — he was the result of a coalition that had been building for a decade, made up of suburban-educated voters, blue-collar and rural voters, and a growing number of middle-class Hispanic voters.... Now, Biden and the Democrats have been caught once again failing to appreciate why they were sent to Washington, D.C. They underestimated just how toxic their intersection with the cultural curators would be for them — with those constantly telling voters they are insurrectionists and racists and lying about voting laws in Georgia and Texas and Pennsylvania or smearing them because they don't want idiotic ideas driven into their children's skulls..."

Writes Salena Zito in "The voters revolt against our cultural curators, again" (Washington Examiner)."

"But the Democratic Party establishment distanced itself from the Wisconsin uprising. Notably, President Barack Obama did not go to Wisconsin..."

"... during the Act 10 protests, betraying a campaign promise to 'put on a comfortable pair of walking shoes myself' and 'march on that picket line with you' if collective bargaining rights were ever under attack. (Vice President Biden did not go to Wisconsin either.) Outrage over Act 10 prompted an effort to recall Mr. Walker that garnered nearly a million signatures and forced him to face a new election in 2012. But Mr. Obama deliberately avoided campaigning with Tom Barrett, the governor’s Democratic opponent. 'This is a gubernatorial race with a guy who was recalled and a challenger trying to get him out of office,' Stephanie Cutter, Mr. Obama’s deputy campaign spokeswoman, told NBC News. 'It has nothing to do with President Obama.' The fallout from the financial crisis, and Mr. Obama’s tepid economic response to it, helped enable the Tea Party backlash, allowing the movement’s funders to realize long-held ambitions of weakening the labor movement and the public sector under the guise of austerity. That effort was made easier by the Democrats’ embrace of their framing. A few months before Mr. Walker announced Act 10, his predecessor, Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, bragged that he made steeper cuts to size of the state employee work force than any governor in Wisconsin’s history. Mr. Obama, too, championed public austerity, imposing a two-year wage freeze for federal workers just after the 2010 election...."

From a NYT op-ed titled "Scott Walker’s Wisconsin Paved the Way for Donald Trump’s America."

"Is it more important for me to tell a basic historical truth, let’s say, about racism in America right now? Or is it more important for me to get a bill passed..."

"... that provides a lot of people with health care that didn’t have it before? And there’s a psychic cost to not always just telling the truth... using your prophetic voice as opposed to your coalition building political voice. And I think there were times where supporters of mine would get frustrated if I wasn’t being as forthright about certain things as I might otherwise be. And then there are also just institutional constraints that I think every president has to follow on some of these issues. And it was sort of on a case by case basis, where you try to make decisions."

Said Barack Obama, answering a question on the Ezra Klein podcast at the NYT about how he decided it was worth it, politically, to refrain from accusing people of racism.

The question, asked by Klein, specifically referred to the Tea Party, and Klein asserts, based on reading Obama's book, that it was clear that the Tea Party was "at least partly" racist. Obama had been musing about understanding people and bringing us together, and Klein, seeming to want to bring some edge to the discussion, asked "How do you decide when the cost of that kind of truth outweighs the value of it?"

I've edited down the answer, but if you look at the whole thing, you'll see that what I left out was blander than what I quoted. Obama referred to the "basic historical truth... about racism," then immediately turned to political expediency. He acknowledged the "psychic cost to not always just telling the truth," by which I think he meant the cost to himself personally in devaluing truth-telling. And he strangely equated truth with "using your prophetic voice as opposed to your coalition building political voice." Prophetic voice? 

CORRECTION: This post originally said Obama was wrong to say "Sarah Palin... was sort of a prototype for the politics that led to the Tea Party, that in turn, ultimately led to Donald Trump, and that we’re still seeing today." I was wrong. He has the chronology right.

ADDED: I wish Klein had pursued Obama about the slippage between telling the truth and speaking in a prophetic voice! Maybe it's developed in his book, but I'd say, just offhand, that prophesy relates to the future, and, normally, when we talk about telling the truth, it relates to the present and the past. 

AND: I don't think the book uses the idea of the "prophetic voice," because I'm not seeing that phrase in connection with the book title. What I can see is that Obama's early speeches, when he first ran for President, were discussed in terms of a "prophetic" tradition among black Americans. I suspect that Obama conflated telling the truth about racism with speaking in the lofty, inspirational style associated with Martin Luther King, Jr.

"[T]he fact that Biden did not lead his party to a landslide will... give him certain political advantages. He will not be permitted..."

"... to re-enact the New Deal or the Great Society, but neither will he be tempted into ideologically driven debacles like Bill Clinton’s failed health care push or even Donald Trump’s failed attempt to repeal Obamacare. Having Joe Manchin and Susan Collins as the most powerful figures in the Senate will not be good for progressivism’s policy objectives, but it could be very good for Biden’s popularity, enabling him to chart a moderate course while telling the left, sorry, but my hands are tied.... Science should guide the coronavirus response, [Xavier] Becerra is a peculiar choice [to run Health and Human Services]: a partisan politician from a deep-blue state whose health care experience is mostly in legal battles with the Trump White House over Obamacare.... It’s less odd, though, if you anticipate using your cabinet agencies the way the Obama White House did in its otherwise-gridlocked second term — as aggressive instruments of partisan policymaking... [such as] immigration amnesties and gun-control executive orders... [and] college sexual-assault policies and school-bathroom regulations... [and forcing] the Little Sisters of the Poor to cover contraception.... ... Biden won the presidency in part because he was more popular than his party (to say nothing of the press), and deploying his bureaucracy aggressively for liberal ends would be the easiest way for him to squander some of that advantage...."

Writes Ross Douthat in "The Biden Opportunity and How to Blow It/The president-elect won promising conciliation. His choice of Xavier Becerra to run Health and Human Services promises culture war" (NYT).

"Some meaningful number of voters who are clear-eyed about Trump and his manifest failures—even those who think he is plainly doing a bad job—will stick with the president..."

"... because they believe Democrats are worse and the media aren’t to be trusted. And these aren’t voters who are glued to Fox News and reading Breitbart News. Often they don’t think about politics at all—and they certainly don’t follow the daily machinations of Washington. They’re typically not on Twitter. Instead they swim in a cultural soup of Trumpism, surrounded by friends, family, and social-media acquaintances who do live more exclusively in a right-wing-media ecosystem. Even if Biden pulls off a landslide victory, that ecosystem will remain. And so will the dislike of Democrats and distrust of the mainstream media. Getting rid of Trump won’t end the opposition’s problems."

From "Why People Who Hate Trump Stick With Him/Since 2018, I’ve conducted roughly 50 focus groups with Trump voters to understand the shifting dynamics within the Republican Party" by Sarah Longwell (in The Atlantic).

Yes, it will be interesting to see what these people do if Trump is cut off after one term. I'm thinking something like the Tea Party will reconfigure itself, but also that much less polite people — having seen how aggressively Trump was torn apart every day of his entire term — will treat Biden just as harshly. 

"David H. Koch, who amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune with his brother Charles from the corporate behemoth they ran and then joined him in pouring their riches into a powerful right-wing libertarian movement..."

"... that helped reshape American politics, has died. He was 79.... Three decades after David Koch’s public steps into politics, analysts say, the Koch brothers’ money-fueled brand of libertarianism helped give rise to the Tea Party movement and strengthened the far-right wing of a resurgent Republican Party....ince the 1970s, the Kochs have spent at least $100 million — some estimates put it at much more — to transform a fringe movement into a formidable political force aimed at moving America to the far right by influencing the outcome of elections, undoing limits on campaign contributions and promoting conservative candidacies, think tanks and policies.... Under the administration of Donald J. Trump, the Koch brothers’ prospects in Washington seemed improved, at least superficially. But beneath the surface lay substantive political and personal differences between the Kochs and Mr. Trump.... As the 2018 congressional elections approached, the Kochs’ frustrations with Mr. Trump broke into an ugly and open exchange between Charles Koch and the president. Charles denounced Mr. Trump’s restrictive trade and immigration policies as divisive, and threatened to withhold the family’s support for Republican candidates who opposed the free-trade, government-shrinking policies at the heart of the Koch political philosophy. Mr. Trump struck back on Twitter, calling the Koch political apparatus 'overrated' and 'a total joke in real Republican circles.'"

From the NYT obituary.

"The lack of a 'liberal Tea Party' reflects a fundamental and longstanding asymmetry between Republicans and Democrats."

"The Republican Party is the agent of an ideological movement; most Republican politicians, activists and voters view their party as existing to advance the conservative cause. Because their goals of reducing the scope of government and reversing cultural change are difficult to achieve in practice, Republican officeholders are vulnerable to accusations of failing to uphold principles..... The Democratic Party, by contrast, is organized as a coalition of social groups. Democratic voters tend to view politics as an arena of intergroup competition rather than a battlefield for opposing philosophies, and the party is dominated by an array of discrete interests that choose candidates on the basis of demographic representation and capacity to deliver policy.... This year, Democratic candidates remain focused on challenging vulnerable Republican-held seats more than purging ideologically impure incumbents.... Liberal candidates and activists can succeed in pushing the Democratic Party to the left on specific issues. But they will do so by appealing to the interests and loyalties of social groups rather than engaging in broader ideological debates."

Writes polisci prof Matt Grossman at "Why There Is No ‘Liberal Tea Party.’"

What he's saying about electoral politics rings true, and yet I also think it's true that it is the left that's looking for heretics and the right is looking for converts. That may not be a contradiction.

ADDED: I think I've figured out why it's not a contradiction. These are the 2 propositions: 1. The electoral success of the Democratic Party depends on maintaining a coalition of interests groups, and 2. Democratic Party partisans create pressure on each other not to get out of line. These ideas fit together well if you take their perspective: We need to stay united. It's not effective at winning converts, because there's no appealing idea to be understood and believed in. In fact, it's threatening to those who are outside of the group. These outsiders may insult the left by saying they are "looking for heretics," but the so-called "heretics" are only people in the group who undermine the adhesiveness of the group. The conservatives can "look for converts" because they do have some abstractions that seem appealing and coherent to ordinary people, and those people can feel burned when their representatives do various pragmatic things that deviate from the ideology.

At the time of the rise of the Tea Party, in the spring of 2010, "Bannon went through 'a visible transformation,' a friend said."

"'In his days in business, he dressed like an investment banker from Connecticut—shirt and jacket, tie or not, boring men’s shoes, a short, conventional men’s haircut. But he couldn’t show up at the Tea Party dressed like that. He started dressing more casually. There was this other side of him—he was from the South, he could be in a sports bar in West Virginia, and he would be accepted... He never fit in in the world of investment banking—he was this gauche Irish kid. Never fit in in the Hollywood world—his politics were much too conservative. Never fit in in the mainstream Republican world—he wasn’t uptight like them. But then he got embraced by the Tea Party world. He really started playing that role, and he came into his own. He loved being on TV.'"

From "HOW HOLLYWOOD REMEMBERS STEVE BANNON/He says that, before he became a senior adviser to the President, he was a successful player in the film industry. But what did he actually do?" by Connie Bruck (in The New Yorker).

Also about clothing:

In 2011, Bannon released a documentary about Sarah Palin, “The Undefeated.”... The real star of the movie was Andrew Breitbart... Over footage of a young man wearing a fitted suit in a corporate office, Breitbart says, "When you go to Washington, D.C., and you meet with the conservative movement, it’s as if they’ve read the exact right books, taken the right tests, met the right people, are wearing the right outfits, wearing the right tie—and you almost feel like an outsider, even though you’re in the actual conservative movement."

To pick up that topic of books, let me just pull out 2 things:

1. "By the early aughts, the former Hollywood colleague recalled, '[Bannon] was sitting on Canon Drive, in his fabulous office, his bookshelves lined with military and history books, and he would take meetings all day with people, some of whom came to him for money for their movies."

2. "When the girls were ready to start kindergarten, Bannon and his ex-wife visited a number of schools. During an interview at one of them, she wrote in a court filing, Bannon 'asked the director why there were so many Chanukah books in the library.'"

"We should subject him to merciless scrutiny and criticism, just as we should with any other president."

"In fact, that will be possible only if we accept that he is legitimately the 45th President of the United States, and the time for protesting Trump's holding this office has passed. If you drown out any discussion of the specifics of his presidency with the familiar refrains that he's abnormal, racist, sexist, etc., you'll remove yourself from the realm of productive debates about the president."

Writes my son, John Althouse Cohen, urging us to get past the shock of Trump's election and start taking him seriously. Trump wasn't taken sufficiently seriously as he ran for President, but he achieved everything he said he would. We should assume he's going to do the specific things he's got in his first-100-days plan and focus on what we'd like and not like to see happen. As John puts it, none of Trump's proposals "involve turning America into a fascist dictatorship, forcibly removing citizens from the country, systematically violating due process, instituting apartheid, or squelching free speech." And some of the proposals are or might be good ideas that even Trump opponents might want to nudge him to focus on.

I remember a couple days before the election, when Newt Gingrich said: "[I]f Trump is elected, it will just be like Madison, Wisconsin with Scott Walker.... a Madison, Wisconsin kind of struggle if Trump wins." But the Wisconsin protests did not happen at the point of Scott Walker's election in 2010. They began in February 2011, after Scott Walker had taken office and the GOP legislature had presented a bill — Act 10 — with specific proposals people objected to. The anger and outrage was directed at legislation, not at the outcome of the election.

So the not-my-President protests against Trump are not like what happened in Wisconsin. Protesting an election — and election that is not contested or unclear — doesn't make much sense unless you're opposed to preserving our constitutional system of government. Perhaps some protesters fall into that category. Some may be a bit confused and think the electoral college ought to be changed, but that's not to say there's something illegitimate about the result of the election. Trump won clearly under the rules of the game everyone was playing. The protesters seem mostly to be afraid of what Trump will do, so they ought to address their protests to the specific proposals.

That's not only how the Wisconsin protests worked, that's how the Tea Party originated. It was not at the point of the election or the inauguration, but the following month, in February, when something particular was proposed. It happened to be — did you remember? — Obama's mortgage relief plan.

The Tea Party has had a lasting effect on American politics, and I don't think we'd have seen the same thing at all if it had begun as a freakout on seeing Barack Obama elected.

The prospect of a merger of the basket-of-deplorables people with the baristas-in-the-basement people.

Project a year or so down the road. Imagine a scenario in which these groups, which seem separate now, merge politically. Describe your scenario.

Group 1 is currently amassed under the banner of Donald J. Trump. Group 2 had been coalescing around Bernie Sanders, but Bernie moved out of their center and left them leaderless. The election will reposition Trump one way or the other, and either way will have an effect on where Group 1 goes next. Both groups will keep getting older and wiser and stupider.

Please speculate.

"The Justice Department notified members of Congress that it is closing its two-year investigation into whether the IRS improperly targeted tea party and other conservative groups."

"There will be no charges against former IRS official Lois Lerner or anyone else at the agency, the Justice Department said in a letter."

The probe found "substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia leading to the belief by many tax-exempt applicants that the IRS targeted them based on their political viewpoints. But poor management is not a crime. We found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution," Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik said in the letter. "We also found no evidence that any official involved in the handling of tax-exempt applications or IRS leadership attempted to obstruct justice. Based on the evidence developed in this investigation and the recommendation of experienced career prosecutors and supervising attorneys at the department, we are closing our investigation and will not seek any criminal charges."

Is it bad that "Conservative PACs Attack Republicans, and It Pays"?

Eric Lipton and Jennifer Steinhauer write in the NYT about petitions like "Boot Boehner,” “Dump McConnell,” “Drop a Truth-Bomb on Kevin McCarthy,” and “Fire Paul Ryan” that come from "conservative websites and bloggers who have helped stoke a grass-roots rebellion to make Congress more conservative" and who use the petitions to raise money for their own on-going effort.

“This is clearly an organized effort and an attempt by these groups to raise money for themselves,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who added that she was the target of a similar attack during the 2013 Senate debate over gun safety legislation. “They hurt our party, they hurt our Congress and they hurt our country.”...

Campaign finance documents examined by The New York Times show that the PACs and other groups running many of these petition drives have a history of spending most of the money they raise on consulting firms, as opposed to using it to support political candidates, a stark contrast to how most PACs function.

The efforts employ similar tactics. Conservative outlets like Breitbart or The Washington Examiner are given “exclusive” advance notice of a new effort, like the “Remove John Boehner” campaign started early last year by the Tea Party Leadership Fund....

I'm puzzling over what's supposed to be bad here. What's wrong with political activity in support of an ideology and what's wrong with trying to take down politicians you oppose instead of looking for politicians to boost? Is it that the political group is able to raise funds for itself and keep its operation going rather than to use the money to get people elected? Isn't this kind of ideological activity done on both the left and the right? The only problem I can detect — and this isn't in the article — is that it works best at the political extremes: moderates and realists can't use it.

"It's the same way as saying we meet with the tea party. Who is the tea party? There's hundreds of thousands of people."

Said Scott Walker, asked about whether he'd meet with Black Lives Matter activists.

The headline meme is that he "stumbled."

"It cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt (like that of a jolly hostess) to bring the shy people out."

"For every practical purpose of a political state, for every practical purpose of a tea-party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted. At a tea-party it is equally obvious that he that exalteth himself must be abased, if possible without bodily violence. Now people talk of democracy as being coarse and turbulent: it is a self-evident error in mere history. Aristocracy is the thing that is always coarse and turbulent: for it means appealing to the self-confident people. Democracy means appealing to the different people. Democracy means getting those people to vote who would never have the cheek to govern: and (according to Christian ethics) the precise people who ought to govern are the people who have not the cheek to do it."

Something more from G.K. Chesterton's "Tremendous Trifles" (also quoted in the previous post).

That long Atlantic article about Erick Erickson, "the man who steers the Tea Party" who "says conservative anger has grown toxic and self-defeating."

"Is the Most Powerful Conservative in America Losing His Edge?" by Molly Ball.

1. There's a man who steers the Tea Party?

2. I haven't read this article, and yet somehow I feel pressured to care about it. I'm not enjoying this feeling.

3. I'm very familiar with the idea that right-wingers are "toxic," that anything at all right-wing is "toxic," whether there's excessive anger or edge or not. Any whiff of right-wingedness can cause left-liberals to view you as toxic, no matter how conciliatory and moderation-oriented you are. That's my personal experience.

4. I've never liked any of the yelling and sneering in politics, this "punch back twice as hard" business. I don't like it from lefties or righties. I've always had an aversion to politics, going all the way back to the time when the yippies moved in on the hippies.

How to power-vault modestly.

I'm reading the headline of the new Dana Milbank column out loud to Meade:

ME: "Elizabeth Warren is not the left’s Ted Cruz. She is the left’s Jim DeMint." What does that even mean?

MEADE: Who is Jim DeMint?

ME: I know.

It's not that we don't know anything about Jim DeMint. He's... a Senator... right?

ME (reading from the Milbank column): "DeMint, the former Republican senator from South Carolina who now runs the conservative Heritage Foundation, is widely seen as the godfather of the tea-party movement."

MEADE: So much for my Tea Party credentials, then. I guess I'm not much of a tea-bagger after all.

Back to the column:

The left’s tea-party equivalent is still in its infancy. But it could be seen recently in the opposition by environmental activists to the reelection of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who lost her seat this month. They wanted to punish her for opposing them on energy issues — even though the conservative replacing her is less to their liking.

This was very much the logic of DeMint, who said he’d prefer a minority of conservative senators to a majority of moderates: “I’d rather have 30 Marco Rubios than 60 Arlen Specters.”

But where's Cruz in all this?

Cruz, long an establishment man, arrived late in the tea party movement, opportunistically embracing its themes to vault himself to power in 2012. His stands in Washington have been less about advancing a policy agenda than about causing mayhem and positioning himself to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

DeMint, by contrast, cared about policy and took a long view of politics....

So you see Milbank's point. Elizabeth Warren is not vaulting herself. She's building a movement, a group project. You can see that — in Milbank's mind — this makes Warren a much better candidate for President. Of course, Warren could just be clever enough to figure out how to seem to lack individualistic, personal lust for power. If so, good for you. There is nobody in this country who can become President on his own....

"Only Revolution Can Bring Peace!" "From Ayotzinapa to Ferguson/Down With Capitalist [something]," "No Justice in the Capitalist Courts!"

I need to do a separate post about "From Plains to Both Coasts, Fury Boils Over," that NYT article about what happened in Ferguson after the announcement that there will be no charges filed against the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown.

The other post is about the NYT's artful phrasing of descriptions of protest violence — the delicacy with which it handles racial matters in what is a touching/absurd muddling of factual accuracy and displays of empathy toward black people.

But this post is about the white people — not the media white people who choose this distanced delicacy, but the white people who participated in protests. There's only one, I think, in the text of the article:

A middle-aged white woman wove through the crowd, yelling, “We need to shut this down across America!” and handing out fliers.

The woman, Jessie Davis, was a supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Party and came here from Chicago.

And the slide show ends with a shot of protesters "disrupting traffic" in New York City. This crowd is overwhelmingly white (to appropriate a phrase famously applied to tea party crowds). I cropped out a section of the lower left so you could look at the signs:



"Only Revolution Can Bring Peace!" "From Ayotzinapa to Ferguson/Down With Capitalist [Police Terror]," "No Justice in the Capitalist Courts!/Internationalist Group."

I don't know what to say about that, so I'll just quote something I read in The Daily Beast, last August: "Communist agitators stirring up a civil rights protest sounds like a bad ‘60s flashback, but that’s just what happened last week in Ferguson, Missouri."