The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free

By Mike Gonzalez

The Plot to Change America exposes the myths that help identity politics perpetuate itself. This book reveals what has really happened, explains why it is urgent to change course, and offers a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the enticements, we can get rid of identity politics.

The first myth that this book exposes is that identity politics is a grassroots movement, when from the beginning it has been, and continues to be, an elite project. For too long, we have lived with the fairy tale that America has organically grown into a nation gripped by victimhood and identitarian division; that it is all the result of legitimate demands by minorities for recognition or restitutions for past wrongs. The second myth is that identity politics is a response to the demographic change this country has undergone since immigration laws were radically changed in 1965. Another myth we are told is that to fight these changes is as depraved as it is futile, since by 2040, America will be a minority-majority country, anyway. This book helps to explain that none of these things are necessarily true.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Release date: Jun 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781641772525

Mike Gonzalez

Mike Gonzalez is Emeritus Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of The Ebb of the Pink Tide (Pluto, 2018) The Last Drop: The Politics of Water (Pluto, 2015) and Hugo Chavez: Socialist for the Twenty-first Century (Pluto, 2014). He is co-editor of Arms and the People (Pluto, 2012).

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Cover: The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free by Mike Gonzalez

Praise for The Plot to Change America

Penetrating and insightful.… Mr. Gonzalez’s illuminating research is particularly relevant now.

—Roger Clegg, National Review Online

Gonzalez goes beyond standard critiques, performing much-needed spadework to trace the left’s steady infiltration of universities, government agencies, courts, foundations, and school boards since the 1960s. His perspective as an assimilated Cuban-American lends authenticity and urgency to the book.

—Eric Kaufmann, Law & Liberty

Gonzalez’s book should be widely read for its valuable insights.

—George R. La Noue, The Federalist

Gonzalez lays out a path forward if we are to have any hope of stemming the tide of identity politics.

—Jarrett Stepman, The Daily Signal

"Identity politics is at risk of tearing apart a nation which aspires to be ‘indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’ Mike Gonzalez explains in The Plot to Change America, how identity politics starting in the 1970s has tried to tear the nation apart—and how, sometimes, it has boomeranged on its practitioners."

—Michael Barone, senior political analyst, The Washington Examiner, and longtime co-author, The Almanac of American Politics

"Mike Gonzalez is a tremendous voice for conservatism. In his new book, The Plot to Change America, Mike irrefutably wrecks the identity politics arguments of the political Left, which have been tearing the country apart for years."

—Ben Shapiro, host of The Ben Shapiro Show and #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Right Side of History

"The Plot to Change America is an incisive, unsparing treatment of identity politics, which represents a clear and present danger to our national cohesion—and our institutions and ideals. Mike Gonzalez traces the political and intellectual sources of this poisonous tendency and argues forcefully and persuasively that it must not define our future."

—Rich Lowry, editor of National Review

Persuasive and clarifying, this book is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand how we arrived at the sordid identity politics of today and what must be done to tear it down. Gonzalez reminds Americans of all races and ethnicities that we are better off choosing individual agency, pride, and success over a culture of victimhood.

—Ying Ma, author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto

Michael Gonzalez shows us that the idea of ‘identity’ did not just innocently emerge. It was invented for the purpose of dividing citizens into groups to be used as political pawns in a plot to change America. Identity politics turns citizens into ‘innocent victims’ in need of governmental carve-outs, and promotes brokers who do their bidding. Gonzalez lays out just how this madness can be brought to an end. A very timely book. Highly recommended.

—Joshua Mitchell, author of American Awakening

A forceful call to stop the cancerous spread of identity politics and begin to undo the terrible damage it has done to our country.

—David Azerrad, Hillsdale College

THE

PLOT TO

CHANGE

AMERICA

How Identity Politics

is Dividing the Land

of the Free

MIKE GONZALEZ

New York • London

© 2020, 2022 by Mike Gonzalez

Preface © 2022 by Mike Gonzalez

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601, New York, New York 10003.

First American edition published in 2020 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation.

Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com

Manufactured in the United States and printed on acid-free paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

First paperback edition published in 2022.

Paperback edition ISBN: 978-1-64177-251-8.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED

THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Names: Gonzalez, Mike, 1960- author.

Title: The plot to change America: how identity politics is dividing the land of the free / by Mike Gonzalez.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019058983 (print) | LCCN 2019058984 (ebook) ISBN 9781641771009 (cloth) | ISBN 9781641771016 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Identity politics—United States. | United States—Social conditions—1960–1980 | United States—Social conditions—1980–Social change—United States.

Classification: LCC HN65 .G595 2019 (print) | LCC HN65 (ebook) DDC 306.0973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058983

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058984

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 22

To Jack, Saskia, and Rafe

Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Introduction

PART I

And Activists Created Groups

CHAPTER 1Hispanics Are Birthed

CHAPTER 2The Asian Paradox

CHAPTER 3Don’t Be So MENA

CHAPTER 4Sex

PART II

Liberty at Risk

CHAPTER 5Marxism by Any Other Name

CHAPTER 6The Demographic Hustle

CHAPTER 7Why It Matters

CHAPTER 8Now What?

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Preface to the Paperback Edition

When I first sat down to write The Plot to Change America in the fall of 2019, little did I anticipate that we were about to enter one of the most fateful years in the lives of the present generation, one in which the plot described in my title would be operationalized through a mixture of violence, deceit, and cowardice.

Two major events collided to make 2020 a pivotal year. First came COVID-19, with its attendant lockdowns, school closures, and long-lasting shortages of such essentials as toilet paper. Supermarkets became dystopic scenes, their ransacked shelves a testament to our new precarity. To all but the very oldest of Americans, the threat of mass contagion was a first. We had read about pandemics, and many of us heard our grandmothers talk about them, but none of us this side of one hundred years old had experienced anything like it first-hand.

As if that wasn’t enough misery, barely nine weeks into the lockdown came George Floyd’s death. The significance of this event went far beyond the personal tragedy suffered by this man and his family. Indeed, it served as the pretext for organizations founded and run by Marxists to set in motion their plans to change our national way of life. COVID-19 has worsened our lives, and two years later we must still wear facemasks to enter public places in many parts of the country. But for the purposes of the ongoing Marxist campaign to transform the United States and its ways, the Black Lives Matter–led disturbances that wrecked our lives after May 25 became the key phenomenon. Two years later, that campaign is now in full force in our classrooms, our offices, our military barracks, our sports leagues, and even our houses of worship. Let no one be fooled, what we have seen in the years since the death of George Floyd proves beyond anyone’s doubt that there’s a well-planned, and well-executed, campaign to change America.

The two phenomena were, of course, related. The pandemic provided the stage for a revolt to finally overthrow the American system, a goal of the Marxist Left for decades. Pandemics create toxic, emotional environments where mass hysterias can fester; the upshot is a double collective affliction. The small village of Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony was just coming out of a smallpox epidemic in the winter of 1692 when it was seized with a rash of accusations of witchcraft. By the time the craze had abated the following year, twenty women had been hanged, five others had died in prison, and one elderly gentleman had been executed by being crushed with heavy stones. Massachusetts officials made an attempt at reparations years later, but the baleful effect on the region lasted generations.

The impact of our 2020 BLM-induced affliction will last even longer, unless Americans—individual Americans from all walks of life, not just elected officials—resolve to stop the plot to change our country. From their creation in 2013, the Black Lives Matter organizations have progressively induced the country into a sort of trance that in many ways resembles the one that seized Salem more than three centuries ago. This condition, which quickly accelerated after Floyd’s death in 2020, demands the suspension of disbelief, as when young Americans who have known nothing but lives of prosperity and liberty, go around repeating the empty mantra people are hurting. Indeed, soon after writing The Plot I sat down again and wrote BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution, which Encounter published in September 2021. I saw clearly what was taking place, how the BLM organizations were carrying out the plot, and that the media was refusing to shine a spotlight onto any of this.

The events since the publication of The Plot in July 2020 have proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is indeed a plot to transform America into something never intended by its Founders, or desired by the more than 100 million immigrants who have come to its shores since the passing of the founding generation. These newcomers voted with their feet to come here precisely because they wanted to flourish under the system the Founders had created. This preface to the paperback edition is an attempt to put the intervening months in the context of the plot underway. The characters you will find in the pages of this book laid the ground for the execution of the plot that I will describe in this preface. The people in the aggrieved categories of race, ethnicity, and sex that Julian Samora, Yuji Ichioka, Linda Sarsour, Kate Millett, and others created or sought to create have become parts of a revolutionary historic bloc. This is a concept conjured up by Antonio Gramsci, and the ideologues who seek to implement the plot largely take their cues from him and from the Frankfurt School.

How BLM Carried out the Plot

The BLM organizations, particularly the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF—the mothership), tactically used violence to achieve the transformation it desires. Some two hundred cities became theaters of conflict, where thousands of demonstrations stopped traffic and generally inconvenienced public life. Demonstrators mounted riots that caused damage totaling in the billions. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED, which is headquartered at Princeton University—and which is pretty BLM friendly), BLM activists took part in 95 percent of the 633 incidents that ACLED identified as riots, and for which we know the identity of the participants.

That was the violence aspect. The deceit comes in the manipulation of the righteous anger that many Americans felt after watching the video of Floyd’s death. Many Americans felt compelled to express their support for their black co-citizens and to affirm that they mattered. Thus, hundreds of thousands marched, pitched signs on their laws, or wore apparel that proclaimed that black lives mattered to them. Most were unaware that BLMGNF does nothing to improve the lives of black Americans or of any other American, or that it indirectly leads to more Americans dying, because police tend to pull back and initiate fewer proactive actions after demonstrations and riots. The BLM founders and leaders are only interested in playing out their part in the plot to change America.

The media played its part, too, while our elected officials did nothing or worse. That’s where the cowardice comes in. Journalists reported extensively on the concept of black lives mattering, or on the movement—the demonstrators and lawn signs—but never critically on the organizations or their founders. BLM has these three components, at least: the concept (which is unimpeachable), the movement (which is amorphous at best), and the organizations and their creators and leaders. The first two components are only tangentially related to the plot; they are in fact continuations of American ideals, though it must be said that the participants in the movement are misguided naïfs, leaving themselves open to manipulation. When we were fighting Soviet Communism, the Kremlin cruelly referred to non-communists who could be manipulated (whether out of a desire for social justice, disarmament, or something else) as useful idiots. The elites at all our leading institutions who accepted the social justice veneer pushed out by BLM, and who are now conducting a totalizing change through reeducation, can certainly be considered under this definition.

But if you look up Black Lives Matter on Google, that modern repository of all human knowledge, you will not find a beautiful concept or a sign on a lawn. Instead, you’ll find BLMGNF, a major political player that supports candidates in electoral races, endorses or opposes bills in Congress, and controls at least tens of millions of dollars. Its cultural cachet is so huge that it even teams up with the rapid-response and action team of Hamilton: The Musical to, in the words of BLMGNF’s 2020 Impact Report, create instructional videos on mail-in ballots for a collection of states. These videos were shared on social media and lived on our Election Center/What Matters 2020 webpage, which was visited by 5 million people.

Our legislators, meanwhile, by and large sat on their hands, afraid to take on an organization that proclaimed to be devoted to social justice or that was related to Black Lives Matter. Yes, Democrats embraced Black Lives Matter and the Critical Race Theory (CRT) indoctrinations they brought in their wake, but Republicans were by and large not profiles in courage. It became evident very quickly that they were allergic to touching anything with the word race or black in it. All of them failed us. Again, cowardice.

The Perpetrators of the Plot

The media, our elected leaders, the academy, our entertainers—all our elites have looked away while a dedicated Marxist Left prepared to change the American way of life. But this is not a recent phenomenon by any means. In this book I detail how activists mau-maued the federal bureaucracy to accept new racial and ethnic categories in the 1970s. The activists themselves had created Asian American as a race and Hispanic as an ethnicity in the early 1970s and, as you will read in these pages, were very open about using the people who suddenly found themselves so identified as a wedge to change America. The idea was to instill into recently naturalized Americans and their American-born children the idea that we live in oppressive society. This is a labor of hate that goes on to this day. Just a month after the publication of The Plot, María Teresa Kumar, the leader of the leftwing organization Voto Latino, explained to the audience of an online forum she held with BLM Founder Alicia Garza and Nikole Hannah-Jones (the architect of the New York Times’s 1619 Project) quite how difficult it is to indoctrinate her reluctant base. The challenge with the work that I do at Voto Latino is that I can’t get people agitated because often times they don’t know the great harm that has happened under the structures that we have been raised by, she said. But once they start understanding it and recognizing it, they act and react, and fight and run for office. Anyone who reads this book’s very first chapter, Hispanics Are Birthed, will immediately understand what it is that Kumar and similar organizers do, and why.

The same goes for sexual and gender politics, as Chapter Four, Sex, explains. Leftist sexual activism is just war on America by another means. The chapter starts out with Kate Millett, one of the legendary leaders of the second-wave feminist movement. Her sister Mallory Millett recounted a meeting in Kate’s New York City apartment in 1969 in this manner: They called the assemblage a ‘consciousness-raising-group,’ a typical communist exercise, something practiced in Maoist China. We gathered at a large table as the chairperson opened the meeting with a back-and-forth recitation, like a Litany, a type of prayer done in the Catholic Church. But now it was Marxism, the Church of the Left, mimicking religious practice.

Eric Mann, a former member of the Weather Underground terrorist group, someone who really should get more scrutiny from the media, recounted in a 2015 interview how his relationship with the African-American civil rights movement was merely strategic. He said he exploits the Black Movement, not because it’s the most oppressed, but because it’s the most philosophically advanced and it has a history of reaching out. If you ask every gay, woman, Latino, Asian, White, in the ’60s, ‘What drove you?’ They would say, ‘The Black movement woke me up to not just my own oppression.’ This false analogizing, of the real plight of black Americans to the plight of those whose experience with discrimination can in no way compare, is integral to identity politics, as I detail in The Plot. But Mann revealed an even more sinister element in his interview: he made clear that to communists like him, the organizing of black, Latino, Asian, feminist, gay, and even climate activists was just division of labor in the more general task of destroying American society and replacing it with socialism.

He said he remembered talking to a gay rights leader and asking him, ‘How did you come up with the idea of the Gay Liberation Fund?’ He says, ‘Why do you think we called it that? Because we believed in the National Liberation Fund of Vietnam. We weren’t just wanting gay marriage, we wanted to overthrow the government as part of being queer.’ Mann adds, I come out of the tradition where wherever you started we’re all trying to make the same revolution. We had maybe a little of divisions of labor, but we only were trying to be generalists.

Mann is in many ways the personification of the plot. In 1989 he founded the Labor-Community Strategy Center, which calls itself a Think Tank/Act Tank for regional, national, and international movement building. Mann himself affectionally calls it The University of Caracas Revolutionary Graduate School, a droll reference (droll to him, not to millions of suffering Venezuelans) to the Marxist government in place in Venezuela since 1999. The Center recruits and organizes future revolutionaries who want to overthrow the United States—which Mann calls the most dictatorial country in the world—and its system. Its purpose, he told students at the University of California, San Diego, in 2008, is to build an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-fascist united front. He urged the students to Take this country away from the white settler state, take this country away from imperialism and have an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-fascist revolution. The strategy consists roughly of the following components: (1) take over the cultural institutions; (2) recruit people; (3) organize them; (4) convince them of their previously unnoticed oppression; (5) convince them that they must become agents of cultural change and of replacing what they would call America’s cultural hegemony with a revolutionary counter hegemony.

These ideas were first enunciated by Antonio Gramsci, the founder of Italy’s Communist Party, whom you will find in Chapter Five. The participants in today’s plot are all Gramscians, in some way. In Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (written from 1929–35, during his imprisonment by Mussolini’s Fascist regime) he detailed why it was that Marx and Engels had been wrong in their prognosis that the workers of industrial countries, the proletariat, would rise up to overthrow the capital-owning class, the bourgeoisie. This lack of revolutionary zeal was a matter that troubled not just Gramsci but also German communist intellectuals who gathered under the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, also known as the Frankfurt School. Both Italy and Germany had revolutions in 1919, but both failed to bring about a socialist state.

They came up with nearly equal explanations. To Gramsci, the worker was not rebelling because he had accepted the norms of his bourgeois oppressor, who therefore no longer needed to use force or even threaten it in order to have the proletariat do his bidding. The worker, for example, remained loyal to God, loved his family, was patriotic about his nation, and rather enjoyed his private property—all things that Engels and Marx’s Communist Manifesto said needed to be abolished. For the Frankfurt scholars, the explanation was nearly the same: the capitalist class had created a conceptual superstructure through which all things were seen and understood (or actually became things!), making it impossible for those inside the system to break free of their oppressive state without the aid of neo-Marxist intellectuals. All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, wrote the Frankfurt scholar Herbert Marcuse, perhaps the most important of all in terms of the baleful impact he had on society.

Gramsci believed that the way to get the worker to shed his false consciousness was for Marxist intellectuals to re-educate them. This was called consciousness raising—giving people their consciousness of servitude. This is the job that Maria Teresa Kumar finds so difficult to accomplish with Latin American immigrants who are too happy when they reach our shores. In Western nations, where civil society is strong, communists would have to pursue a war of position. As Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebooks (translated from the Italian by, among others, Joe Buttigieg—the father of the erstwhile presidential candidate, and the foremost Gramsci scholar of his day), the war of positions is the only viable possibility in the West. In societies without strong mediating institutions—such as tsarist Russia or much of the Third World today—revolutionaries were of course free to instigate the violent insurrections and revolutions that Marx and Engels demanded in their Manifesto. Yet in the more stable West, Edmund Burke’s little platoons—churches, schools, the family—were an insurmountable obstacle for revolution. In some cases, a mixture of violence, indoctrination, and intimidation would be required to carry out the plot.

It has become clear since I wrote The Plot that just this combination—long-term indoctrination into the belief that America is systemically oppressive, spasmodic violence that will create crisis, and intimidation of dissenters—is precisely what is being pursued in America at the moment, perhaps because the institutions have been taken over by Marxists and because civil society has begun to fray. It just so happens that Eric Mann’s most famous recruit is none other than Patrisse Cullors, along with Alicia Garza one of the co-founders of BLMGNF. In his 2011 book, Playbook for Progressives (the title an obvious nod to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals), Mann boasts of recruiting Cullors at the tender age of seventeen and then training her for ten years. When Cullors says, in a famous video interview now removed from the internet, that she and Garza are trained Marxists, this is what she means. The job of an organizer, Mann writes in his book, is to build a base and lead it effectively to advance an overarching long-term strategy. The goal is to force those in power to do something they would not do otherwise, and it cannot be achieved unless organizers are equipped with a clear ideology and a firm, unambiguous strategy.

At Mann’s Strategy Center, Cullors learned how to change America. It was there that she studied the fundamentals, as she put it in her 2017 memoir When They Call You a Terrorist. I read, I study, adding Mao, Marx, and Lenin to my knowledge of [bell] hooks, [Audre] Lorde, and [Rebecca] Walker. Mann placed Cullors at the Bus Drivers Union he had created in 1992. Why buses? At a time when many workplaces have 25 to 50 employees, an overcrowded bus has 43 people sitting and from 25 to 43 people standing, he wrote years later. Ten organizers on ten different buses can reach 1,000 or more people in a single afternoon. Mann thought of every angle. But it wasn’t really about buses. In a 1996 essay, Mann wrote that the Center taught the recruits to go beyond narrow ‘trade union’ or ‘bus’ consciousness to build a movement based on a more transformative, internationalist consciousness and create a united front against U.S. imperialism—rooted in the strategic alliance of the multi-racial, multi-national working class. This would be the explosive combination of deep ideological framing and grassroots organizing. It is never really about race, or sex, or gender, or climate, or bus riding. David Horowitz, a ’60s Marxist who rejected progressivism and became a neoconservative, likes to say that the issue is never the issue. The issue is the revolution.

As Cullors mentioned, Alicia Garza is also a trained Marxist, in her case straight from a trained Gramscian. Garza started out her political indoctrination at the School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL), a sort of Marxist preparatory that was co-founded in Oakland, California, by Harmony Goldberg, a cultural anthropologist and Gramscian scholar. Garza started there as an intern when she was just twenty-two, and it was SOUL that then found her employment in the thick web of socialist organizations that span the globe.

At SOUL, Garza told SFWeekly, she learned that social movements all over the world have used Marx and Lenin as a foundation to interrupt these systems that are really negatively impacting the majority of people. As the Bay Area online weekly publication described it, Garza’s summer with SOUL wasn’t just about getting a political education in a leftist ‘analysis around capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy and heteronormativity,’ as she describes it, but a crash course in grassroots community organizing. Instead of the bus drivers’ union, where Cullors cut her teeth, SOUL put Garza to organize against gentrification in Oakland. I spent my summer getting my ass kicked, knocking on doors ten hours a day. It was really good training. Really, really, really good training, Garza told SF Weekly. All good organizing, as Mann, tells us, must combine strategy with ideology.

Like Mann, Goldberg sees black Americans as the key societal force to be exploited in order to carry out the plot. Gramsci always recognized the need for a multi-class alliance which had a united vision on how to replace the hegemonic narrative with a revolutionary one. But not all classes are the same. The historic bloc is not a flat alliance of different classes. In every historic bloc, there is a single class that plays a leading role and serves as a cohering force. This role is not determined arbitrarily but reflects that in every society, there is a class whose position in society gives it the interest, consciousness, and capacity to lead the rest of society in a transformative movement, Goldberg wrote in an insightful paper on Gramsci.

In its unsigned manifesto on the 2020 election, the communist group LeftRoots (of which Goldberg, Garza, and Cullors are members) also identifies all the groups whose creation and organizing I detail in the first chapters of The Plot as making up the historic bloc:

[T]he class and social forces that we see as the bloc’s driving forces are Blacks, Latinos, and Indigenous people—particularly women and gender-oppressed people—from the middle, hyper-exploited, and excluded layers of the working class. Additionally, this historic bloc will need to incorporate the interests of various key forces: The broader multiracial working class including Muslim, Arab, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and white peoples; the multiracial lower layer of the small scale capitalist class.

LeftRoots is quite open about what it intends to do and how. The 2020 manifesto, quoting from the LeftRoots 2017 constitution, adds, LeftRoots has two primary purposes: 1) to develop strategy to build 21st century socialism; and 2) to develop cadres with the individual and collective skills to formulate, evaluate, and carry out such a strategy That’s how the plot is hatched.

Mann, for his part, is quite open about who should be the most important constituent of the historic bloc that will work to transform America. He calls for an agreed-upon Black priority. In the all-important dimension of his revolutionary campaign, destroying society’s ability to defend itself by defunding the police and shutting down the prison system, the leadership clearly came out of the black community, Mann writes. On this score, Mann successfully teamed up with BLMGNF, specifically the head of its Los Angeles chapter, Melina Abdullah, to convince the L.A. School Board to cut $25 million from the L.A. School Police Department’s budget, a 35 percent cut, in June 2020. His comments on the matter one month later are worth quoting at length:

We know of no other Defund the Police campaign in a major U.S. City that has made such a major political and material breakthrough.… Our campaign was also a major ideological victory. It delegitimized the very existence of police in the public schools and affirmed the experience and demands of the most militant and conscious Black students.… Dozens of angry, articulate, and organized Black students—many from