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“There’s no rule of law that’s going to get us out of where we are,” says author and organizer Andrea Ritchie. In this episode of Movement Memos, Ritchie and host Kelly Hayes discuss the role of criminalization in authoritarian and fascist regimes, and why “we need more outlaws” and less fetishization of “law and order.”

Music by Hatamitsunami & Pulsed.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer, Kelly Hayes. Today, we’re discussing the role of criminalization in authoritarianism and fascism, and why clinging to the rule of law in this messy moment in history is a catastrophic mistake. We will be hearing from Andrea Ritchie, a co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization and the author and co-author of multiple books, including No More Police, with Mariame Kaba, and Practicing New Worlds. Criminalization is the default framework people turn to in the United States to restore their sense of order, amid a crisis or emergency, so, when I hear someone suggest something wild, like calling the police on ICE, I understand where they’re coming from. But as the Trump administration continues to consolidate power, we need to lose our illusions about the law as a moral instrument. We need more outlaws and less confusion about what the law protects and who it targets.

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[musical interlude]

KH: Andrea Ritchie, welcome back to “Movement Memos.”

Andrea Ritchie: Thanks so much, Kelly. It’s so good to be here with you.

Kelly: How are you doing today, friend?

Andrea Ritchie: I’m hanging in there. I’m of course sitting with where we are, with the military occupying the nation’s capital, bolstered by forces from states loyal to the regime and the very clear announcement of intent to deploy military force to opposing regions of the country, and particularly to cities led by Black mayors and with predominantly Black populations, and how people are responding or not responding to that reality. And I’m also feeling really fortified and inspired and emboldened and hopeful about all the ways people are moving, seen and unseen, in response in this moment, including this coming weekend, Labor Day weekend. The People’s Conference for Palestine will be happening in Detroit, and I’m very grateful to the organizers for making space for us to think about the connections between those two. For some people it might feel like disparate and competing realities, which are in fact very much connected. And I’m excited about being in space with folks to think through how resistance on both fronts can fortify and make more possible on all fronts.

KH: I am also really grateful for our Palestinian co-strugglers, for their steadfastness, and the lessons they teach. This is a time to understand authoritarianism, and to fight it, on all fronts, and our Palestinian siblings have been engaged in that struggle for a long time. I am also tremendously grateful for my co-strugglers across Chicago who are rallying and organizing in the face of Trump’s threats to create a military occupation of our city. I have a broken ankle, right now, but I’m still moving fast — figuratively speaking — and trying to do my part, because we have a lot of work to do. But I do want to stress that, as daunting as these threats may be, I am full of strength and hope right now, because I believe in my community and I believe in Chicago.

AR: I do too. I feel so grateful to be hearing from the people I, as you were saying, have been in community with in Chicago for many years, moving together in collectivity, in unison, in preparation, in defiance and in readiness to take care of each other. And it’s so heartening. So many of us have learned so much from Chicago over the years about what truly intersectional organizing looks like, what fierce and joyful resistance looks like, and what prefiguring possibility looks like. And so my heart is with every single person in Chicago right now because you’re staring down an occupation, and also my heart is with you all in resistance and coming together to create what is needed for this moment.

KH: Well, so much of what I, personally, am able to bring to this moment is the product of being in conversation and collaboration with friends like you, so I also want to express that I am so grateful for you, as well, Andrea.

AR: And I for you, Kelly, really. I say this every time I have an opportunity. You heard me say it recently, that this podcast, and these conversations that you’re having with people and organizers in your newsletter, and making possible in community in ways that people don’t see, I think are a critical light shining our way forward. As you wrote recently, “As we’re limping through the darkness” – and I know that’s a labor that is … It’s a lot of labor. And I recently witnessed you doing it in the middle of the night. And I want listeners to know that it’s a labor of love and it is a labor, and I’ll continue to be a “Movement Memos” evangelist, I guess, is one way I could describe myself.

KH: That is so kind, and it really does mean the world to me that people find this podcast useful. Because I really am over here with a busted ankle, a swollen spine, a banged up knee, and a bad shoulder, just trying to make things that are useful to people, amid everything that we are up against. So, thank you for affirming that, and with that, let’s dig into some of this analysis that we are hoping people will find useful today.

As someone who has been working for years to interrupt the violence of criminalization, how would you describe this moment?

AR: I would describe it as a culmination of criminalization, of a deep investment ideologically, politically, financially, emotionally, spiritually in criminalization over centuries, and certainly many recent decades of modern history. And that is true in the US and around the world.

And so many people have heard me, at this point, talk about how criminalization is a political process that extends beyond the enactment of criminal laws and policies and their enforcement by police and other law enforcement agencies to a political process that designates groups of people and places as inherently criminalized and criminalizable and feeds into those core practices of fascism, which is to create an “us” and a “them,” a core practice of authoritarian regimes, which is to contain, control, repress, expel, and exterminate, ultimately, in its most extreme form. And that’s the most extreme form of criminalization, whether it’s the death penalty or genocide. And that is where we are in this moment.

What’s really striking me is how visible that is in real time in D.C., that the occupation of D.C. is being justified, rationalized, given cover by this process of criminalization, whether it’s of unhoused communities, of unmet mental health needs, of disabled people, of under-resourced communities, Black communities, of youth, of all the groups that of course have consistently been criminalized since 1492, in the original occupation of these lands. And how that is literally the cover that the administration is, and the regime, is using to justify it.

And then when opposition mounts, they have the gall to say that they’re engaging in this occupation to protect Black people, while critiquing what they see as predominantly white people resisting it by saying, “Well, they haven’t experienced the kind of violence that we’re trying to stop through this extreme form of criminalization called occupation.” And it’s just so clear about right now in D.C. how criminalization is mobilized. Not just to repress the opposition, not just to suppress dissent, not just to target the regime’s opponents, which of course it is also being used for that, but to literally rationalize the whole process of authoritarianism and fascism, and frankly, to manufacture consent for it among people who would otherwise be alarmed by what’s happening.

But this sort of pacification of, “No, but we’re doing it in the interest of public safety. We’re doing it because crime is rife in D.C. or Chicago or New York. We’re doing it to protect underserved, under-resourced communities. We’re doing it to help people who can’t help themselves.” Those ideas have been so deeply ingrained and so deeply implanted in our souls and spirits that it turns down the temperature of people who would otherwise be like, “What is happening in our nation’s capital?” Because criminalization is such a powerful idea, we’re so deeply invested in it, and it serves the interest of this regime so well.

And so that’s what I’m seeing in this moment. Obviously, as I said, genocide is the ultimate form of criminalization. The notion that everyone, from newborns to nonagenarians, in Gaza deserves to be starved to death because that is the appropriate punishment for existing on land that someone else wants, claims, occupies, is the ultimate form of criminalization.

And I think it’s important for folks to understand that criminalization operates the same at any level.

So, in the same way that corporations that commit wage theft will never be criminalized, but the person who shoplifts a basic necessity of life will be, particularly if they’re Black, Indigenous, Queer, trans, disabled, poor, obviously. It’s also important for folks to recognize that that operates at the national and international level.

And so we’re in a moment where people are really pinning their hopes on the criminalization of the president around what’s in the Epstein files, around any number of other acts that he has engaged in that are ultimately violations of criminal laws, or holding out hope that some form of criminalization of Netanyahu or Israeli occupation force officials or soldiers will stop the conditions that we’re living under and describing.

And I really need people to understand that criminalization is a political process that serves the interests of those in power. And so there is no way that the people who are engaging in the greatest acts of violence right now are going to be criminalized and stopped by criminalization because that’s not the purpose of it. And so I think that’s a really important moment too, that that’s really being unmasked in ways that are undeniable. And yet, I see people continuing to hold on hope to the possibility that criminalization can stop what’s happening, instead of being the thing that’s fueling what’s happening.

So, that feels like an equally important thing for us to confront, which is that our best chance at stopping fascism and authoritarianism and striking at the heart of it is to interrupt criminalization, is to confront, challenge, refuse, and uproot criminalization as a central organizing force in our world and in our lives, including in our personal lives. But also to stop looking to criminalization as a process that is going to end violence, whether it’s in our communities or at the international scale, and start to think about what else is required, which obviously those of us who are abolitionists believe is moving from a place of transformative justice, which is transforming the conditions that make violence possible, that make it necessary, that are essential to the functioning of the systems that we’re in, rather than this process that furthers those systems of power.

KH: Absolutely. Criminalization produces disposable people. That’s what the process of criminalization does. People who are deemed undesirable, people who threaten the functionality of systems of oppression, and as Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches us, people who are deemed surplus as economic and social conditions shift — criminalization is the process by which these people are disposed of. Not just functionally, but in public consciousness as well.

It takes people whose actions are often symptoms of or responses to systemic conditions and labels them the problem. So, if they’re punished or disappeared from society, justice was supposedly done, and we can all go about our days, continuing to contend with those same conditions — and not giving any thought to the torturous or impossible conditions those people face, because we have social permission to stop thinking about what happens to them once they are labeled as criminals. How people can look at this system, which grinds people like you and me under every day, and see it as the fix for fascism, rather than the beast Donald Trump would feed us to — I mean this is obviously the product of a near-religiosity, in terms of how criminalization and punishment are deployed as a means of sense-making. When people’s lives feel out of control, they want there to be a number they can call, they want there to be people whose job it is to make things make sense again. But what those forces really offer us is a process of human disposal that reinforces untenable and increasingly cruel and inhumane conditions.

This has long been true, and it’s even truer now, under authoritarianism and fascism. What Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment,” where services that help maintain and sustain communities, and people’s lives, are stripped away, and policing and prisons are increasingly funded to manage the fallout — what we’re seeing right now is that phenomenon on steroids. This society already had scapegoats. Black people were already scapegoated for crime, immigrants were already scapegoated for job losses, women, trans, and queer people were scapegoated for the anger and alienation of cis straight men, and these ideas always came into play when people in these groups were criminalized or otherwise experienced violence. Fascism creates moral panics around scapegoated groups, and builds culture and policy around the total control, containment, or eradication of people it portrays as a threat to the dominance of its in-group members, to status quo values, or civilization itself. Fascism provides a fantasy landscape where if scapegoats are disposed of, the chosen people will be restored to a state of greatness they never actually knew, because systemic conditions have never actually allowed things to be great for them, and certainly won’t now, under Trump.

AR: I was going to say there’s absolutely no doubt about........

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