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Outlaw Ethics

This file is useful against K Affirmatives that make inclusion good claims, attempt to
reform traditional debate so that their arguments are no longer considered outside
bounds of fairness, or both. The gist of the file is that its better to give the finger to the
System than to try and convince it to accept you.
Better to be an Outlaw than begging for the State to recognize your worthiness, only
you can set yourself freeeven demands on your oppressor perpetuate the power
relationship whereby you are still under their control
Wolfe 1 [Claire, Living the Outlaw Life: Freeing your inner outlaw, June,
http://www.backwoodshome.com/columns/wolfe0106.html]
To be truly free, you will be an Outlaw. I dont mean criminal although you are probably that, also. I mean a person who
thinks outside the law. When

you are an Outlaw, your body (just like everybody elses) may be subject to the
dictates of bureaucrats, armed enforcers and various elected fixers, controllers, connivers, pork-barrellers, socializers, corporatizers,
fear-mongers, cigar-sexers, bribe-takers, old-boy-networkers and global influence peddlers. But when you are an
Outlaw, your heart and mind (unlike most everybody elses) are your own.
What exactly does that mean, though, in this over-lawed, over-ruled, over-executive-ordered world?
Lets go back for a moment to the statement that youre already a criminal. Ive said it before and it always offends somebody: YOU may be a criminal, Wolfe. But IM a law-abiding citizen.
Dont paint me with your black brush.
Well, sorry. You may not already be an Outlaw. But definitely you are already a criminal. You cant help but be.
In The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton write:
The U.S. Code, which contains all federal statutes, occupies 56,009 single-spaced pages. Its 47 volumes take up nine feet of shelf space. An annotated version, which attempts to bring order out
of chaos, is three feet long and has 230 hardcover volumes and 36 paperback supplements. Administrative lawmaking under statutes fill up the 207-volume Code of Federal Regulations, which
spans 21 feet of shelf space and contains more than 134,488 pages of regulatory law. Federal law is further augmented by more than 2,756 volumes of judicial precedent, taking up 160 yards
of law library shelving.
And youre certain youre not breaking one of those laws?
During the Clinton years alone, as James Bovard noted in Feeling Your Pain, Federal agencies issued more than 25,000 new regulationscriminalizing everything from reliable toilets to snuff
advertisements on race cars. And Bovard wrote that before Clintons final year in office, when the federal government issued more than 100,000 pages of new regulations.
Thats just federal. Lets not even mention the states.
Still think youre not a criminal?
Really. So youve never: forgotten to report a little extra income on your 1040, built an addition on your house without a permit, driven without a seatbelt (the Supreme Court says cops can
throw you in jail for that), given a glass of dinner wine to your 17-year-old, smoked a joint, disconnected a pollution control device on your car, cut a friends hair without a license, installed an
outlaw toilet, carried a pocket knife with a blade longer-than-legal (bet you dont even know what length is legal, do you?), been in a room where friends were talking about doing something
illegal (conspiracy!), put a dollar in a football pool, patronized a prostitute, taken a tax deduction you really werent entitled to, lied to a bureaucrat, willfully failed to file, built a pipe-bomb
just to watch it go boom, carried money with traces of cocaine on it (like some 82 percent of the paper money in circulation today), put prescription medicine into one of those little daily
dispenser containers, given one of your own prescription pills to a sick friend (search Title 21 of the U.S. Code and just see if you can figure out exactly what you can and cant do with that ittybitty bottle of Zoloft or Prozac you depend on to help you survive this modern madness), owned chemicals that might be used in bomb making (like the bleach and ammonia bottles under your
kitchen sink), transposed the digits of your Social Security Number on a government form, or driven in a car with someone who might have been transporting contraband. Ever?
Remember, these days you can be convicted of conspiracy for crimes you dont even know about, or for buying legal items that might be used for illegal causes. Some acquaintance gets in
trouble and needs to snitch on a friend to get his own sentence reduced and youre toast.
You can even be convicted of violating laws that dont exist as plenty of tax criminals have been. Ask the IRS for copies of the laws youre allegedly breaking and theyll respond with
legalistic gobbledegook. I have a friend who once testified as an expert witness in a tax case. Her expertise? Grammar. On the stand, she diagrammed a mega-monster sentence from the tax code
and proved the alleged regulation couldnt be obeyed because it literally had no meaning in the English language. Still, people get arrested for disobeying it.
Those are just a few of the ways individuals can get in trouble. Heaven forbid you should own a business and try to get through the day without committing a crime. For example, while Your
Father in Washington still permits you, you lucky little person, to disconnect the crazy-making doodad that goes bingidy-bing-bing when you leave your car keys in the ignition and open the
door, its a federal crime for your car dealer to disconnect it at your request. Like, whose car do they think it is, anyway? Well, actually, its not a federal crime to disconnect only the part that
goes bingidy-bing-bing when you open the door and leave your key in the ignition, but it is a federal crime to disconnect the part that goes bingidy-bing-bing when you unhook your seatbelt and
leave your key in the ignition, which is all part of the same system but a different set of wires from the other one. (Are you following this? There wont be a test, but there could be a hefty fine
later.) Oh yeah, by the way, before you unhook the thing yourself, youd better check your state law. You wouldnt want the state-o-crats SWAT team swooping down on you when youre
armed only with a pair of wirecutters.
Bottom line. You are no longer a law-abiding citizen. There are too many laws to abide. And it doesnt matter whether they call em laws, rules, regulations, or something else altogether. You
break them every day.

With laws like these, who even wants to be a law-abiding citizen? When you put yourself at the service
of rules and diktats of this nature, you put your life in thrall to the kind of people who make them. Even
if youre a member of the infamous Snopes clan, youre bound to be better at figuring out how to live your own life than people who sit around
all day cooking up stuff like this and figuring out how severely to punish you if you dont obey.

In the science fiction novel Pallas, one of L. Neil Smiths characters says, Peoplepardon me, journalists
and politicianshave often accused me of believing that Im above the law. And yet, who isnt? The
law is created by demonstrable criminals, enforced by demonstrable criminals, interpreted by
demonstrable criminals, all for demonstrably criminal purposes. Of course Im above the law. And so
are you.
Amen, bruthah Neil.

So why not enjoy being above the law? Why not embrace it? Why not do it with panache? Flair? Savoir
faire? Pride and shining resolution? Why not, in short, free your Inner Outlaw?
For this is what divides the OutlawD.B. Cooper, Bonnie and Clyde, Robin Hood, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorrofrom the
mere criminalthe creep who steals your CD player or the furniture out of the White House. Or the person who breaks the same old
everyday laws you do, but breaks them in a sniveling, sneaking, guilt-ridden way, rather than with a jaunty shrug. Attitude. Attitude. Attitude.
Dont let me give you the wrong idea. You dont have to start holding up IRS offices and distributing the proceeds to starving taxpayers to be an

The essence of free Outlawry is the way you live in the


face of growing tyrannythe Outlaw way you think. Even when its the government thats committing the real crimes, being an Outlaw comes in handy.
Outlaw. Whatever crimes youre already committing will do.

Some examples:
You go into a doctors office a year from now and they tell you, Sorry, Comrade. Thanks to federal privacy protection, you can no longer get medical care unless you accept a unique
identifying number and consent to have your medical records shared with anyone the government wants to see them. The good little citizen, sick, vulnerable, overwhelmed and puzzled,
submits. The Outlaw? The Outlaw has already prepared for this and, depending on the kind of Outlaw he is, has options. Maybe he meekly submits, alsousing one of his five pre-built
identities. Maybe he knows an Outlaw doctor who trades services for cash. Maybe he makes such a stink threatening to bring a civil rights suit that the doctor decides shed rather risk the wrath
of U.S. Health and Human Services than the wrath of a mad patient who knows his rights (and a good lawyer).
Youre driving along minding your own business when you find yourself in the middle of a checkpoint. Who knows what theyre trolling for today? Drugs, booze, seatbelt crimesor perhaps
just Your papers, please (an insurance checkpoint). A cop comes to your window and although his words say please and may we? his tone says, Cross me, muhfuh, and youll be on your
face in the gravel with my knee jabbing a hole in your kidney. Where are you going? he asks. Where are you traveling from? Whats that in the back seat? Who helped you load your pickup?
Do you mind if we search your vehicle? The good little citizen, once again, submits. The Outlaw, once again, has options. That might mean anything from playing dumb and innocent (Im
sorry, officer, are you sure its okay for you to do this? My high school civics teacher told me they absolutely couldnt do things like this in America. You seem like a nice young man and Id
hate to see you get in trouble.) to calmly refusing any consent to search to covertly making note of all officers badge numbers, names, and descriptions for possible later use. (You know, like
maybe sending them a copy of the Constitution.)

The Outlaw doesnt always emerge victorious from encounters with authority. Bonnie, Clyde, and John
Dillinger ended up with their bullet-riddled bodies on public display, after all. You really might end up with your face in the
gravel and your nether portions in a world of hurt if the nice officer is having a Justin Volpe moment and thinks youre Abner Louima. Refuse
to allow a random search of your vehicle, for instance and, as Boston T. Party describes in You and the Police, a drug dog and handler may be
brought to the scene. The handler strokes a baggie of marijuana in his pocket then touches the trunk of your car. The dog goes wild and voila!
instant probable cause. (Or the dog simply sniffs you, and the almost inevitable traces of cocaine on your federal reserve notes lead to a shakedown and the forfeiture of all the cash youre carrying.)

Government ruthlessness is a giant purple rhinoceros standing in the path between you and the free
enjoyment of Outlawry. Its a rabid rhino. With a cyanide-tipped horn. Its rutting season and it thinks youre
competition. Its got a thorn in its little hoofie. In general, its having a really, really, really bad day.

Yes, resistance to arbitrary power is dangerous. Lets nobody kid herself about that. But resistance is not
futile.
In most cases, being an Outlaw doesnt mean attracting attention to yourself. It simply means living, as
much as possible, as you wish. More important, it means having the mindset needed to live that way in a world of adversity. More
often than confronting, it means ignoring or evading insane and excessive rules. When confrontation is
necessary, it means having the knowledge, preparation, andonce againattitude to help you get
through the situation without either passively submitting or going unproductively postal.
In practice, that means something different for every Outlaw. But in every case, it means you have an
attitude of self ownership (or, if you prefer, of belonging to God), not being the natural subject, and easy target, of any bureaucrat or
badge-bearer who wishes to push you around.

It means recognizing the pathetic state of law and justice around you, and recognizing its dangers
but resolving to live your life more like a free American than a Stalinist peasant, regardless. It means living by your own
highest moral and ethical choices, rather than trying to tippy-toe around every persnicketing regulation in every obscure book in every cubbyhole
governmental office.
It means remembering that this is still our America. Not theirs.
It means remembering that you are still a human being with potential beyond anything those who want to put us all into tight little categories and
boxesand prison cells!could ever conceive.

It means knowing every day that, despite the chains and travails of too much government, and their
very real threats to your security, your heart and mind remain free.
It means you belong to yourself. That you think for yourself. That you have higher values than any do-gooder,
lobbyist, congressthing, corrupt cop, or midnight raider will ever give you credit for .
But thats okay. Because its not their approval youre looking for. Freedom is what youre looking for.
And youre only going to find that by being determined to live it.
Gandhi said it: We must be the change we wish to see.

Dignity is the greatest weapon against Capitalist Hegemony and it can only be wielded
by refusing to follow the agenda set by the Oppressor confronting is just the flip-side
of conforming
Holloway 10 [John, Professor in the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades of the Benemerita
Universidad Autonoma de Puebla in Mexico, Crack Capitalism, 49-50]

Cracks break with the logic of capitalist society. To that logic, we oppose a different way of doing
things. We want to break the system, the social cohesion that holds us in place and obliges us to act in certain ways.
Dignity is a cutting edge shearing through the tight, tough, compact weave of capitalist domination. Dignity is an icebreaker, its sharp bows cutting into an enormous mass of compacted ice, the apparently unbreakable horror that we call capitalism. Dignity is a
pick-axe wielded against the encroaching walls that threaten to crush the whole of humanity. Dignity

is a blade hacking at the

strands of the spider's web that holds us entrapped.


The weapon of dignity is otherness, other-living, other-doing. The otherness of dignity is a weapon, an
otherness-against, a misfitting directed (explicitly or not) against that which we do not fit into: a world of exploitation and destruction.
The spaces and moments we have called cracks are often described as autonomous spaces, or spaces
of exodus or escape. We have tended to avoid these terms here simply because they draw attention away from the crucial issue: the conflict
between these space-moments and the world that surrounds them. It is important to sing the glories of the worlds that are being created, the new
social relations and the new ways of doing things: but we cannot go very far without talking of the clash with the world to which these dignities
are opposed. There is

a constant antagonism, a constant pressure to make the otherness yield to the


enormous cohesive force of the society that surrounds us.
The spaces are not autonomous, though they aspire to be. They are rather cracks, the sharp ends of a
social conflict. Dignity is an attack on capitalism, but not necessarily a confrontation. To confront
capital is to allow it to set the agenda. Dignity consists in setting our own agenda: this is what we shall do,
irrespective of capital. If capital chooses to repress us, to co-opt us, to imitate us, so be it, but let it be clear that we lead the dance. This
certainly does not mean, cannot mean, that we cease to struggle against capitalism, but that, as far as possible,
we take the initiative, we set the agenda, we make it clear that it is capitalism struggling against us,
our lives, our projects, our humanity.
Dignity is to refuse-and-create: to refuse to make capitalism and to create a new world. In an article on the movement
in Oaxaca, Gustavo Esteva comments, 'Thousands, millions of people assume now that the time has come to walk our own path. As the
Zapatistas say, to change the world is very difficult, if not impossible. A more pragmatic attitude
demands the construction of a new world. That's what we are now trying to do, as if we had already
won' (Esteva 2007d: 7).1 Building a new world does of course mean changing the existing one, but the shift in emphasis is crucial:
instead of focusing our attention on the destruction of capitalism, we concentrate on building something else. This is an
inversion of the traditional revolutionary perspective that puts the destruction of capitalism first and the
construction of the new society second. To make a new world means to cut the web that binds us into
the cohering force of capitalist society, so that we can create something different. The enemy is the
social synthesis of capitalist society.

Rodriguez 10 [Dylan, Professor at UCR of Latin American Studies, "The Terms of Engagement: Warfare,
White Locality, and Abolition", http://crs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/1/151]
My concern in this essay is with contextualizing and resituating the profound state and state-ordained violences
of those proliferating warfare technologies that have been rendered mundane, acceptable, and banal

within the nuances of the American 'domestic' social formation in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. More
precisely, I wish to bring analytical and theoretical attention to the organized human fatalities and orchestrated subjections of racially
pathologized social subjects that are essential to white supremacist nation-building, even and especially within the historical conjuncture of the
multiculturalist racist state's emergence as the hegemonic institutional phenotype of the USA. Thus, what might a radical sociology, antiracist

the white supremacist state as something that has neither


obsolesced nor decomposed, as if simply a relic of an earlier, vulgar moment in US racial formation (Omi and Winant 1994),1 but
has reinvigorated and recomposed its animus of dominance through a symbiosis of multiculturalist
incorporations/empowerments and political enhancement of a statecraft that is durably and
praxis, and social theory contribute to a critical reframing of

foundationally racist? Here, I follow scholar activist and political geographer Ruthie Gilmore's clarifying definition of racism as 'the
state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death' (Gilmore 2002: 261).

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the recent proliferation of 'antiwar' liberal and progressive
discourses challenging the militarized US global regime of the Bush Administrations War on Terror, the
circumstances, scenes, and locations of warfare have been insidiously periodized and re-sited not
incidentally by the 'antiwar' left itself - to the nominal historical and geographic exteriors of the USA. There is a political-discursive circuit
bridging the extra-national and global military mobilizations of the US state, DOD J including its knowledge-producing and violence-enhancing
techniques, and the loyal opposition and dissension of the establishment US left to a state-induced global 'war' that it alleges is being conducted

The energy conducted by this political-discursive circuit (as with all


reproduces each of the nominally opposed elements of its bridge while, uniquely,
generating bodies of social thought (embodied by scholars, pundits, activists, state figures, and public
media forms) and political performances (rallies, 'antiwar' agendas/manifestos, and rituals of public
debate) that instruct a particular common sense of what 'war is.
This common sense obscures and consistently disavows the material continuities between state-formed
technologies of warmaking across historical moments and geographies, while re-forming the US
'Homeland' as a place of relative peace' or at least as a place that is not at war wherein state-produced and state-proctored
under false, flawed, or immoral pretensions.
functioning circuits)

institutionalizations of massive racist violence are unrecognizable as such, and articulations of the current emergencies of domestic warfare
e.g. by prison

and penal abolitionists (Critical Resistance Publications Collective 2000), radical women of color
antiviolence activists (INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence 2006), and imprisoned radicals and
revolutionaries (Hames-Garcia 2004; Rodriguez 2006) are held with suspicion as the allegations of those (simply)
unwilling to concede the fundamental tenability and universal reformability of the US social and state
forms.
I am thus addressing a modality of war that is most often contained and disappeared into the categorically unremarkable: that which is so takenfor-granted, assumed so organic to the production of the social landscape, that it is quite literally not worthy of extended remark, much less

this historical present is a warfare mosaic that refuses simplifying


categorization precisely because its composition absorbs the identification of its observers, and (following
Althusser s formulation) 'hails' social subjects with individualizing narratives of national vindication. The
discursive techniques of this war subsume regularly available, locally recognizable artifacts of martial law (e.g.
announced and valorized police roundups of 'gangs' and 'illegal aliens'), a racist police state (euphemized as 'racial profiling'), and deeply
political or proto-political civil insurrection (e.g. rioting, cop assassination, and property destruction) under the
rubrics of law, policing, justice, and (most importantly) 'peace' or 'peacekeeping'. In the context of this politicalcultural 'national' production, ordinary people are not merely witnesses to state-waged atrocity in their midst, but are
(sometimes overlappingly) its participants, enablers, victims, and strategists .
sustained critical comment or analysis. As such,

Logics of inclusion are coopted by White Supremacy to provide cover under the guise of
multiracialism while perpetuating Racist oppression

Rodriguez 10 [Dylan, Professor at UCR of Latin American Studies, "The Terms of Engagement: Warfare,
White Locality, and Abolition", http://crs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/1/151]

White supremacist political, cultural, and economic formations are utterly foundational to the
emergence and national-social reproduction of the USA, and are an indelible component of American
institutionalities more generally Here, as in prior work, I understand white supremacy as a logic of social organization that produces
regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized 'human difference, enforced through coercions and violences that are
conditioned by genocidal possibility, including physical extermination and curtailment of people's collective capacities to socially, culturally, or
biologically reproduce (Rodriguez 2006). As a national' vernacular and institutional modality of domination, white supremacy is both based on,
and constantly reshaping, notions of the white (European and Euroamerican) 'human'-as-universal historical subject through both militarized
liquidations and neutralizations of (non-white) other humans, and multiple institutional incorporations and empowerments of the white
subject's/body's racial antagonists.

the Obama administration signifies this complex tension between universal (white)
humanity "non-white" subjection to logics of disposability/genocide, and multiculturalist
empowerment in continuity with the violence of the white supremacist state. White supremacy is historically
The ascendance of

characterized by a periodic flexibility of phenotype (e.g. "first black president" as white supremacist nation-buildings moral/political vindication)
that is already determined by the structural durability of the social logics of racial dominance/violence. Thus,

to consider white

supremacy as essential to American national formation (rather than an extremist deviation or incidental departure from it)
inaugurates a deeper theorization of how this material logic of violence overdetermines the social,
political, economic, and cultural structures that compose American white locality/globality and,
crucially, generates the common sense indispensable to its ordering.
It thus is within the confines of Homeland Security as white supremacist territoriality a structure of feeling
that organizes the cohesion of racial and spatial entitlement that multiculturalisrn is recognized as a fact of life, an
empirical feature of the world that is inescapable and unavoidable, something to be tolerated,
policed, and patriotically valorized at once and in turn. On the one hand, white locality is a site of existential identification
that generates (and therefore corresponds to a white supremacist materiality. As subjects (including ostensibly non-white' subjects) identify with
this sentimental structure a process that is not cleanly agential or altogether voluntary they enter a relation of discomforting intimacy with
embodied threats to their sense of the 'local'. Those alien bodies and subjects, whose movement suggests the possibility of disruption and
disarticulation, become objects of a discrete discursive labor as well as material/military endeavors. Most importantly, they become specified and
particularized sites for white locality's punitive performances: racialized punishment, capture, and discipline are entwined in the historical fabric

the emergence of white locality's


hypermobility has necessitated new technologies commensurate with the hyperpresence actual and
virtual of white subjectivities. As white bodies and subjects exert the capacity to manifest authority
and presence in places they both do and do not physically occupy (call the latter 'absentee' white supremacy for
shorthand), the old relations of classical white supremacist apartheid are necessarily and persistently
reinvented: racial subjection becomes a technology of inclusion that crucially accompanies and is
radically enhanced by ongoing proliferations of racist state and state-sanctioned violence.
Further, this logic of multiculturalist white supremacist inclusion does not exclusively rely on strategies
of coercion or punishment to assimilate others such as in the paradigmatic examples of bodily subjection that formed the
institutional machinery of Native American boarding and mission schools (Adams 1995; Smith 2005)) but instead builds upon the
more plastic and sustainable platforms of consensus and collective identity formation. I do not mean to
of white supremacist social formations from conquest and chattel enslavement onward, and

suggest that either consensus building or identity formation are benign projects of autonomous racial self-invention, somehow operating
independently of the structuring relations of dominance that characterize a given social formation.

the social technologies of white supremacy are, in this historical moment, not reducible to
discrete arrangements of institutionalized (and state legitimated) violence or strategies of social exclusion (Da
Rather, I am arguing that

Silva 2007) but are significantly altered and innovated through the crises of bodily proximity that white locality bears to its alien (and even

It is in these moments of discomfort, when white locality is internally populated by alien others who have neither
immigrated nor invaded the space, but have in multiple ways become occupied by the praxis of white locality-construction, that logics of
incorporation and inclusion become crucial to the historical project of white supremacist globality.
enemy) populations.

Calling on the USFG to make amends for particular wrongs allows the System of White
Supremacy to continue intact this malleability is how the SQuo maintains the power
relationships by affirming reforms
Rodriguez 10 [Dylan, Professor at UCR of Latin American Studies, "The Terms of Engagement: Warfare,
White Locality, and Abolition", http://crs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/1/151]

Residing in the normative core of white locality's imagined community is the irrevocable pull
gravitational in force, seductive by nature of a presumptive patriotism, a vague though powerful demand to
impulse that elevates visible and visceral allegiance to American ascendancy as the primary political
technology of this time. The downloadable flyer accompanying DawaNets call, which the organization intended for common
distribution by its membership to presumably suspicious or otherwise uneasy neighbors', suggested a militancy of Islamic Americanism that
amplified the Homeland Security animus here, it is the Muslim as 'proud American' who stands in allegiance to the banalities of American
'democracy' and 'good citizenship', while declaring ambivalent solidarity with the work of anti-terrorism':
A Friendly Note from Your Muslim Neighbor:
We want you to know - Islam and democracy are compatible and complementary. Both rest on accountability, consultation, open discussion, delegation and consensus.
The opening words of the U.S. Declaration of Independence express deeply felt Islamic sentiments ...

They wish to be good citizens and neighbors by practicing their commitment to


tolerance, charity, hard work, cooperation, and interfaith activities for community betterment. (DawaNet 2002b)
DawaNets response to the revivified racial solidarity of white supremacist place-making is symptomatic
of the multiculturalist turn in the broader coordination of cultural, state, and 'civil society'
apparatuses for the sake of producing and aggressively protecting the sanctity of the white body. In
fact, this multiculturalist order of protection animates a conception of national diversity that
constitutes and transforms the institutional agendas and collective identity formations of precisely
those designated racial, sexual, religious, and gender minorities' whose very modalities of sociality their bodies,
gestures, communities, and political articulations suggest a crisis of white nationality Thus, the historical moment
engages a material rhetoric of diversity that is fundamentally inseparable from white supremacist
nation-building.
- Muslims are proud to be Americans.

To revise the classical Marxist formulation, the sustenance of white bodily integrity is the structural logic that produces state, economic, cultural,
and social formations, and is the usually unspoken discursive logic through which the 'Homeland' obtains its narrative and material gravity.2

The political crises and social contradictions that emerge from these arrangements including those
articulated as antiwar', 'antiracist', pro-civil and human rights, and pro-diversity are inevitably and
necessarily framed as conflicts to be decisively mediated by white civic subjects whose terrain of
struggle is rendered coherent by the mandate of white bodily integrity Suppression or resolution of crisis
and contradication, in this case, can only be intelligible when articulated or (at least) sanctioned by a decisively
white community of (national) interest, and it is here that white locality becomes a flexible, rigorously
innovative formation of white supremacist dominance: the lived locality of Homeland/National Security is the propertied
fantasy of embodied white subjects from scales across the narcissistic individual to the audaciously collective or national, the fantasy of
Homeland belongs to them at

a time when the discursive structures of white supremacy find coherence in


the trappings of multiculturalism (consider the formulaic and rigorously enforced 'diversity' of the White House police forces, and
the US military, for example).

The permanence of domestic warfare practiced by the White Supremacist Settler State
is strengthened by progressive calls for anything other than full abolition the AFF has
underestimated the States ability to use their demands to mask the larger problem

Rodriguez 10 [Dylan, Professor at UCR of Latin American Studies, "The Terms of Engagement: Warfare,
White Locality, and Abolition", http://crs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/1/151]
Thus, behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public policy, civil liberties, and
law, and beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught of racist, classist, ageist, and misogynist
criminalization, there is an unspoken politics of assumption that takes for granted the mystified

permanence of domestic warfare as a constant production of targeted and massive suffering, guided
by the logic of normalized and mundane black, brown, and indigenous subjection to the expediencies
and essential violence of the American (global) nation-building project. To put it differently: despite the
unprecedented forms of imprisonment, social and political repression, and violent policing that compose the
mosaic of our historical time, the establishment left (within and perhaps beyond the USA) really does not care to
envision, much less politically prioritize, the abolition of US domestic warfare and its structuring white
supremacist social logic as its most urgent task of the present and future. The non-profit and NGO left,
in particular, seems content to engage in desperate (and usually well-intentioned) attempts to
manage the casualties of domestic warfare, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that
openly, critically, and radically addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars.
In so many ways, the US progressive/left establishment is filling the void created by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called the violent
'abandonments' of the state, which forfeits and implodes its own social welfare capacities (which were already insufficient at best) while
transforming and (productively) exploding its domestic warmaking functionalities which Gilmore (2007b: 445) says are guided by a
'frightening willingness to engage in
human sacrifice'. Yet, at the same time that the state has been openly galvanizing itself to declare and wage violent struggle against strategically
targeted local populations, the establishment left remains relatively unwilling and therefore institutionally unable to address the questions of
social survival, grass roots mobilization, radical social justice, and social transformation on the concrete and everyday terms of the very domestic
war(s) that the
state has so openly and repeatedly declared as the premises of its own coherence. Given that domestic warfare composes both the common
narrative language and concrete material production of the state, the question remains as to why the establishment left has not understood this

it is because critical
intellectuals, scholar activists, and progressive organizers are underestimating the skill and reach of
the state as a pedagogical (teaching) apparatus, that they have generally undertheorized how the state
so skillfully generates (and often politically accommodates) sanctioned spaces of political
contradiction that engulf 'dissent' and counter-state, antiracist, and antiviolence organizing. Italian
political prisoner Antonio Gramscis thoughts on the formation of contemporary pedagogical state are instructive here:
The State does have and request consent, but it also 'educates' this consent, by means of the political
and syndical associations; these, however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the
ruling class. (Gramsci 1995: 259).
statecraft as the state of emergency that the condition so openly, institutionally encompasses (war!). Perhaps

By not calling for abolition in the 1AC, the AFF has already forfeited crucial political
potential energy their choice to center the discussion around particular harms assures
they win the battle only to lose the war

Rodriguez 10 [Dylan, Professor at UCR of Latin American Studies, "The Terms of Engagement: Warfare,
White Locality, and Abolition", http://crs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/1/151]

The regularity with which progressive organizations immediately forfeit the crucial political and
conceptual possibilities of abolishing domestic warfare is a direct reflection of the extent to which
domestic war has been fashioned into the everyday, normal' reality of the state. By extension, the non-profit
industrial complex, which is fundamentally guided by the logic of being state-sanctioned (and often state-funded), also reflects this common
reality: the

operative assumptions of domestic warfare are taken for granted because they form and
inform the popular consensus.
Our historical moment suggests the need for a principled political rupturing of existing techniques and
strategies that fetishize and fixate on the negotiation, massaging, and management of the worst
outcomes of domestic warfare. One political move long overdue is toward grass roots pedagogies of radical dis-identification with
the state, in the trajectory of an anti-nationalism or anti-patriotism, that reorients a progressive identification with the creative possibilities of
insurgency (this is to consider 'insurgency' as a politics that pushes beyond the defensive maneuvering of 'resistance'). While there are rare groups
in existence that offer this kind of nourishing political space (from the L.A.-based Y^uth Justice Coalition to the national organization INCITE!
Women of Color Against Violence), they are often forced to expend far too much energy challenging both the parochialisms of the hegemonic
non-profit apparatus and the sometimes narrow politics of the progressive US left.

The abolition of domestic warfare, not unlike precedent (and ongoing) struggles to abolish
colonialism, slavery, and programmatic genocide, necessitates a rigorous theoretical and pragmatic
approach to a counter- and anti-state radicalism that attempts to fracture the foundations of the
existing US social form. This political shift requires a sustained labor of radical vision, and in the most crucial
ways is actually anchored to 'progressive' notions of life, freedom, community, and collective/personal security
(including safety from racist policing/criminalization and the most localized brutalities of neoliberal or global
capitalism). Not long from now, generations will emerge from the organic accumulation of rage, suffering,
social alienation, and (we hope) politically principled rebellion against this living apocalypse and pose to us some
rudimentary questions of radical accountability:
How were we able to accommodate, and even culturally and politically normalize the strategic, explicit, and openly
racist technologies of state violence that effectively socially neutralized and frequently liquidated entire nearby
populations of our people, given that ours are the very same populations that have historically struggled to survive
and overthrow such 'classical' structures of dominance as colonialism, frontier conquest, racial slavery, and other
genocides? In a somewhat more intimate sense, how could we live with ourselves in this domestic state of
emergency', and why did we seem to generally forfeit the creative possibilities of radically challenging,

dislodging, and transforming the ideological and institutional premises of this condition of domestic
warfare in favor of short-term, 'winnable' policy reforms? (For example, why did we choose to formulate
and tolerate a progressive' political language that reinforced dominant racist notions of 'criminality' in the process of
trying to discredit the legal basis of 'Three Strikes' law?) What were the fundamental concerns of our progressive
organizations and movements during this time, and were they willing to comprehend and galvanize an effective, or
even viable opposition to the white supremacist states terms of engagement (that is, warfare)**.

The perm precludes the truly radical imagination necessary to overcome SQuo
oppression the AFFs call for the ballot is just the kind of winnable victory that allows
the System to remain in power

Rodriguez 10 [Dylan, Professor at UCR of Latin American Studies, "The Terms of Engagement: Warfare,
White Locality, and Abolition", http://crs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/1/151]
In the vicinity of the constantly retrenching social welfare apparatuses of the US state, much of the most urgent and immediate work of
community-based organizing has revolved around service provision. Importantly, this pragmatic focus also builds a certain progressive ethic of
voluntarism that constructs the model activist as a variation on older liberal notions of the 'good citizen'. Following Fanon, the question is

To respond to this political problem requires an analysis


and conceptualization of 'the state' that is far more complex and laborious than we usually allow in
our ordinary rush of obligations to build campaigns, organize communities, and write grant proposals. We
require, in other words, a scholarly activist framework to understand that the state can and must be
radically confronted on multiple fronts by an abolitionist social theory.
whether and how this mission ought to be fulfilled or betrayed.

Effectively contradicting, decentering, and transforming the popular consensus (for example, destabilizing assertive assumptions common to
progressive movements and organizations such as 'we have to control/get rid of gangs,' 'we need prisons,' or 'we want better police') is, in this
context, dangerously difficult work. Although the truth of the
matter is that the establishment US left, in ways both spoken and presumed, may actually agree with the political, moral, and ideological premises

Leaders as well as rank-and-file members in avowedly progressive organizations can


and must reflect on how they might actually be supporting and reproducing existing forms of racism,
white supremacy, state violence, and domestic warfare in the process of throwing their resources
behind what they perceive as 'winnable victories', in the lexicon of venerable community organizer Saul Alinsky.
Arguably, it is precisely the creative and pragmatic work of political fantasy/political vision/political
imagination that is the most underdeveloped dimension of the US establishment left's organizational
modus operandi and public discourse.
of domestic warfare.

The AFF isnt radical, just radically naive their claims to be so different from traditional
practices only mask their codependent relationship with debate hierarchy propping up
the very system they claim to tear down, while seeking awards from the community
they claim to stand apart from
Stroube 1 [Jack, frmr UT-Austin debater and TOC finalist at St Marks,
www.ndtceda.com/acrhives/2001/10/0301.htm]
Public debating is not benign in itself and can easily be a tool of cooption or a new form of
legitimation for the corrupt, elitist debate institution. Dabait expertise is a sham. The shanafuck sellout legacy of
critical argumentation has failed miserably here. The institution has been catered to and the kritik has
been tolerated and allowed to exist as a form of tolerable lyrical indignation under fascism. Hence the
implication is that shanafucks can claim not to believe in truth twisting free of binaries while they plug
into a dabait truth machine, i.e., a machine that through psyops, hypnotic, waking suggestion induces an effect of
expertise on the audience regardless of the content of expression. The lineage here is Foucaults archaeology of
knowledge through deleuze and guattaris anti-oedipus to their kafka; minor literature through to a thousand plateaus, this is an anti-science
anti-lineage. Debate is a science which rests on fundamental assumptions as the kritikers admit the problem we are facing here is that more
goes into the production of expertise than the truth of statements by an ego in a round. Collective assemblages/truth machines are composed
of complex regulations and regularities.

Despite their radical contradictory statements against policy


assumptions, public audiences are and will be left with the impression of hearing professionalized
coded discourse. Lay folk are and will continue to feel as if in the presence of professional public
speaking experts specifically tailoring their arguments for the lay public from a kritik perspective
that seriously takes into account Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari and their predecessor Canguilhelm, this is a problem that the
kritikers rely on their performances and unwilling to attack the dabait institution, unwilling to
disengage from the whole kritik hierarchy which gets them top jobs at premier institutes for the high school elite
destined for the CIA, business management, and the stale grey life of critical academic echelons. Aint no
clash anymore, just rackin smoof K tourney wins
We have a problem that are sucking off and converting the old policy hacks through a form of critical
argumentation that is malleable to the competitive format and all of the old traditions which just get
more legitimacy cover head from the whole stinkin deal. They are unwilling to attack their own
sentimental attachments to the institution and competitive activity which stabilize their location
within hierarchy all the old war stories they are unwilling to rip the rug out from under their competitive
dabait tournament identities. They create myths about the benign essence of critical argumentation which attacks capital T truth
and debate as a process of switching sides again undermining capital T truth. This is a sham. From conversations with evans and grove, I
know they know how the section of History and Sexuality Volume I by Foucault where he talks about how power strategies can deploy
contradictory discursive moves.

The only reason I can find which explains their reluctance to attack the debate
institution and seriously attempt to short-circuit policy bastions like the CSIS is because the institution
has put them on a pedestal and made them feel important through sentimental sardine tricks. oh,
please teach top lab at our institute. They get paid the big bucks and get all the credential power kudos. They are
seriously falling for da bait. SHANAFUCK SELLOUTS. The dabait institution now deploys two seemingly
opposed discourses as components of an overall dabait discursive expert power movethe kritik
experts get up and kritik the indidviudal speech acts of the policy experts in the round claiming some vague
discursive activism of universal intellectual consciousness raising, whuppidy kritik shit. Virtually the
entire rest of dabait tradition (fragile at only 100+ years old) remains intact to their kritik expert advantage.

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