Ana Kasparian is a progressive.

We know this, or at least, we’re encouraged to think this because she’s an executive producer and co-host of The Young Turks, described by its Wikipedia entry as an “an American left-wing news commentary show”. Kasparian is also a routine debater of gelatinous figures such as Dennis Prager; more cliche than man.

When words like ‘progressive’ and ‘left wing’ are used to describe someone, there are expectations. Reactionaries, always missing the forest for the trees on their hurried way to pre-formed conclusions, expect, at best, a person who’s ‘woke’ (a misappropriated term which, when issuing from the mouths of atavistic simpletons, means someone who still possesses even the barest amount of consciousness) and at worst, a traitor. If you’re a person on, or perhaps one should say of the left, you expect your political ally, regardless of particular type of left expression, to ask basic questions about how the world works and why it is as it is. You expect a progressive to not just shout: John robbed the gas station! You expect a progressive to wonder what motivated John to rob that gas station and what can be done to prevent future robberies;  to, in other words, build a world in which robbery is rare because it’s unnecessary.

You needn’t be a Marxist to ask such questions; you just need to possess some level of curiosity about how the world works and a desire to improve its state.

Perhaps it’s me, perhaps I’m missing something but when someone who describes herself as a ‘progressive’ writes a paragraph like the one below, the second paragraph of an article Kasparian wrote for Newsweek titled “My Fellow Progressives: We Need to Stop the Gaslighting on Crime questions arise:

“The FBI‘s newly-released annual crime report, which isn’t even complete, estimated that 2021 saw 22,900 murders, bringing the nation’s homicide rate to 6.9 per 100,000 people. It’s the highest number in almost 25 years, following a 30 percent spike in homicides between 2019 and 2020. Cities like Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles broke annual homicide records, and there’s been an uptick in other violent crimes like armed robbery and aggravated assault.”

With this paragraph, Kasparian sets the scene; there’s an emergency, verified by police provided statistics and personal anecdotes.  Although the sources she cites in that paragraph such as this Fox News article contain quotes like the following, we can be reassured her goal is simply to inform her fellow progressives because she is, after all, a progressive herself:

“Former New York Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Howard Safir attributed the high murder numbers last year to several factors, including “cancel culture and woke mentality that assumes that police are racist and brutal.” He also pointed to soft-on-crime policies and a lack of support for police. 

“If crimes continue to be committed in large numbers, and police continue not to have the backing of politicians and the public, then they’re not going to do their job the way they did when I was commissioner,” Safir told Fox News Digital on Tuesday.”

Well, that’s a bit odd; surely Ana, as a progressive (a word used eleven times in her Newsweek article), would be able to find less superheated material to support her argument that, in spite of hard facts, other progressives – the gaslighters – are ignoring material reality for ideological reasons.

Let’s go back to Kasparian’s Newsweek article to see where she’s going with her argument. Perhaps that will help me find its progressive aspect:

“Prominent civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis regularly smears reporters as “copagandists” for simply reporting on crime statistics. Karakatsanis is the founder of a non-profit called Civil Rights Corps that employs as its treasurer the progressive former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was evicted from office earlier this year by voters sick of his soft on crime approach. As homicides were exploding in many parts of the country in the summer of 2021 Karakatsanis argued that “what constitutes a crime is determined by people in power who have a lot of money.“

Oh, now I am very confused indeed! Kasparian, a progressive, is not only dismissing the idea that perhaps, journalists who routinely relay police department statements without analysis or a hint of investigation might be doing a bit of the old propaganda, she also declares a former district attorney as being ‘soft on crime’, a phrase you’d expect to hear from your disgruntled uncle at a tense Thanksgiving dinner but not from a person professing an allegiance to, well, progress.

Curiouser and curiouser.

I decided to look into Alec Karakatsanis a bit more closely; if Kasparian, a progressive, found his arguments lacking, maybe he doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to police despite having a career of over a decade dedicated to criminal justice reform in the US.

Perhaps Ana Kasparian, executive producer and host of The Young Turks,  “an American left-wing news commentary show” and, we’re told, a progressive, knows more about the nuts and bolts of how policing works than Alec Karakatsanis. I found an article Karakatsanis wrote for Current Affairs which includes the following dissection of the use of statistics by police:

“Police are not some objective body neutrally “enforcing the law.” Not only do they choose to look for some crimes, committed by some people, in some neighborhoods, some of the time, but they have political incentives to manipulate the data they collect, and not to collect other data at all. To take one example, depending on the political winds, police have an incentive to either under or over report the number of various types of crimes in order to promote particular campaigns or narratives. To take another example, police do not record as crimes all of the illegal stops, searches, and assaults that they themselves commit, even though counting these would likely increase overall “crime” dramatically by adding thousands of additional physical assaults to the record books in every major U.S. city each year.”

What’s that now? Do the police have an incentive to portray events in a way that benefits their budgets and power? Surely, Ana Kasparian, a progressive, is aware of this simple, indeed commonsense (if not commonly understood) feedback loop of motivations?  Let me do a quick search of her Newsweek article again to see if she offers any information besides reports from police.

Well that’s odd: when it comes to data, for Kasparian it’s cops in the beginning, cops in the middle and cops in the end. Alongside police provided statistics, Kasparian notes several stories of people who are victims of crime, including herself (a sexual assault). We’re told of people such as Albertha Mendez, Sandra Shells and Jessica Christic, each of whom suffered crimes as severe as loss of life (Shells) and assaults of various types. These are terrible stories which make us wish something could have been done to prevent this suffering.

What is to be done? What is Kasparian’s progressive recommendation? 

“It would be a mistake to think that the public isn’t open to necessary criminal justice reform. They just want to make sure that policy changes are balanced by the need for public safety. But when the political group pushing for reform consistently downplays the crime wave as nothing more than Right-wing fear mongering while simultaneously pushing for maximalist police and prison abolition, it’s impossible to find them trustworthy.

I’m urging my fellow progressives to take crime seriously.”

“Take crime seriously” we’re told. 

With this ending, Kasparian brings us, and she hopes, her fellow progressives, with some amount of cleverness to an inevitable conclusion; to `’take crime seriously” means to take seriously the state of siege portrayed by police. And to take that state of siege seriously means to provide police with what they routinely ask for, even demand: larger budgets, more equipment, greater latitude in ‘fighting crime’. Never mind the stats about how criminal justice is meted out in the US, never mind about police inflicted violence, according to Ana Kasparian, a progressive and host of an “an American left-wing news commentary show” funded by millions in investment capital (surely with no strings of any sort attached), we only need to  take crime seriously. With this funhouse mirror version of progressivism as our guide, we can ignore difficult topics such as the structure and nature of the society producing crimes of various types. At that Thanksgiving dinner, instead of arguing with our disgruntled Uncle about cops, we can join him, as the turkey cools, in shouting for ‘law and order’ to, at long last, be restored. 

Ana Kasparian is a progressive, host of The Young Turks, “an American left-wing news commentary show”  and a person calling for increased police presence in Los Angeles, and across the US.

Do words have meaning?

We have entered a phase in the history of left media, as practiced in the US, when merely calling yourself something – a progressive, a Marxist, an anarchist, etc – and talking on YouTube has replaced the application of  political theory to real-world practice. Left media figures use debates with odious right-wing figures as a diversionary tactic, moving our attention away from their failure to the awfulness of the people they waste time talking to and about (Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager – always and forever). 

This uselessness is bad enough but Kasparian, and TYT are going even further, pretending to be “left wing” while promoting right wing goals. What else can we call a plea for more police under current conditions but a reactionary maneuver? What else can we call an effort to frame this as progressive but an attempt to nullify, or redirect,  left action via a muddying of the water? 

Ana Kasparian calls herself a progressive.  With progressives like these, we scarcely need conservatives; these progressives will do their work for them.