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Eddie Glaude vs. Morning Joe: Exposing the Authoritarian Impulse [1]
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Date: 2025-09-09
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The New ‘Law and Order’:
How Policing Becomes Fascism in Disguise
On Morning Joe, Eddie S. Glaude Jr.—an African American scholar and public intellectual of the highest order, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton—stood his ground in a clash that cut to the bone of America’s crisis. Joe Scarborough has used his platform to cheerlead for Democratic governors and mayors to partner with the president and unleash federal forces on their cities in the name of “public safety.” Glaude stripped away the euphemism: this isn’t safety, it’s authoritarianism.
He reminded viewers that this script is old: Nixon’s “law and order,” the 1990s Crime Bill, Giuliani’s “stop and frisk.” Each was sold as protection but left devastation in its wake: mass incarceration, gutted families, and a generational void of Black men removed from their communities. These policies never made Black neighborhoods safer; they disciplined them, contained them, broke them. The call for more police today is not a “new solution.” It is the same instrument of racial and class discipline, reheated and recycled.
Scarborough, undeterred, doubled down. More Black police officers, better pay, better training—he insisted that was the answer, touting Giuliani’s New York as a model. He waved a Washington Post poll as evidence, claiming 91% of D.C. residents—mostly Black women—say crime is their top concern. But as Glaude countered, acknowledging crime does not mean endorsing militarization. The women asked for public safety. That poll is not a blank check for soldiers in the streets.
Cornered, Joe turned mean. He accused Glaude of pandering to “liberal social media,” suggested that because he lives in Princeton, he no longer speaks for Black communities, and—astonishingly—positioned himself as the defender of Black women’s concerns. The irony was grotesque: a white southern congressman-turned-pundit lecturing Eddie Glaude on Black life in D.C. His paternalism dripped with the old colonial logic: that order must be imposed on “unruly” Black and Brown bodies. What Joe was really defending was the architecture of a police state—the fascist bargain: surrender your freedom, and the state will promise you safety.
Meanwhile, another truth was buried. On Saturday, September 6, thousands marched in D.C. against the National Guard occupation and Mayor Muriel Bowser’s collaboration. Morning Joe ignored it. They covered Chicago’s protest, but not the one in the nation’s capital. Even Glaude’s exchange vanished from later replays of the show, and the clip has not appeared on Mediaite. Silence is never neutral—it is a political choice.
Speaking Truth Is Not Enough: Eddie Glaude and the Responsibility of Intellectuals
Robin D. G. Kelley, in The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide, makes the stakes clear. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci, he distinguishes between “traditional” intellectuals who uphold the order of the powerful and “organic” intellectuals who rise from struggle to fight back. Their task is not neutrality but commitment: to choose a side. In that moment, Glaude decided to name the authoritarian impulse for what it is. But Kelley reminds us: naming is not enough. Black insurgent intellectuals like Du Bois, Claudia Jones, and Paul Robeson did more than call out fascism; they organized against it, often at great personal cost, and their movements outlived them. Will Glaude and other Black intellectuals pick up the Barton?
We are again in such a moment. The right has built its own organic intellectuals—think tanks, strategists, policy architects—who are openly assembling a fascist bloc. Fact-checks and “speaking truth” alone will not break it. Black intellectuals must do more: organize, build counter-power, align with justice movements, and refuse silence. Because of the repression we are facing now, it is rivaling the Red Scare. And the stakes? Nothing less than freedom itself.
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