A Radical Approach to Electoral Politics w/Butch Ware

Adnan Husain: Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. Salam, hello, peace to you all. Welcome to the program. I'm Adnan Hussain back with another live stream program where hopefully we'll be able to get a chance to have your comments and questions. But we have a fantastic returning guest Dr. Butch Ware, who, as you all know, is a professor of history at UC Santa Barbara, specializing in West African and Black diasporic history, particularly Islam in West Africa and the Sufi tradition. And we had a whole episode where he talked about his research, and I think it was a breath of fresh air for him because he's had to talk about a lot of other sorts of issues, which we've...

Butch Ware: to interrupt, but my mom's favorite episode of any podcast that's come out in the last year. So sorry to interrupt, but go ahead.

Adnan Husain: No, but that's the kind of interruption we like to have. You know, mom is happy. That's like really an endorsement. So you all know him because, of course, he was the Green Party vice presidential candidate in the last federal election on the ticket with Dr. Jill Stein. And of course, now is running for governor of the great state of California, where I basically grew up. So I have a lot of, you know, interest in this, you know, race and in the state, state of the state. And so we'll be talking also about that. So Brother Butch, it's great to see you. Welcome back to the program.

Butch Ware: It's good to be with you again. I'm looking forward to the conversation as ever.

Adnan Husain: Okay, great. Well, you know, where I wanted to start is just maybe some orientation about your kind of political approach and imagination and commitments. And I know you have talked about the black radical tradition, but I thought maybe it would be a good place to start a little bit with what informs your approach. We'll be talking about electoral politics And so that's why I'm asking about this. But, you know, what is your sort of approach and how do you see yourself fitting into the black radical tradition?

Butch Ware: Yeah, I mean, my politics were framed pretty early in life. I read the autobiography of Malcolm X when I was 15 years old. I converted, I read it cover to cover. And one night I went out, checked out an English translation of the Quran, read that cover to cover. The next night I converted to Islam before the week was out. And that was also my beginning of grappling with the Black radical tradition as a kind of basic framework for interpreting reality and how to move inside reality. you know, struggle, you know, kind of against my own inner demons, right? Because that's what's part of what's so powerful about Malcolm's autobiography is that he's talking about his struggle against his inner demons and against his external oppressors. So for me, those things have been intimately connected. I think that that episode on Sufism, part of the reason why my mom enjoyed it so much was it allowed us to have that conversation about the relationship between spirituality and social justice. So those things have been connected for me, you know, from the beginning. I was doing pan-Africanist revolutionary reading groups. I started when I was 19. We were reading Cabral and Fanon and Assata Shakur and Walter Rodney. I studied African history. specifically to focus on resistance, anti-colonial thinking, and so forth. So my overall politics are, you know, rooted in the Black liberation tradition in the US, but also in the broader tradition of anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, you know, Pan-African resistance traditions, which are part of a broader, you know, like third world solidarity movements that, you know, grow up in the 60s and 70s. So that's the kind of overall, you know, shape of my, you know, my politics. I never expected that that would pull me into electoral politics. And when Jill asked if I would consider running as the VP candidate in 2024, it was 24 hours after I met her. We met in an online discussion where I was asking for clarifications about her platform and what she was running on because I wanted to communicate that to my social media followers and people in the activist and organizing space. And instead I was called into action. And so, you know, then I had to reassess what I thought the role of electoral politics was in our broader liberation struggle, in that broader Black liberation struggle. And so I went to Malcolm again, because, you know, that's where things kind of begin and end with me. And I read the Ballad of the Bullet and then I listened to audio of the Ballad of the Bullet. And it was the part where Malcolm, not in the Detroit speech, that's the one that where people find the most often, you know, April 12th, 1964, but he gives a different version of the same speech, April 3rd, 1964 in Cleveland, Ohio. And in the Cleveland speech, he says, we're gonna knock on every door in Harlem and we're gonna register every black face behind every door, not as a Democrat, not as a Republican. We are going to say, show us your card. And whoever did not have the responsibility to register themselves, we will have words for them and we might just move them out of town. It's going to be the battle of the bullet. So when I heard Malcolm saying that, that that electoral power was a mandatory tool in the toolkit of an engaged revolutionary, then I was like, OK, well, I'm going to take this on. And here we are.

Adnan Husain: Well, we might talk a little bit more about how you translate that into electoral politics, but I wanted to move on a little bit to, you know, other parts of your background. But I would say that also that there has been, you know, suspicion, though, in, you know, the black radical tradition about politics. getting engaged in mainstream style politics because it has not been a place for real positive change occurring. And, you know, although on the other hand, you know, the Black Panther Party was meant to be a party. You know, these things have to be assessed. What are the conditions? What kind of support? What are the opportunities? What are the risks and the benefits? So I guess that's the kind of calculation you've had to make is how to get involved.

Butch Ware: A brief engagement with that specific point. Right. Huey P. Newton ran for Congress not once, but twice. Bobby Seale ran for mayor of Oakland in 1973. Elaine Brown, the first female chairman of the Black Panther Party, worked with electoral candidates in the city of Oakland to get specific outcomes. Because what the Panthers model was, in short, and this is the one that I employ in my own politics, is that it's mutual aid plus direct action plus electoral power in that order of significance. But for me, People associate Malcolm with by any means necessary, but by any means necessary means by any necessary means, right? And so electoral power is one of those necessary means that we have to utilize. Kwame Ture likewise said, he said, voting every four years is the height of bourgeois hypocrisy, but I would shed my blood for the vote and I have, because I know that the vote is how I organize my people. So there are goals that are organizational in the way that you use electoral politics, but there are also goals that are strategic, that are about winning elections and putting people in positions of power so that they can provide support and cover for the communities that are doing the liberation work on the ground of mutual aid and direct action. Imagine if you had a governor in the state of California that instead of you know, looking the other way while the LAPD is running cover and carrying water for ICE, was directing the Attorney General to prosecute the LAPD when they run cover and carry water for ICE. What if you had a governor that was, instead of, you know, making war on resistance groups like BC Defense, you know, here in Ventura, not far from me, was providing resources and support to the groups that are doing rapid response and ICE watch, right? So that's strategy behind electoral politics is not that it's going to be a solution by itself. None of our revolutionary forefathers or foremothers thought that. But the overwhelming majority of them did believe in utilizing electoral political tools when they could help advance the causes of collective liberation. Malcolm said the ballot is a weapon of war as effective as a bullet or more so.

Adnan Husain: Right. Right. He just thought what was the problem or that people were, you know, holding up the two party system and that Black people had been exploited. You know, you know, you had said something earlier about how you got into starting an anti-imperialist reading group even at a young age and that you connected things about you know domestic radical black politics with the decolonizing um you know movements around the world um particularly in in in africa and it just reminds me that so many people who are in academia get interested in these things who characterize their approach as decoloniality and decolonizing and so on have been so silent on the major colonial and imperial tragedies. Well, it's more than a tragedies, crimes, a genocide, you know, in Gaza. And so I think that's an important thing to note is that for you, it hasn't been just a matter of ideas, but of political commitments that have to be made real and actual political struggle. So I don't know if you have any thoughts.

Butch Ware: Just briefly, thanks for signaling that liberal academia is always concerned about whatever genocide isn't currently happening.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, once they can write papers about it and, you know.

Butch Ware: Yeah, once they can write papers about it, once they can publish articles about it, once they can use it as grist for the middle of their own academic careers, they're happy to take an anti-colonial perspective. Walter Rodney was my first academic hero. Right. Because I read how Europe underdeveloped Africa when I was 19. And Walter Rodney was martyred because of his political organizing activity in his homeland of Guyana as a socialist organizer. And he was also, you know, the foundational scholar in African history as a diaspora African. And so my goals throughout this, you know, the only reason why I considered pursuing a PhD and working in these academic institutions as anything other than a fundamental betrayal of the people was because Walter Rodney showed me that you could do both things at the same time. W.E.B. Du Bois showed me that you could be a committed Black anti-capitalist. I mean, after he got out of his talented 10th liberal BS phase early in his career, right? And that you could provide the intellectual infrastructure for our revolutionary praxis and be engaged in our revolutionary praxis at the same time.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, because anti-imperialism is an important part of your political commitments right now, you know, even though the governor of California doesn't have, let's say, the office that you're running for a lot of say over U.S. foreign policy, it does seem that it's still been very important front and center for you to be clear about the genocide in Gaza and opposing U.S. empire. the Iran war. I mean, this is something that nobody in mainstream politics really wants to talk about, except from the perspective of some kind of criticism of the competence of, you know, or the process, like you didn't come to Congress, which these are all serious issues. I'm not saying they're not, but, you know, these are the framework in which they look at it. I'm wondering how you see it and how would you, you know, make that an important part of your platform?

Butch Ware: Yeah. It's an excellent question. I should say that I see it quite a bit differently than this. And I think that this is part of the establishment response to my candidacy, is that I think that their reading is probably closer to mine, which is that I actually do not see a way in which American imperialism can survive an independent anti-imperialist governor in the state of California. I think that if the wealthiest state in the union with a GDP of over $4 trillion annually, and actually which constitutes if the United States were set into 50 independent republics, California would be the third largest economy in the world after China and Germany. If that economy were to divest from genocide and occupation in Palestine, if it were to divest from Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, the five weapons manufacturers that consume 60% of the United States war budget, then actually American imperialism is doomed. And I think that they have perceived the same thing that I did, which is that it's like that... What is it? It's an exhaust chute in the Death Star, right? That's where they drop the bomb and Luke Skywalker is able to explode the whole Death Star because it has this tiny... seemingly insignificant structural weakness, which if you drop a ballot in that box, you can cause the whole Death Star to explode. That's what the California gubernatorial campaign actually presents. And that's the reason why the systemic resistance to my candidacy from the mainstream media, from the Secretary of State, the lawfare, all the other things that they're hurling at us. It's because they're showing you where their structural weakness is. So I actually don't think that running for California governor is just strictly about domestic issues because, frankly, Californians do not want our tax dollars, state tax dollars or otherwise, to be consumed illegally. in imperial adventurism, murdering, torturing, and genociding the rest of humanity. They want those things. And I've been on the speaking tour, divest from occupation, invest in education. They want that investment to be in California, in things that are economically productive and beneficial for people here rather than destructive of humanity abroad.

Adnan Husain: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think there's a lot of threads we could pick up on there. But I do want to, you know, ask in that context that right now, if we look at, you know, if we think of your candidacy as contributing to. rearranging or bringing down and dismantling U.S. empire on behalf of people and people's concerns and issues for their interests, best interests domestically. And we also think about what's happening in this war, which has been revealing a lot of other kinds of components of the weakness of this imperial system with Iran's chokehold on oil flows and other petroleum-based products that are necessary for the entire global economy, that right now there is resistance taking place against U.S. empire that is really in some ways hastening on geopolitical terms, the weakness of the U.S. empire. And I'm wondering how you feel, you know, in particular, you're a Muslim, you just mentioned it. I feel as well in some ways that there is something that Muslims are contributing on behalf of humanity by taking on this struggle. It's not a choice that they had. It's been put upon them, but they have risen up to it to face it, or at least many have, like, you know, those who are resisting. And I'm wondering what you think about, you know, how to understand in world historical terms and its impacts for Western societies, U.S. in particular, of, you know, this resistance that we're seeing.

Butch Ware: Beautiful, beautiful question with levels in it. The first thing that I would just say is with the exception of the Palestinian resistance, and of course, glory to the resistance, I'm one of the people that has, you know, never condemned, you know, Palestinian resistance never will. I said that the right, it's not just a right of occupied people to resist their occupation up to and including armed resistance, but it's actually a moral responsibility. It's not just a right. The right is enshrined in international law. The responsibility is actually coded in natural law and moral law. So the one thing that I'll say is with the exception of the Palestinian resistance, it hasn't been Muslim resistance. It's been Shia resistance. The Sunni orthodoxy has been absolutely complicit with Western imperialism. The United Arab Emirates, the Saudis, these are simply neocolonial babysitters that have offered no substantive resistance to the Western order to which they owe their entire existence. I've said that Saudi specifically is Israel in a thobe. insofar as it was created by British imperialism the same way that Israel was created by British imperialism, that it pairs a fundamental distortion of an old, ancient, sacred faith with a heinous, murderous political project. So Zionism does that on the one hand, and Wahhabism does that on the other hand with respect to the Saudis. So The ordinary people in Muslim societies across the planet, Arab, South Asian, Malaysian, West African, here, right, are united in solidarity against Western imperialism because we have been on the business end, right? of American imperialism specifically, you know, for a very long time, right? You know, for at least, you know, four decades in kind of fundamental ways. And then you can draw that back further. But to be clear, with respect to political leadership, it has been, you know, it's been Iran, it's been Yemen, you know, and these are not, you know, these are Shia. And I say that as a Sunni Muslim, right? You know, as somebody who, you know, Sunni Maliki Ashari are, you know, but I also study the West African Islamic tradition, which was never incorporated into the so-called caliphate and therefore is able to maintain critical distance with respect to Sunni traditions around politics. And so from where we sit, we see the flaws and the blemishes of this corrupt and compromised Sunni leadership.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, absolutely. I'm so glad that you said that. That's been a huge theme of our discussions on the running series I have, Iran versus the Epstein Empire. We're up to episode 16, and we've been coming back to this, you know, kind of complicity of the Gulf states, of Sunni kind of passivity in this way. This is one reason why the sectarianism discourse is so terribly devastating for genuine solidarity and resistance. I think the Shia resistance has shown a really incredible example of solidarity with people in Palestine who are Sunnis, with people in Cuba. and Venezuela. And that's the kind of politics that I think we're really hoping to build. But I also wanted to ask you a couple of other questions before we talk about the campaign, which is that, especially among the anti-imperialist community, there are many people who have been concerned with remarks or positions you've made about characterizing China as waging a genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang province. I've heard you talk a little bit about it, about how it derives from your own experience speaking with Uyghurs about the conditions that they have experienced. And I do feel that... We make a mistake if we think that Islamophobia as a discourse and as a practice is something that can't be globalized. It obviously can. Just look at India and Hindutva's targeting of Muslims, their alliance with Israel. But many people feel that the situation with China, and especially given hostility of the US and the kind of cold war on China that is emerging that to criticize the Chinese state's policies towards ethnic and religious minorities is playing into some kind of imperialist propaganda against them. And so I just wanted to raise that and say, well, how have you been thinking about this? I know you've had a chance to field questions on this, but this is the kind of thing that matters to an anti-imperialist audience on the show.

Butch Ware: Yeah, I mean, so just to set the record straight, I've never said that there was a genocide in Xinjiang. It's a completely fabricated claim. What I said was that I don't support any Islamophobic policies of any government, whether those are Western governments or Chinese governments. And so it's a completely fabricated claim, and it's nonsensical. What I've said plainly is that Han supremacy in China is a major fundamental issue. And I say that because in large part, I'm a historian. I work in history departments. I was on a Chinese history search committee where we interviewed dozen Chinese candidates that were raised in communist China, and every last one of them says that Han supremacy remains a fundamental problem inside China. Not to mention having actual conversations with Uyghurs who have themselves faced Islamophobic policies and practices in their actual experience. that you will never satisfy, you know, campists who believe that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, and therefore you can never be critical of someone that you've taken as a friend because you share an enemy, right? And whereas my primary commitments are to human dignity and morality and a right of peoples to self-determination. And none of my positions regarding China are in any way rooted in any Western discourses about them. They're coming from Chinese historians who speak and read Chinese and who explain Chinese history in... and it's vagaries to me um as well as lived experience so i i there there's never been a place or time where i have ever advocated for any kind of western and interventionism of any kind especially not united states interventionism so this is so to be blunt like it's it's it's Someone also put this in the chat, like that I have a support for the Syrian regime as well. Where? I'll wait. Show me the evidence of these nonsensical claims. And the reality is, is that there are just some people that don't like hearing me talk because my foundational commitments are as a black Muslim revolutionary, the same way that Malcolm was. My foundational commitments are not to Marxism or to socialism, though the Panthers are my heroes, though I'm an anti-capitalist for my entire life, though I teach and believe in the philosophy of Walter Rodney, that my anti-capitalist revolutionary heroes are people that I wrote about in my work that I did the primary research on that were fighting against imperialism, white supremacy and capitalist exploitation 200 years before Marx was a glint in his daddy's eye. So I don't swear an oath on Das Kapital. And therefore I reserve the right to be critical of any regime anywhere, right? On the basis of the way that they actually practice.

Adnan Husain: Well, and I think also, frankly, to be honest, if you look at the positions that many so-called Marxists in the West, in fact, there's even a sort of school of them as Western Marxists. They have been extremely bad on like issues of colonialism and imperialism, partly because they see it perhaps as. You know, capitalism, as bad as it is, is somehow advancing, you know, kind of progressive change and it sharpens the contradictions. And, you know, that it's a progressive force that will change the world. So, you know, there's been a lot of problems. I really think that when it comes to thinking about what is the major contradiction in the world today, it is. the empire, imperialism, and the suppression of sovereignty in the global south. They cannot choose their own path because they're prevented from doing so.

Butch Ware: And let us be clear, right? And I talk about this both as a historian and as a Muslim, is that there has never been a more dangerous instrument of surveillance and death dealing in all of human history than the United States is right now. Like, you know, part of the reason why the Koran spoke to me so powerfully after reading Malcolm's autobiography is that for me, it was this anti-imperialist manifesto. I learned about Abraham ten toes down against Nimrod of Babylon. I learned about Moses and Aaron against Pharaoh. I learned about John and Jesus, Yahya and Isa, speaking a word of truth in the face of Caesar. So for me, the fundamental, you know— argument was a moral argument about the necessity to struggle against empire that was also paired with this lasting truth which is that all empires fall nothing that is taken by force is ever held and that ultimately struggle against that kind of ruthless stripping of our natural rights to self-determination and dignity by those that would seek to enslave us through their political projects, that this produces a moral obligation on us to struggle against imperialism in all its forms. So I've never at any level equated anything that China does with the US. I've never advocated for interventionism of the US anywhere at any point at any time. It's just that literally some people do not like you saying anything negative about China, even if it's objectively rooted in fact, right? You can't talk about the role that Chinese capital plays in Africa. despite the fact that I lived in Africa for years and sat with African socialists that will tell you that there are detrimental outcomes to the way that Chinese capital functions in African environments. Now, am I equating that with Western imperialism and capitalism? Of course not. But the point is, is if I even utter the first part of that sentence, then you're going to get a bunch of triggered leftists who feel like they have to reflexively defend China, which for the record is at best, socialism mixed with capitalism. Their party calls itself a Chinese Communist Party, but there is no communism in China. You have state-controlled investments and capitalism that runs parallel with a socialist project. And that's whatever. China is allowed to do whatever China wants to do because that's what self-determination is supposed to look like.

Adnan Husain: Well, I wish I was a China expert and could, you know, you know, really have any something to bring back that I'm sure many people feel that it is communist, even though, of course, it's state directed and so on. But I think the point here is that if you uphold sovereignty, then, you know, basically we're saying that people, countries should be able to choose their own path outside of the umbrella of of US imperial coercion. And that's something I think, you know, is the key problem that we have in geopolitics right now. But as we were discussing, there are forces moving against it. And, you know, we look forward to a day when, you know, we will see the end of the US empire. It's not fault now. For two reasons, both because Islamic resistance defeats it in West Asia and because you become governor of California and bring out the big economy of California to implode it from within.

Butch Ware: And I'd love to actually just offer just a quick, you know, follow up on that. That's that's so crucial in Islam. Studying the trajectories of empires and their falls, it's very, very clear that we're in the terminal phases. Richard Wolff, economic historian, has talked about the fact that there's always this first sell-off of the imperial currency as the reserve currency. This happened with the Maria Theresa dollars for the Spanish, and then the Dutch, and then the French, and then the British. About 40 years ago, something like 80% of the world's reserve currency was in U.S. dollars. That's now down to 40% or perhaps less. There's been this massive sell-off of the dollar as the reserve currency, which is one of these signs of empire, of an imperial collapse. And what often happens, what's happened in almost all the cases, frankly, is that as that empire is losing its power, it becomes more... what's the word, extractive and violent in its imperialist endeavors because it's trying to make up for its lost soft power with sheer brutality. And that ends up hastening and accelerating its demise. So that resistance, which we praised rightfully and which we will continue to praise on the outside of the imperial core is hastening that demise as are the foolish policies of folks that are trying to double down on empire. And what I said is that it's our job from inside the imperial core, right? I tell this to my students, because I have tenure and I can, that if you are a student at a North American university in 2026, you're a trainee on the Death Star, behave accordingly, right? That the United States is this structure that points beams and destroys whole worlds. But somebody's got to get the plans out to the rebels. Somebody has to subvert the Death Star from within. And we actually have an incredible opportunity from inside the empire to to serve as a destructive force against Zionism inside the imperial core, to serve as a force to dismantle the militarism inside the imperial core. Our resistance can serve as an internal counterpoint to the resistance of those that are brought.

Adnan Husain: yeah okay well um maybe coming to california a little bit more in focus um i wanted to ask you a little bit about how you see decolonizing politics in solidarity with indigenous land back movements, just as you would maybe also talk about reparations. So how do you see, how do you affiliate with land back if you're a governor of California or what is it that you are proposing to the people

Butch Ware: Yeah, I mean, I'm the only candidate anywhere, frankly, that's in the California gubernatorial election. And that includes other so-called socialist candidates. That includes Land Back as part of the platform. And part of that is that I'm much more or at least equally rooted in understanding indigenous conceptions of sovereignty and stewardship as I am in understanding the Marxist tradition of anti-capitalism. Because unfortunately- many socialist projects are, they behave as though land back is a non-starter, that restoring indigenous sovereignty, indigenous ownership and mastery of land and utilizing indigenous principles of stewardship and political economy, that those things don't belong to what they understand as anti-capitalist resistance. And for me, if you just say well whitey stole it fair and square so now i'm going to include it in my socialist project then then then you are not a leftist you are um uh you're an imperialist it's just that your imperialist perspective is shaped by leftist readings, and you are unable to address the fact that the foundational injustices and expropriations and forms of oppression that indigenous people have faced, that enslaved Africans face, and their descendants, which include me, have faced, that those require specific harm redress, require reparations, restorative justice, land back. that a simple class analysis by itself will not resolve those issues. For the same reason that Huey P. Newton said in Revolutionary Suicide, that even if we address capitalism and defeat it, we will still be left with the problem of white supremacy. And that is despite the fact that, as Walter Rodney argued and as Huey P. Newton also understood, white supremacy is a byproduct of capitalism. But getting rid of capitalism and imperialism will not, therefore, eliminate white supremacy and its impact. cascading effects on communities of color, that will require its own form of redress. And so those forms of redress are reparations, those forms of redress are land back, it's indigenous sovereignty, indigenous land stewardship, empowerment of indigenous communities. And for me, those are not just to be clear, mutually exclusive approaches. I find, you know, the approach that the Panthers took, rooted in Marxist-Leninist thinking, capacious to encompass those kind of efforts. And that's the reason why the Panthers were so critical in the creation of the Brown Berets and the Young Lords and the Young Patriots. And I think that it's it's essential that as, for me, the left starts with anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. And I think that we need to, inside of that broad group of resistance, we need to understand that we're not always going to see eye to eye on ideology, on identity and other pieces, but we have to develop political solidarity that actually allows us to struggle against the fundamental forces that are diminishing us all.

Adnan Husain: I'm really pleased to hear that sort of analysis, because from my perspective, I mean, you put it as white supremacy is a byproduct of capitalism, but that the erasure of capitalism isn't enough to solve the problem of white supremacy. From my perspective, it actually even precedes If you think of the, you know, construction of Christendom, white Christian identity, whiteness, Europeanness is something that is still part of feudal society as it's going through its transition and this crusader ethos. translates into colonialism, just, you know, without all of the same crusader language, some of the, you know, missionizing, civilizing sort of dimensions. And so definitely what you're talking about in terms of proposals for concerted action to remedy and try and overcome that problem is going to be needed, even if you do equalize some components of the economic basis of society, you have to work on that. Yeah.

Butch Ware: Yeah. And I really like the kind of historical rectification that you just provided insofar as I actually don't think that our that our two arguments are at odds with one another. I would actually fully agree that the anti-Muslim sentiment long predates the white supremacy component. And it's one of the factors that shapes the ultimate evolution of white supremacy because it's rooted in religious identities and a kind of association and incorporation of those religious identities into a feudal economic system in Europe. Yeah, so I think that your friendly amendment is fully accepted.

Adnan Husain: Excellent. Well, I do want to come to like how this kind of political imagination and set of commitments, both globally in terms of anti-imperialism, how do you translate that into electoral politics, trying to communicate within the imperial core the sort of ideas that, especially when you think that very often, like there were theories that you can never really go with an anti-imperialist politics, because as you were even explaining, certain kind of socialist redistribution still will, you know, assume it's okay for us to be, you know, dispossessing the indigenous people and we don't need to make reparative justice for, you know, the exploitation and enslavement and oppression of black people for 400 years, etc. You know, because there's like a labor aristocracy that's never going to identify with the plight of the global south. I'm wondering, how do you translate these kinds of concerns and ethics and values and policies into effective electoral politics? How do you communicate that?

Butch Ware: So this is the part that people might find shocking, right? Is that this has been the easy part. It's like, Adnan, I will invite anyone to just come to one of our campaign events and you will see why there is this effort from the mainstream media to make sure that what we're doing never sees the light of day or broad distribution. Because we organized an event called Unity Uprising at Cal State LA. Myself, Chris Smalls, Angelica Ross, the brilliant trans influencer and thought leader who's also, I hired her as my communications director, and I had to promote her to deputy campaign manager within three weeks because she was just too good at everything even to leave her in that position. So, you know, Angelica, myself, Senator Nina Turner, who I think would describe herself as probably a progressive rather than a radical, but was nonetheless eager to participate. Dr. Malina Abdullah, others all pointed this is just to say an almost entirely black cast that was that was taking on the question of how the black radical tradition engages with collective liberation. But why am I bringing it up? Because when you went out into the hallway, 70 percent of my volunteers are white kids. right? And I say white kids because I'm just picturing the people that were at that table. But when we packed the court in Sacramento, when the Secretary of State's trying to knock me off of the ballot, there were people between 16 and 85 years of age. There were Muslims there in full hijab and sisters in denim shorts and tank tops. And everybody was aligned on the same political message, the same political vision, because the absurdities of empire have now so deeply sunk their fangs into so many different communities that when I stand 10 toes rooted down in the Black radical tradition and in my authentic whole self as a Muslim, and just show up as me, it gives a bunch of other people permission to show up as themselves as well and to stand in solidarity even if even if there's differences in who we pray with and who we lay with, right? Those things disappear and dissolve. And when I say solidarity beyond identity and ideology, I'm not talking about it. We are building that in a movement space. The response has been overwhelming. the response has been overwhelming. So I actually think that that part is the easy part. It's fighting through the institutional structures that keep us from being able to broadcast and amplify that messaging and literally having to spend $100,000 on lawsuits, right? Just to fight against the lawfare that the system and the establishment is going to hurl at us to keep this movement from accelerating in its momentum.

Adnan Husain: Well, speaking of fighting the establishment, I wondered if you had any updates on the status of your case to try and get on the ballot after the shenanigans that were pulled about the tax forms and all of that. in an unfair way. And if you want, you can mention it. I hope people have heard about this already. Maybe they haven't. So tell us about what happened briefly, since hopefully people have heard a little bit about it. But what kind of measures have you taken to respond to this? Any updates on that? Are you getting an opportunity to be on any debates? And how are you dealing with the blackout, as it were, from media and mainstream politicians?

Butch Ware: Yeah, I mean, we continue, you know, we're still in federal court and the courts continue to provide the same kind of answer. Our case is still ongoing. The Secretary of State is going to have to provide a response by next Monday. The judge denied the temporary restraining order, which just means that the case continues at normal speed. And again, their defense, so just to be clear, the reason why I was struck from the ballot was that the Secretary of State claimed that in five years of tax returns that we submitted on time, you know, and that there were two redaction errors, that I left a phone number unredacted, because you're supposed to submit unredacted and redacted copies of your tax returns. One goes to the Secretary of State, the other is made public. They said that I made a mistake on two pages, that there was an unredacted phone number and there was an over-redacted business name. And they gave me 10 minutes to rectify that or they were going to disqualify me from the ballot. So they disqualified me on this pretext. We take them to court. When we went to court, from what the opposition, from what the Secretary of State entered into evidence, they actually proved for us that they had the correct forms in their possession the whole time. They admitted them into evidence. And then they were confronted on this by the judge who said, so you had these correct the whole time? They said, yes, they were in our possession, but it's not our job to collate them for the defendant or for the plaintiff. So they literally said, we have all the paperwork. We just... We wouldn't put it together. So you can't make this stuff up. Since that day on March 26, they have never actually claimed that I did the thing that they're disqualifying me from the ballot for. They've never claimed that. They no longer claim that I submitted anything incorrectly because they've already said in court that they had everything. Their defense since March 26th and right now to the present is that it's too late for us to do anything about it. It'll mess up our election. So their argument is that we can stab you and we just have to let your campaign bleed because if I were to give you a Band-Aid, it's gonna affect the outcome of the election, which is of course nonsense. And it just means that they continue to run cover and carry water for the establishment because we are the extant threat. The day that they moved to strike me from the ballot, I was five points behind the leading Democrats in the polls. Tom Steyer had spent $34 million on YouTube ads at that point in time, and it had purchased him a five-point lead over me in the polls. So they perceived the threat, they moved to eliminate it. And you know that it was a selective application of justice because the thing that they accused me of, which they then had to recant, The thing that they accuse me of, you can go on the Secretary of State's website right now and find the Libertarian candidate has dozens of such redaction errors in his file. You can go on multiple candidates and the thing that they're accusing me of that I didn't do is a thing that actually several people did and they're still on the ballot. And this is just part of the broader attack, especially that the Democrat establishment has had against Green candidates, because they're afraid of us. They spent $20 million trying to sue Greens off the ballot in nine states in the 2024 presidential election for a simple reason. Because unlike some other so-called socialists, we win elections. PSL has never won an election at any level for any office anywhere, period. They've never won an election for dog catcher. Greens have won 57% of the elections in which we have stood a candidate nationwide over the last three years. And that number in the state of California is 79% of the election. Because we beat Team Blue and Team Red together when the mainstream media isn't a factor and when big money isn't a factor. Because on policy and on platform, we're giving the people what they want. So this effort is just an effort to try to attack the most credible threat, because they know that in order to finish in the top two in the primary, I'm only going to need about one million votes. And that there are a million Muslims in the state of California, and that almost 60% of California Muslims already voted for me in the presidential election in 2024, because a majority of Muslims voted green in 2024. So this is all a perfect storm for them. Again, that image of a structural weakness in the Death Star, I'm Luke Skywalker up in this for them because they're afraid that I'm going to fly in and blow the whole thing up.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, well, speaking of that, I mean, you mentioned that the PSL hasn't won elections and of course, I'm sure you agree with many of their platforms and all of that. It's really about the institutional kind of coming together around a candidacy that has a chance to do damage to the two party system and put progressive people's agenda on the ballot and in a realistic chance to get media attention and victory. So this is why something I just, I thought, and even friends of mine who were retweeting this thought that this was a joke. When we saw it, you know, I should go back to the original post, which was Jason Moore, who's been a guest on this show, a great radical ecologist. You know, is this for real? You know, that California DSA voter guide recommends Tom Steyer, people, Tom Steyer. And quotes, I guess, from this voter guide saying the most progressive of the current viable candidates for governor is Tom Steyer. Time will tell whether he's truly a class traitor. So I think they're kind of already giving up the game right there. It's going to be a long time, you know, to try.

Butch Ware: Brianna Joy Gray said currently viable is doing a lot of work in that sense. And that's a direct reference to my campaign, right? And the fact that in March, when they moved to knock me off the ballot, that I was within easy striking distance of Steyer, despite the fact that he had outspent me by $34 million. And just really quickly, just on YouTube ads, he now spends $150 million total on the campaign. And I just want you to be, I want to be very, very clear about this. that Tom Steyer has raised exactly $160,000 from people that are not named Tom Steyer. That's nothing. We've raised almost three times that amount from ordinary people. So the idea that Tom Steyer is a viable candidate is something that Tom Steyer has purchased. Tom Steyer has purchased viability because he does not have people. On the day that Javier Becerra passed me in the polls for the first time, it was the day after Eric Swalwell dropped out of the race. And the reason I pulled ahead of him in every poll up to that point in time, the reason why he passed is the entire Democrat establishment and all of their influencers came out supporting Becerra on that day, which brings us back to DSA. What kind of Listen, they can call themselves democratic socialists, but we know that those are social democrats. Right. And that those are those are two very different things. But but we'll we'll we'll call we'll call them by the name that they choose for themselves, you know, a lot, you know, Muhammad Ali rather than Cassius Clay. So let's call them democratic socialists. What kinds of democratic socialists are going to support an anti BDS? AB 715 supporting, that's the law that outlaws free speech about Palestine in classrooms. So he supports a Zionist definition of antisemitism. He is anti-BDS. He will not call Gaza a genocide. He made hundreds of millions of dollars off of private prisons and ICE detention centers and gave exactly none of that money back. And he does this cute white grandpa routine on television as though he is harmless. At first I thought it was a vanity run. And then I remembered that billionaires don't do anything for vanity. They do it for the money. He wants to go from being a billionaire to being a mega billionaire through executive power the same way that Trump did, the same way that Elon Musk did through proximity to executive power. He's doing it to get richer. And the idea that people that call themselves socialists or even more reprehensibly care action, Council on American Islamic Relations, political C4 endorsed Tom Steyer.

Adnan Husain: Hmm.

Butch Ware: Because what Malcolm described as the black misleadership class, that exists in the Muslim community too. And the Muslim community is not falling for this. We opted off of the Democrat plantation nationwide. 53% of Muslim Americans voted green. the biggest migration away from a major party in 130 years, only 20% for Team Blue Genocide, 20% for Team Red Fascism. And here comes the upper middle class bourgeoisie in the community to shepherd a bunch of Muslims back onto the Democrat plantation because they have sunken costs with the Democrat establishment that are threatened by our movement. So just to be clear, DSA, I knew that they were going to support somebody like Steyer because there's a there's a bright young lieutenant governor candidate named Oliver Ma, who I like very much. He's 28 years old. He's actually descended from the Chinese general that sailed to East Africa. He himself is of way Muslim, although he's not a practicing Muslim.

Adnan Husain: Yeah. The name Ma is pretty typically of the, you know, Chinese Muslim, you know, Han Chinese Muslim community.

Butch Ware: And so I had lengthy conversations. We we reached an agreement. We met for four weeks and then we filmed five hours of campaign ads together because we were going to do mutual endorsements of one another. This was two months ago. When DSA found out about this, they threatened to pull their endorsement of Oliver Ma, which was the first time DSA had ever endorsed a candidate in a statewide race. And so Oliver, 28, not knowing what to do, backed out of the endorsement deal. And I don't hold that against him. I hold that against DSA, right? Because you have to understand that they are not socialists. They are just Democrats. And I know that a lot of the rank and file inside DSA believe in their principles in the same way that a lot of the rank and file in Muslim communities stand with us. We have a lot of DSA people that volunteer for our campaign, but you have to understand that in the end, DSA will respond to protect Team Blue. And so that's what they're doing. And of course, they're making a mockery of themselves by supporting what kind of socialist supports a billionaire who's buying an election? Even if you set aside all the BDS stuff and the private prison stuff, like that's just it's outrageous on the face of it.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, yeah. Well, time will tell if he's a class traitor. I guess he hasn't had enough time to demonstrate that yet, according to the tweet. Well, I want to be respectful of your time. I know we're getting essentially about an hour, so I just want to see if you have any kind of concluding things you want to say or how people who might be interested in supporting can get involved and so forth.

Butch Ware: Yeah, I think, you know, what's on my heart after this really, really, you know, enjoyable and animated conversation is... Sorry, I'm looking at my desk because I've got Malcolm on the Saturday evening post staring at me from my desk. And it had me thinking about something that Malcolm said. Malcolm said... The media is the most powerful entity on earth. It will turn the innocent into the guilty and the guilty into the innocent because it controls the minds of the masses and that's power, end of quote. So what I was thinking looking at Malcolm was, the the media will also turn winners into losers and losers into winners because it controls the minds of the masses um michael parenti wrote this uh so we know about noam chomsky you know being in the epstein files and being a real eos and i i proudly say that i never quoted him because i never trusted him he just looked like another white liberal to me and it turns out you know he actually was um he wrote this book manufacturing consent that people like to cite but michael parenti who's an actual leftist wrote a much better book called Inventing Reality. And the idea is not that the media is distorting reality in order to manufacture consent, but that the media is creating reality through the narratives that it constructs. One of my favorite MCs, Wise Intelligence, said, narrative scripts human behavior the way that code scripts computers.

Adnan Husain: Yeah.

Butch Ware: So what's happening right now is that the people are being gaslit by the Wizard of Oz, a smokescreen, being employed by a power structure to think that Tom Steyer and Javier Becerra are strong candidates. I've still out-fundraised Becerra if you take out his corporate donations. If you took all the air, the ads that the California Democrats are paying to run ads for Becerra, and if you take out the ads that are being run by Steyer and actually look at who has more volunteers on the ground, who's raised more money. There was a poll, Rove DNC held a poll about a debate that I wasn't even participating in asking, who would you like to hear from at tonight's debate? 45% said Butch Ware. 33% said Javier Becerra, 17% for Steyer, 6% for Katie Porter. 3,200 respondents. An average Emerson poll doesn't have my name in it at all, and it will have 1,000 respondents. So all I want to do is encourage people to make their own assessment of where we actually stand in this campaign and vote your conscience, write Butch Ware on your ballot, and you can find more at butchwareforgov.com. I'm at Butch Ware on all platforms because I know that the revolution is not going to take place only at the ballot box, but I know that there are revolutionary uses of electoral power And I am building the Green Party into that revolutionary party through this action in the state of California and through our broader organizing efforts. And if you believe that we need an option to team blue genocide and team red fascism, then put your money and your time and your effort where your mouth is and join the damn fight. We need people to get off the sidelines and into the fight.

Adnan Husain: Well, Butch, I really want to thank you for taking the time to come on to talk about this. You fielded some tough questions of people who have heard things or think that they've read things about you. And I appreciate you being willing to address them. And I know that, you know, in my kind of an audience, there's even suspicion of any involvement in this. electoral politics so it's helpful to remind us that you know malcolm x at least thought that there was some uses for it i really appreciate you talking about land back i mean some people think that the whole electoral process and um you know uh the whole state is illegitimate because it is a settler colonial state. But we all have to work in various ways where we can to bring down the empire. And I appreciate you. You know, you could be a professor enjoying teaching your students, writing your books. But that's anti-imperialist scholarship. That's those studies of Walter Rodney and others. have meant that you took seriously that it can't just be about knowledge that you share, but action that you have to take. And I really appreciate you coming on. And I'm inspired by your example for being willing to put yourself out there. So I hope people have learned something from this conversation. And whatever happens, we wish you the best with it. And I hope I'll, you know, even if you don't get into the governor's office, but especially if you do, I still want you to come back onto the show. Tell us what you're doing. But if you don't make it, I look forward to talking more about the Black Atlantic world and Islamic resistance. things that I think are fascinating that you study. And in fact, actually, I'm trying to write an article right now about the tradition of Sufi anti-colonialism, because there is no tradition in the Wahhabi Salafists. All the tradition is within Sufis, whether Malaysia, you know, North Africa, Caucasus, and of course, what you've studied, West Africa. I'll be consulting your scholarship. So we appreciate everything you've been doing. And thanks so much for being on. And I want to thank all of you in the chat for coming on, sharing your thoughts. Some of you were the ones who asked these tough questions that I posed for Butch. I appreciate you coming and being part of the discussion and the dialogue. And I won't be on Iran versus Empire 16 live stream tonight because I'm in Istanbul, Turkey, and that would be 3 a.m. And I can't quite make it, but make sure to attend. It's going to be a great lineup. And also join me tomorrow. I'll be speaking with Huda Amori, co-founder of Palestine Action. That is an inspiring example as well of how you know butch mentioned mutual aid direct action and then electoral you know uh contestation these are you know three parts of the plan let's learn a little bit more about what's happening with palestine action and the crackdown on uh pro-palestine solidarity the end of jury trials the persecution of a barrister actually my friend rajiv menon you know, for defending the Palestinian actionists. So do attend that. That's tomorrow. Check it out. But until next time, peace with justice and solidarity to you all.

Butch Ware: All power to the people.